Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume VIII, Maryland Narratives
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume VIII, Maryland Narratives
United States. Work Projects Administration
In the late 1930s, as the Great Depression stretched on and the last generation of people born into American slavery grew elderly, the U.S. government sent writers across the South to record what they remembered. This volume gathers the testimonies of men and women from Maryland who had lived through the Civil War as enslaved people. What emerges is not a single story but a chorus of voices, each recounting plantation life, family, labor, and survival with startling clarity. Some remember cruelty; others describe masters who provided education or treated enslaved workers with relative kindness. The collection preserves intimate details no history book could capture: the texture of daily life, the pain of separated families, small acts of resistance, and the complicated feelings toward former owners decades after emancipation. These are primary documents, the raw memories of people who were there. Reading them feels like sitting in a room with history itself, hearing directly from those who lived it.
