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An HBO
Special
UnChained Memories--1930s WPA Slave Narratives
A Response to the Editor
By Amin Sharif
I
have just watched the HBO Special
UnChained Memories: Slave Narratives. And as always, I was deeply
touched by the words and spirit in the words of our ancestors.
When I use the term "spirit in the word," I mean
nothing other than the spirit of endurance. How we endure is as
much a measure of our humanity as any other. The slave
narratives have always baffled me for their wholly human
character. They always open my mind to a new order of
existence--a new way of being. I have said as much before.
Tell me, if you can, how does one find
meaning as a human being in a system that is designed to deny
one's humanity? The reason I ask is that our children are on the
verge of losing their humanity to the same system that placed
our ancestors in chains. Losing their humanity -- that is what
all the hype about materialism and hedonism amounts too. We were
once a people who had nothing -- forced to deny all that we
were. Yet, we held on somehow. Today, we find ourselves and our
children more lost than ever.
When
I compare the slave narratives to the screams and wails of the
hip hop generation, adorned in enough silver and gold,
possessing sporting cars that would buy a plantation, I am
filled with embarrassment and shame for my children -- for our
children. When I hear the words of our fathers and mothers
forlorn in a land that amounted to a living hell, I look at the
present generation and see nothing but a lot of spoiled cry
babies. Could one or any of them endure a day of true slavery!
No, they are too busy whining about the false night of
their existence. Slavery -- that was the blackest night of
all! If our ancestors could find and maintain their
humanity in the darkness of a slave cabin, then why
can't our children find their humanity on the streets of the
ghetto?
Perhaps,
they have lost their desire to be human. I do not say this
lightly, my brother. It is easy to give in to bestiality when it
has been made so attractive to our babies, our youth. Perhaps
the fault is not totally to be found within our children. After
all, it is we (the prior generation) you place the first
pair of Nikes on their toddler feet. And it is we who
continue to feed them the pabulum that all that is of value in
the world can be brought and sold. Was it Fanon who said that
every slave or oppressed person must participate in their
slavery/oppression to make it work?
Here,
we have come full circle. For tonight, I have seen and heard the
words of those who were bought and sold. With regret, I find
that the spirit in those words are more precious than the silver
and gold that adorns the throats of our forlorn children.
Time does not permit more to be said.
* * * * *
Check out also
the following material:
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Not
Gone With the Wind: Voices of Slavery." New York Times (February,
9, 2003.
George P. Rawick,
The American Slave: A
Composite Autobiography.
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1979.
Ira Berlin, et al.,
Remembering
Slavery:
African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of
Slavery and Emancipation.
(The New Press, 200
Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html
(Includes typescripts and photos).* * * * *
Narrative
Samples
Rev. Ishrael Massie's account of rape:
"Lord chile, dat wuz common. Marsters
an' overseers use to make slaves dat wuz wid deir husbands git up,
do as dey say. Send husband out on de farm, milkin' cows or cuttin'
wood. Den he gits in bed wid slave himself. Some women would fight
an tussel. Others would be 'umble - feared of dat beatin'. What we
saw, couldn't do nothing 'bout it..''
* * *
* *
Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—Unchained Memories,
an HBO documentary that makes its debut tomorrow
night, provides a powerful answer to that question.
It gives us, through the faces and voices of
African-American actors, an introduction to a vast
undertaking that took place in the 1930's: the
collection and preservation of the testimonies of
thousands of aged former slaves in an archive known
as the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal
Writers' Project. This archive unlocked the brutal
secrets of slavery by using the voices of average
slaves as the key, exposing the everyday life of the
slave community. Rosa Starke, a slave from South
Carolina, for example, told of how class divisions
among the slaves were quite pronounced:
''Dere was just
two classes to de white folks, buckra slave owners
and poor white folks dat didn't own no slaves. Dere
was more classes 'mongst de slaves. De fust class
was de house servants. Dese was de butler, de maids,
de nurses, chambermaids, and de cooks. De nex' class
was de carriage drivers and de gardeners, de
carpenters, de barber and de stable men. Then come
de nex' class, de wheelwright, wagoners, blacksmiths
and slave foremen. De nex' class I members was de
cow men and de niggers dat have care of de dogs. All
dese have good houses and never have to work hard or
git a beatin'. Then come de cradlers of de wheat, de
threshers and de millers of de corn and de wheat,
and de feeders of de cotton gin. De lowest class was
de common field niggers.''— NYTimes
* * *
* *
My mother's
mistress had three boys, one 21, one 19 and one 17.
Old mistress had gone away to spend the day one day.
Mother always worked in the house. She didn't work
on the farm in Missouri. While she was alone, the
boys came in and threw her down on the floor and
tied her down so she couldn't struggle, and one
after the other used her as long as they wanted for
the whole afternoon.
Mother was sick
when her mistress came home. When the old mistress
wanted to know what was the matter with her, she
told her what the boys had done. She whipped them
and that's the way I came to be here.—Mary
Estes Peters, former slave—NYTimes
* * *
* *
Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003— Voices like hers had
waited more than 70 years to be heard, and why they
were silent for so long is itself, in part, a story
of class tensions within the black community.
Fugitive
African-American slaves enjoy a rare distinction in
the long and bloody history of human slavery: they
alone created a genre of literature about their
bondage and freedom, as Frederick Douglass put it in
the title of his second autobiography. The slave
narratives, which came of age with the publication
of Douglass's best-selling ''Narrative'' in 1845,
were extraordinarily popular, the thrillers of
antebellum America.
Encouraged by
white abolitionists, more than 100 fugitive slaves
wrote or dictated book-length accounts from 1760 to
1865. About as many people born into slavery
published autobiographies between the end of the
Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's.
Slavery—or rather, its transcendence—made for good
reading. In the first few decades after the Civil
War, as slavery receded into memory, rooting one's
origins in that putrid soil served as a sort of
legitimizing ritual for black men and women
establishing themselves as authors and public
figures.
If the printed
word was no adequate substitute for actual
experience, slavery could nonetheless be both
represented and remembered—analyzed, critiqued,
contained— through the written testimonies of the
articulate, literate few who had broken their
chains, escaped to the North, and mastered literacy,
ostensibly speaking for the slaves left behind.
William Wells Brown, who devoted his career as an
author to depicting slavery in novels, plays,
histories and autobiographies, knew this: ''I stand
here as the representative of the slave,'' he said
in a speech in 1854,'' to speak for those who cannot
speak for themselves.''
By the turn of
the century, however, slavery had become something
of an embarrassment to an aspiring black elite
desperate to integrate into a gilded American age.
Booker T. Washington himself led the charge by
calling for a New Negro, one who would cease
complaining about slavery. Even in his classic Up
From Slavery (1901), he urged his black readers to
obliterate their memory of hurt and wrongs, bragging
that he had completely rid himself of ''any ill
feeling toward the Southern white man for any wrong
that he may have inflicted upon my race.'' As his
contemporary Benjamin Tanner put it, ''The very
remembrance of our experience is hideous.'' Sarah
Debro, an ex-slave, told an interviewer in North
Carolina in 1937: ''My folks don't want me to talk
about slavery. They's shame niggers ever was
slaves.'' Slavery? Forget about it.—NYTimes
* * *
* *
The
Bondwoman's Narrative: A Novel by Hannah Crafts—Edited by Henry Louis Gates—Both slavery and marriage were institutions of private life,
with which government should not meddle; but owners were
entitled to make marriages among slaves, controlling their
intimate lives, making and breaking their families at will.
Hannah's worst moment - the event that precipitates her flight
to freedom - comes when she crosses her white mistress who, as
punishment, decrees that Hannah should be married to a field
slave. 'With all your pretty airs and your white face, you are
nothing but a slave after all and no better than the blackest
wench.' Hannah has determined never to marry while she is a
slave - she refuses to give birth to a child whose innocent body
will perpetuate the system.
But when she is exiled to the cabin of her prospective
husband, her senses as well as her principles revolt. She is to
be married to a man whose person, speech and manner could not
fail to be ever regarded by me with loathing and disgust. Then
to be driven in to the fields beneath the eye and lash of the
brutal overseer, and those miserable huts, with their
promiscuous crowds of dirty, obscene and degraded objects, for
my home I could not, would not bear it. A day picking cotton
makes her fingers bleed.
This is Hannah, who can not only read, but play the harp!
Deeply colour-conscious, shaped by her superior education, she
has no access to the minds of the field slaves, and she makes no
effort to imagine herself into their skins. The degraded men and
women she describes are voiceless and outside history. It is
likely they will defy the most probing investigations of Gates's
PhD squad. They have lives, but no biography; they are less
chronicled than a white man's dog.
Only a novelist could give them a voice, but Hannah doesn't
try; real life is taking over now. Hannah's vengeful mistress
had a real existence. The novel's first mentions of the family
designate them 'Wh--' but later the writer takes courage and
fills in the name: 'Wheeler'. From this, Gates has identified
John Hill Wheeler, a lawyer, functionary, plantation owner and
sometime member of the state legislature of North Carolina, who
became briefly famous through a 1855 court case in which he
attempted to regain possession of a fugitive slave called Jane
Johnson.— The Shape of Absence—A review by Hilary Mantel
* * *
* *
Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—The Bondwoman's
Narrative [was] written by a mulatto house
servant, Hannah Crafts, in the 1850's. Crafts
describes field hands as the ''vile, foul, filthy
inhabitants of the huts.'' By the Harlem
Renaissance, Crafts's view had become something of
the norm, even if rendered less harshly. As Alain
Locke put it in ''The New Negro'' (1925), ''Uncle
Tom and Sambo have passed on.'' Uneducated blacks
were not ''presentable'' to a white American public
that stereotyped all blacks as inferior and
uneducable, and their voices had to be repressed,
both by the fugitive slave authors and by
revisionist historians of the Old South, the
moonbeam and magnolia blossom school of Confederate
apologists.
Slavery lost
its romance, and its usefulness. (By 1954, the year
of Brown v. Board of Education, only one slave
narrative would be in print.) For many black
intellectuals, it seems, slavery had been
represented all too much, at least as a salient
shaping force in the history of Negro citizens
seeking to end legal segregation.
The majority of
slaves, those who worked in the fields, would gain
their voice, oddly enough, only in the Great
Depression, initially through the under-financed
efforts of a small group of black historians. For
them, too, the question was not whether slavery
could be represented; the question was, represented
by whom? This time, the answer was different. As the
historian Lawrence Reddick put it in 1937, ''There
is not yet a picture of the institution as seen
through the eyes of the bondsman himself.''
Reddick's
impulse indirectly gave rise to interviews with more
than 2,000 former slaves, the field hands who had
been rendered silent in the printed narratives and
in standard histories of slavery. (To understand the
project's import, imagine if 2,000 interviews of
Greek or Roman slaves suddenly became available to
classical historians.) Little could have alarmed
Booker T. Washington more than hundreds of
interviewers, most of them white, fanning out all
over the South, armed with a list of questions and
writing down testimonies about life under slavery.
Why turn to the
slave so very many years after the abolition of
slavery, especially when so many black intellectuals
were skittish? There are several reasons, but the
most important is the emergence of black historians
who were intent on refuting the rosy, and often
racist, depictions of slavery propagated by scholars
who were little more than apologists for the
Confederacy. Chief among these was the Yale
historian Ulrich B. Phillips, whose ''American Negro
Slavery'' (1918) portrayed the slave as happy and
content, his treatment by his master generous,
''civilizing'' and humane. Even many black people
accepted these stereotypical notions. What more
effective way to counter these claims than with the
words of former slaves themselves?
Charles S.
Johnson, the great black sociologist, had begun a
project at Fisk University in Nashville in 1929 to
interview former slaves in Tennessee and Kentucky,
and later in Alabama. The historian John B. Cade at
Southern University embarked on a similar course of
interviews the same year. Reddick, at Kentucky State
College, proposed in 1934 that the Federal Emergency
Relief Fund systematically interview former slaves,
in part to give employment to ''unemployed Negro
college graduates.'' Reddick's project yielded 250
interviews, gathered in Indiana and Kentucky in 1934
and 1935.
At the urging
of John A. Lomax, a seminal figure in the collection
of American folklore (and the father of the folk
music archivist Alan Lomax), and Sterling A. Brown,
a poet, critic and Howard University professor who
was director of the Office of Negro Affairs within
the Federal Writers' Project, the writers' project
began gathering oral narratives of former slaves in
1937. Brown argued the case for black interviewers
in as many Southern states as he could. (Zora Neale
Hurston actually recorded former slaves in Florida.)
Nevertheless, most units of the Writers' Project
remained segregated, according to the Jim Crow
practices of the time. The project's financing ended
by 1939, but not before previously silenced slaves
had finally had their say.
The archive
that was gathered consisted of 2,300 interviews
conducted in 17 states. (Some 1,200 or so more
interviews have been unearthed in other archives.)
The former slaves had been 1 to 30-something years
old when the Civil War ended seven decades before,
but most were from 6 to 20; they represented about 2
percent of the total former-slave population.
All sorts of
colorful characters in the drama of slavery,
relegated to cameo appearances in the earlier
narratives, take center stage in these oral
histories, from cooks and chambermaids to gardeners,
barbers and carpenters. Perhaps the most important
contribution the oral narratives make to our
understanding of slavery is the registering of the
thoughts and feelings of women. Only six slave
narratives were published by women before the end of
the Civil War, roughly 5 percent of the total. Here,
by contrast, about half of the interviews were with
women. And they provide details of daily life not
generally stressed in the printed narratives,
especially about the sexual exploitation of female
slaves.—NYTimes
* * *
* *
''Lord chile,
dat wuz common. Marsters an' overseers use to make
slaves dat wuz wid deir husbands git up, do as dey
say. Send husband out on de farm, milkin' cows or
cuttin' wood. Den he gits in bed wid slave himself.
Some women would fight an tussel. Others would be 'umble—feared
of dat beatin'. What we saw, couldn't do nothing
'bout it.''— Rev.
Ishrael Massie—NYTimes
* * *
* *
Not Gone With
the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—9
February 2003— The Writer's Project archive began to
be systematically published in the 70's, under the
editorial direction of the historian George P.
Rawick, and today no fewer than 40 volumes (10,000
pages totaling 3.5 million words) of these
fascinating interviews are available in print under
the title ''The American Slave: A Composite
Autobiography'' (Greenwood Publishing Group).
Recordings of a number of the actual interviews are
also available in ''Remembering Slavery,'' a
book-and-tape set published by the New Press. And
the original typescripts, as well as 500
photographs, can be viewed on the Web site of the
Library of Congress, at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html .—NYTimes
* * *
* *
*
* * * *
 |
Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
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Black World
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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