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In 1972 when the first nineteen volumes of The American Slave were published, I believed the work contained all
the interviews with ex-slaves collected by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. All the interviews came from a
collection in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress, and there was no indication that the collection was
incomplete. However, after this first group of narratives was published, it occurred to me that for certain states, such
as Mississippi, there ought to be more interviews somewhere, since there had been a large number of slaves there
and we had a relatively small number of narratives. Such was the case, as the efforts of Jan Hillegas and Ken
Lawrence in Jackson, Missippi, were to prove. They discovered close to 2500 pages of Mississippi material we had
not known of in the stacks of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson. These were published
in 1977 as volumes 6 through 10 of Supplement, Series 1, of The American Slave.
In addition to these narratives, we discovered many narratives that were not in the RBR collection in a number of
other libraries. There were collections of FWP ex-slave narrative material in the library of the University of Georgia
at Athens, the Alabama state archives in Montgomery, the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City, the
library of Indiana State University at Terre Haute, the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus, the Colorado State
Historical Society in Denver, the Western Historical Collection at the University of Missouri library in Columbia,
the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Columbiana Library at the
University of South Carolina in Columbia, and the Minnesota State Historical Society in St. Paul, and a few items in
libraries in Oregon and Washington. Of these narratives, the ones that were not in the RBR collection or were
significantly different versions of the ones in the RBR collection were published in Supplement, Series 1, to The
American Slave. In addition, I discovered items from Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Ohio in the files of the
Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress. These also were published in 1977 in Supplement, Series 1.
While completing work on this collection, in the spring of 1976, I received a letter from James M. Poteet, then
assistant professor of history at the University of Houston, telling me that the Metropolitan Archives in the Houston
Public Library had a small collection of some thirteen Texas narratives not in the RBR collection. I also heard from
Chester Kielman, the director of the Barker Library at the University of Texas at Austin, in response to a form letter
I had sent out to some fifty possible repositories of FWP materials throughout the United States. Kielman wrote that
there were Texas ex-slave narratives in the Barker Library, but that he did not know how many or whether they
were anything other than carbon copies of the items in the RBR collection.
In June of 1977 I went to Houston to see James Poteet and Orson Cook, with whom he was working. Cook was then
a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Houston. I looked at the narrative material in
the Metropolitan Archives of Houston as well as an interesting file of correspondence about the material. I also went
to Austin, not anticipating finding very much. However, I found in Austin the largest state collection of narratives
that has been found. All but one of the items in the Houston collection, the narrative of Jacob Aldrich, were also in
the Austin collection.
This Supplement, Series 2, includes all of the items in Austin that either were not in the RBR collection or were
different, usually longer, versions of the narratives in the RBR collection, as well as the Jacob Aldrich narrative
from Houston. In addition, it includes almost forty narratives from the Archive of Folk Song collection at the
Library of Congress which were not in the Austin or Houston collections; these, also, either were not in the RBR
collection or were substantially different versions of narratives in the RBR collection. The interviews from the
Archive of Folk Song collection are those of Manuel Armstrong, Harrison Beckett, Monroe Brackins, Rosella
Brown, Steve Brown, Amos Clark, Jake Compton, Josephine Compton, Nelson Davis, Anderson Edwards, Lucinda
Elder, Tempe Elgin, Archie Fennels, Jim Franklin, Catharine Green, Pierce Harper, Nellie Hill, Lydia Jefferson,
Anderson Jones, Richard Kimmons, Mollie Kirkland, William McDonald, Curly McGade, Andy Nelson, Katie
Phoenix, Will Rhymes, Will Shelby, Ike Simpson, Green Sims, D. W. Wallace, Clara White, Jack White, Alice
Wilkins, and Tobe Zollicoffer.
In this Texas collection there are interviews with 591 ex-slaves, 352 men and 262 women, as well as an appendix of
eight interviews with whites old enough at the time to have remembered slavery. All narratives that displayed even
the slightest change from those originally published have been included; in all but a few cases the changes are
substantive. The interviews with whites provide a contrasting backdrop against which to read the ex-slave
narratives. A few of the ex-slaves were interviewed together with a spouse or some other close relative, and in those
cases two ex-slaves are presented in a single narrative.
Of these narratives, 275 are different versions of the narratives in the RBR collection, published in 1972 in either
volume 4 or volume 5 of The American Slave. The remaining narratives in this Supplement, Series 2, are for people
for whom we have no narrative in the RBR collection; that is, we have a "new" narrative. A second version has been
found for all but about 8 percent of ex-slave narratives in the RBR collection. It is likely that there is only one
version of most of that 8 percent.
The major important characteristic of these newly discovered versions of the RBR collection is that they are, with
rare exception, considerably longer. In addition, they provide the names of the interviewers and information about
where the interviews were held, information that had been deleted from the RBR versions. Obviously, these longer
versions were earlier versions of narratives which had been edited and shortened to create the versions in the RBR
collection. These earlier versions found in Austin, Houston, and the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of
Congress were slightly over 2000 pages, as compared with slightly less than 900 pages for these same narratives in
the RBR collection. Thus, these narratives as a group are closer to the original spoken narratives than the previously
published group.
A few words about the form in which I have chosen to present these narratives is in order. The RBR collection gave
no information about the FWP interviewers or editors; nor do they give the place where the interviews took place.
The Austin materials, much of the Archive of Folk Song material, and the one item from Houston do give such
information. The name of the interviewer or interviewers and of any editor, if so indicated, has been placed at the
upper left-hand corner of the first page only. The name of the narrator, last name first, has been placed at the upper
left-hand corner of the remaining pages of each narrative. In the upper right-hand corner of the first page of each
narrative, the date the item arrived in the Texas FWP office, if such had been given, appears.
Also, when the words "Yes" or "No" appear on the original narrative, they have been placed in the upper right-hand
corner. These words were written, usually in pencil, on most of the narratives in what appears to be the same
handwriting, and with rare exception they coincide with whether or not the narrative shows up in the RBR
collection---those marked "Yes" are usually in the RBR collection; those marked "No" usually are not. This notation
suggests that the choice of which narratives went to Washington and which did not was determined in Texas by a
senior official of the Texas Federal Writers' Project, and that after the choice was made, the rewrite was done. We
rarely have a rewrite or edited version for those marked "No," but we almost always have one for those marked
"Yes."
The choice as to which narratives went to Washington was in all likelihood made by one person in Texas, but that
does not necessarily mean that that person did all the rewrites. It seems more likely that the rewrites were done by a
small staff chosen from among the interviewers. Furthermore, there may well have been some discussion among
these rewriters as to the process of editing, thus partially accounting for the fact that items that were edited out
display a great deal of consistency as to content and do not appear to have been the result of individual preferences.
However, it also is quite clear that there need not have been any sort of active "conspiracy" on the part of those
doing the rewriting because, as we shall see, the items deleted helped make the narratives conform more closely
with the accepted version of proper race relations of the times. Individual editors are likely to have shared the
accepted value system and could well have made the same sort of deletions in response to the suggestion that they
shorten the interviews because of space considerations. The material deleted might well have appeared to them the
least important and trustworthy.
One interviewer, Fred W. Dibble, obviously did not agree with the desire to shorten the interviewers. Dibble was
responsible for far and away the largest number of interviews---some one hundred. In the Houston Metropolitan
Archives there is a file of correspondence about Dibble's work. There was a serious conflict between Dibble and the
directors of the project as to his rendering of black dialect in the Houston-Beaumont area where he worked and as to
the content of some of his interviews. It appears that while Dibble certainly had a patronizing attitude towards the
people he had interviewed, he had tried to remain faithful to what he heard them say. He thought of himself as an
expert on black dialect rendition, although there is little reason to assume that his treatment of black dialect was
necessarily superior to that of other interviewers. At any rate, many of the Dibble interviews were rewritten with the
help of several other interviewers-editors. A considerable part of the interviews in the RBR collection for which I
found preedited versions in Austin, Houston, and the Archive of Folk Song collection were those for which Dibble
had been the principal interviewer. A few of the rewrites of Dibble's interviews and of the work of two other
interviewers have not been included in this collection because they were identical, except for some changes in the
rendering of speech patterns or "dialect," with the items in the RBR collection.
In the preparation of the manuscript for these volumes, the narratives were copied word for word including most of
the misspellings that occurred in the original. I thought it best to leave intact most of the spelling errors because they
give us some sense that the Federal Writers' Project employed writers who may have been somewhat less than
"professional." I did make some changes in spelling when it was clear that what was involved was a typist's error---a
genuine "typo"---and not one that reflected the talents of the writers. When there were penciled-in corrections on the
original typed version, the original typed version was followed except when the correction was designed to change a
genuine typographical error. Whenever necessary I placed a few words of my own in brackets to help clarify
meaning, but these are all clearly marked.
The 265 narratives for which we now have both the RBR version and another, earlier, usually longer, version may
constitute the most important group of narratives we have if we want to come to a better understanding of the
process involved in editing the narratives. Let us examine some of these pairs of Texas narratives in order to gain
some indication of the patterns of the changes. This discussion is meant only to be suggestive, not comprehensive,
and students of the narratives are urged to do their own comparisons between the items that appear in this
Supplement, Series 2 and the narratives for the same persons appearing in volumes 4 and 5 of the original volumes
of The American Slave.
The Sarah Allen narrative in the RBR collection was less than two pages long. The original was four pages. Deleted
material included a story of how the religion the masters preached to the slaves consisted primarily of the injunction
not to steal from the master, evidence about freedmen before the Civil War, a statement that Sarah Allen's husband's
father had never been a slave and was "of a mixture ... bright gingercake color," another that after the war her
husband, partially because he had learned to read while a slave, had become a magistrate, and a third that she herself
had taught school. Also deleted was the statement that her mother had told her, "Sarah don you let dem chillen call
you niggah. Dey's just a little colored blood in you." Her life on a slavetrading speculator's gang from the age of five
to her adolescence was collapsed into the phrase "us stay in de spec'lators drove de long time." The original
included details about limited food and "nigger dogs" to keep them in line. Comments about her master's life that
suggested master was not of "quality folks" and did not live at "Tara" were deleted. One particularly was that
"Master had a log house. 'Twarn' very nice. 'Twarn't no frame house...." Details about her life at the time of being
interviewed were also deleted.
The RBR version of the narrative of Andy J. Anderson was three pages long as compared to nine pages in the
earlier version. Many, many details of daily life were deleted, including material about the nature of the plantation's
economy, and a long story about how he got his name, how it differed from his master's name. Discussions of how
the master didn't voluntarily join the Confederate army, how "they took him away," and of runaway slaves who "am
never catched" were deleted. The following comment about a whipping was deleted: "I's could not feel de lash
'cause my body am numb, an' my mind am numb. De last thing I's 'membahs am dat I's wishing' for death." Some
evidence of his strong desire for freedom, as in the story that when his master told the slaves they were free but they
could stay, he responded loudly, "Lak hell I's will," was deleted.
The Agatha Babino narrative in the RBR version was two pages long. The earlier version was five pages long. The
unedited version suggests a much harsher view of slavery, telling of how the slaves slept on moss put down on the
floor, how the "marster ... had plenty of sausage but de slaves got none....", how the slaves had to bow to master's
white company, how dogs were used to catch runaways, how they "tied dey feet and dey hand" of slaves being
whipped, how the Catholic priest came to visit the master, but not the slaves. Also deleted were details about Agatha
Babino's life after slavery, such as the facts that she had a church wedding and had 125 grandchildren.
The original version of John Barker's narrative had many more details about his life both after slavery and under
slavery. "I have seen many a nig-person go out in de mawnin' and deir backs cut ju' like it was cut wid a knife";
slaves were not allowed to go to church and couldn't make a garden; women worked all week in order "to get
Saturday off in de afternoon to do deir washin' an' ironin'"; slaves were sold and yoked together like steers; there
were bloodhounds, whippings, and harsh overseers. An entire page of material about life after slavery and the
following summary of his attitude towards slavery were deleted in the RBR version: "I ust to say dat when I got to
be a man, I was goin' to kill ever'body I saw. Oh, I tell you, I saw enough o' dem slave times."
In the original version, the narrative of Joe Barnes had a brief discussion of whippings, runaways, and poor food. It
also declared that "ol' marster he scouted (hid out in the woods) so he wouldn't hafter go to de war." Instead of
giving such details, the RBR version has him declare to the interviewer, "I's feared I didn't tell you so much 'bout
things way back, but de truth am, I can't remember like I used to." The "truth am," of course, that he did, but from
the perspective of some editor, it was the wrong truth.
The pre-RBR version of the Harrison Beckett narrative says that if a slave marriage broke up, the man would be
whipped, and in some cases the woman sold. The master's house was described as "a one story plank house." There
is a great deal about life after the war ended, church affiliation, membership in the United Black Farmers and the
Farmers Union, and participation in the Populists' storehouse scheme to keep surplus grain until needed and thus
stabilize the market.
The RBR narrative of Sarah Benjamin had discussions, deleted later, of children's work, food, and slave speculators,
of slaves' carrying news from one plantation to another, of games, songs, and ghosts, of postwar life and her
wedding. The following line was also deleted: "We warnt loed to pray either cause dey Lord might hear us and free
us."
In the Barker Library version, Oliver Blanchard told of many things in greater detail than in the RBR version: of
how mother worked in the big house, of how children played, of whippings, of how the war was the war "to free de
niggers," and of how Oliver Blanchard ran off with the Yankees, with two white boys.
Although some small details vary, the Barker Library version of the Elvira Boles narrative was approximately the
same except for one line: "I's a child of the marster ... Ray, his wife, she sold me." That was a significant deletion.
The treatment of the William Byrd narrative is prototypical. In the original Barker Library version, this was an
eleven-page narrative. In the RBR version, it had become three pages long. In this interview, as in many of the
Texas interviews, the interviewer was going through a list of questions developed by the national staff of the
Federal Writers' Project. (See my Sundown to Sunup, pp. 173-76, for this questionnaire.) Many of these questions
dealt with life after the Civil War. In the RBR version, virtually all answers to such questions have been deleted. As
a result, the RBR version gives an image of "a slave," while the earlier version gives a much fuller picture of the life
of an individual who spent the first twenty-five of his ninety-seven years as a slave.
The sixteen-page narrative of Louis Cain was reduced to three pages in the RBR version, and when this was done,
of course, almost the entire life of the person was lost. The larger, earlier version gave some indication of a Muslim
past. A long story about a dishonest white man was deleted most likely because the "slaves" were not supposed to
be commenting on "their masters," only "on themselves." In the RBR version, we read the flat statement: "If some
niggers was mean they'd get it." In the early version, it was: "Maser was a pretty good man, he was good to his
slaves and was mean to them also, if they didn't behave." That is the statement of a reflective, mature man able to
make distinctions. He talks of slave sales in the longer version and punctuates his point by saying, "I was trade for
land myself." There is much more on religion, on work, on the slave patrol, and on passes. He describes the impact
of daily life on the slave: "At night we generally fell in at our quarters as we would be so tired we could hardly
move until next morning." He continues to reflect on the master who was both good and mean, and offers some
framework within which to understand this complex person, the master.
Another complex person, Louis Cain, declared that the master "could not afford to let us die, as we were too
valuable to him ..." and then indicates the difference between the white men then and white men "now": "but now if
negro dies they just get another one. The white people tells you that now, if a mule dies---get another one." And the
KKK really did keep the peace in the South, preventing social revolution: "if it had not been for ... what they call the
KKK the negro would have gone on the war path."
The RBR version of the narrative of Richard Carruthers was fine and informative and at times profound. It was five
pages long. The Barker version, which was thirteen pages long, is so much better. Carruthers carefully describes the
conditions under which Texas masters lived, at least to his knowledge: "None of the marsters I know of had brick
houses. My marster had a big fine weatherbo'd house." Richard Carruthers received many whippings as was
general. When talking of graves and funerals, he said they happened "when slaves die or git whupped to death...."
The deeply moving discussion of how the slaves went out into the fields and hollows to pray at night is even more
moving in the Barker version when he says that they did this "so the white folks won' hear." In the RBR version, he
describes how slaves became unconscious because of "getting happy" and being possessed; in the original he also
says they got unconscious for more earthly reasons: "because of whippings." He has a certain dramatic flair which
makes us understand what slavery was all about. In the Barker version he says, "sometimes nigger folks git so
mixed up about who kin to who, they marry their own sister or brother," not because they didn't try to keep it
straight, but because with all the selling and trading of slaves, it was difficult to know.
Jeptha Choice told that slaves called the black drivers or overseers "nigger traitor." A long section in this earlier
version about life after slavery is particularly rich as it tells of Reconstruction and the role of the Federal Provost
Marshall in bringing word of freedom and in stopping the KKK.
Perhaps some sense of the importance of these earlier versions of the RBR narratives could be gained through a
comparison of the twelve-page summary of the Thomas Cole narrative with the fifty-four-page original, but space
limitations do not allow us to compare them here. The original provides a totally new narrative about a person who
never emerges in the RBR version.
Moreover, it is the comments that have been deleted from the somewhat smaller narratives that are the most
revealing, not only about slavery, but about the feelings of older black people in the 1930s. The RBR version
deletes Eli Coleman's comment: "I was share cropper, and Mr. White Man, that was really when slavery begins ..."
and his comment about the KKK: "They could not let the negro exert his freedom." There is an entire universe of
historical understanding in those two comments.
Laura Cornish's comment that "Dey never was no whippin' on our place neither, 'cause papa Day say we is human
bein's an' not beasts ..." was deleted in the RBR version, perhaps because it implies that only a master such as Day,
who is reported as being opposed to slavery, didn't whip!
Anderson Edwards' comment that "Master Gaud was a wicked man and didnt care anything about God, Heaven and
his outfit ..." was deleted, probably because no black man ought to be allowed to say that about a white man, even if
possibly true.
The same is true of Ann J. Edwards' strong views about Lincoln, slavery, and blacks' contributions to their own
freedom, and her belief that Negroes and women should be allowed to vote. Ann Edwards was the adopted daughter
of Richard H. Cain, a Washington, D.C., antebellum freedman who became Reconstruction Congressman from
South Carolina in 1876 and the husband of a Howard University graduate who also was a minister. Ann Edwards
also attended Howard University but did not graduate. When she spoke in the earlier version, she used the tones and
the frame of reference of a member of the black elite who talked of "uplifting the race." Of the Civil War, she said
that while she was young "I knew there was a conflict taking place and a war waging that was taking thousands of
lives, and that my race was the main cause, and I knew that the outcome of the conflict would determine the status
of the negroes." This was deleted from the RBR version, perhaps in obedience to the dictates of consensus
historiography of the 1930s, which was more willing to accept sunspot storms than the future "status of the negroes"
as a cause of the Civil War. The RBR version also deleted an account of her feeling when Lincoln was assassinated:
"it was as if everyone had suddenly experienced the death of their most beloved child." She remembered the service
her step-father held in church: "For days after the incident the people moved about showing their deep feeling. As
young as I was, I could sense the effect."
Tales of sexual exploitation were often deleted. In the narrative of Gabriel Gilbert, for instance, the following was
deleted: "Daddy's pa was ... a white man named Bonnet. Ol' Marster had seb'ral boys. Dey went 'roun' after some of
de slave gals on de place. Dey raise se'ral chillen by 'em." In fact, the master's sons were the overseers and used their
contact with the female slaves to their advantage, leaving the other slaves unattended: "Sometime dey see a gal and
go off in de woods wid her and leave de han's to do dey work by dese'fs."
Stories of lynchings were often deleted, as in the story of Mattie Gilmore, who told of an uncle accused of putting
poison in white folks' coffee. He was lynched, and she remembered that "we all had to stand right der and watch
dem do dat ter him." There were many other details of cruelty in this narrative, including a story of the sale of a
sister: they "made her pull off part of her clothes...."
Stories of slaves' enforcing some sort of decency in treatment were often deleted, as in the story of Austin Grant,
who told of slaves whipping an overseer. Moreover, he said, "Sometimes when the overseer would over do the
thing, the slaves would go there and tell the overseer that he had give that child or that man enough."
Stories of the Klan were often deleted, particularly ones in which the Klan disciplined whites. It seems that
indications of political conflicts among the whites were problematic for some of the interviewers and editors. For
example, in the original narrative of William Hamilton, there is a story of the Klan's disciplining Jack Ditto and his
black workers because he was a Baptist preacher who preached to the blacks. The story was not in the RBR version.
In the Pierce Harper narrative, the RBR version deletes his views of Southern soldiers: "I never thought much of
'em. I don't think much of no man wha"
