Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XIV, South Carolina Narratives, Part 1
1936
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XIV, South Carolina Narratives, Part 1
United States. Work Projects Administration
1936
In the sweltering summer of the 1930s, government workers fanned across the American South to interview men and women who had once been enslaved. They recorded not statistics or census data, but voices: halting memories of plantation life, of mothers stolen and families torn apart, of the peculiar mixture of grief and relief that came with emancipation. This volume gathers testimonies from South Carolina, preserving the actual words of people like Mrs. M. E. Abrams and Ezra Adams as they recalled the superstitions that sustained them, the brutality they survived, and the strange, difficult business of learning to be free. These are not polished histories but raw, imperfect memories, transcribed as they were spoken, with all the weight of lived experience and the limitations of aging minds. The Federal Writers' Project, born of the New Deal's desperation to put intellectuals to work, created something far more valuable than jobs: an irreplaceable archive of American testimony that scholars, novelists, and citizens have turned to for decades. This is history from the inside, unfiltered and unforgettable.
