The Life of Aunt Harriet Smith

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Aunt Harriet Smith’s interview, Interview with Harriet Smith, Hempstead, Texas, 1941

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teaches us that slave narratives can be happy and light-hearted. Through her life, she was able to find some things to laugh about and tell stories about later. Even though she went through the absolute lowest form of treatment, she derived some positives from it all. The two timelines intersect through the big wars, big bills, and big social events that occurred during her life. They had an impact on everyone, including her. For example, the Model T was a car that she never saw but, her husband did, and he came back to tell her all about it. It’s evident that big events had an impact on almost everyone who lived during them but in very different ways. Some people have funny stories and some have the opposite. I was surprised that she spoke about all of her husbands. It made me laugh the way she spoke about them all. She really valued her first husband but he was killed and then the three that followed seemed to be more fun for her. Not that she didn’t have fun with her first husband, but she told wilder stories about her other husbands. This interview is useful because she is a former slave who reports little issues with her master. We can see her becoming so used to slavery that she excused and justified any act that her master did, no matter how severe. It takes her a little while to get to the crux of the subject or remember what really happened which is funny but a little frustrating, too. I believed that oral histories were important to the documentation of our past but, I forgot to address that they can sometimes be hard to understand

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. My recordings had cracking sounds and you can hear Faulk periodically saying “lean in” or “speak up”. I also forgot that the people who had the means to record it had to have the equipment and might be in a higher social standing than their interviewee. I was happy that Faulk was not racist towards aunt Harriet Smith and that she was comfortable enough to speak so candidly with him, despite them discussing an issue that confronts race head-on. ³It’s clear that the social standing of the 1930s is better than it was before. They’re able to converse about the past and let her tell her whole story which, she’s not always been able to do. I liked how he asked questions and that you can hear someone cooking something in the background, it gives off the feeling that maybe they would have a meal together at the end. 

1. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941016_afs05499a/, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941016_afs05499b/, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941016_afs05500a/, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941016_afs05500b/
2. Library of Congress. “A Note on the Language of the Narratives.” The Library of Congress, Congress.gov, 2019, www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/note-on-the-language-of-the-narratives/#note.

    

3. Hirsch, Jerrold. Portrait of America : A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project, The University of North Carolina Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.mutex.gmu.edu/lib/gmu/detail.action?docID=880196.