Even And Especially with First-Hand Narratives, Context is Queen.

I've been reading a lot of first hand narratives this year. This week I've spent time in the archives and in some paper copies of "slave narratives." 

I've been reading through these from the WPA Slave Narrative project as conducted in the 1930s as a way to engaged unemployed writers in Southern states - almost all White and many confederate sympathizers or even members of the UDC (United Daughters of the Confederacy.) And I've also been reading the stories collected by William Still, an underground railroad conductor and abolitionist, who received many freedom seekers after they arrived in Philadelphia, documenting their stories in real time. (more on this towards the end).

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It is incredibly heavy and nuanced reading. Most of what's discussed doesn't feel like mine to speak about. 

There's been one thing that I've been spending a lot of time reflecting on - something that Nicole Hudson and I talk about in STL Sandbox around data.... Data always has a source...how it is procured, and why, and who owns it matters a lot. 

When we teach on this we ask:

• What’s the data behind the data?

• Who is the data?

• Who owns the data?

• How do people feel about the data?

• Who does this data impact?

The more I read about HOW these came to be, the more is illuminated about the contents...and perhaps what is not included.

Taken out of context the stories in the Slave Narratives could support a whole variety of tales and narratives and myths (and in fact they have), because there is a whole variety of stories included. The story of the creation itself is important... and the creators can acknowledge a few of the limitations....

What's not necessarily mentioned is the context of the times...the 1930s...height of depression, economic insecurity, peak of racial terror and lynchings in Southern states and in the midst of one of the largest human mass migrations (north, away from the terror) in human history. That any stories at all were offered or shared is remarkable. That project creators can't also see the embedded racism or white gaze is unsurprising and also infuriating.

I was struck reading just how much specific discussion there was about how wealthy White plantation owners used poorer White men as brutalizers and overseers of enslaved people, as well as the continued class tensions between freed Black Americans and poorer White Southerners in the reconstruction years. Tensions and ploys that continue to plague us today. This felt useful and important to reflect on. 

AND...

I rooted around the administrative files to get a list of the questions asked, because those are struck from the record.

One of the questions was this: "Was the overseer poor white trash?" I mean, that was what was asked. 

(Also makes you wonder about the assumptions made about who the question askers would be.)

One of the reasons I was looking for the questions was that I noticed just how many people had clearly been asked about "conjuring" and herbal remedies....never a not dangerous question to be asked. 

The original set of listed questions doesn't include anything about conjuring or herbs, but clearly some interviewers were asking a lot. In fact project notes indicate that questions about Hoodoo were most asked in Tennessee. 

There was this question though: "Tell why you joined a church and why you think all people should be religious."

One of the most powerful pieces included in the books that I read was the expression of fear about these interviews that one woman shared....it just says so much about this effort and its limits and harms.

Comparing this 1930s White-led work with that of William Still in the 1800s is....incredibly illuminating and revealing. Whereas all those interviewed by the WPA project are referred to as "ex-slaves", Still refers to each by name and relation, daughter, mother, child, father, son, brother. The tremendous care given to their stories and truths - evidence of dignity and respect - is present on every page. Still's initial motivation was to aid in the reunion of families so cruelly and violently separated by slavery. He knew that the story gathering was dangerous and unlikely to be published for some time. And still it's been available since 1872.

"...the idea forced itself upon his mind that all over this wide and extended country thousands of mothers and children, separated by Slavery, were in a similar way living without the slightest knowledge of each other's whereabouts, praying and weeping without ceasing, as did this mother and son. Under these reflections it seemed reasonable to hope that by carefully gathering the narratives of the Underground Rail Road passengers, in some way or other some of the bleeding and severed hearts might be united and comforted."

So many lessons to learn through this inquiry and comparison...available for 100-150 years...

And that the UDC was successful in promulgating many of the most sympathetic WPA accounts through the Southern school curriculum is something we are all still paying dearly for. And we are resisting the opportunity to know better, do better by whitewashing our curriculums again. But yet we wonder how Russian people are so susceptible to misinformation. 

I'm left reflecting on something else I read from in the journals of Caroline Fox a young British woman living in Cornwall England, who, simultaneous to the work of Mr. Still, had begun questioning what she knew and attending anti-slavery society meetings in her hometown.

“I felt I had hitherto been taking things of the highest importance too much for granted, without feeling their reality; and this I knew to be a very unhealthy state of things. This consciousness was mainly awakened by a few solemn words on the worthlessness of a merely traditional faith in highest truths. The more I examined into my reasons for believing some of our leading doctrines, the more was I staggered and filled with anxious thought. I very earnestly desired to be taught the truth, at whatever price I might learn it.”