Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XIV, South Carolina Narratives, Part 4
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XIV, South Carolina Narratives, Part 4
United States. Work Projects Administration
In the late 1930s, as the last generation of people who had lived through American slavery grew elderly, the Federal Writers' Project sent interviewers across the South to capture something precious and perishing: the spoken memories of the formerly enslaved. This volume gathers raw, unfiltered testimonies from South Carolina, where men and women in their seventies, eighties, and beyond sat down to recall lives that legal bondage had rendered property. These are not polished histories but living voices, sometimes contradictory, often painful, occasionally surprising in their complexity. A centenarian named Mary Raines speaks of childhood in slavery and the chaos of war. Others recount family separations, acts of resistance, the architecture of white supremacy, and the hard-won dignity of survival. These pages hold no single story but many: the brutality of the auction block and the warmth of church congregations, the cruelty of overseers and the strange loyalties that bondage bred. What emerges is an indispensable human document that refuses to let the dead speak without interruption or interpretation.
