November 15, 2019

The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) collected more than two thousand interviews with formerly enslaved people between 1936 and 1938.[1] Historian Catherine Stewart writes, “The FWP’s revolutionary decision to include black Americans in the federally sanctioned production of historical knowledge helped to permanently destabilize a white monopoly on representations of black history, culture, and identity.”[2] Stewart’s recent work, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (2016), not only registers the FWP leadership’s competing visions for the project, but also demonstrates how new approaches to reading the ex-slave narratives provide nuanced insight into how interviewees understood themselves as narrators of a truer American history.

Stewart’s excellent book is the most recent monograph to consider the Slave Narrative Collection, and the first to consider how FWP employees determined its collecting methods. Stewart is critical of much of the white leadership of the FWP; she reserves a chapter for discussion about folklorist John Lomax, who, Stewart writes, “positioned himself as better equipped to interpret black folk culture than the African Americans themselves.”[3] Lomax held racist opinions of people of African descent and appropriated black culture for his personal gain. Stewart contrasts Lomax with the examples of Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling A. Brown, champions of black folk and black folk cultures. Stewart is careful to attend to the philosophical differences between black FWP employees: she notes that in contradistinction to Hurston, who advocated for an understanding of black cultures from “the bottom up,” the Florida’s Negro Writers’ Unit wanted the interviews to highlight black middle-class respectability and aspiration. In an important intervention, Stewart restores black FWP employees to a central role in the collection of the ex-slave narratives.

Historians have often disagreed about how to read the interviews, or even if they should be considered legitimate historical sources. The ex-slave narratives were not widely available until the 1970s, when historians—Eugene Genovese, Sterling Stuckey, Paul Escott, John Blassingame, and Leon Litwack, to name a few—began to incorporate the interviews into their scholarship. Inevitably, there was pushback. In 1982, oral historian David Henige argued against the use of the Slave Narrative Collection.[4] More recently, historian Walter Johnson acknowledged he would not use ex-slave narratives in Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999).[5]

But between Henige’s, Johnson’s, and others’ pronouncements against use of the ex-slave narratives, a methodological sea change transformed how scholars could interpret the interviews. Through close reading and particular attention to black vernacular traditions, scholars could access the interviews’ “hidden transcript” through the study of “signification,” as exemplified in the works of scholars like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Deborah Gray White, and Thavolia Glymph.[6] Furthermore, Stephanie Shaw’s research into what the ex-slave narratives reveal about life in the 1930s provided an example of how ex-slaves commented on the present while they were seemingly being asked about the past.[7]

This is the tradition Stewart’s Long Past Slavery participates in. This is especially apparent in her landmark chapter, “Rewriting the Master(’s) Narrative.” “In their strategic counternarratives about the black experience of slavery and emancipation, ex-slave informants revised white southerners’ master narratives by telling their own life histories,” Stewart writes.[8] For example, in an inversion of the dominant narrative of emancipation, Sam and Louisa Everett, interviewed in Florida, related how a former slave-owner despaired and became hysterical when he learned his slaves had been freed. In the Everetts’ telling, the owner did not know what to do in freedom time, whereas the formerly enslaved left the plantation with a purpose.[9] Stewart shows how ex-slaves ingeniously rewrote the master(’s) narrative at a crucial juncture in American history.

According to anthropologist David Scott, the creation of archives of formerly enslaved people represented “an enlargement of the sources of public memory, a compilation of the possible pictures of the past available for remembering, and an enrichment of the possibilities of criticism by which to reshape our present.”[10] Catherine Stewart’s exemplary Long Past Slavery is a lodestar to follow as historians read and reread the polyvocal Slave Narrative Collection to learn more about slavery, its legacies, and the pasts of the present.        

 

Bibliography

Blassingame, John W. “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” The

            Journal of Southern History, 41 (1975), p. 473-492.

 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary

            Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

 Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage. The Transformation of the Plantation

            Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Henige, David. Oral Historiography. London: Longman, 1982.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA:

            Harvard University Press, 1999.

Scott, David. “Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory.” Small Axe, no. 26 (June

            2008): p. v-xvi.

Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale   

University Press, 1992.

 Shaw, Stephanie J. “Using the WPA Ex-Slave Interviews to Study the Impact of the Great

            Depression.” The Journal of Southern History 69, vol. 3 (Aug., 2003): p. 623-658.

 Stewart, Catherine A. Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers Project.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

 White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York:

            W.W. Norton, 1985. 

 Notes

[1] This figure accounted for roughly 2% of the extant population of former slaves at the time. See https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/.

[2] Catherine A Stewart, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers Project (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), p. 9.

[3] Ibid., p. 93.

[4] See David Henige, Oral Historiography (London: Longman, 1982), p. 117-118.

[5] See Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 226, n. 24.

[6] See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifyin(g) Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary

Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

[7] See Stephanie J. Shaw, “Using the WPA Ex-Slave Interviews to Study the Impact of the Great Depression,” The Journal of Southern History 69, vol. 3 (Aug., 2003), p. 630.

[8] Stewart, p. 228.

[9] Ibid., p. 226.

[10] David Scott, “Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory,” Small Axe, no. 26 (June 2008), p. ix.