For this assignment, I listened to an interview between Fountain Hughes, a 101-year-old ex-enslaved man, and Hermond Norwood, a WPA interviewer. 1 Hughes was living in Baltimore at the time of the interview. He previously worked as a manurer hauler when he first moved to the city. In his old age, he mostly stayed in his home and listened to radio as it played old religious songs he grew up hearing. I think this interview shows that even after the abolishment of slavery and the end of Reconstruction, ex-enslaved people still couldn’t find jobs that strayed away from the field. On a brighter note, however, a good portion of this interview deals with religious songs Fountain sung as a boy, and even up until the moment of the interview, which I think shows ex-enslaved people’s relationship and reliance on their religion.
Because of Fountain’s old age, I think it’s interesting to look at my timeline and see the range of events he lived through. He lived through the American Civil War and the establishment of Apartheid in South Africa, two racially charged moments in world history that still have repercussions in today’s society and people still haven’t healed from. This fact also shows the consistency of issues affecting the world at that time, no matter where they took place. What was most surprising was the fact that he didn’t talk about his time of enslavement in depth; though, with his age, it was also understandable. Hughes said he didn’t want to talk about it because he knew it made people feel bad, but when he did talk about, he wasn’t candid about his feelings, which I appreciated. He stated multiple times that being enslaved was like being treated like a “dog,” and that if he had to go back into being enslaved, he’d shoot himself first. I was also surprised by the fact that Norwood, the interviewer, didn’t try to pull answers out of Hughes. He just let him talk freely. Lastly, after having our class discussion on dialect, I was surprised that Hughes had a good grammar structure. I knew his time in school was probably limited, if any, (he did state that slaves weren’t allowed to read), so I was surprised to hear how he spoke and how the only real flaws present were due to him trying to remember and state his thoughts.
