Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 6
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 6
United States. Work Projects Administration
In the desperate summer of 1937, as the last Americans who had known slavery slipped into old age, government interviewers fanned across the American South with a simple, urgent question: tell us what you remember. The result is this book, one of the most important collections of American oral history ever assembled. Here, in their own words, formerly enslaved people from Arkansas recount the cotton fields and plantation houses, the families torn apart and the bonds that survived, the war that promised freedom and the long, uncertain years that followed. These are not polished memoirs but raw testimonies, recorded with all the pauses, repetitions, and raw emotion of people confronting memories most had spent lifetimes trying to forget. Doc Quinn remembers Colonel Ogburn's plantation as a child; others recall the Underground Railroad, the brutality of overseers, the small acts of resistance that constituted survival. What emerges is not a single story but a chorus of individual voices, each bearing witness to an experience that shaped a nation. This is primary source material at its most human: messy, contradictory, invaluable, and impossible to look away from.
