Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XVI, Texas Narratives, Part 2
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XVI, Texas Narratives, Part 2
United States. Work Projects Administration
In the late 1930s, as America struggled through the Great Depression, a New Deal agency sent writers across the South to interview elderly Black men and women who had been enslaved as children. What they recorded constitutes one of the most remarkable oral history projects ever undertaken: raw, unfiltered testimonies from people remembering a world that had tried to erase them. This volume gathers interviews with former slaves from Texas, capturing their voices across nearly a century of memory. Here are stories of childhood terrors and family love, of cruelty and quiet resistance, of conjure doctors and church songs, of the war that promised freedom and the Reconstruction that withheld it. These are not polished memoirs but something more precious: human speech, in all its contradictiory power, direct from people who lived through an American catastrophe most history books have rendered silent. To read these pages is to hear what was almost lost.
