John Blassingame lecture, "Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems," at the University of Iowa, June 11, 1974

Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 11, 1974, as part of the sixth annual Institute on Afro-American Culture held at the University of Iowa. Speaking on Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves, Approaches and Problems, is Mr. John Blassingame, an instructor at Howard University. Making the introduction is Profession Darwin Turner, Chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: John Blassingame, our speaker for this evening, is currently Professor of History at Yale University. He was born in Covington, Georgia, in 1940, received his Bachelor of Arts from Fort Valley State College where before his time I believe the individual I referred in a seminar this morning, Horace Mann Bond, was President. He received an MA in history from Howard University, a Master of Philosophy from Yale, where he also earned a PhD in history. Before coming to Yale, where he served as acting Chairman of the Afro-American Studies Program, Professor Blassingame was an instructor at Howard University, an associate in the Curriculum Project in American History at Carnegie Mellon University, and an Assistant Editor of the Booker T. Washington Papers while he was a lecturer at University of Maryland. Darwin Turner: In addition to belonging to the major professional associations in history, Professor Blassingame holds important positions in many of the associations. He is a member of the advisory board for the Afro-American [Bicentennial] Corporation, a member of the board of the International Center of African Research, and a member of the American Historical Association Review board. He's also on the executive council of the American Historical Association and the executive council of the Association For The Study of Afro-American Life and History, and in 1975 he will serve as Chairman of the program committee of the Organization of American Historians. His numerous publications have earned him positions as contributing editor to the Black Scholar and as a member of the editorial board of Reviews in American History and of the Journal of Negro History. Darwin Turner: Professor Blassingame has edited or co-edited three books. He edited New Perspectives in Black Studies. He co-edited In Search of America and the Autobiographical Writings of Booker T. Washington. He is the author of two books: The Slave Community and Black New Orleanians from 1860 to 1880. Included among his more than 25 essays are four of special importance to this Institute: one entitled Sambos and Rebels: The Character of the Southern Slave, which was the third annual [Rayford Logan Lecture, another entitled The Slave Family, published in the American Historical Illustrated Magazine number seven, a bibliographical essay, Foreign Writers View Cuban Slavery, in the Journal of Negro History, and Black Autobiographies as Protest, History, and Literature, which was published in The Black Scholar. His forthcoming publication will be White Proscriptions and Black Protests from 1865 to 1969. This will be published in the Encyclopedia of Black America. Darwin Turner: This evening, Professor Blassingame will speak on the topic using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves, Approaches and Problems. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Blassingame of Yale University. John Blassingam...: Darwin asked me not to comment on his introductory remarks to the introduction, so I won't. I'm very happy to be here today to participate in this Institute. As I read the list of participants you had I recognized a number of my heroes included in it and also, much to my surprise, a number of people who I talk about in the course of this paper. You will hear the names as I go through it. I hope they follow me rather than have proceeded me, that is the names that I mention. Then you can ask them questions about whether or not I was lying on them tonight. John Blassingam...: What I'd like to talk about tonight is using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves, Approaches and Problems. Historians of the south's peculiar institution have been engaged in a perennial debate about the reliability of various sources. Conceding the virtual impossibility of finding the completely objective observer, many of them insist that every class of sources should be investigated. [Stanley Elkins] presented the most convincing argument on this point in 1959 when he wrote that, "I witnessed accounts of slavery, quote, were both hostile and sympathetic in nature. It is perhaps best that each kind be given equal weight, as evidence in the judicial sense must always be, and the best presumption probably is that none of these observers was lying about the facts as he saw them." Different facts impress different people, of course. Much is gained and not much is lost on the provisional operating principle that they were all telling the truth. John Blassingam...: Unfortunately, few historians have acted on the principles outlined by Elkins. While examining practically all kinds of accounts written by white eyewitnesses, they have largely rejected those accounts written by ex-slaves. Ulrich B. Phillips left a way in his life and labor in the old south in 1929 when he declared that, quote, "Ex-slave narratives in general were issued with so much abolitionist editing that as a class their authenticity is doubtful." Most scholars have followed Phillips in refusing to read the accounts of former slaves. Only three of the 16 states studies of plantation slavery published between 1902 and 1972 drew even moderately on slave testimony. Among the general studies of slavery, only Fredrick Bancroft, in Slave Trading in the Old South, used the testimony of former slaves extensively. John Blassingam...: A number of scholars have challenged Phillips and contend that in order to understand slavery from a vantage point of Blacks one must carefully study Black testimony and suggest ways it can be used. Historians need to know, for example, how to analyze interviews that were conducted with former slaves in the 20th century. Which of the published autobiographies can be verified by independent sources? Which of them are least reliable? What kind of questions can and cannot be answered by a resort to the accounts of former slaves? How many of the stories were written by the Blacks themselves? How edited the published narratives? John Blassingam...: The fundamental problem confronting anyone interested in studying Black views of bondage is that the slaves had view opportunities to tell what it meant to be a channel. Since the Antebellum narratives were frequently dictated to and written by whites, any study of such sources must begin with an assessment of the editors. An editor's education, religious beliefs, literary skill, attitudes towards slavery and occupation all affected how he recorded the accounts of a slave's life. John Blassingam...: Generally, the editors of the Antebellum narratives were an impressive group of people noted for their integrity. Most of those for whom biographical data were available were engaged in professions, that is they were lawyers, scientists, teachers, historians, journalists, ministers, physicians, or they were business men or engaged in businesses, or they had gained a great deal of prior experience in separating truth from fiction, applying rules of evidence, and accurately portraying men and events. Many of them were either antagonistic too or had little or no connection with professional abolitionists. This was especially true, for example, of Samuel Eliot. Eliot, the editor of Josiah Henson's first narrative, was a musicologist, an essayist, who had served successfully as state legislator, mayor of Boston, and congressman in 1850 and 1851. When Eliot voted for the fugitive Slave Law he was denounced by abolitionists. John Blassingam...: Often, whites edited narratives because the interest in slavery was aroused by sensational trials involving kidnapped or fugitive Blacks. For example, Harper Twelvetrees, a London manufacturer, copied John Anderson's story almost verbatim from the stenographic report of a Canadian and English extradition hearing. Similarly, when the New York free Negro Solomon Northup was rescued from slavery in Louisiana, he attracted the attention of one his neighbors, David Wilson. A local historian, lawyer, and poet, Wilson had served of superintendent of schools and as a state legislator. He had no relationship with abolitionists. John Blassingam...: Five of the editors, William George Hawkins, Joseph C. Lovejoy, James W.C. Pennington, Thomas Price, and William Greenleaf Eliot, were noted ministers in the United States and England. The most famous of them was William G Eliot. Ubiquitous reformer and philanthropist, Eliot served a long 10 years as pastor of a St. Louis congregational church, president of the city school board, and founded Washington University at St. Louis. During the Antebellum period, Eliot frequently castigated what he called fanatical abolitionists and adhered rigidly to his belief in gradual emancipation. John Blassingam...: Many whites edited the narratives because of their interest in history. In fact, nine of the editors had published historical works before 1860. The editors who wrote one historic work during the Antebellum period included Samuel A. Eliot, Pennington, and Price. Other editors might be properly treated as amateur or professional historians and biographers. Numbered among them were James S. [Loring], Henry Trumbull, [David Wilson], Joseph C. Lovejoy, Charles E. Lester, and Charles Campbell. One of the most prolific of the lot was Charles Edwards Lester, a presbyterian minister, console, and reporter. He published 27 books during his lifetime. Lester's Life and Voyages of Americus Vespucius went through several editions between 1846 and 1903. John Blassingam...: Undoubtedly, the most highly qualified of the historian editors was a southerner: Virginia's Charles Campbell. School principal, newspaper editor, and essayist Campbell edited the papers of Theodorick Bland, the military records of the American Revolution, and wrote a book on the colonial history of his state. One of Campbell's contemporaries characterized his work as, quote, "remarkable for its research and accuracy." John Blassingam...: Some of the abolitionist editors also had impressive credentials. This is especially true of those editors with considerable journalistic experience. Louis Alexis Chamerovzow, Isaac Hopper, and James W.C. Pennington. Chamerovzow had edited various journals and served as secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society before he edited the Narrative of John Brown. Thomas Cooper's account was edited by Hopper, the implacable Quaker prison reformer who had served as co-editor as the National Anti-Slaver Standard and was one of the foremost penologists of his time. The editor of J.H. Banks's Narrative, James W.C. Pennington, was a former Maryland slave who had edited the Clarksonian and served as a correspondent for Frederick Douglass's paper in the Anglo-African Magazine. John Blassingam...: Many of the procedures the editors adopted are now standard in any biographical study or oral history project. Generally, the ex-slave lived in the same locale as the editor and had given oral accounts of his bondage. If the fugitive believed that the white man truly respected Blacks, they discussed the advisability of publishing his account. Once the Black was persuaded to record his experiences for posterity, the dictation might be completed in a few weeks or be spread over two or three years. Often the editor read the story to the fugitive, asked for elaboration of certain points, and clarification of confusing and contradictory details. When the dictation ended, the editor frequently compiled appendices to corroborate the ex-slave's narrative. The appendices consisted almost entirely of evidence obtained from sovereign sources: official reports of legislatures, courts, governors, churches, and agriculture societies, or books and newspapers written by southern whites. If those among the editor's friends who first heard the narrative doubted its authenticity, they sometimes interrogated the fugitive for hours. John Blassingam...: A comparison of the narratives with other works written by the editors reveal a few essential differences between the techniques they employed. Charles Campbell, for example, approached Isaac Jefferson's narrative with the same detachment that he did when he edited the papers of Theodorick Bland. The appendices, poems, and letters contained in Joseph C. Lovejoy's Life of his brother and The Reverend Torrey are similar to character to those included in his edition of the Narrative of Lewis and Milton Clarke. The same pattern prevails in various historical works in the narratives edited by Wilson, Lester, Loring, Price, and others. John Blassingam...: Of course, many of the more reliable narratives contain elements which cannot be attributed to the Blacks. Certain literary devices which appear in the accounts appear beyond the ken of unlettered slaves. First, many of the narratives contain long dialogues which could only represent approximations of the truth. Sometimes it is obvious that the editor has fleshed out the sparse details supplied by the fugitive to heighten the dramatic effect of the dialogues. Second, the abolitionist editors often include indirect or direct appeals to their white readers. Many of them also pen long digressions on the duplicity of northerners in maintaining slavery. Similarly, the most complicated philosophical, religious, and historical arguments were sometimes attributed to the slaves to show that bondage violated divine law and the natural rights of man. On occasion, the narratives contained so many of the editor's views that there was little room for the testimony of the fugitive. Sometimes they were so romantic and focused so heavily on the flight from bondage that they were more akin to Indian escape literature than slave autobiographies. These features are so prevalent in the narratives of Elleanor Eldridge, Sally Williams, Jane Blake, and others that they generally reveal few of the details of slave life. John Blassingam...: There can be little doubt that the abolitionists interjected some of their own ideas into some of the narratives. [inaudible], a majority of them faithfully recorded the factual details they received from the former slaves. If it is conceded that many of the abolitionist editors were honest but biased men, the major task which then devolves upon the historian is to find ways to separate their rhetoric from the sentiment of the slaves. The first step in this direction is to compare the Antebellum narratives with some of the best autobiographies written by former slaves after the Civil War. Although they are sometimes rather romantic or devote few pages to their life on the plantation, the accounts published during the post-bellum period are in many ways the most significant and reliable of the lot. The pain of the whip had generally faded enough for the former slaves to write about bondage with less passion than their Antebellum predecessors. John Blassingam...: Another way of identifying elements added by white editors is to compare the first edition of a narrative with each revised edition. The first edition of most narratives is often the one with the fewest distortion, the except I think is Frederick Douglass. Even when one is able to identify and discount abolitionist rhetoric in the accounts of fugitive slaves, the facts supplied by the Blacks may seem false. The only way such doubts can be removed to try to verify the details of the account by examining independent sources. Fortunately, a plethora of Antebellum sources enable historians to ascertain whether the abolitionist editors distorted the accounts of the fugitives. Several of the Blacks, for example, made and wrote numerous speeches and letters antedating the publication of their narratives. When these records are compared to the published accounts, it is obvious that many of the editors try to write the details of the fugitive's life as he dictated them. This is especially true of the narratives of Lewis and Milton Clarke. The first edition, the 1849 one of Josiah Henson, William and Ellen Craft, and to a lesser extent for those of Henry Watson and Henry Box Brown. John Blassingam...: A number of scholars have investigated judicial proceedings, manuscript census returns, diaries and letters of whites, local records, newspaper and city directories, and proven that the narratives of Solomon Northup, John Brown, Olaudah Equiano, and others were authentic. Many Blacks who purchased their freedom, or who had purchased their freedom, been manumitted, or who had escaped from bondage wrote autobiographies without the aid of white editors. The comparison of the narratives of John Thompson, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, James W.C. Pennington, Henry Bibb, Jermain Logan, Austin Steward, Noah Davis, Solomon Bailey, Richard Allen, and G.W. Offley, with the Antebellum letters, speeches and books, reveal so many similarities in style that there can be no doubt about either the authorship or authenticity of their accounts. Similarly, more than 90% of the 67 narratives published after the Civil War were written by the Blacks themselves. John Blassingam...: Although most of them are authentic, the published narratives constitute a limited sample of the total slave population in a number of ways. First, there are many more accounts of slavery in the upper than in the lower south, and practically none for Florida, Arkansas, and Texas. Second, and most important, Black women wrote less than 12% of the narratives. Third, the percentage of fugitives among the narrators was much higher than the percentage of Blacks who escaped from slavery. While less than 5% of the bondsmen successfully followed the North Star to freedom, fugitives wrote about 35% of all narratives. Finally, an overwhelming majority of the narrators were among the most perceptive and gifted of the former slaves. John Blassingam...: Because of the high proportion of exceptional slaves among the Black autobiographies, many of the scholars insist that more of the, quote, average slaves should be heard and point to the 2,300 interviews with ex-slaves complied by the WPA between 1936 and 1938 as a chief source for such testimony. Even before Greenwood Press published the entire collection in 1972, Benjamin Botkin and Norman Yetman had made a convincing case for their use. [George Warrick] and Eugene Genovese have added their own enthusiastic endorsement of Botkin's and Yetman's views. According to these scholars, the WPA interviews were much more representative of the total slave population: less biased and less distorted than the published narratives of former slaves. Since there are so few thematic analyses of the interviews, it is difficult to assess the validity of their claim. John Blassingam...: One obvious shortcoming of any study based on the WPA [inaudible] is that view American historians have been trained to use interviews. Because of its traditional fascination with the written word, the American historian when confronted with the oral lore represented by the WPA interviews has no methodical tools which are applicable to them. Social scientists have pinpointed several problems in interpreting oral lore which are especially evident in the WPA interviews. The first and most important question one must raise about these sources is whether the interview situation was conducive to the accurate communication and recording of what the informants remembered of slavery. John Blassingam...: In this regard, it should be noted that Black interviewers were virtually excluded from the WPA stance in all the southern states except Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida. Discrimination in employment led to a distortion of information. During the 1930s, caste etiquette generally impeded honest communication between southern Blacks and whites. Dollard, Powdermaker, Davis, and many other social scientists who studied the south during the 1930s give vivid pictures of the milieu in which the WPA data were collected. In the context of the 1930s the often repeated declaration of WPA officials, that they were not interested in, quote, taking sides on contemporary racial problems seriously limited their ability to obtain accurate information from southern Blacks. Traditionally, any white man who is not with Black folks is inevitably viewed as being against them. John Blassingam...: Anyone who doubts this should read William R. Ferris's essay on the problems he encountered while collecting rural lore in Mississippi in 1968. During his interviewing, Ferris found that, quote, "It was not possible to maintain rapport both with whites and Blacks in the same community for the confidence and cooperation of each was based on their belief that I was with them and my convictions about racial taboos of delta society. Thus, when I was presented to Blacks by a white member of the community, the informants regarded me as a member of the white caste and therefore limited their lore to non-controversial topics. Blacks rarely speak openly about their society with whites because of their vulnerability as an oppressed minority. As a group in power, whites can afford to openly afford to express their thoughts about Blacks whereas the latter conceal their feelings towards whites as a means of self preservation." End of quote. John Blassingam...: The Black man's vulnerability to white oppression was painfully evident in the Depression south. From 1931 to 1935, for example, more 70 lynchings occurred in the south. Nine Blacks were killed who had committed no crime and 25 were lynched for minor offenses. Many of the Black WPA informants lived in areas where labor contracts were negotiated in jails, death was perpetual, travel was restricted, and the threat of violence made peonage a living hell. Historian Pete Daniel, after an exhaustive study of southern peonage, concluded that, quote, "The violence that attended peonage sent tentacles of dread throughout the entire Black community." End of quote. Since many of the former slaves still resided in the same areas as their masters' descendants and were dependent on whites to help them obtain their old age pensions, they were naturally guarded and often misleading in their responses to certain questions. Frequently, the white interviewers were closely identified with the ancien regime. On occasions, they were the grandsons of the Blacks' former masters. John Blassingam...: The answer to many of the questions of the WPA interview schedule could neither be divorced from the dependent position of the aged Blacks or the contemporary state of race relations in the south. Since attitudes towards the past were often so intertwined with the present in the minds of both informants and interviewers, there was a high premium placed on giving the right answers to such questions as, "Did you have a kind master? Did you have a vote? If so, what do you think of the present restrictive suffrage? How would you compare the younger generation of Negros to the slaves? How would you compare your life now to slavery days?" Now some of these are fairly objective questions except they always turn them around: "Auntie, you had a kind master, didn't you?" John Blassingam...: The white staff of the WPA had mastered so little of the art and science of interviewing that many of them found it impossible to obtain trustworthy data from their informant. The whites disregarded a fundamental rule of interviewing which Ferris noted in 1968. He wrote, "As a white collector, rapport with Blacks was particularly delicate and required constant sensitive to the feelings of informants." End of quote. Many of the WPA interviewers consistently referred to their informants as darkies, niggers, aunties, mammies, and uncles. Reminiscent as these terms were of rigid plantation etiquette, they were not calculated to engender the trust of the Blacks. Rather than being sensitive, the white interviewers failed to demonstrate respect for the Blacks, ignored cues indicating a tendency towards ingratiation, and repeatedly refused to correct an informant's belief that the interviewer was trying to help them obtain the coveted pension. John Blassingam...: Not only did most of the whites lack empathy with the former slaves, they often phrased their questions in ways which indicated the kinds of answers they wanted. My favorite is an interviewer in Georgia who starts her report of the interview by saying that the slave she interviewed, Sue somebody, in her reporting of her slave life talking very somber terms, and she started the interview by asking her, "What kind of master did you have?" She said, "Oh, he was terrible. Beat us all the time." The interviewer was a little upset by this and she said, "But you did have a kind mistress, didn't you?" She said, "Well, she was kind some... Well, I ain't going to lie. She was bad too." The interviewer said, "The children had a good time, didn't they?" She said, "Well, mine didn't. I don't know if they did. I've never had a chance to she them." But she kept trying to get this sense of kindness in terms of the white family out of this particular slave. John Blassingam...: Every recorded interviews has two authors: the person who asks the questions and the one who answers them. Often the white interviewer or author's actions and demeanor led to distortions and limitations of what the Black informant author told him. Many of the Blacks played it safe. They claimed that they remembered very little about slavery and gave one or two page interviews. There's one man in Arkansas where every time they came to his door would tell them he was born after slavery. Said the reason they did that, they would never ask him any questions. One Black interviewer finally got to him and he gave him about a half page interview. Even the most candid of the informants who gave the longest interviews refused to talk about certain things. One frustrated Kentuckian, for example, reported that, quote, "In interviewing the different Negros of this community I have not found a single Negro that could admit, if I asked the direct question, that they are the least bit superstitious." End of quote. John Blassingam...: Sometimes it was impolitic, if not dangerous, for the ex-slave to tell all that he remembered. This is especially evident in the folk songs and tales. Although practically every intensive study of these cultural elements reveals much anti-white sentiment, rarely does this attitude surface in the WPA collection. Many of the secular songs or lullabies are hunting songs. The white-hating trickster slave Jack almost never appears in the tale. The Blacks were carefully editing what they told whites. Generally, they only told them children's tales and songs. One indication of this is the difference in the tales recorded during this same period by the Black folklorist J. Mason Brewer and those of the WPA. Taken from the class of informant, the tales Brewer recorded have a relatively high anti-white content and many Jack or John stories. John Blassingam...: A second weakness of the WPA interviews is that many of them are not verbatim accounts. The informant stories were often edited or revised before they were typed or listed as official records. Even when the former slave's views are purportedly typed in his own words, the interview may have been doctored, certain portions deleted without any indication in the typescript, and his language altered. Consequently, the interviews are not, as Norman Yetman has claimed, quote, "Almost exclusively verbatim testimonies in which Blacks describe in they own words what it felt like to be a slave." End of quote. Indications of the deliberate distortion and interpolation of the views of the WPA staffers pose a serious challenge to historians who rely heavily on the interviews. John Blassingam...: The best evidence on the alteration of the interviews appears in the record for Roscoe E. Lewisand a Georgia interviewer J. Raph Jones. In 1936 and '37, Jones conducted five interviews which were returned to the state office of the WPA. Three of the five transcribed by state officials are identical to the copies that Jones retained. The other two were significantly reduced in length and seriously distorted. Jones's interviews with Rias Body and W.B. Allan were edited to delete references to cruel punishment, to Blacks serving in the Union Army, runaways, and Blacks voting during Reconstruction. John Blassingam...: Jones had two interviews with WB Allan and the second one is recorded in identical words in his record and the WPA typescript. The WPA typescript of the first interview, however, lists Allan's date and place of birth incorrectly and does not include 1,700 words which appear in Jones's record of the interview. About half of the section excluded from the WPA typescript refer to cruel slave traders, the religious life of the slaves, the tricks they played on the patrollers, and the songs they sang. While the transcript refers to the kind treatment Allan received from his owners, Jones's record show that he spent a great deal of time talking about the hard work and cruel floggings characteristic of a plantation. The WPA transcript gives the impression that Allan spoke in dialect using such words as fetched, de, dis, chilluns, and fokes: F-O-K-E-S. But in his records, Jones's observed that Allan, quote, "Uses excellent English." End of quote. John Blassingam...: J. Raph Jones's experience was not unique. The same kind of distortions appeared in the typescripts of the Virginia WPA. Nine of the Virginia informants included in the Library of Congress collection were also quoted in a 1940 publication The Negro in Virginia, Roscoe E. Lewis the editor. After original report of interviews in his possession and seven of the nine informants he quoted presented views excluded from the typescripts of their accounts. According to excerpts quoted by Lewis, between one and 1,200 words of original interviews were excluded from the transcripts of these slaves. The transcripts are poor summaries of the ex-slaves comments. Songs and religious sentiments were frequently left out of the WPA typescripts. Indications of cruel punishments, forced marriages, family separations, ridicule of whites, of the kindness of Union soldiers appeared in the record cited by Lewis but often do not appear in the WPA typescripts. John Blassingam...: Although the facts are not entirely clear... that's a wavering phrase that historians always use to cover themselves. It is clear that they doctored the manuscripts. Although the facts are not entirely clear, it is obvious that some of the WPA interviews were altered after the dictation ended. The national office of the WPA encouraged this in regard to the language patterns of the Blacks and urged state directors to record dialect uniformly. This may have accounted for dialect being ascribed to former slaves who spoke English perfectly, but how can we account for the discrepancies between the interviews Jones and other recorded and those the WPA staff typed, where two out of every interviews in Georgia and other southern states distorted in the same way? While there are no definitive answers to these intriguing questions historians must ponder them when they try to use the WPA interviews. John Blassingam...: A third factor which led to the distortion of the WPA interviews was the average age of the informant. Two thirds of them were at least 80 years old when they were interviewed, and since only 16% of the informants had been 15 years or older when the Civil War began an overwhelming majority of them could only describe how slavery appeared to a Black child. Because all of the Blacks were at least 72 years removed from a plantation, there is no sense, or sometimes little sense, of immediacy in their responses. All to often they recall very little of the cruelty of bondage. A good way of determining the impact of age on the responses of former slaves is to compare the WPA interviews with the hundreds conducted by northern journalists, soldiers, missionaries, teachers, Black scholars, and American Freedman's Inquire Commission during and immediately after the Civil War. The informants of the AFIC and other interviewers were still close to bondage and consequently they remembered far more of the details of slavery than the WPA respondents. John Blassingam...: Were the WPA informants, as Yetman claimed, representative of a total Antebellum slave population? Apparently not. Since the average life expectancy of a slave born in 1850 was less than 50 years, those who lived until the 1930s might have survived because they received better treatment than most slaves. Taken at face value, there seems to be a bias in many states towards the inclusion of the most obsequious former slaves. This is especially true when most of the informants have spent all their lives in the same locale as their former masters' plantation. Since the least satisfied and most adventuresome of the former slaves might have migrated to northern states and cities after the Civil War, the WPA informants may have been atypical of Antebellum slaves. John Blassingam...: Geographically, the WPA collection is also a biased sample. Although more than 900,000 of the south's slaves, or 23% percent lived in Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, only 155 Blacks from these states were included among the 2,300 published interviews, or less than 6% of the total. Consequently, the upper south, and especially the boarder states, is underrepresented. On the other hand, while Arkansas and Texas had only 293,000, or 7%, of southern slaves in 1860, the 985 Black informants in these states constituted 42% of all former slaves interviewed by the WPA. John Blassingam...: Most of the interviews are so limited in focus, or are so short, that it requires considerable skill to extract reliable information from them. In the South Carolina volumes, which contain some of the longest interviews, only 18% of the accounts are more than five pages long. Because of the brevity of the interviews it is often impossible to resolve internal inconsistencies, reconcile tone with fact, separate rumor from direct observations, fathom subtle nuances, or verify uncertain chronology, or to determine the extent of what's known as structural amnesia and the manipulation of data to conform to the conditions existing in the 1930s. Since the major objective of the WPA project was to record folklore, other topics relative to plantation slavery often receive little attention. John Blassingam...: Although there are probably other weaknesses and limitations of the interviews which could be noted, the historian's main concern must be with determining ways to utilize them. While the [inaudible] principles in interpreting oral lore is that the investigator must have an intimate knowledge in an informant's group, tribe, or race, according to the Africanist Jan Vansina quote, "Members steeped in the culture itself and sometimes only the more sensitive among them are in the best position to study oral lore. It is preferable that study of traditions be entrusted to people who belong to the society itself." End of quote. But whether a Black or white scholar studies the WPA interviews is not as important as the approaches they take. They should begin by mastering the skills of the linguist and then systematically examine the internal structure of the interviews, the recurrence of symbols and stereotypes, the sequence of episodes and the functions they serve. John Blassingam...: Given the staffing policies of the WPA, some effort must be made to determine the relationship between the sex and race of interviewers and the reliability of the account. Generally the stories are most revealing when the informant and the interviewer were of the same sex. Black interviewers obtained more reliable information than white ones, and white women received more honest responses than white men. Given the staffing polices of the WPA, it is fortunate that a majority of the former slaves in most states were interviewed by white women: 60% in North Carolina, 80% in Arkansas, and about 90% in Georgia. The reverse, however, was true in South Carolina where 78% of the former slaves were interviewed by white men. John Blassingam...: There are also other important variations in the collections. Although the Arkansas interviewed more Blacks than any of the others, a larger percentage of them had never actually been slaves. I'm convinced after going through those volumes that the... Interviewers in Arkansas were paid two dollars for every interview they came in with regardless of who they got it from and I think they have some quality control in some of the other states because they came in with people who were 40 years old and couldn't possibly have known anything about slavery. For example, about 40% of the Arkansas informants were born during or after the Civil War. Many of them were in their 40s or 50s in 1939. John Blassingam...: All things considered, the Georgia collection is one of the most reliable of the WPA volumes. I should tell you I'm from Georgia. C. Vann Woodward, who's from Arkansas, reviewed this collection. He concluded that Arkansas had the best collection. He's biased. I'm not. John Blassingam...: All things considered, the Georgia collection is one of the most reliable of the WPA volumes. Most of the informants had actually been slaves, although not as old as the South Carolina Blacks, and were interviewed by white women. The Georgia [inaudible] also made an effort to evaluate the interviews they collected. These evaluations were cautious and generally in accord with the data contained in the interviews. Louise Oliphant for instance, asserted, quote, "There are many ex-slaves who have vivid recollections of the days when their days were inseparably bond to those of their masters. Mistreatment at the hands of their masters and the watchdog overseers is outstanding in the memory of most of them." On the other hand, Ruby Bradford discovered that, quote, "Out of 35 Negros contacted only two seem to feel bitter over memories of slave days. All the others spoke with much feeling and gratitude of the good old days when they were cared for by their masters." Bradford either did not accept such declarations as indicative of planter paternalism. Instead, she tried to correlate them with the average age of the informants and concluded that, quote, "Most of the slaves interviewed were too young during the slavery period to have experienced any of the more cruel punishment, although some remembered hearing tales of brutal beatings." John Blassingam...: The interviewing skill of the Georgians differed greatly from that of many other white southerners. Consequently, it is mandatory to compare the stories collected by Black interviewers with those collected by whites. The key questions in this comparison are those which involve life in the quarters and the treatment of slaves and there's frequency of floggings, adequacy of food, character of masters, and so forth. A portrait given by South Carolina informants is a good example of those recorded by predominately white interview staffs. According to South Carolina Blacks, most of them were well treated, [inaudible] fed and clothed, and rarely overworked by kind masters. Most of them longed for the old plantation days. Although a great deal of this can be attributed to the general propensity of man to view his childhood through rose-colored lenses, most of it is due to caste etiquette and actions and attitudes of white interviewers. John Blassingam...: The former slaves who talked to Black interviewers presented an entirely different portrait of their treatment from what they told white interviewers. Black scholars at Hampton, Fisk University, and Southern University, and some of the Blacks on the Georgia WPA and Arkansas WPA, conducted approximately 1,000 interviews with ex-slaves between 1929 and 1938. The interviews they received run directly counter to the South Carolina image of planter paternalism. More importantly, none of the volumes of interviews conducted by whites reveal as much about the internal dynamics of slave life as these conducted by Blacks. The informants talk much freely to Black than white interviewers about miscegenation, hatred of whites, courtship, marriage, and family customs, cruel punishments, separation of families, child labor, Black resistance to whites, and the admiration of Nat Turner, because if you read most of the interviews the only Black who is admired is Booker Washington. There's this one question they always ask, "Who do you admire most?" And they would roll off some names. Roosevelt was very popular because they felt he controlled the power to give them the pensions and who could be safer than Booker Washington if you lived in Georgia talking to another white man about who you admire? John Blassingam...: I was always struck by the fact that... since I had been led to believe by a study done by a friend of mine that Jack Johnson was a very important folk hero, and if any of you ever find Jack Johnson mentioned in the WPA narratives I would appreciate it if you told me, but he doesn't appear. It's not very difficult to see why. Jack Johnson sort of running around all over the country and the world with these blonds, usually, some redheads I think, that he married. And while he had the nerve to go and speak to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s about all this, I'm sure had I been living in Georgia in the 1930s I would not have admitted that I admired Jack Johnson because they would've thought I admired everything about him. John Blassingam...: If one begins with the testimony collected by the predominately Black WPA staff and uses them as a standard of accuracy, many of the general distortions in the WPA collection can be eliminated. In spite of this huge sample, the distortions, and biases, the WPA interviews reveal much about the nature of slavery. Given the average age of the informants when they were freed, for instance, their stories contain a great deal of information about the childhood experiences of slaves. And given the interest of the interviewers, they contain a large repository of folklore. Using all of those slaves who were at least 15 years old in 1860, it is possible to compile some limited statistics on the separation of families, the age at which children started work, the occupation of slaves, and the extent to which overseers and drivers were used. The most reliable information can be compiled by asking questions which differ from those asked by the white interviewers. In this way, some of the distortions caused by the interview situation can be overcome. John Blassingam...: Since the memory of the harshness of the Antebellum plantation was inversely related to the former slave's geographical distance from it, it is necessary to compare the stories of informants living on or near those plantations with those Blacks who resided in other states. It is significant, for example, that former South Carolina slaves who were interviewed in Georgia had a far different view of bondage than those who were interviewed in South Carolina. Such comparisons as this improve the accuracy of data complied from the WPA interviews. On certain topics, the WPA interviews represent an incomparable source. They probably contain, for example, more religious and secular songs than any other single source. Similarly, the interviews contain much genealogical data on Black families not found anywhere else. The WPA collection is also a rich source of information on Black speech patterns. There are, however, many problems involved in the use of such data, in particular, all other speech. Thing if you remember how the editors sometimes distorted what they supposedly said, plus the fact that if you read the instructions to the interviewers you will note that the model that they took for recording the words was based on some novels written by some southern whites. They said, "Follow this." We don't know what the hell we're getting when we see these des, dises, and dats in the interviews. John Blassingam...: Uncritical use of the interviews will lead almost inevitably to a simplistic and distorted view of the plantation as a paternalistic institution where the key feature of life was mutual love and respect between masters and slaves. A more sophisticated examination using the skills of the linguist, statistician, folklorist, behavioral scientists, anthropologists, and Africanists will uncover the complexity of life on the plantation. Such systematic studies of oral lore combined with critical examinations of published narratives will enable scholars to write more revealing and accurate portrayals of slavery. Many scholars, while granting the desirability of studying both kind of Black testimony, still wonder which of them is the best kind of historical evidence. John Blassingam...: The WPA interviews are so numerous and now so much more accessible than the published narratives that at first glance they would appear to have the edge. On the other hand, the narratives, while part of Black oral tradition, are literary records and easier for most historians to study. Then too, if all the narratives which have been published in newspapers, magazines, church minutes, and court records were collected, they would probably outnumber the WPA interviews. Actually, the two sources are complementary. The interviews include the women, 50% of the total, and average slaves who did not publish their stories. The narratives include the Blacks from the board of states missing in the interviews, and the preponderance of WPA informants from Texas, Arkansas, and Florida make up for the [inaudible] of narrators from these states. By and large, the topics covered in the interviews and the narratives are identical. Both kinds of testimony may be biased. John Blassingam...: The narrative has, however, three great advantages over the interview. First, the average narrator was 28 years younger than the average WPA informant when their stories were recorded. Second, an overwhelming majority of the narrators were over 20 years of age when they obtained freedom and could thus tell what slavery was like for adults as well as for Black children. Third, all of the book length narratives were far longer, of course, than the WPA interviews. As a consequence of these differences, personality traits appear in sharp relief in the narratives while often being obscured in the interviews. John Blassingam...: Although there can be no definitive answer to the question, there's a way to demonstrate some of the things mentioned above. One former Kentucky slave, Peter Bruner, wrote a narrative in 1925 and was interviewed by the WPA in 1936. A careful reading of the two stories reveals many of their similarities but there are so many contradictions in the two accounts that it is obvious that, one, Bruner conceals some things from the interviewer, two, the transcription was inaccurate, or three, Bruner had forgotten many of the details he included in his 1925 narrative by 1936. That is a possibility which I don't believe. He was a Civil War veteran and almost annually he had to tell where he was born, how many toes he still had at a certain date, who his friends were. It was this long thing that the veterans had to go through. John Blassingam...: During both the 950 word interview and the 54 page narrative, Bruner recalled his cruel master, the floggings he received, and his numerous attempts to escape, but in the interview he revealed nothing about his parents or the development of his attitudes, character, or personality. In the interview, Bruner and his master have a one dimensional quality. Both have complex personalities in the narrative. Besides these elements, Bruner's narrative includes many other things that he did not reveal to the WPA interviewer: for example, his addiction to alcohol or Blacks who had helped runaways or Blacks who had resisted floggings. He did not talk about the amusements: gambling, drinking, dueling, and so forth [inaudible] and their oppression of poor whites. Did not talk about his introspective revelations about his feelings about being enslaved, the development of his attitudes towards work, slave holders, and poor whites, and the [inaudible] of the slave. John Blassingam...: In the final analysis, the methodical skills possessed by the historian and the question he wants to answer will determine whether he uses the narratives or the interviews. Where skills and interests intersect, he will use both. In either case, the approach must be a critical one and take into account the following declaration of Solomon Northup: "There may be humane masters as there certain are inhuman ones. There may be slaves well clothed, well fed, and happy, as there surely are those half clad, half starved, and miserable. Man may write fictions portraying [inaudible] life as it is or as it is not, may expatiate with honest gravity upon the bliss of ignorance, discourse flippantly from armchairs of the pleasures of slave life. Let them toil with him in the field, sleep with him in the cabin, fed with him on husk. Let them behold him scrouged, hunted, trampled on, and they will come back with another story in their mouths. Let them know the heart of the poor slave, learn his secret thoughts, thoughts he dare not utter in the hearing of the white man. Let them sit by him in the silent watches of the night, converse with him in trustful confidence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and they will find that 99 out of every hundred are intelligent enough to understand their situation and to cherish in their bosoms a love of freedom as passionately as themselves." John Blassingam...: If scholars want to know the heart and secret thoughts of slaves, they must study the testimony of Blacks. But since the slave did not know the heart and secret thoughts of masters, they must also examine the testimony of white. Neither the whites nor the Blacks had a monopoly on truth, had rendered the veil cloaking the life of the other, or had seen clearly the pain and the joy bound up by color and caste. The perceptions of neither can be accepted as encapsulating the totality of plantation life. Consequently, whether we focus on the slaves or the masters, we must systematically examine both Black and white testimony. But just as there are some topics on which only the masses can provide reliable information, there are some questions which only the slave can answer. In this regard, scholars should always remember the perceptive observation of Frederick Douglass, that a free man, quote, "Cannot see things in the same light with the slave because he does not and cannot look from the same point on which the slave does." John Blassingam...: Because of these differences in perceptions, scholars who have studied a variety of sources have concluded, as did Roscoe Lewis, that, quote, "There are questions about the slave system that can be answered only by one who has experienced slavery. How did it feel to be owned? What were the pleasures and sufferings of a slave? What was a slave's attitude toward his owner, toward the white man's assumption of superiority, toward the white man's god? Do slaves want to be free? Did they feel it was their right to be free?" End of quote. Individual and collective mentality of the slaves, the ways they sought to fulfill their needs, the experiential context of life in the quarters and in the fields, and the Black man's personal perspective of bondage emerge only after an intensive examination of the testimony of ex-slaves. Thank you. Darwin Turner: Professor Blassingame will respond to questions that you have. John Blassingam...: Yes ma'am. Speaker 5: What was your evaluation [inaudible] narrative? John Blassingam...: It depends on which one. The first one I don't like.