“I was born in Green County, Alabama, in January 1844.
“My mother was a white woman, and he name was Jane Jenkins. My father was . . . a coachman on my master’s place. I was told this in 188o by the white doctor, Lyth Smith, which brung me into the world. My master, who was my grandfather, brung me to Texas when I was jest seven or eight years old. A few years later, he brung my mother down to Texas, and she had with her three boys, which was her children and my brothers. They was white children and name Jones. . . . I didn’t know my mother when I seen her. All my life I done jest knowed my white kinfolks and nothing ‘tall about the other part of my color.
“Before I was born, my mother was tucken away . . . and kept in the attic hid. They tuck me soon as I was born from her. When her time to be in bed was up, she’d ask the waitman [waiting man] whar I was at. The waitman was Dr. Lyth Smith. He’d tell her I was at Ann’s house. I never got a chance to nurse my mother. After she got up and come down, she wanted to see her baby. Then she commenced screaming, tearing her clothes off and tearing her hair out. They sent her to the calaboose till they could git her some clothes to put on. She went distracted. She tore out towards town. The way they got her to hush, they tole her I was with grandma. . . . It was a destruction thing. Well, that scandalized the family and they moved to Texas, and come by and got me and luck me to Texas. . . .
“My master and his family jest lived in a log house. My mistress was my grandfather’s wife and my grandmother, but I couldn’t claim her. Her and her oldest child treated me some rough. I never had no good time till that old white woman died. . . . They tuck turns about treating me bad.”1
So speak the words of ninety-three-year-old Lewis Jenkins, who told his story in June 1937 to a government interviewer. This narrative, along with over one hundred others, may be found in the Archives and Manuscripts Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Although the typewritten interviews were made with former slaves living in Oklahoma, thirty-two of them contain remembrances of individuals who were slaves or freedmen in Texas.
The story of the typescripts in Oklahoma City goes back to the Federal Writers’ Project sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, one of the New Deal programs of the 1930s. The project attempted to create jobs for otherwise unemployed writers while at the same time providing public services in the various states. Thus in some localities the Writers’ Project employees put together state guidebooks, inventoried historic newspapers, and assembled scrapbooks. In response to interviews with former slaves that had been done in several states, the agency in 1937 organized a systematic effort to be undertaken in all states with substantial ex-slave populations to interview as many former black slaves as possible. John A. Lomax, then the national advisor on folklore and folkways to the Federal Writers’ Project, prepared a standard questionnaire for field workers, and by summer 1937 interviewers in eighteen states began actively seeking former slaves whom they might interview.
From handwritten notes in the field, the government employees prepared intermediate drafts of narratives written as if they had not been prompted by the field workers’ questions. After these texts were edited to conform to vocabulary and grammar standards issued by the agency, final drafts were prepared and forwarded to Washington. There they again were screened and then channeled to the Library of Congress, where eventually two thousand interviews were bound into a series of greyish-green library bindings and embossed with the words, “SLAVE NARRATIVES.”
In the summer of 1990 the manuscripts came to the attention of Dr. T. Lindsay Baker, director of academic programs and graduate studies in Baylor’s Department of Museum Studies, and Julie Philips Baker, director of the Layland Museum in Cleburne, Texas, and a research associate in museum education with Baylor’s Strecker Museum. The Bakers had traveled to Oklahoma City to look for information on a teacher who had lived and worked among free blacks and Creek Indians near Muskogee, Oklahoma. As they visited one day with William Welge, an archivist at the Oklahoma Historical Society, they were intrigued to learn that there was a box of “freedmen’s narratives” in the collection that had been sitting idle for years. Knowing of the slave narrative project of the Federal Writers’ Project and of the publication of its multiple volumes in the 1970s, the couple decided to investigate.
The Bakers never imagined the depth or breadth of what they would find. Opening the cardboard box, they looked down onto yellowed legal-size file folders bearing penciled notes of names, long out of alphabetical order. The folders looked as if they might just have come out of an old oak file cabinet and been chucked into the box to be forgotten. Inside, the Bakers found the original working files of the Oklahoma Slave Narrative Project funded by the W.P.A. There were not only final typescripts of narratives but also rough and intermediate drafts and even some interoffice memoranda. In some instances they found even the handwritten notes taken by interviewers in the field. Putting everything else aside, the Bakers started making photocopies. During return trips they copied the entire 1,200 pages of manuscripts in the carton.
Subsequent research in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress confirmed that the typescripts and notes in Oklahoma held considerable numbers of slave narratives that for one reason or another had never even been submitted to Washington for inclusion in the “official” project housed at the Library of Congress.
As they copied the Oklahoma materials, the Bakers removed the rusted staples, clips, and straight pins that had held them together for fifty years, replacing them with less damaging inert plastic clips. Sulfuric acid residues from the paper-making process left some of the pages so brittle that they were difficult to handle without damaging them. These silent voices had been mostly unread and forgotten since the government field workers took down the words from the aged former slaves in the days of the Great Depression.
The aim of the government interviewers and the clerks who edited and typed their transcripts had been to prepare a written record of the remembrances of the former slaves. They prepared them in the form of narratives, using standardized spelling and grammar so that they read as if the former slaves had been simply sharing their stories. Obviously the texts were filtered through the minds of the interviewers and editors, and the fact that the field workers were generally white must have influenced the elderly respondents, but even so the W.P.A. slave narratives present a unique glimpse of the African-American past.2
In 1937 Robert V. Lackey, a white field worker for the Oklahoma Writers’ project, interviewed eighty-seven-year-old Allen V. Manning in Tulsa about his experiences earlier in life. Manning related:
“I was born in slavery, and I belonged to a Baptist preacher. Until I was fifteen years old, I was taught that I was his own chattel-property, and he could do with me like he wanted to, but he had been taught that way too, and we both believed it. . . .
“Like I say, my master was a preacher and a kind man, but he . . . [had] been taught that they [slaves] was jest like his work hosses, and if they act like they his work hosses they git along all right. But if they don’t—Oh, oh!
“When the [Civil] War come along, old Master jest didn’t know what to do. He always been taught not to raise his hand up and kill nobody—no matter how come—and he jest kept holding out against them that was talking about fighting, and he wouldn’t go and fight. He been taught that it was all right to have slaves and treat them like he want to, but he been taught it was sinful to go and fight and kill to keep them, and he lived up to what he been taught. . . .
“The Yankees done got to town . . . not far away, . . . [so] old Master come down to the quarters and say git everthing bundles up and in the wagons for a long trip. . . . we struck out for Texas. . . .
“We go north a while and then turn west, and cross the Sabine River and go to Nacogdoches, Texas. . . . Mammy was mighty poorly, and jest when we got to the Sabine bottoms she had another baby. Old Master didn’t like it ’cause it was a girl, but he named her Texana on account of where she was born.
“Old Master went with a whole bunch of wagons on out to the prairie country in Coryell County and set up a farm where we just had to break the sod and didn’t have to clear off much. . . .
“He seem like he changed a lot since we left Mississippi, and seem like he paid more attention to us and looked after us better. But most people that already live there when we git there was mighty hard on their Negroes. They was mostly hard drinkers and hard talkers, and they work and fight jest as hard as they talk, too!
“One day Old Master come out from town and tell us that we all been set free, and we can go or stay jest as we wish. All of my family stay on the place and he pay us half as shares on all we make. . . .”
The economic reason for slavery was labor, cheap labor. Thus the daily routine for most agricultural blacks began about four o’clock in the morning and continued until dark or later in the evening. In 1937 freedwoman Annie Hawkins remembered from her Texas days:
“I never had no white folks that was good to me. We all worked jest like dogs and had about half enough to eat and got whipped for everything. Our days was a constant misery to us. I know lots . . . had a good time but we never did. . . . When I was small my job was to tote cool water to the field to the hands. It kept me busy going back and forth and I had to be sho’ my old Mistress had a cool drink when she wanted it, too. Mother and my sister and me worked in the field all day and come in time to clear away the things and cook supper. When we was through in the kitchen we would spin for a long time. Mother would spin and we would card.”
Not all the slaves worked as hard as Annie Hawkins and her family. At age eighty-three George W. Harmon in 1937 told interviewer J. S. Thomas about a slave he knew in bondage in Lamar County, Texas:
“. . . . there was one slave who would . . . work only when he chose, and when they would get at him to whip him, he was so fast a runner that they could not catch him. He could run so fast that he named or called himself, ‘Bird-in-the-Air.’ So my Master learned of a white fellow who made a specialty of running and had the reputation of catching any slaves who might be uncatchable. So my Master sent for this fellow and had warned this fast-running slave that he had sent for this runner to catch him whose title or reputation was heard of as ‘Hawk-running-son-of-a-gun,’ to catch this slave, ‘Bird-in-the-Air.’
“So on the day he was to arrive, ‘Bird-in-the-Air’ awaited his arrival. When he arrived he went into Master’s house to get orders of whom to catch, and after getting all [the] details he and Master came out and went to where this slave lived. Just when they reached the cabin where ‘Bird-in-the-Air’ was, he ran out and hollowed, ‘Bird-in-the-Air.’ This white slave-catcher replied to him, ‘Yes and the hawk is after you!’
“So the chase begun and ‘Hawk-running-son-of-a-gun’ caught him within a half an hour, and with power to hold him until Master and others on horse arrived who took charge and whipped him. From that day on all that was necessary in controlling ‘Bird in-the-Air’ was to warn him by saying, ‘If you don’t do so-and-so I’ll send again for “Hawk-running-son-of-a-gun!'”
The aspect of black servitude which elicited perhaps the loudest outcry at the time was the harshness and indeed sadism of punishments meted out by masters and overseers. On August 9, 1937, L. P. Livington interviewed John White, who had been a slave near Linden in Cass County, Texas. White worked in the kitchen on the Davenport plantation, while at the same time doing laundry. “I learns to be careful about streaks in the clothes,” he told the interviewer.
“I learns by the bull whip. One day the Master finds a soapy streak in his shirt. Then he finds me.
“. . . . the Master drives me down the road and ties me to a tree. First he tears off the old shirt and then he throws the bull whip to me. When he is tired of beating me more torture is a-coming. The salt water cure. It don’t cure nothing but that’s what the white folks called it. ‘Here’s at you,’ the Master say, and slap the salt water into the bleeding cuts. ‘Here’s at you!’
“Then I was loosened to stagger back into the kitchen. The Mistress couldn’t do nothing about it ‘cept to lay on the grease thick, with a kind word to help stop the misery.”
The stories of Texas black slavery preserved in the Oklahoma Slave Narratives are not easy material to read for either black or white. They are, however, the raw ingredients of regional history. Their existence long forgotten in an Oklahoma library illustrates the fact that records of the past are not necessarily preserved where they might be expected.
Convinced of the historical importance of these manuscripts, T. Lindsay and Julie Baker secured a publication contract with the University of Oklahoma Press. Setting aside their other research projects for the time being, they have spent their free time during the past three years reading and preparing these long-forgotten stories for publication. Much time will go into the project, which has a targeted publication date of 1995. But for the Bakers, the time is well spent, for they believe these stories–of hardship and triumph, of brutality and integrity–will give readers an important glimpse at our past and, in turn, a better understanding of our present.
Notes:
1 “Lewis Jerkins [sic] Age 93 Yrs.[,] Oklahoma City, Okla.,” TS, 1937, pp. 1-3 Oklahoma Slave Narratives, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The interviews of informants cited in this article are from the holdings of the Oklahoma Historical Society and are not available in the “official” slave narratives preserved in the Library of Congress.
2 For an overview of the slave narrative project of the Federal Writers’ Project, see George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Ser. I, 7 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972) 7:163-78. The published versions of the slave narratives compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project and preserved in the Library of Congress may be found in Rawick, The American Slave, vols. 2-7, and in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, from Interviews with Former Slaves (St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1976), 17 vols.
