Okay, dear colleagues, I'm going to jump into the pool here.  Kevin  
Hardwick wrote:

"So let's stipulated that some former slaves, remembering slavery,  
recalled it in nostalgic, positive terms.
So what?  What larger inferences do you draw from the fact that some  
elderly people had positive memories of their childhoods (as slaves)?
Just what are you arguing for, anyway?  What's your point?"


Basil Forest replied:

"'By far the best proof is experience'"


To which Kevin replied:

"I do not understand the point you are making here.  Can you spell it  
out a bit more directly?
Thanks . . ."


To which J. South replied:

"Merely that their testimony is the best evidence we have of their  
feelings about this lives in slavery vis-a-vis their lives at the time  
they were interviewed.  They don't speak for everyone, but they do  
speak for themselves.
I love the way historians like to take such accounts and  discount the  
veracity of the interviewee to meet their intellectual and academic  
point of view."


Okay, let me see if I can explain why that's an absurd statement, with  
all due respect.

J. South and Basil Forest, no one is "discounting the veracity of the  
interviewee."  But do you really think that historians take *any*  
document or testimony at face value?   Because I can assure you that we  
don't.  No matter who wrote the document, or spoke the words, -- no  
matter who! -- historians (and probably you, too, if you think about  
it) know enough about human nature to recognize that any human  
utterance exists in a context, and that to understand it you have to  
understand the context also.

All historical study of documents, and much literary scholarship, is  
based on that belief.   Why do you believe that we should treat the WPA  
narratives differently from any other historical source?  Why should we  
take the words of the WPA interviewees at face value when (for example)  
the words of George Washington or Robert E. Lee need to be understood  
in historical context?    What makes the WPA narratives the great  
exception?

And if you look at the context of the WPA interviews, you find that  
they took place in a society that placed whites above blacks and  
involved poor, elderly black people, many of whom still lived in or  
near the same community where they'd been enslaved and many of whom  
were hoping to qualify for government pensions to help alleviate their  
poverty, being interviewed by much younger middle-class white people  
who were either strangers or from the same community and who said they  
were there on behalf of the government.

Now, in that setting, is one obliged to consider the likelihood that at  
least some of the testimony saying, in effect, "your  
great-grandparents, or your fellow white people's great-grandparents,  
treated me okay" is perhaps to be taken as a strategically qualified  
statement rather than a statement of absolute candor?   Or is it safer  
to assume that these poor old black folks were so stupid they thought  
they'd better tell these quite possibly powerful white folks the full  
unvarnished truth, and damn the consequences?  (The questions  
themselves were less than neutral: read them starting at  
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mesn&fileName=001/ 
mesn001.db&recNum=18 , and notice that they leave plenty of scope for  
pleasant memories and very little for recollections of punishment and  
such.)

J. South and Basil Forest, how do you answer that argument?  If you  
believe the contexts of these interviews are (uniquely) irrelevant, can  
you please say why?

Here's another piece of evidence.  If you read hundreds of the WPA  
narratives, as I have -- and which anyone can readily do by reading   
those found at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html -- you  
find that, yes, they contain many personal memories of both cruelty and  
contentment.  But you also start to notice something else: that there  
are many memories of cruelty experienced by others, in the neighborhood  
or even on the same plantation, rather than by the interviewee him- or  
herself.  The person says, in effect,   "I did okay, but here's what  
happened to my aunt, or my friend, or the people down the road."  In  
other words: I'm not going to say anything against the people who owned  
me, but I will tell you about the cruelty of their neighbors, or of the  
overseers who worked for them.  Could that, just possibly, be a way of  
telling some difficult truths while shielding the speaker from direct  
responsibility for them?  Could that tell us anything about the  
willingness, or reluctance, of the interviewees to be direct about  
their own experiences?  I don't know, but surely it's worth  
considering.

One final suggestion.  If you know anyone who's been in combat, think  
about how they talk about it, if they do so at all.  (If you're a  
combat veteran yourself, sit down with a young relative at the next  
family gathering and ask them to interview you about it.)  My guess is  
that the positive memories -- the camaraderie, the bravery, the  
hardship successfully endured -- will be readily shared, but the  
traumatic ones will not.

Slavery, like war, was an extraordinarily complex experience.  Why  
should we assume that either slavery or war leave simple, unconflicted  
memories and records that can best be understood at face value?

--Jurretta