Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 1
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 1
United States. Work Projects Administration
In the late 1930s, as America lingered in the shadow of the Great Depression, a New Deal agency did something unprecedented: it sent interviewers across the South to record the memories of men and women who had been enslaved as children. This volume gathers testimonies from former slaves in Arkansas, preserving voices that had long been dismissed, suppressed, or simply forgotten. Their recollections are uneven - childhood memories blur with adult understanding, kindnesses coexist with brutality, and freedom arrives not as a single moment but as a gradual, complicated awakening. These aren't polished histories but human testimony - raw, particular, sometimes contradictory. Some remember their masters with strange tenderness; others recount sales, separations, violence. All speak of family, of survival, of what it meant to become free. These are among the last recorded voices of a generation, and they constitute an essential archive of American experience. For anyone seeking to understand the real texture of slavery beyond abstraction, these pages offer something irreplaceable: the testimony of those who were there.
