Bringing "That Slavery Thing" Out of the Archives

On the heels of blogging about The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr.'s novel set among enslaved people (02/18/2021), I found many points of agreement between that fiction and what Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith has found in archived interviews with the last Americans to have been born in slavery. His article "We Mourn for All We Do Not Know" is in the March 2021 issue.

Smith was surprised to find, among the horrific accounts of violence and deprivation that he expected,

stories of enslaved people dancing together on Saturday evenings as respite from their work; of people falling in love, creating pockets of time to see each other when the threat of violence momentarily ceased; of children skipping rocks in a creek or playing hide-and-seek among towering oak trees, finding moments when the movement of their bodies was not governed by anything other than their own sense of wonder.

The accounts of love and wonder resonate with Jones's novel, where flirtation, love, dancing, and horseplay at the stream are all part of the texture of the story. But Smith writes that some members of a black family, reading an ancestor's account of some happy times, were suspicious, because it played into pre-and-post Reconstruction propaganda about how slave life was so sheltered and carefree.

Smith writes that these interviews, conducted in 1938 for the New Deal program the Federal Writers' Project, have long been suspect, for some good reasons:

• Were the memories of people so old be trusted?
• Few of the interviewers were black; living in the Jim Crow South, did elderly men and women say what they thought a white person would want to hear? Did biased interviewers manipulate their subjects?
• The transcripts are written in dialect, e.g., "My mudder...hafter git some food... Us all 'round de table like dat was like a feast"; to what extent were the transcripts altered to be "more authentic?"
• Critics after historian Ulrich B. Phillips (d. 1934), who thought slavery was a civilizing influence, mistrust what black people had to say about slavery because, well, how can black people be objective about slavery?
  

Answering that last one, Daina Ramey Berry, History Chair at U.T. Austin, wonders how white people can be objective about plantation owners.  She told Smith that there's some kind of bias in every source.

Something else that resonates with Jones's novel is something that sociologist Orlando Patterson calls "natal alienation." Patterson observes how black people under slavery and still to this day have been "stripped of social and cultural ties to a homeland we cannot identify." Records weren't kept. In The Prophets, the character Isaiah aches to be able to remember his mother and the name she gave him.

Smith interviewed modern-day black historians and genealogists who have searched for their own families in those archives. They tell of strong emotional reactions when they see photos of great-greats that they'd only heard of. Janice Crawford traced her family back to the plantation operated by the Rogers family. 

[Photo: Carter J. Johnson, born in slavery, who raised Janice Crawford's orphaned mother]

Crawford contacted one Rogers descendant who had published an article extolling his family's preaching the word of God through many generations of ministers, but he didn't stay in touch. She wonders how slave owners could commit to slavery while espousing Christian principles; The Prophets features a slave owner who quotes scripture to assuage his momentary moral qualms.

Smith also talked with Gregory Freeland, who grew up on Crest Street near where I lived on the campus of Duke University.  I was never aware that the Crest Street community had originally been its own town established by people emancipated after the Civil War. Freeland, who has done extensive research in the archives, regrets that he passed up the opportunity to ask questions of his own elders when he was growing up. "I was sort of ready to get away from that, that slavery thing," he tells Smith. Now he's working to collect interviews with those who remember the Civil Rights era.

That slavery thing has been left moldering in the archives while white history has wanted to move on.  In the 1980s, when Ken Burns' Civil War documentary ran on TV night after night, I was teaching in Mississippi.  I talked about each installment with friends. We were all college-educated and liberal in our racial views, and we loved the 89 appearances by Mississippi writer Shelby Foote, who had a wry twinkle in his eye as he regaled us with anecdotes from that conflict. While we respected the big-picture commentary by Columbia College professor Barbara Fields, I remember consensus that her 10 or so clips were too many, because, being black, she just couldn't move on from the topic of slavery. But, being white, we didn't think about "moving on" from Lincoln, Lee, and Mary Chesnutt.

Articles like Smith's and writing like The Prophets, along with other books I've read recently -- Bryan Stevenson's memoir Just Mercy and the YA novel Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam (see blogpost 12/2020) -- make me more aware than ever how our desire to segregate "that slavery thing" from the rest of America's life still distorts our teaching of history, our political discourse, our laws, and our communities.

[By coincidence, Clint Smith has popped up in my reading and radio listening three times this weekend. He told Shankar Vedantam on Hidden Brain about his early career teaching literature to mostly poor black kids, and how he learned that averting their eyes from their lives to Shakespeare and fantasy literature was a mistake. He's also represented in a book of essays 400 Souls. I've learned that Smith is also a poet. Here's a photo from a short talk-and-poem on TED talks. His web site is www.slintsmithiii.com

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