Evidence of Slave Resistance (from WPA Slave Narratives)
In the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to write down their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. John A. Lomax, the National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP (and the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress), was extremely interested in the ex-slave material he received from these states. In 1937 he directed the remaining states involved in the project to carry out interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions on what kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects, the result of which may sometimes be offensive to today's readers (see A Note on the Language of the Narratives). The field workers often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of informants and their houses. The interviewers then turned the narratives over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C.
The Slave Narrative Collection provides a unique and virtually unsurpassed collective portrait of a historical population. Indeed, historian David Brion Davis has argued that the voluminous number of documented slave testimonies available in the United States "is indisputably unique among former slaveholding nations." In addition to the substantial number of life histories it contains, the most compelling feature of the collection is the composition of the sample of people who made up its informants. Although not a representative sample of the slave population, they were a remarkably diverse and inclusive cross-section of former slaves. Those whose voices are included in the collection ranged in age from one to fifty at the time of emancipation in 1865, which meant that more than two-thirds were over eighty when they were interviewed. Almost all had experienced slavery within the states of the Confederacy and still lived there. They represented all the major slave occupations. Moreover, the size of the slave units on which respondents reported living varied considerably, from plantations with over a thousand slaves to situations in which the informant was his or her owner's only slave. The treatment these individuals reported ran the gamut from the most harsh, impersonal, and exploitative to work and living conditions and environments that were intimate and benevolent. In fact, except that most of the informants were relatively young when they experienced slavery (older slaves had died long before these interviews were undertaken), all the major categories of the slave population appear to be well represented in the collection.
Source: Yetman, Norman. "An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives." Library of Congress.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/
https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/
Anderson Edwards, enslaved in Texas
When we prayed by ourse’ves we daren’t let the white folks know it and we turned a wash pot down to the ground to cotch the voice. We prayed a lot to be free and the Lord done heered us. We didn’t have no song books and the Lord done give us our songs and when we sing them at night it jus’ whispering so nobody hear us. One went like this:
“My knee bones am aching,
My body’s rackin’ with pain,
I ’lieve I’m a chile of God,
And this ain’t my home,
’Cause Heaven’s my aim.”
“My knee bones am aching,
My body’s rackin’ with pain,
I ’lieve I’m a chile of God,
And this ain’t my home,
’Cause Heaven’s my aim.”
Mattie Logan, enslaved in Mississippi
It seems like this overseer was of the meanest kind, always whipping the slaves for no reason at all, and the slaves tried to figure out a way to even up with him by chasing him off the place.
One of the slaves told how to cure him. Get a King snake and put the snake in the overseer’s cabin. Slip the snake in about, no, not about, but just exactly nine o’clock at night. Seems like the time was important, why so, I don’t remember now. That’s what the slaves did. Put in the snake and out went the overseer. Never no more did he whip the slaves on that plantation because he wasn’t working there no more! When he went, where he went, or how he went nobody knows, but they all say he went. That’s what counted ⎯ he was gone!
One of the slaves told how to cure him. Get a King snake and put the snake in the overseer’s cabin. Slip the snake in about, no, not about, but just exactly nine o’clock at night. Seems like the time was important, why so, I don’t remember now. That’s what the slaves did. Put in the snake and out went the overseer. Never no more did he whip the slaves on that plantation because he wasn’t working there no more! When he went, where he went, or how he went nobody knows, but they all say he went. That’s what counted ⎯ he was gone!
Fannie Berry, enslaved in Virginia
I wuz one slave dat de poor white man had his match. See Miss Sue? [interviewer] Dese here ol’ white men said, “what I can’t do by fair means I’ll do by foul.” One tried to throw me, but he couldn’t. We tusseled an’ knocked over chairs an’ when I got a grip I scratched his face all to pieces; an dar wuz no more bothering Fannie from him; but oh, honey, some slaves would be beat up so, when dey resisted, an’ sometimes if you’ll ’belled [rebelled] de overseer would kill yo’. Us Colored women had to go through a plenty, I tell you.
Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.