Basil Forest wrote:
> What's the basis for the belief that the WPA former slave interviewees were  
> dishonest in their views on slavery over fear of the "white man"?  Is this  
> the PC way to dismiss the evidence to the contrary on the treatment of some  
> slaves by their owners and the apparent benevolent feelings of the slaves toward  
> their previous lifestyle post-war and freedom?
>  
>  
>
>   
Let me answer this with a couple of observations from John Blassingame's 
The Slave Community (rev.ed., 1979):

Like the autobiographies, the interviews must be used with caution. One 
of the keys to utlizing them was presented in 1937 by 
ninety-four-year-old Amy Chapman who informed an interviewer for the 
Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration: 'I kin tell you 
things about slavery times dat would make yo' blood bile, but dey's too 
turrible.' Though an overwhelming majority of the more than 3,000 blacks 
interviewed by the WPA in the 1930s had been children when the Civil War 
began, they told Southern white interviewers so many things to make the 
blood boil that much of what they said was deleted. The heavy editing of 
the WPA interviews makes them  far more difficult to utilize than black 
autobiographies. Since Southern white interviewers often deleted 
materialcontrary to the paternalistic image of the Old South they wanted 
to present, the WPA stories are least reliable as indices of planter 
treatment of the blacks. Because the informants had generally only known 
bondage as children, however, the interviews present a revealing 
portrait of slave childhood. Slave folk tales, religion, medicine, 
recreation and songs also emerge clearly in the WPA interviews. By 
comparing the few verbatim interviews with the edited ones, those 
conducted by blacks with those conducted by white interviewers, and the 
accounts of blacks who lived on the same plantations, it is possible to 
overcome some of the shortcomings of the WPA interviews. It is 
mandatory, when reading the WPA interviews, to remember the observation 
of ninety-year-old Martin Jackson of Texas: 'Lot of old slaves close the 
door before they tell the truth about their days of slavery. When the 
door is open, they tell how kind their masters were and how rosy it all 
was. You can't blame them for this because they had plenty of early 
discipline, making them cautious about saying anything uncomplimentary 
about their masters.'" (pp.374-375)

For a more recent evaluation and some actual sound recordings of these 
interviews, see the book edited by Ira Berlin and others, Remembering 
Slavery (1998).

I suspect that all of us who teach about slavery do so in ways that 
encourage students to use a wide variety of sources critically and 
creatively. Along the way, we try to correct as many misconceptions as 
we can. One of those misconceptions is that positive testimony by slaves 
and certain facets of slave behavior support the conclusion that slavery 
was satisfactory or acceptable to most slaves. Slaves, like all 
subordinate groups, tended to adapt to the circumstances and larger 
realities they could not change, in order to make the best of a bad lot. 
But was slavery so charming that they--or anyone--preferred it to 
freedom? No. Compare the number who tried to escape slavery altogether 
by running away (many thousands) to the number of free blacks who 
petitioned to be enslaved (maybe a dozen or two known cases in the state 
legislative petitions). I don't believe any whites volunteered to become 
slaves, no matter how poor and miserable they might have been as free 
persons.

Doug Deal

 

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