George P. Rawick lecture, "Towards a Methodology for the Use of Slave Narratives," at the University of Iowa, June 17, 1974

Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 17th 1974, as part of the Sixth Annual Institute on Afro-American Culture held at the University of Iowa. The subject of this presentation Towards a Methodology for the Use of Slave Narratives by George Rawick, Professor of Learning Resources at Empire State College of the State University of New York. Making the introduction is Professor Darwin Turner, Chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: ... present during that time period. This afternoon I'd like to introduce just a bit formally an individual whom most of you have already had opportunity to meet professor George Rawick who is Professor of the Learning Resources Faculty at Empire State College of the State University of New York. He received his undergraduate training at Oberlin, his graduate degrees, the Masters and PhD at the University of Wisconsin. His most significant publishing venture in relation to this Institute is his editing of the 18 Volume Edition, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Darwin Turner: And of course as you know, he is also the author of the volume which is the first in that series From Sundown to Sun Up. He is currently working on additional slave manuscripts that have not been published. Professor Rawick. George Rawick: Thank you very much. I want to talk this afternoon to the uses of the Slave Narratives. And here, I think I have in mind both the Antebellum works and the many interviews that were done during the 1930s. And here I mean not only those done by the Federal Writers' Project, but also those done at Fisk University, those two or three other collections done elsewhere. The first thing I really want to say is something that I find the necessity of saying and yet dislike saying because to have to say it seems to be superfluous. George Rawick: I have probably cannot remember anybody of a potential historical evidence placed under such careful scrutiny as to its validity and its legitimacy as this body of material. And the reason I find that very odd is if you think about what is used by standard historiography as their standard sources, which indeed has not been questioned. For example if you look at virtually every book until nickels, blessing game and myself you will find at best, at best one or two passing references to a body of literature in which people who had been slaves talked about that experience. The exception is Franklin Frazier that I can think of, the exception is Carter Woodson, the exception is W.E.B. Du Bois, but you see we leave them and I'll come back to that in a moment, they were for that time not setting the canons of historical research. They are on the outside. George Rawick: The standard sources are plantation records, the letters of plantation owners, the letters of visiting European travelers passing through the South, the letters or observations of visiting Northern journalists passing through the South, the accounts in state in the recordings of state legislatures, in national political debates. That isn't sources that are with almost no exception white, [planter] oriented and removed from the source. And that has never really upset anybody very much. George Rawick: I saw a letter by leading a liberal historian of slavery in which he justified that. He said that you have to write about slavery using the same kinds of materials that historians generally use. And now I want to begin with really where the Slave Narratives for me began. Where they really began was an increasing awareness that the kinds of materials used by historians, where they generally are class biased, race biased, that there is free from the top down. That in fact, we have bless it little history that is written that really reflects the mass experience of people. We have many histories of the United States. George Rawick: We have books that call themselves the history of the American people, but if you read them carefully what they really turn out to be are histories of American politics, the American economic system, American foreign relations, non a chapter or two on American intellectual life. And then a jazzy chapter two on popular arts and culture and then we're finished with that. And the life as experienced by everyone, by the mass of the population, white, blue, green, black, red, that's really not there. George Rawick: And that's not only true in the United States, it's generally true of the whole canons of historical writing in Western civilization, the document. There was a time at about the turn of the century that the most solid history was diplomatic history because thereafter all you had those absolutely wonderful documents to go by. Those official diplomatic correspondence and they were marked official and it's more officially, well, that was history. And you learned what historiography was off that. George Rawick: And there was a peculiar bias and there's a peculiar bias in favor of the written word as if the written word was somehow rather the voice of the Lord. There is a peculiar bias throughout Western civilization about the written word. And so we've had a historiography that is from the top down. And I really started to look for the Slave Narratives to be very honest, not because I really wanted first and foremost, the question first and foremost was not in my mind that I wanted to know about slavery. The first thing I wanted to do was to deal with a substantial body of material that could give one the view of society, of life, of the historical experience of people who are not quote unquote historical characters. We only know their historical characters because they get into history books. George Rawick: They were famous men or women, usually men. And I wanted to find another way of going about it. I wanted to begin to write the history if you will, of the American people. That was really what I wanted to do. And interestingly enough, and not surprising, and I will come back to that in a moment. The one source that gives us the most substantial source material for the history of the population at large, of popular history, of mass history, of history of poor people, of poor farmers, of working people, the one single best source turned out to be the history of Black people and the slavery. I'll come back to them in a moment, the reason for that. George Rawick: At the very time that I was doing all of that and thinking all of that, I came across one of those wonderful things you read in popular history journals, a popular history journal that was called American Heritage Magazine, very famous magazine that is spread around dentists offices and it's a sort of official repository of history for everyone a little expensive thing. And an article in 1968, Peter [inaudible] writing about slavery says, "A subjugated people reduced to and held in a condition little better than that of domestic animals is not likely to make much history." And then he tells us what much history means in his terms, "As uneducated slaves, Blacks were obviously in no position to lead noteworthy careers. They could not be conduct as lawyers, military leaders, architects, engineers, and statesmen." The end and now we have dispensed with the possibility of finding any material about slavery because you see slaves themselves work noteworthy. They didn't have noteworthy careers. He doesn't even get into the question of how much literacy there was. It's just that history is about noteworthy people. George Rawick: That's as blatant as it is. That's the blatant kind of class bias, of race bias that's involved. It's very interesting just to the side, we don't really have histories of the American working class or of American working people. We have histories of trade unions. And if you can make it as a trade union, you can get history written about you. But if you don't make it as a trade union, then it's like a little doubtful. Then you were in some little other field it's called folklore and that's not quite as important as history. And I know that. I know that- I was taught that at least when I went to graduate school that folk lore was not as important as history. There was this sort of gradation and they went from diplomatic correspondence, which was at the top to folklore and oral history, which is at the bottom. George Rawick: Well, the bottom rail going to be the top rail. That's the methodology, that's the insistence. I want to turn it upside down. I want to see what you can do when you turn it upside down. I don't think there's any need to justify the use of the Slave Narratives. They have lots of problems. We can talk about their problems. There are lots of problems that limit them and like with any other body of data, when you know this history of them, you begin to assess them in terms of that. But you don't throw them out. You work around them, you devise strategies and tactics to utilize them. I give you a quick comment on that. If for example the interview we're predominantly white, which indeed they were in the WPA Collection, and if they followed a schedule of questions that John Lomax set out, that doesn't mean you throw out the narratives, you have a lot of checks. George Rawick: First check you have is, what happens if all of those narratives or large numbers of those narratives don't, in response to different kinds of questions give the same sort of data? That is to say, sometimes the data comes in response to question three of the Lomax schedule of questions, sometimes the question 12 it has nothing to do with it and the same kind of data. That is to say what happens is the people generally speaking, ignore the questions. They ignore the questions because they weren't folklorists. And it's very hard to think like a folklorist if you're not a folklorist. And so you don't sort of, sort of answer the question. One of the questions were do you remember when the stars fell? Which is the passage of Haley's Comet in 1847? George Rawick: Well, first of all, very few do's at attempt to date, but we got a lot of interesting discussion that people engaged in, in answer to that question. They talked about stars, they talked about nature, they talked about the outdoors, they try to make some connection. It had nothing to do with Lomax's question. That's the first thing. The second thing I think is most interesting to do is to try to find places where if you take the documents, the narratives that are edited where the interviewer was Black is a material that much different. Some of it will be. George Rawick: Generally speaking. I have no doubt about say that the interviews that were done by Black interviewers are generally the most full, the most substantial and the like. But for given points, are they substantially different for example, than the others? And if they're not, then that's a kind of way of utilization of them. One end in corroboration. One of the things I find most important is to say is that you have to find strategies and tactics to get from the narratives material about questions that neither interviewer nor interviewee was aware was being asked. George Rawick: Incidentally, people talk about all sorts of things in which they were not being asked. That question was not being asked. For example, no one had in mind asking them to substantiate or not substantiate Frazier's view of the Black family. That was not in the mind of anybody. But there's a lot of questions and a lot of material about the family that you can reconstruct. A tremendous amount of material about the family, because what do people talk about? Well, they talk about that kinfolk. You got to find the language in which they talk about their kinfolk. And you've got to listen carefully to the language in which they talk about their kinfolk. And I think that's very, very crucial. George Rawick: No one really was asking them about specific customs, the sort of general folklore kind of things. You get a whole series of discussions for example on the jumping the broom wedding ceremony... Of answers rather of the jumping the broom wedding ceremony. Now that's not an answer to a specific question about the jumping the broom. That's really an answer to a specific set of questions about marriage ceremonies. For that matter what's most frustrating is that all sorts of questions that I would really like to know about that particular ceremony, weren't asked. That wasn't in the minds of anybody. George Rawick: It's interesting to find out how often it's described, how it's described, what it's used by. In short and brief I don't think the problems of using the narratives are any more complex or any more difficult than using any other historical source except one. And that is, that if you're writing a doctoral dissertation in departments under the ages of traditional historians and traditional historiography, they're not going to like it very much. And that's a very practical difficulty that you may get into. And they going to ask you to justify that body of material in ways that they cannot justify the use of their kind of material. George Rawick: I'll give you an example. No one in reviewing George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in The White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny 1817-1914, has asked him the following question. Why is there not one reference in here to the views of Black people on exactly the same question? That's part of the debate but it's excluded from the debate as indeed it was. No one bothers with that. That is to say, "This meets all the proper cannons of the historical profession. I find that very intriguing. George Rawick: Vincent Harding in a recent article, really not in the speech sometime ago, writes the following, "Black history is not just about Black people. Black history is not just about Black things. Black history speaks about seeing all of America through Black eyes. About placing our definition, not only on the Black experience but on the entire experience. If you do that, then a totally different picture of America emerges because Black history says our experience, our history," and here he means Black experience, Black history, "Our story cannot be assimilated into the mainstream American story. There's an organism that is totally at war with a mainstream story. Either it must be rejected or a whole new experience has to be created to bring it in." George Rawick: He says that way. He says, "People are now learning that the proper way the judge, the nature of the American experience is by the way in which the most downtrodden of the society have been treated." All right. Now I propose that one of the most important uses of the Slave Narratives has yet really began to be probed. And that is to see American society through Black eyes. That's all. George Rawick: For example, what about writing about the history of American racism not by learning debates about what learned or unlearned or obscure rant this, but learned philosophers and philologists in German universities we're talking about. What about talking about what racism was about from how Black people looked at racism and saw racism. And try to understand it. If for nothing else, except that at the face value and try to understand it. For example, I'll read a little bit of social pathology to you. George Rawick: Junius Quattlebaum was born in slavery in 1853. He says, "Master liked to see his slaves happy and singing about the place. If he ever heard any of them quarreling with each other, he would hull at them and say, singers ain't got no time to fuss on this place." Then he goes on to a long description about how the master joined them when drunk at a corn husking, passed the bottle around and they command to them, "Everybody sing. Sing this song. Pass around the bottle and we'll take a drink." Some of them in the crowd objected to anything. Master kind of scratched his head and said, "Well, let me get a poll. And you all is going to sing. And singing there as sure as he was bored." The niggers around the corn piles at night, I said that song right now. There was no waiting for the pole and nothing else. They wanted to sing there. The next day, Junius Quattlebaum continues that the master was too sick to get the slaves to work and there was a holiday. George Rawick: And the next day he got up in the morning and he got out the whip and he whipped them all. And the next month he went to a prayer meeting and he got religion again. And he came back and he whipped them some more. And they all testified that he was at his most dangerous when he got religion. Because that was when he was not going to go and have a good time and pass round the bottle and sin himself and drink and have all those people sin and drink. No, he was going to work hard. He was going to be a good, hardworking man. George Rawick: If you want to take that as the sort of normal, everyday experience of a society that is well together, you may but I think you're in difficulty if you do. This wonderful pattern of sin, punishment, the hangover, redemption, hard work and working everybody else well, conversion and getting religion and working everybody else harder and then after a while sin some more and you go around again, that's pretty scary. Scares me. I wouldn't have liked to have been old man Quattlebaum, but there were a lot of them. Well, let's try this out a little bit. George Rawick: [Mariah Emanuel], who was a small child under slavery in South Carolina. Like I speak to you, my white folks was blessed with a heap of Black children, but then there've been an odd one in the crowd that wasn't always like the mothers. All the other children with Black skin, had kinky hair and she was yellow skin with right straight hair. My Lord, ole' miss has been mighty proud of her Black children, but sure she should've been touchy about that yellow one. I remember one of his children was playing round about the step one day when Ms. Ross was sitting and she asks that yellow child today, "Who your Papa?" The child never know no better her right out exactly the one her mama told her who was her papa. Lord, Ms. Ross she says, "Well, get off my step. Get off and stay off there because you don't know is belong to me." George Rawick: The poor child, she cried and she cried. So I tell her, mommy never knew what to do. She take and grease her and Black a rollover with smut but could she never trouble that straight hair off her, no way. That how come there's so much different classes today, I say. A lot of the narratives are replete with stories that white women were very often the most brutal with a whip and particularly brutal with a whip towards young children who somehow weren't as dark as the others and whose eyes were a little blue and whose hair were a little yellow. As well they might given what all that meant. George Rawick: And again, I present to you the suggestion that that's not exactly a happy society. William Faulkner understood it very well. Read the society William Faulkner describes. It's not as society after all of a happy white population, happily non guiltily going about its life. It's a population that lives in the midst of a tremendous amount of guilt, a tremendous amount of anger, frustration, hostility, pathology and if you will madness. I think that's probably the most devastating use yet to be made of the Slave Narratives. Of all of them what does white society look like from the point of the narratives? George Rawick: I've been thinking of asking questions like what a white abolitionists look like from the point of somebody who is using a white abolitionist as someone to write down the Slave Narrative? Can we find out material? I think we can. I think we can. I think you might find some very strange things. One of the things I'm doing right now, just because I think you have to play it both ways because I have a diary of a white abolitionist. The young and not a famous one. Nobody ever heard his name before and he was a Vermont boy and he went on down to Boston for a year from a farm he became a printer, became an abolitionist. Didn't want to sin no more and then came the war and he joined [inaudible] army and he went down to New Orleans and he liberated New Orleans. And at the age of 24 he found himself the head of a Black regimen. George Rawick: And he sort of agonizes with himself page after page of this unpublished diary. This abolitionist who has risk life and limb to go down and free the slaves so he could sin no more and he is agonizing about one question. Are his Black troops really human just like him or are they a different species? He's in trouble. He's in trouble. I imagine a lot of trouble, a lot of difficulty. He's gone down there, he's risked life and limb to free those people and he's not sure whether they're really human, just like him. And he agonizes page after page. His diary has never been published either. I think it's sort of as rich as the Slave Narratives in a funny sort of way. George Rawick: What I'm trying to suggest is if you will, that what we really need, isn't new historiography. That what we really need is a new way of looking at history, looking at a people's experience, looking at the American experience because that's the one I live in, you live in, trying to understand it. And I think the place to begin is here. One of the things I find most intriguing about studying the history of the narrative collections themselves was how aware those people were, who were in charge of taking these narratives of what this material was all about and how dangerous it was. For example, you look in the collection in Washington DC and you look for the Mississippi narratives. And there are what? Slightly over a hundred pages is that right? Something like that of Mississippi narratives. Very small. Yeah, Mississippi there were a lot of people in Mississippi who could have been interviewed. George Rawick: I found the rest of them that never got to Washington. They were over here by the way. Or Xerox copies are in my little suitcase here because I've been taunting them around because I'm going somewhere to edit them right now. And I thought maybe I read some, maybe I wouldn't. I have 300 more and they never got to Washington. You have to ask why didn't they get to Washington? Because it got very hard editing them. You had to spend all those times editing them. Let's read with somebody in one editor writing. George Rawick: Seems that the story of the Negro uprising talking about one of the narratives. This is found in Jackson, Mississippi in the archives. She gave more testimony in favor of the white man. For merely reading the story, it might give some damn Yankee even today, a good excuse to complain that the treatment accorded to the Negro in those days. The gory details of the execution are given but the untold horror of a possible Negro rule as people sought in those days should be made clear for the benefit of readers whose grandfathers did not take part in this at all. George Rawick: Well, after a while with that kind of point of view, you get these narratives and you can cut out, I'll show you one of them, something that was cut out. This is in a narrative. This was cut out of a narrative that is in the main collection in Washington but this following paragraph doesn't appear. I found it in an earlier edition down in Jackson. George Rawick: It's the story of [Pat Franks] told to Mrs. [Richard Kolbe]. And this part is cut out of the ones that are published in the set I edited and which is simply taken from one of the Library of Congress. I recollect one time, one day there was snow on the ground and it was freezing cold in the middle of the night. We heard somebody knocking at the door and when my pappy got up, there was a nigger man out in the cold without no shoes on and with mighty few other clothes on. He said he was freezing to death. My mammy got up and did all she could to help him but his feet was frozen. Two of his toes dropped off when they thought. Next morning, we called the mistress down to see him. And she just naturally cried when she looked at him. When she found out where he come from, she made demands to hitch up the salary and go carry him back and the master said he was going to turn that owner over to the law or know the reason why. George Rawick: Before he got there, the nigger done died. I remember another time, but that was during the war. When I was riding on my horse over to Columbus to carry some clothes to the soldiers. On the way back, I heard bells ringing and I think it must've been a cow strayed off. When I look, I see a nigger man with his hands on an eye and a halter up above his head and a bell strung between them. He says his master had beat him. And then for two days he kept his hands and feet nailed to a board. You could see the nail holes too. And then he'd put his arms in that halter and turned him loose. He says it was all because he master heard they'll tell that he say, he'll be glad at the Yankees won the war so he could be free. George Rawick: You got to cut that out. But after a while he got tired of cutting that kind of stuff out and sending it on. You had other things to do. You weren't being paid that well. So what you did with the rest of the narratives is you filed them. And now lying there I suspect that they're the best of the narratives. I suspect they are the ones that have been least touched. Right now, I have an estimate that there is many pages of narratives unpublished out of just the WPA collection as in the WPA collection. The one that is in the American Slave Edition. George Rawick: Something else is interesting about that. I have two more points, something else interesting about that. I have copies of narratives that went through. I have two editions, neither one of which got to Washington. I have about 10 of those. I read them very carefully and I've been thinking about why neither one got to Washington. Because either you had to destroy them or it didn't matter what you were doing to rearrange it, all you would do is rearrange either material and you left out a little and you did leave out a little, but the same thing kept coming through. The same thing kept coming through certain kind of picture of white society. George Rawick: And you know what the interesting thing is the thing that was most intriguing, I think to the people who did the narratives was a picture of white society. That was the one they didn't like to hear and that was the one they was going to censor the most. I want to say a word or two about quantification. I have nothing against quantifying anything. If it's worth quantifying, if what you're counting, you know what you're doing with and you don't make exaggerated claims for it. The thing that is most problematic about quantifying the Slave Narratives is there is nothing random at all about the collection that reached Washington. They're cold, they're cold. And I never knew that as much as I now know. George Rawick: I don't think you can ask quantifiable questions and get too much out of it. They're going to be skewed. They're going to be funny skewed though. They're going to be very problematically skewed. On the other hand, I suspect that if we get to the point where the other 2000 or 3000 narratives that I am almost certain are out. You had add it to the collection and the two are separately quantified and the results compared. At that particular point, we might know the answer to what value of quantification would be. If for example the results come out very differently as I suspect they might for certain key questions, then I think quantification will be more than interesting because we will have an interesting check. If they come out the same. I don't know what it's going to mean. It could mean that the whole set is very difficult to quantify. I'm very leery about what's going to happen when you quantify it. George Rawick: The typical question is going to be asked, "Did the slaves like slavery?" The answer to that is virtually clear unless you quote out of context. If you don't mean by that question, was everybody on the barricades? If you allow for a range of human responses, then it is clear that the overwhelming majority say, "Slavery presented its problems, freedom presented its problems, but freedom was better than slavery, but not that much better." And I ask you, "Is that such an unreasonable statement or is it a very reasonable statement?" For example, one of the things that is very interesting is many of the people can't remember really the difference between freedom and slavery. And I want to propose that there's a reason for it. The reason for it was that there wasn't much difference. Try that as a possibility, try that the various forms of peonage and indenture were for people who did not move. George Rawick: Now, there were the people who moved and they had another experience. There are certain ways in which it was different. But in certain ways, it wasn't different. After all lots of people continue to live in the same house, work the same land, and have some sort of peonage relationship with the same master. I did that till 1974. Now I would propose that if those people don't perceive a great deal of difference between slavery and not slavery, maybe what they're telling us about is not how wonderful slavery was but something about the continuing reality, the day by day continuing reality that people experienced. George Rawick: And I think if that's the case, then I think there's something else involved. One of the things last things I want to say, and I know we'll turn this over to whatever kinds of discussion and question is that while we thought about these up till now largely as Slave Narratives, as narratives of ex slaves the important thing to note about them is there's a lot of material in them about people who lived way past 1865. There's lots of material about reconstruction. There is some of the most really moving stories about the struggles under reconstruction. That kind of struggles. They are embedded in here stories of Black populism. There are stories of the day by day life. But the interesting thing I suppose is, when do people have a sense of time? George Rawick: I would suspect that people have the greatest sense of time when something changes. But if things do not change, maybe it's not just old people who can't remember the difference between 1856 and 1940 or 1936. Maybe in fact, from a lot of perspectives there wasn't a lot different that had happened. Life went on and they struggled. They gave in and some win and some lost and it was pretty tough all the way around. George Rawick: Point last, but maybe not least. I think there's a lot of very interesting political history embedded in the narratives. Henry David Thoreau once commented in the essay on civil disobedience. He said that the morning they let him out of jail for he'd in jail for if you may remember for refusing to pay his taxes and he got out of jail and he said, a group came to him and asked him to be at the head of a group of berry pickers. And he went up on a Hill above Concord and there is that famous line and he says, "And the state was nowhere to be seen." Now, if we understand by the state what he understood by the state, the tax collectors, the jail house, the law, the judges, the forces, the sheriffs, all the rest then I want to make a proposal. George Rawick: That one part of him of the white experience in America has been that for large numbers of folk in America, rich and poor or poor and rich alike, there's been experiences where for a lot of times, the state was nowhere to be seen. But I want to propose that from the point of view of Black people in America, if you want to understand racism you better talk about it as institutionalized racism, then you better understand the fact that I think that what comes to me at least out of the narratives and what I want to explore now for the next year or two, is that for Black people the state was always to be seen, always to be felt, it was always there in the form of the patrolers, one thing all of the narratives are quite clear about there's none of the narrative, none of those who are interviewed who say they don't know about the slave patrol. George Rawick: Everybody knew about the slave patrol and the slave patrol was the local militia, the local form of the state. And the state was to be seen and not only to be seen was to be felt and the state was not only to be felt it was there. And maybe that was his prime function for much of the time. For people who talked about the Jeffersonian state and wanted the minimal state that was for themselves, over them. But they wanted the maximal state over the slaves and they had the maximal state over the slaves. And I think that's something that has to be explored. I don't think you can approach the narratives without philosophy, I don't think you can approach the narratives without theory, I don't think he can approach anybody of that or without theory and philosophy. George Rawick: But if you make those things explicit to yourself and to your reader, I think you have here, not just the mine of information as good as, as professor Woodward said, as all other information on slavery but much better. And not only about slavery, but I would suspect about a lot of other things. I suggest that there's... We just begun to have the period of the use and abuse of the narratives. I have here, it's lying on the floor, that's not a comment really, one of Fogel and Engerman students who has devised a way of putting the narratives on tape and quantifying them. And I'm sure that will come into the next part of Fogel and Engerman's work. George Rawick: I think I've already made my comment on that without even mentioning Fogel and Engerman. I think we're going to find other people. I said, it's very important to look at theory. The narratives don't just speak to us, nothing does. Eugene Genovese is coming out with a book. Unfortunately he was to have been here tonight and would have talked part of that. Genovese is coming out with a book in October, 800 pages based on the narratives. And we don't agree in our view as to what happened in slave life. And there's no doubt that's because we have certain kinds of different theoretical insights and theoretical perspectives from which we start. And we come out somewhat differently. I warn you about that. Don't become a raw empiricist about anything. It depends on where you start, where are you going to come out. George Rawick: Last and not least, I suppose when you read the narratives, read them with the same through science and sensitivity you read anything else. And there's only one ultimate critical judgment I have to make about anything. If they speak to you, they speak to you and if they don't speak to you, then they don't speak to you. And I don't know any other way around that particular one. And they're going to speak to various people in different ways. I have no doubt about that. And I'm not worried about that either. I welcome that. I welcome people talking about the narratives in different ways but I think there's two kinds of confidence you have to have with the narratives. First that the narratives are not only as good as any other historical source, but I want to argue better. They're better to get at the kind of experience that's being talked about. George Rawick: Is it better to find out about slavery from the point of view of the journal of a visiting white journalist or of a slave master or is it better to get it from the point of view of the slave? That's one question I want you to answer. And I would argue from that point of view, I don't have any big debate as to where it's better. That they're not just as good but they're better. And that you have to have confidence in that. And the second thing you have to have confidence and I suppose is yourself. And that's no different than using any other source and it's not more complicated. I know more easy than using any other source. It requires all the skill and all the art and all the philosophy and all the science that you can bring to bear upon it and a lot of hard work. George Rawick: But with that, I think that in the narratives, there's a whole world yet to be tapped and the like. And I'll open this up for questions, discussion. Speaker 2: You were mentioning that slavery was still with us as recently as 1974. George Rawick: No, I didn't say slavery was with us as, I said that people were living under the conditions of agricultural, plantation life of semi-peonage that it day by day terms wasn't that different? Speaker 2: [inaudible] You are automatically assuming I am attacking you. I'm agreeing with you. George Rawick: But I just want to make it clear it's not the slavery, but all right, go ahead. Speaker 2: I'm agreeing whole heartedly and I'm wondering if, as a sociologist you know of any movement especially in the Congress that will help alleviate the situation. I do know, for example, that from the last month there was a regulation I think, made it to law that a person can no longer work a main from nine to five for $5 and coffee. It has to be $1.91 an hour minimum wage. This was also applicable to other workers. What about- George Rawick: I recall [inaudible] workers are still excluded. Speaker 2: Is that right? George Rawick: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Speaker 2: People will pick the grapes [inaudible]. What about elevator workers, for example, who were getting, I think the federal minimum is $140 in some States is- George Rawick: I'm not sure of that. I think that elevator workers are now covered universally but I'm not sure of that. That's a guess. Speaker 2: No. I'm talking about those who are retired. For example, those people over 65 who have been getting as little as $114 a month, I know of two people. George Rawick: Sure. I'm sure they're not going to get any more because that was the kind of social security money that was paid in and that's what they're going to get. Speaker 3: Yeah. But on the [inaudible] step in narrative. There is 26 in the collection. And I was very interested in working with the narrative to find that there were others, but from an analysis of those 26 as it's done and even when you were talking, for example, our number one right off the hat one by one, by the name of Netta Henry who stayed on with her mistress, she and her daughter after slavery. But in the end at the point that I'm making in the end the State of Mississippi, whoever was responsible for sending those to Washington by excluding those 300 that they did, interesting commentary, nevertheless comes out for example, in the Henry narrative though she stayed on, what she revealed in her narrative is a whole commentary on reconstruction, Meridian, Mississippi, in which the town, the riot and the Black porters were burned. Speaker 3: So the point that I'm making is that and despite this, all of this information is revealed and the efforts of these individuals to curb it, they did not know that they were an actual [inaudible] projecting a much more about the system than they thought that they were eliminating. George Rawick: I think you're quite right. It's that kind of confidence I have. If anything, what I've discovered is that A there's a lot more material and B I have if anything found the limits of how much they've editorialized about it. And there wasn't that much, and that's what really surprised me. It wasn't that much not because they didn't want to but because they didn't understand it and they didn't have the time. Let me tell you the tip. I've interviewed now several interviewers. And now I have several white interviewers in Mississippi or someone else has done it for me, but I've heard the tapes three and a half hours worth in one case. George Rawick: Let me give you an example of how if you're a white interviewer in Mississippi, how you were hired and what you were really doing. You came from the [inaudible] gentry of Meridian, Mississippi. You're a widow, your husband had been a local minister and he passed away and you had a small theater group in Meridian, Mississippi. And you'd been off to school but your grandfather had been one of the three first settlers of the town. And you were a prominent person, but you didn't have any money. You had status but you hadn't had any money. And you were illiterate. So they gave you the job through the WPA as the director of the Federal Writers Project for three counties around Meridian, Mississippi. And as one of the 33 things you did, you interviewed some slay ex-slaves. And you went out and you interviewed them, and you wrote up your interview as best you could and you sent them on down to Jackson where they got filed. George Rawick: Sometimes they got typed and sometimes they didn't even get typed. Sometimes they just got filed and nobody touched it. You have to remember that most of the stuff was make work. There's almost a peculiar protection around these things, the peculiar protection of racism. I want to give you a... It doesn't really matter what those folks say. There's almost that peculiar quality combined with the daily pressures on these people who were doing the narratives to do so many things. They had all these other things they were doing. They weren't just doing the narratives. George Rawick: The woman I interviewed wrote two children's plays during her two years and produced them. She supervised the work of nine other people. She constantly was writing memos off to Jackson. And occasionally she'd do an interview, a narrative. Okay. So then you get... That's that. On the other hand, you've got there are people, there was man named Taylor, he was Black in Little Rock Arkansas. Anybody here ever worked with the Arkansas narratives? Do you remember Taylor's interviews in the Arkansas narratives [inaudible]? Speaker 4: Yeah. They've been mentioned as being a fairly respectable. It's the preacher? George Rawick: Yeah. And they've really first... They go on and on and they follow a form and they're very careful and he's very full and he asks his own questions and he's got info responses. And they're very different and you can check them out. But that's really what I find interesting. I would agree with you. And I find that that's part of the whole configuration. Speaker 4: Yeah. I've also worked with the Mississippi narrative and I found that there were three people who were mentioned pretty frequently. There was a Mrs. Richard Cobb whose name is appears first and then there is... It was re-written by Pauline Loveless and edited by Clara [inaudible] Now each of these three people on the scene- George Rawick: No, no. Mrs. Cobb was on the scene then her supervisor of her area was Loveless I believe I've got these. I have now from Mississippi, this thing, I don't have it here but I do have. I think that's how it would be. And that the third person was somebody part of the state staff in Jackson. Then they didn't do anything with it. And some of Mrs. Cobb stuff went in. But I have about 25 more Mrs. Cobbs interviews here. Some of which I had the typed scripts now, but I took them from hand scripts. I've been typing from hand scripts. So that what you have is... And sometimes the editing is simple. Sometimes the editing consisted of taking care of the spelling. George Rawick: I might as well tell you, look anybody who thinks she can use the Slave Narratives to get at the question of a great source of Black English don't. That it isn't. That it isn't and won't be and I tried to tell that to everyone else, because if you can read this wonderful thing that John Lomax did, where he told them how to translate words... It's in 177 here, he says, "AH for RI, BAW for BORN, and so forth. He standardized it in the first place in the second place a lot of people didn't like his standardization, so they did their own Uncle Remus talk, and then we've got this. So there's a lot of that. I would not take it too seriously. George Rawick: I don't think that you're getting most of the time and by the way one of the things that's true with Taylor's is he takes them out of any dialect whatsoever. And he writes them in the most straight well-educated white English he can find by the way so that he's not even trying to use the... I don't think you're going to get that. I don't think the language is that. And I think that's important. And I think it's a limit. When I think the limit has to be stated. I think if you want to get that sound, that nuance, that kind of thing, I think to use the narratives for that purpose is a mistake. And I think there's where the editing went through the most serious thing. George Rawick: But the most particular thing is to read John Lomax's little list of how you supposed to spell everything. And then from that to watch the editing going on and people just sort of very carefully the debating. And I've even seen a little members. Now they don't speak it that way, not around where I live. They say it this way. I've warned several people off already, and it's a general warning. I don't see this as a very good source for that.