What do I believe and disbelieve from this source?

Comments

Abner Jordan

Looking over this whole narrative, it’s clear that there can be a lot of potential problems with slave narratives.

• They were recorded seventy or more years after the end of slavery and they rely on very old memories of people who may have been children or very young men and women when the Civil War ended.
• Most were recorded by white interviewers whose race and, sometimes, standing in the local community may have caused their interviewees to keep silent about their true feelings about slavery and the white families who had owned them under slavery.
• In many cases, interviewers asked questions that might have shaped the way the interviewees responded, or they might have neglected to ask questions that would have led to a fuller, more accurate view of the interviewee’s life.
• In many cases, the text of the interview was written down by the interviewer who may not have gotten everything right — and in the editing process, we have seen that sometimes interviewees’ words were changed to reflect the editor’s idea of how African Americans sounded rather than the way the interviewee actually spoke.
• The context of the Jim Crow South permeated the interviews, perhaps causing interviewees to minimize their discussions of abuse, racism, and negative feelings. At the same time, the context of the Great Depression — a time when many southern African Americans lived in abject poverty — may have caused some interviewees to look back on their slave past with rose-colored glasses.

With all of these problems, historians might wonder — why use these sources at all? What kinds of truth can we possibly extract from sources that are layered with so many possible errors, biases, and misinterpretations?

The fact remains that, whatever the problems with these sources, they are the best source historians have for understanding slavery from the slave’s point of view. Numerous records from plantation holders exist — diaries, letters, ledger books. But those sources only tell the story of slavery through the eyes of people who owned slaves — people who, for the most part, saw no real problem with owning other human beings and forcing those human beings to work for their own profit. To really understand slavery and what it meant to be a slave, we need to try to see the institution through the eyes of former slaves themselves. Whatever the potential problems of the slave narratives, these sources provide us with a window through which we can glimpse some of the slave experience.

To be sure, no single slave narrative can tell us the whole story about slavery — the experience was too diverse for any one source to provide definitive answers to all or even most of our questions. By comparing the stories found in the hundreds and hundreds of slave narratives, however, historians can begin to see patterns. They can start to understand which memories seem to be common among former slaves from particular parts of the South or from particular sizes of plantations. As the big picture emerges, historians can start to make educated guesses about which details seem to be corroborated by dozens of other narratives and are, therefore, likely to be accurate; and which seem to be experiences that were uncommon — or even misremembered or unlikely to have actually happened. By comparing the narratives of slaves from specific plantations to the narratives of others on the same plantations and to the diaries and letters of the whites who owned the plantation, historians can begin to piece together the day-to-day workings of a specific piece of land from both the perspective of the slave and the perspective of the slave holder, using one source to verify the details found in the others and being constantly watchful for the biases that each individual source might contain.

Those skeptical of the slave narratives should also remember that while these sources contain inaccuracy and bias, so do most other sources that historians use. Diaries and letters all come from a single person’s perspective and are often shaped by that person’s biases, prejudices, and personal opinions as well as by the audience that they expect to read the source later on. (Would you write the same things in your diary if you thought your nosy brother or sister would read it? If you keep a blog that you know is read by a lot of people, do you choose to leave out certain things or embellish others for the sake of your readership?) Even seemingly objective sources like newspapers can contain their own biases. (Who decided to write a story on a particular topic for that day’s paper? What editorial slant does the paper have? Did people in the newspaper’s community have specific attitudes or views that the newspaper might be pandering to?)

Since no source is without bias or possible problems, the best a historian can do is weight the value of the evidence provided against the possibility of bias or inaccuracy and then do everything he or she can to analyze the source carefully and to verify as many details as possible by looking at other sources that might shed light on the same historical events. By thinking critically about each source and looking for common themes and repeated patterns of information across several sources, historians can make educated interpretations of the past, comfortable that they have done their best to eliminate the problems inherent in the sources that they have found.

The slave narratives have benefited historians tremendously. They provide details about daily life on southern plantations that would otherwise be long forgotten. They shed light on the African American experience of slavery, providing a much-needed balance to the historical record that, previously, had been established using white sources only. Given that most slaves were not permitted to learn to read or write, these oral sources also provide the only records that many former slaves left behind. The Federal Writers Project’s efforts ensured that these voices would not be allowed to remain silent. We may need to listen to the stories these interviews tell with a critical ear and be attuned to possible problems, but the stories that they tell are so compelling and offer us such rich and valuable information about the past that they certainly seem worth the extra effort.

For another scholar’s discussion of this question, see the American Memory Project’s introduction to the slave narratives.

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Daisy Whaley

You may wish to consider the extent to which you think the interviewer influenced this narrative. Based on what Mr. Jordan said, what kinds of questions do you think the interviewer asked? What biases might Ms. Whaley have brought to the interview? How might her questions have shaped the resulting story? Does the impact of the interviewer on the narrative cause you to have any doubts about the usefulness of the source?

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WPA Slave Narrative Project, North Carolina Narratives, Volume 11 Part 2, Federal Writers' Project, United States Work Projects Administration (USWPA);

Do you think that the Federal Writers’ Project (through the questions it distributed, its choice of interviewers, its choices when planning and implementing the project) influenced this source in any way? If so, do you think those influences were serious enough to cause you to doubt the usefulness of the source?

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"I wus bawn about 1832

We already know from our explorations into the factual content of this source that Mr. Jordan was probably born in the early 1850s, not 1832, making him about 82 years old at the time of the interview, not 95 or 105. So we can’t believe the information provided in the narrative about his age. Does this piece of incorrect information cast doubt on any other parts of the source?

Because Mr. Jordan and the interviewer gave information about his age that appears to be incorrect, should we assume that the interview probably contains other information that is faulty or unreliable? Not necessarily. Whenever historians encounter factual inaccuracies in sources, they have to carefully consider the importance of those inaccuracies. For example, they might ask why the narrator was incorrect — did he or she not have access to the information they would have needed to provide an accurate account? Was this information not important to that person, or not a significant enough part of their life to warrant careful, specific memories? What might have caused the inaccuracy? Never really knowing the information in the first place? Failed memories of events that happened long ago? Purposeful distortion of the facts? Bias?

Mr. Jordan’s uncertain reporting of his birth date suggests that he may have not been told accurate information about his birth, or that the information wasn’t particularly important to him. It doesn’t, however, suggest that he was being intentionally deceptive or that his recollections of other events are also inaccurate. Knowing that he was probably inaccurate about this one detail, what kinds of details do you think Mr. Jordan might also be mistaken about? What kinds of things do you think he probably remembered and reported accurately?

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I played wid him an' wus his body guard. Yes, suh, Where ever young Marse Benehan went I went too. I waited on him.

Mr. Jordan doesn’t convey any information about his feelings about Paul Cameron, who owned his family, or Bennehan Cameron, whom he waited on as a servant. Since he doesn’t say anything negative about them and just “tells it like it was,” can we assume that Mr. Jordan was happy in his role as a slave?

Not at all — it is quite possible that Mr. Jordan didn’t share his feelings about the Cameron family because, consciously or unconsciously, he was concerned that speaking frankly about the white family that owned him with a white interviewer in the 1930s South could lead to serious negative repercussions for him or for his family.

If you believe that this was the case, how would knowing that Mr. Jordan was watching what he said color your interpretation of the interview? What do you think went unsaid? Are there parts of the interview that you think would have been very different if he had spoken more freely? Does his choice not to share his personal feelings necessarily make any part of the source less credible, or or is it simply less rich than it might otherwise have been?

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When de war come de Yankees come to de house an' axed my mammy whare de folks done hid de silver an' gol', an' dey say dey gwine to kill mammy if she didn' tell dem. But mammy say she didn' know whare dey put it, an' dey would jus' have to kill her for she didn' know an' wouldn' lie to keep dem from hurting her.

Do you think Mr. Jordan’s mother knew where the valuables were? Do you think that this confrontation happened exactly as he says it did? What alternative scenarios can you imagine?

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