Oral History
Oral history from accounts of the enslaved provides firsthand narratives of the brutal realities, resilience, and cultural heritage of enslaved individuals.
During the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project undertook the task of locating formerly enslaved individuals and recording their oral histories. Called the Slave Narratives, more than ten thousand pages of interviews with over two thousand formerly enslaved were filed in the Library of Congress. There are 1200 pages of interviews with 284 former slaves in SC.
From this storehouse of information, Belinda Hurmence has chosen twenty-seven narratives. Her compilation is a firsthand account of the last years of slavery and first years of freedom. The formerly enslaved describe the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the houses they lived in, the work they did, and the treatment they received. They give their impressions of Yankee soldiers, the infamous Ku Klux Klan, their masters, and the bitter reality of their newfound freedom.
In one of the poignant interviews, formerly enslaved Sylvia Cannon of Florence recalls the fact that she was not permitted to become educated. “The white folks didn’t never help none of we black people to read and write no time… Northern women come there after the war, but they didn’t let ‘em teach nobody nothing.” The oral tradition is what carried the history to present day.