African American History Before 1877, Essay Example

According to Donna M. Campbell of Washington State University, slave narratives are basically literary accounts of a person’s slavery experiences (often second-hand as told by the children of slaves) during the antebellum period of American history, being  the years before the Civil War when the South was considered as the bastion of human slavery in the West. As literary devices, slave narratives often draw on “Biblical allusion and imagery, the rhetoric of abolitionism (i.e., the Northern movement to end slavery in the South), the traditions of the captivity narrative (such as found in the Old Testament), and the spiritual autobiography” (Campbell, “The Slave Narrative”). Also, almost all of these slave narratives contain a frame of reference or some type of introduction that attests to “their authenticity and to the sufferings described” by the narrators (more often than not black women) as indentured slaves in the “Old South” (Campbell, “The Slave Narrative”).

On the Library of Congress website “American Memory,” one can find hundreds of interviews with former slaves and their children. Known as “Voices From the Days of Slavery,” these interviews were done between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states. Some of the people interviewed were born between 1823 and the early 1860’s and generally talk about their personal feelings on slavery, their slaveholders or “Masters,” their coercion or bondage as slaves, their families which often suffered even more than the person being interviewed, and how they felt when freedom came their way after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War in 1865 with the Union as the victors over the Confederacy (“Voices From the Days of Slavery”).

The first interview (i.e., a transcription of the recorded interview) is with Mrs. Williams of Norfolk, Virginia, and was conducted sometime between 1937 and 1940 when Mrs. Williams was in her late 80’s or early 90’s. Although she does not provide a date, we can assume that her experiences occurred sometime around the late 1850’s. Like many slave narratives, Mrs. Williams discusses how she was victimized and brutalized by her slave master or owner. For instance, she declares that she was “whupped” (whipped) nearly to death” but that the whipping was not enough to “whup” “salvation out of me,” due to believing in God and Christ as a Christian. Mrs. Williams also indicates that she was not afraid of dying (“Now kill me!” she says to her Master), due to believing in a hereafter (“Interview with Mrs. Williams, Norfolk, Virginia, ca. 1937-1940”).

Mrs. Williams also talks about an old “overseer” or a white person (almost always a man) who was given the responsibility by the plantation owner to act as a supervisor over what occurred on the plantation related to working in the fields. Mrs. Williams admits that this man treated the slaves rather decently and allowed the black children to intermingle with the white children of the plantation owner. “We was just like brothers and sisters to the white kids,” she says which obviously shows that prejudice and discrimination was not a problem between the children regardless of their skin color. Mrs. Williams adds that the black slave children also worked with the white plantation children. However, this does not necessarily mean that the white children worked in the fields along with the slaves (“Interview with Mrs. Williams, Norfolk, Virginia, ca. 1937-1940”).

On the darker side of the story, Mrs. Williams recollects how she was bought and sold as a slave on New Year’s Day. Mrs. Williams notes that she was “put on the block,” being the slavery block for sale to the highest bidder, much like an auction for cattle. She also adds that some of her family members were sold into slavery by an unidentified woman who “market(ed) me (and) my own folks back into slavery” (“Interview with Mrs. Williams, Norfolk, Virginia, ca. 1937-1940”). What is most telling about this recollection is that Mrs. Williams declares that the man who bought her slavery family “had five plantations” which indicates that the buyer was quite wealthy as a Southern Virginian prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 (“Interview with Mrs. Williams, Norfolk, Virginia, ca. 1937-1940”).

In contrast, the second interview is with Joe McDonald of Livingston, Alabama, conducted sometime around 1940. In this interview, McDonald discusses a few things that most interviewees tend to ignore, being their lives in the fields as field hands. The importance of this lies in what McDonald says about field work which at a plantation during the days before the Civil War was highly important, due to creating most of the wealth held by the plantation owner. In this respect, the crop was cotton which along with tobacco created vast wealth in the “Old South” and which allowed white Southerners to live a life of utter luxury and entitlement.

According to Mr. McDonald, he was nineteen years old when he was first sent into the fields as a cotton picker. This was somewhat unusual for a black male slave, due to the fact that able-bodied black males were often sent into the fields as children. But in this case, it appears that Joe was also a house slave or one that worked inside the plantation home.

This is clear from what he says in the interview via admitting that the “overseer” “put me plowing” while a baby slept inside the house. “I want you to go up yonder,” says the “overseer,” “while the baby’s asleep and plow,” but when “Mrs. D. call, you go back to the house and see if the baby stir” (“Interview with Joe McDonald and Unidentified Woman, Livingston, Alabama, 1940”). It would be safe to say that Joe the slave was a trusted individual, due to being given the responsibility to tend to the needs of a sleeping baby. One other item that shows that Joe worked inside the plantation house is that he admits he picked “a hundred an’ fifty, sixty, seventy” pounds of cotton in one day. Under normal conditions, this amount would be quite small, considering that the field slaves worked from sun-up to sundown every single day except for Sunday. Thus, these two interviews serve as important primary sources because they are recollections from the person who lived through the experience, much like a person recalling the incidents of a battle during a war or as a witness to some type of historical event. They also highlight some of the historical aspects of the “Old South,” especially by revealing that the life of a slave was not as harsh for some as we can see from the recollections of Mrs. Williams as opposed to those of Joe.

Works Cited

Campbell, Donna M. “The Slave Narrative.” Literary Movements. Department of English, Washington State University, 2013. Web. Accessed 10 March 2015. <http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/slave.htm>.

“Interview with Mrs. Williams, Norfolk, Virginia, ca. 1937-1940.” Voices From the Days of Slavery. 2015. Web. Accessed 10 March 2015. <http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/afcesn:@field%28DOCID+afc9999001t8245b%29>.

“Interview with Joe McDonald and Unidentified Woman, Livingston, Alabama, 1940.” Voices From the Days of Slavery. 2015. Web. Accessed 10 March 2015. < http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/afcesn:@field%28DOCID+afc9999001t4034a%29>.