Introduction. The heart: 1937

1. Robert F. Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839– 1893 (Knoxville, TN, 1999); Lorenzo Ivy: Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville, VA, 1976), 151–154; personal communications with Rev. Doyle Thomas, January 2012.

2. Stephen Small and Jennifer Eichstedt, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington, DC, 2002); cf. Stephanie E. Yuhl, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Centering the Domestic Slave Trade in American Public History,” JSH 79, no. 3 (2013): 593–625.

3. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Shadow and Act (New York, 1964).

4. Many recent historians of slavery, preferring the published autobiographies, have discounted the WPA narratives. Systematic critiques of the use of such interviews include the following: John Blassingame, “Introduction,” in ST, xliii–lxii; Donna J. Spindel, “Assessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsidered,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27 (1996): 247–261; Damian Alan Pargas, “The Gathering Storm: Slave Responses to the Threat of Interregional Migration in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Early American History 2, no. 3 (2012): 286–315. I find these critics less persuasive than those who argue that the twentieth-century narratives are extremely useful. The WPA narratives contain rich personal observation remembered by the interviewees themselves, which can be read carefully and successfully with an understanding of the interview dynamic. Just as importantly, the narratives also transmit collectively held stories that in some cases are even older than the interviewees. The latter reflect the culture, beliefs, and vernacular history of the enslaved—including concepts and beliefs that clearly predate and make their way into the nineteenth-century narratives. See Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925 (New York, 2000), esp. 113–116; George Rawick, “General Introduction” to AS, S1, 11, xxxix; Edward E. Baptist, “‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migration, Ex-Slave Narratives, and Vernacular History,” in Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp, eds., New Studies in the History of American Slavery (Athens, GA, 2006), 243–274. For links between vernacular storytelling by slaves and former slaves, on the one hand, and literary production by African Americans, on the other, see William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana, IL, 1985), 274; Marion W. Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (Boston, 1981, repr. of 1946 diss.); Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, eds., The Slave’s Narrative (New York, 1985); Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988).

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