Thread: Portraits of African Americans, formerly enslaved, taken in 1936-8.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs. via @librarycongress
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs. via @librarycongress
Green Cumby, Henderson, Texas: "Durin' slavery I had purty rough times. My grandfather, Tater Cumby , was cullud overseer for forty slaves and he called us at four in de mornin' and we worked from sun to sun." 
Minerva Bendy, born in Alabama and later moved to Texas: I was just about five years old when us make de trip to Texas. Us come right near Woodville and make the plantation. It a big place and dey raise corn and cotton and cane.
Andy Anderson, Williamson County, Texas: Massa Haley owned my folks and about 12 other families of niggers. I was born in 1843 and that makes me 94 years old and 18 when de war starts.
Green Cumby: "We mos'ly lived on corn pone and salt bacon de marster give us. We didn't have no gardens ourselves, 'cause we wouldn't have time to work in dem. We worked all day in de fields and den was so tired we couldn't do nothin' more."
Green Cumby: "My mammy doctored us when we was feelin' bad and she'd take dogfenley, a yaller lookin' weed, and brew tea, and it driv de chills and de fever out of us. Sometimes she put horse mint on de pallet with us to make us sweat and driv de fever 'way."
At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves: t.ly/NuAq
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
