978-0-89587-285-2
0-89587-285-4
11.95 paperback
5 x 7.5"
106 pages
Press Release (PDF)
--Gary Kirkland, Gainesville Sun (full review)
In the depths of the Great Depression, the Florida state director of the Federal Writers’ Project sent his boss several interviews that Florida writers had conducted with former slaves.
The idea caught on, and within two years, more than 2,000 former slaves in 17 states had produced more than 10,000 pages of transcribed oral histories. Kept in the Library of Congress under the name “Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the U.S. from Interviews with Former Slaves,” this collection forms what editor Horace Randall Williams calls “the best window we have into the way slavery felt and looked and smelled.
“The richness of the narratives and the diversity of the voices make the project a unique window into the American past. . . . These interviews are often the only historical record of the thoughts and recollections of those who had been in bondage,” Williams writes in the introduction.
No Man’s Yoke on My Shoulders is the latest volume in the Real Voices, Real History™ series published by John F. Blair, Publisher. As with the previous titles in the series, No Man’s Yoke on My Shoulders presents powerful firsthand testimonies of one of the most challenging chapters in our nation’s history. In this case, the testimonies come from those who experienced slavery in Florida, the state that first sought to gather these recollections.
“Some historians have been skeptical of the usefulness of the slave narratives because of the suspected influence of the interviewers, especially when . . . the subjects were elderly, illiterate, poor African Americans, while the interviewers were usually middle-aged, middle-class, educated whites,” Williams writes. “But in Florida, ten of the eleven interviewers were African Americans . . . and half of those were women.”
Compiling the Florida narratives still presented challenges. Less than two dozen of the 2,358 interviews in the collection contained detailed memories of slavery in Florida. From those, Williams selected 20 oral histories to include in the book.
Recollections such as those of Frank Berry and Squires Jackson give the lie to the myths and distortions that have surrounded the South’s “peculiar institution” and its legacy. “Even in slavery,” Berry said, “the white people didn’t kill Negroes then as they do now. Anybody can kill a Negro now because they ain’t worth a cent to nobody.”
Jackson disagreed. “Even the best masters in slavery couldn’t be as good as the worst person in Freedom,” he said. “Oh, God, it’s good to be free, and I am thankful.”
about the editor
Horace Randall Williams has researched and written extensively about civil rights, segregation, and slavery during three decades as a reporter, writer, editor, and publisher of newspapers, magazines, and books. He is the former managing editor of Southern Changes magazine and was the founding director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch Project. He lives in Montgomery, Alabama, where he is Editor-in-Chief of NewSouth Books.