Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2
United States. Work Projects Administration
In the late 1930s, as the last generation of people born into American slavery grew elderly, the Federal Writers' Project sent interviewers across the South to preserve their stories. What emerged is perhaps the most powerful oral history in American letters: the unfiltered voices of men and women who had lived through bondage, recounting the daily realities, the small resistances, the family separations, and the moment they learned they were free. This volume gathers testimonies from former slaves in Arkansas, their words rendered in dialect as they spoke them. These are not polished memoirs but something more raw and vital. Frank Cannon describes the intricate web of relationships between enslaved and enslaver. Zenie Cauley recalls the chaos of wartime freedom. Others speak of the families they built afterward, the land they worked to own, the schools they or their children finally attended. Some accounts are harrowing; others reveal surprising complexity. All are indispensable. What makes this collection extraordinary is its directness: these are not histories about the enslaved, but histories from them. They resist erasure. They insist on being heard.
