Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume X, Missouri Narratives
1936
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume X, Missouri Narratives
United States. Work Projects Administration
1936
These are the voices of people who were there. Collected in the late 1930s by Federal Writers' Project interviewers reaching into the final living memories of American slavery, these narratives carry the weight of lived experience in ways no history book can replicate. This volume gathers testimonies from men and women who spent their childhoods and young adulthoods in bondage across Missouri - people like James Monroe Abbot, Betty Abernathy, and Aunt Hannah Allen, whose words open this collection. What emerges is not a single story but a chorus: accounts of backbreaking labor and cruel masters, of families torn apart by sale, of daring escapes and quiet acts of resistance. Yet the narratives hold more than suffering. They preserve the texture of everyday life under bondage - the songs, the folk remedies, the relationships, the humor that persisted even in darkness. These are memories told to young white interviewers decades after emancipation, sometimes halting, sometimes fierce, sometimes tender. They are a people speaking directly across time, insisting on being heard. For anyone seeking to understand America's original sin not through legislation but through the human beings who endured it, these pages are irreplaceable.
