Born in Slavery

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mesn&fileName=161/mesn161.db&recNum=199&itemLink=r?ammem/mesnbib:@field(DOCID+@lit(mesn/161/200193))

This is an oral history collected by the Federal Writers Project for their collection, "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938." The WPA, founded by President Roosevelt as part of his New Deal to get out-of-work writers involved with public works projects, sent writers to 17 states to interview "ordinary people" for the purpose of preserving their life stories. The National Advisor on Folklore and Folk, John A. Lomax, found the material from former slaves the most interesting, and refocused the project on these terms. The writers received special instructions on how to record the dialect of their subjects and often collected a series of interviews from the same person. This interview in particular is the life story of James Cape, who was over 100 years old at the time. I picked this interview because he was the oldest of the interviews available. He was born a slave in southeast Texas, fought for the Confederate Army, was freed and did odd jobs around the country until settling in a falling apart shack on some stock yards in Fort Worth. The dialect is incredibly apparent, as it takes a while to understand what he is saying when it is written down in that affected manner, making the narrative difficult to comprehend but adding a unique dimension to his recollections. His story begs the question, what is freedom without economic freedom? Did the government have more responsibility to slaves besides just freeing them and setting them loose unprepared into a country that had been conditioned to hate them?

It is interesting that this collection was sent to the folklore editor of the writers' project and that it was published in the Archive of Folk Culture in the Library of Congress. What does it mean to consider the often tragic personal lives of former slaves as bits of American folklore? Does that have a pejorative tone or does classifying these stories as folklore uplift them by officially making them part of the fabric of the American narrative? Also, I find it interesting that the position of National Advisor on Folklore and Folk was created during the Great Depression. How important is it to record "Folklore" for future generations and is it really the government's job (or should it even be the government's job) to undertake such a project?