The Virginia WPA accounts are readily accessible in a terrific collection from UVA Press, titled WEEVILS IN THE WHEAT.  They certainly do contain some relatively nostalgic accounts of slavery.  What should we make of this?  What kinds of conclusions about the nature of slavery can we draw from such information?

As historical data, we need to take into account the provenance of data.  The Virginia narratives were collected as part of a WPA program for unemployed school teachers, in 1936 and 1937 (I am writing from memory here, so don't hold me to those dates too tightly.)  

Unlike accounts from other southern states, the Virginia program employed both black and white teachers to conduct the interviews.  Obviously, the race of the interviewer matters considerably--the accounts taken by a black interviewer are much more likely to offer authentic insight into the mind of the interviewee.  Elderly black people were much more likely to say what they really thought to a younger black person than they were to a younger white person.  Or perhaps a better way to say this is that the agenda of the interviewee was likely to be quite different, depending on the race, age, and gender of the person conducting the interview.

We should bear in mind that either way, the accounts tell us a great deal more about conditions in the 1930s than they do about the 1850s and 1860s.  That is true of any historical data--historical data speaks most authoritatively to the time in which it was produced, regardless of its subject matter.  What we have in the WPA narratives are the recollections of elderly black men and women, whose memories of their childhoods are conditioned by sixty odd years of intervening experiences.  Through a glass darkly, indeed!

By their very nature, and to the extent that these accounts do let us say something about slavery, they speak mostly to the experience of young people.  In 1936, when these accounts were first collected, emancipation was 71 years in the past.  Thus, almost all of the black people alive in 1936 to have their memories recorded would have been born after 1850, and would have been children when they were enslaved.

We know from other sources that the experience of slavery became considerably more harsh once slaves entered their teens, and began to assume more adult jobs.  Thus, we would expect, all other things being equal, that people whose memories of slavery dated largely from their childhood would have a more benign recollection than those who experienced the full harshness of slave work.

Finally, we also know that the experience of slavery tended to vary with the life-cycle of the slave-owner.  Thanks to the pioneering work of Herbert Gutman, we know that there was a life-cycle to a slave plantation.  In the early years of a planter's life, he was concerned mostly to assemble a slave labor force, which entailed splintering slave families.  Then, for a lengthy period as a mature planter, the family life of the plantation's slaves was relatively secure. As the planter's children began to leave his home, however, slave families once again were vulnerable to being split apart.

Since separation of families was one of the (but by no means the only) evils of slavery, we would expect some variation in the WPA narratives.  Those slaves who grew up on plantations in the middle, stable period of the plantation life cycle, would have better memories (all other things being equal) than those who grew up on plantations at the beginning or end of the cycle.

The WPA narratives are an extraordinarily rich set of data.  But we should be leary of reading them uncritically--they have their own unique set of strengths and pitfalls.  I recommend them heartily to those who have not read them--for all of their difficulties, they really do pack a real visceral punch to them.  I assign them routinely when I teach Virginia History, and my students routinely report back that WEEVILS IN THE WHEAT was the book from which they learned the most.
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University