Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation

by Annette Gordon-Reed (Foreword), Ira Berlin (Editor), Marc Favreau (Editor)

When it was first published fifteen years ago, this startling—and bestselling—first-person history of slavery was heralded as "powerful and intense" (Atlanta Journal Constitution) and "invaluable" (Chicago Tribune). Drawing from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writers' Project, this astonishing collection makes available the only known recordings of people who lived through the enormity of slavery. The groundbreaking interviews with former slaves collected in the original book-and-audio set of Remembering Slavery are now available for a new generation of readers and listeners in both affordable paperback and enhanced audio e-book.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, American History, African American, Memoir, Race

416 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1998

About the author

Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have the book and cassette edition which includes actual recordings of interviews with former slaves. The book is beautifully written, but pales in comparison to the voices rough with age and obviously recorded at the end of these incredibly important living historical figures lives.

[Michelle Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think it is amazing how they have restored their records from the the 1940's of real freed slaves. On the back it said that for decades the recordings were so fragile that no one could listen to them and that alone made me want to cry...it is like thinking of a book with a lock on it. I listen to accounts of men and women who are over one hundred years old. They were all amazing and they deserve respect.

[Charles Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most interesting and heart-wrenching books I've ever read. The dialect of the narratives of former slaves is occasionally distracting, but the stories shine through.

[Rachel Yeager · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://www.loc.gov/collections/voice...
https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave...
Links to free online resources connected to this book/the project that produced it.

This book is a collection of primary sources of interviews conducted in the 20th century of people who suffered in American slavery until emancipation in 1864/5. I think the editors did a great job explaining how these interviews were collected, recorded, and are now being released and how despite the sources being eyewitnesses to their own lives and those around them there are layers of lenses that could affect the 'truth' (for example almost all these interview were conducted by white people and the interviewees might have been influenced in their retellings by that). It is powerful to read people discuss their own lives in a way that ANY fiction, no matter how well done, can match. I wish more effort had been made (honestly in every situation) but in similar projects to record and recognize these people's experiences in their lives. I'm grateful for what we do have recorded, before finding this book I assumed no such project existed and that the events were too far past for there to be significant amounts of recordings. I encourage EVERYONE to read books and others like it to hear firsthand (or as close to as one can) what it was like to LIVE the horrors of slavery. Not just the physical punishments but the basic indignities of everyday life. Not living with your husband. Having your children taken from you. No control over your own life. No ability to have hopes or dreams or ambitions. I know many people don't take a basic interest in history but we all have *some* amount of family history and knowledge passed down to us, if you're from a white family like mine that history is going to be fundamentally biased from its own perception of American/world history through a white point of view. On the surface, there's nothing *wrong* with that but it is SO necessary to not allow yourself to remain in that place of ignorance because the history of America/the world is not at all gone, it's affecting the present in real and often terrible ways. We have to read books like this and investigate and *CARE* about the experiences of other people and not allow ourselves the laziness of only caring and therefore knowing about the people who look like us. No one and nothing exists in a vacuum, the more knowledge we can gain, the more context we can gather the better citizens of this county, THIS WORLD, we can be.

[Nicole Marble · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some topics need a first hand report rather than interpretation. And this is one of the best sources for what it was like for some American slaves. A must read.

[Rowland Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very Rewarding Recollections of Slavery and Emancipation

Some of this collection is very hard to get through as the sadistic treatment of slaves is almost beyond belief at times. Nevertheless this is an invaluable resource for any interested in what life in slavery was like. Certainly all high school students should at the very least read excerpts from this book. And for those Southerners and others who still claim slavery was a positive paternalism this should be required reading. The horrors revealed belie any such belief.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without a doubt, one of the most stark, vivid, tragic, heartbreaking, and disturbing books I've ever read. This work was compiled in the 1930s and 40s through paper and audio, when many former slaves were still living. To hear the shocking history of slavery directly from them made me feel, acutely, the depths of sadness, as well as an angrier-than-ever hatred of slavery: the most disgusting cancer on the skin of American history that ever was.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the 1930's, an act of oral historiography was undertaken in which a variety of researchers were sent out to preserve the vulnerable and threatened knowledge and culture of illiterate African Americans whose history and culture had not previously entered into the American record to a great degree. To be sure, minstrel shows and stories about blacks had been relatively well known (and some of these, like the Uncle Remus stories and Gone With The Wind, remain popular), but accounts of blacks talking about their own experiences were not well known and it was thought worthwhile to record these for analysis. As is the case with all such accounts, there is a certain amount of concern that one has about the trustworthiness of such accounts, all the more so because these accounts were transcribed by (mostly white) interlocutors who may or may not have written down what they heard in a trustworthy manner. Even so, those who wish to understand slavery from the point of view of those who had been enslaved have few other alternatives other than to examine accounts such as this because of their documentary value, even with the concerns about the accuracy of the accounts, and what we have here is a rather fascinating work about how slavery was remembered by elderly former slaves, most of whom remained in situ in the South up to the 1930's when they were interviewed.

This book is almost 350 pages long and it is divided into five chapters as well as containing two appendices. The book begins with a foreword and a preface that discuss the sources and their limitations, as well as an introduction that discusses slavery in memory and history and some information about the editorial method used in the work. After that there are a lot of accounts with a certain amount of editorializing by the people responsible for creating this compilation. The first chapter examines accounts that deal with the troubled relationship between slaves and owners in dealing with the faces of power (1). After that comes a discussion of work and the slave life, sometimes explicitly compared with the different work life experienced under freedom (2). There are plenty of accounts that discuss the relationship between family members (3), some of which give poignant reminders of how fathers would suffer punishments in order to visit their children on neighboring plantations in order to show their love to them. There are accounts of slave culture, including religion, dancing, and music (4). Also, there are accounts that discuss the Civil War and the coming of freedom and what this meant to the slaves (5) who were now freed. There are then appendices that provide the radio documentary "Remembering Slavery," which takes some of these accounts and stitches them together (i), as well as the recordings of slave narratives and related materials in the Library of Congress' Archive of Folk Culture (ii), along with suggestions for further reading, short titles used in the notes, notes, afterword, and index.

How did people remember slavery? The results are somewhat complicated. Even given the vagaries of memory and the reliability of those who took down the transcriptions of those memories, there is a certain tone of gossip that creeps into the memories, as people remembered certain things about their masters and the behavior of their masters and the way in which they learned that it was only save to talk about some things in the fields and not around whites (especially when praising Abraham Lincoln to rebellious slaveowners). One former slave remarked that his master had been "a sissy" who had no use for bright-skinned blacks, presumably because he suspected them (probably accurately) to be relatives who might request special favors. The complexity of slave favor or the lack thereof based on being part white in the eyes of other slaves or the master or mistress is also deeply interesting and deeply complicated as well, especially since those who came from black elites have often remained part of the black elite to this day. This book, obviously, does not deal with these blacks as elites, but merely looks at them as a historical source to how the slaves themselves felt about slavery, and their nearly uniform hatred of being transported and sold around from owner to owner and place to place.

[Adam Gutschenritter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved reading about slavery in their own words. However, the introduction on the process of how they were recorded (that's right recorded) as well as written down was much more interesting for me. The idea that dialect was altered to fit the stereotype and that it is very likely that everything that was suggested was not actually even the beginning of what was seen. Still, much to be digested as I enter my next year teaching US history.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely mesmerizing. The individuals have the most beautiful spirits. Their stories are their own and are filled with their divine nature, their intuition, their love, their pain, and their visceral life.

[Cheryle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most emotionally draining books I've ever read. The real accounts of people who were enslaved are compelling and distressing. For any student of history, of the Civil War, of the slave-holding South, this is a must-read.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book contains firsthand accounts of what it was like being a slave in the United States. The stories were compiled in the early 1930s. Chilling stories at times....

[Leah Henderson]

Definitely worth a read. To learn about the pasts of those often not recognized as men, women or children is truly humbling.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed this book. I expected it to be dry and depressing, and while it is harsh and at times infuriating, I was constantly inspired. I don't know if I can explain why. Maybe it's simply because these are ex-slaves, still bearing the scars of brutality, telling their stories 80+ years later. Survivors whose same feet that were not given shoes during winter can now walk on the graves of those who brutalized and de-humanized them.

It's disappointing that thousands of these interviews were skewed because of the ignorance and indifference of the interviewers during ignorant and indifferent times, but the results are still fascinating. There are stories of violence that will curdle your blood, and experiences of relative content that makes you wish you could have been there.

This book comes at a time when my interest in the last 150 years of this country has been piqued because it is a period in time that we still have direct ancestral connections to. This book is one of those connections.

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remembering Slavery is an invaluable collection of interviews recorded as part of the WPA’s efforts in the 1930s to preserve the testimonies of the last living generation of American slaves. These recollections capture the pain, horror, confusion, sorrow, and injustice committed against enslaved blacks during the two and a half centuries of institutionalized slavery. These interviews are also testaments to the courage, resilience, and strength of the men and women who survived and defied the inhumanity of slavery to see the dawn of freedom. Each of these spoken accounts puts a name and face to those who suffered through the scourge of the most shameful era in American history. As valuable as this book is, it reads very slowly due in part to the rich vernacular of each remarkable story. This adds authenticity to each testimony, but it does require patience with taking in the details and the chronological flow of the survivors’ experiences. To gain the full appreciation of these spoken words, it would probably be more rewarding to listen to the audio version of the book.

[Vicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of first-person histories began in the 1930s then became buried in state and national archives. Thousands of interviews were conducted with ex-slaves by researchers working with the Federal Writer’s Project. At first, other scholars downgraded the value of this collection, and some transcribers edited the “voices” into common speech. A different group of linguistic scholars through advanced technology studied these interviews and captured the true voice of each person’s dialect and unedited story. The introduction tells us “how”. The book is laid out to give us a short story from the mouths of each ex-slave. Not until I started the Introduction did I see my second cousin Natalie Maynor as one of the linguist researchers. Since I read Caste by Isabel Wilkerson in 2020, I have sought more from books and personal actions-from myself. These stories were captured close to 100 years ago when my parents and Natalie's grandmother were young teens. I'm grateful to hear these voices speak the truth of their history.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of spoken memories chronicled from former slaves. It stems from work done by the Federal Writers Project in the late 1930's to collect the memories of former slaves, who at that point were very elderly. These transcripts were brought together for the purpose of this book with audio recordings in the Library of Congress. The book is organized into thematic chapters, such as 'family life and slaves' and 'Civil War and the coming of freedom', and there are old black and white pictures of some of the slaves whose memories are transcribed in the book.

There are all kinds of memories caught here, from work to games to family life. The most frequent theme is the cruel beatings inflicted upon these people, who had no legal protection nor recourse. The earlier transcriptions and now this book are vital components of documenting an evil system that treated people as property.

[Jacob Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It definitely opened my as to what slavery was like in the south. I always thought they were all treated terribly, granted awful things did happen to slaves, but out of the people who were interviewed there were a few that were treated well. So much so that they say they had a better life then than they do now.

What I also enjoyed about it, was that it was a fast reader because, there was a new story about the former slaves lives about every 15 pages or so. People that would enjoy this book would be people that like reading about history. Also anyone who wants to learn more about this time period in america. this is by far one of the best books I have read. this is also a book intended for a mature audience.

[Cherry Bear · Rating 5 out of 5]

The true stories from those who lives history themselves are always something special compared to the fictional works that try to imitate and dramatize it. Insightful, valuable, and a core of understanding America's troubled history with race and oppression.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone in the US needs to read this.

[Jeffrey Leonards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real people discuss what slavery was like. Very sad, but important reading.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories grabbed my attention but the pictures grabbed my heart. Very good book.

[Mica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a deep and emotional book. Sometimes I had to read parts again out of sheer disbelief because they were so shocking. We’ve come so far since then and I’m incredibly proud of us descendants.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the historians for the Federal Writers' Project transcribed their interviews with former slaves in egregious, minstrel show-like dialect. So you need to be prepared for that, up front, when reading this book. Despite that caveat – a lot's changed since the Great Depression – the stories in this book are POWERFUL. Thank goodness people went out and talked to these former slaves while they were still alive. Clearly these men and women had stories they wanted to share. My one real reason for not giving this book 5 stars was that I wanted it to be longer. I wanted more of the interviews (which can all be found online) discussing the Civil War and, in particular, Reconstruction. I suppose for that I can just go on the Library of Congress website.

This is still a pretty stellar book, though.

[Elizabeth Puntolillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Always took his text from Ephesians, the white preacher did, the part what said, 'Obey your masters, be good servant.' Can't tell you how many times I done heard that text preached on. They always tell the slaves that ef he be good, an' worked hard fo' his master, dat he would go to heaven, an' dere he gonna live a life of ease. They ain't never tell him he gonna be free in Heaven. You see, they didn't want slaves to start thinkin' 'bout freedom, even in Heaven."

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've finished two books regarding slavery this month. This was actual first-person memories of what it was like to live in slavery--taken from interviews done in the 1920s and 1930s. Fascinating! Certainly impacted my reading of the book about John Brown--Cloudsplitter.