Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XII, Ohio Narratives
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XII, Ohio Narratives
United States. Work Projects Administration
In the late 1930s, as America grappled with economic collapse, a desperate race against time began. The Federal Writers' Project dispatched interviewers across the South and Ohio, seeking out the last living Americans who had been enslaved. What they captured was nothing less than a treasury of human memory: voices that had waited nearly eighty years to be heard. These are not histories written by scholars but testimonies spoken by people who had picked cotton, fled to freedom, reunified families, and rebuilt their lives. Some accounts describe unspeakable cruelty; others recall moments of unexpected kindness. Together, they compose a chorus of survival against the machinery of bondage. This volume, focusing on Ohio narratives, captures a unique regional story: former slaves who found their way north, carrying their pasts into a uncertain present. Their words preserve details no textbook could: the taste of particular foods, the songs sung in fields, the faces of parents sold away, the exact hour freedom arrived. This is history rendered in the intimate register of human voice.
