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"He came up and
said, 'Speak to your young mistress." And I said, 'Where she at?'
He said, 'Right there,' and pointed to the baby in my mistress'
arms." --Lu Mayberry
"My oldest
sister...was fooling with the clock and broke it, and my old marster
taken her and tied a rope around her neck--just enough to keep it from
choking her--and tied her in the backyard and whipped her I don't know
how long. There stood Mother, there stood Father, and there stood all
the children, and none could come to her rescue." --Mr. Reed
In 1929, the Social Sciences
Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, began recording
the oral histories of former slaves. During the mid-1930s, the Federal
Writers' Project undertook a similar effort, ultimately compiling more
than two thousand interviews and ten thousand pages of material in
seventeen states.
In this volume, thirty-six
former slaves living in Tennessee recount what it was like to live under
the yoke. Tennessee was not a large slaveholding state compared with
others in the South. On the other hand, it was a leader in the abolition
movement prior to 1830 and a powder keg of mixed Union and Confederate
sympathies at the time of the Civil War. The voices in this volume thus
recall the extreme conditions of slavery in the border country.
about the editor
A writer, editor, and editorial project manager, Andrea Sutcliffe is
the author of Touring
the Shenandoah Valley Backroads and the editor of The New
York Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage. She lives in
Virginia.
Other slave narrative titles in
Blair's Real Voices, Real History™ series:
My
Folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery
We
Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard
Before
Freedom, When I Just Can Remember
On
Jordan's Stormy Banks
Prayin'
to Be Set Free
I
Was Born in Slavery
Weren't
no Good Times
Also by Andrea Sutcliffe:
Touring
the Shenandoah Valley Backroads,
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