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