Reviewed by:

• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938, digital archive, Library of Congress
• Paul A. Minifee (bio)

To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves’ own folklore and folk-say of slavery.

—B.A. Botkin, Chief Editor, Writers’ Unit, Library of Congress Project (1941)

Since the 1970s, scholars have debated the authenticity and use fulness of materials housed in this digital archive, which includes over 2,300 narratives and 500 photographs of formerly enslaved people. Released in 2000 by the Library of Congress, it features the collaborative efforts of the primarily white interviewers, writers, and editors of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a government-funded program tasked with documenting “America as a more pluralistic, inclusive society” in the 1930s (Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick, “Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21st Century,” Community Literacy Journal 7, no. 1 [2012]: 2). Because the database’s core contents have been scrutinized for decades, its “About this Collection” and “Articles and Essays” sections prove more valuable for students and scholars of history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology who can determine on their own how the slaves’ accounts could serve them.

The title of this database might mislead some readers. While these slave narratives portray scenes of brutal punishments, rape, inhumane slave auctions, backwoods weddings, and ecstatic religious worship similar to those found in the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, the differences in their contextual and compositional constraints should be noted. Both sets of narratives involved editorial negotiations with socially and politically progressive white editors and publishers who sought to liberate African Americans from society’s prejudicial views and discriminatory laws; however, ideological conflicts and methodological inconsistencies among the FWP administrative staff who produced these early twentieth-century accounts warrant serious considerations that explain ongoing deliberations regarding their historical significance.

Organized on a state-by-state basis, each slave narrative includes the interviewer’s name and a brief introduction with their impression of the subject. These prefaces expose the interviewers’ biases toward the “informants,” generally in favourable terms that remind us of the white aboli tionists who endorsed nineteenth-century slave narrators. For example, writer Cecil Miller describes ex-slave John W. Fields as a “fine, colored man” and a “fine example of a man who has lived a morally and physically clean life.” However, the stylistic variations among entries reveal inconsistencies in the narratives’ [End Page 267] production—including differences in questions posed, rhetorical framings, and editorial revisions or over-writing. In some cases, the interviewer acts as an amanuensis writing an objective transcription; in others, as an interlocutor who panders to the reader’s sympathies by sensationalizing the slave’s story through flowery, pathos-laden language. The anonymous writer of Sarah Graves’s story, for example, includes an epigraph by Shakespeare, “Sweet are the uses of Adversity / which like a toad, ugly and venomous, / wears yet a jewel in its head,” which clearly frames a compassionate depiction of Graves’s life. This writer, referring to themself as “the interviewer,” opens by describing Graves’s physical appearance (as many writers do of their subjects), including her hair, posture, smile, and clothing, and closes by glorifying the story of African Americans who survived slavery: “These children of a transplanted race, once enslaved, have through years of steadfast courage overcome the handicap of race and poverty.” The most objective entries resemble a transcription and only include a brief biographical abstract with the informant’s name, birth date and place, occupation, and current living situation.

Notwithstanding the variations in each narrative’s rhetorical framing, style, and interlocutor influence, these slave narratives reveal at least two significant features about the genre that students of African American history and literature should consider. First, these narratives differ substantially from their nineteenth-century predecessors in plot: they depict the experiences of emancipated slaves as opposed to escaped fugitives. Arguably, one of the most compelling elements of antebellum slave narratives was the portrayal of how the enslaved escaped—whether...

审核人：

• 生于奴隶制：1936年至1938年联邦作家项目的奴隶叙事，数字档案馆，国会图书馆
• 保罗·A·米尼费（Paul A.Minifee）（生物）

在奴隶制的白人神话中，必须加上奴隶自己的民俗和奴隶制的民间说法。

—国会图书馆项目作家部主编BA Botkin（1941）

自1970年代以来，学者们一直在争论这个数字档案馆中所含材料的真实性和实用性，其中包括2300多种叙述和500张以前被奴役的人的照片。它由国会图书馆于2000年发行，主要由白人采访员，作家和联邦作家计划（FWP）的编辑共同努力，该计划由政府资助，旨在记录“美国是一个更加多元化，包容性更大的国家”。 1930年代（Shannon Carter和Deborah Mutnick，“写作民主：关于21世纪联邦作家项目的笔记”，《社区素养杂志》）7号 1 [2012]：2）。由于对该数据库的核心内容进行了数十年的审查，因此其“关于本馆藏”和“文章与散文”部分对于历史，社会学，文化人类学和社会心理学的学生和学者来说具有更大的价值，他们可以自行确定如何奴隶的账户可以为他们服务。

该数据库的标题可能会误导某些读者。这些奴隶的叙事描绘了残酷的惩罚，强奸，不人道的奴隶拍卖，偏僻的婚礼和狂喜的宗教崇拜的场景，类似于弗雷德里克·道格拉斯，威廉·威尔斯·布朗和哈丽特·雅各布的自传中所发现的场景，但它们在上下文和构成约束方面的差异应该注意。两组叙述都涉及与社会和政治上进步的白人编辑者和发行者进行的编辑谈判，他们试图将非裔美国人从社会的偏见和歧视性法律中解放出来。然而，

每个奴隶的叙述都是按州组织的，包括访调员的名字和对他们的印象的简短介绍。这些前言揭露了访调员对“告密者”的偏见，通常以有利的字眼使我们想起了支持19世纪奴隶叙述者的白人宗座主义者。例如，作家塞西尔·米勒（Cecil Miller）将前奴隶约翰·菲尔兹（John W. Fields）描述为一个“有色人种”，也是“一个过着道德上和身体上过上清洁生活的人的典范”。然而，条目之间的风格差异揭示了叙述的不一致之处。[结束页267]作品-包括所提出的问题，修辞框架，社论修订或改写方面的差异。在某些情况下，面试官扮演写有客观抄本的a蒲的角色。在另一些情况下，则是对话者，通过花哨的，充满悲哀的语言轰动奴隶的故事，引起读者的同情。例如，莎拉·格雷夫斯（Sarah Graves）故事的一位匿名作家包括莎士比亚的题词：“甜蜜是逆境的使用-它像蟾蜍一样丑陋而有毒，/头上还戴着珠宝，”显然描绘出富有同情心的描绘。格雷夫斯的一生。这位作家称自己为“采访者”，开头是描述了格雷夫斯的外表（许多作家对他们的主题所做的事情），包括她的头发，姿势，微笑和衣服，并以美化奴隶制而幸存下来的非洲裔美国人的故事作为结尾：“这些被移植种族的孩子一旦被奴役，便通过多年的坚定勇气克服了种族和贫困的障碍。” 最客观的条目类似于抄写，仅包括简短的传记摘要以及举报人的姓名，出生日期和地点，职业以及当前的生活状况。

尽管每个叙述的修辞框架，风格和对话者影响各有不同，但这些奴隶叙述至少揭示了非裔美国人历史和文学学生应考虑的体裁的至少两个重要特征。首先，这些叙述在情节上与19世纪的前辈有很大不同：它们描绘的是解放奴隶的经历，而不是逃亡的逃犯。可以说，战前奴隶叙事中最引人注目的要素之一是对被奴役者如何逃脱的描绘-是否……