Laura Smalle suffered as a slave throughout her childhood, however, she does not talk a lot about the abuse she received. It seems like those memories were farther away from her and she did not like to bring them back into her current life. In part 5 of the interview, Laura mentions that colored people would get beat up. The interview asked if they still did and she said, “They do not beat them up so, so bad like the use to.”. 1. She then goes into talk about how she was scared but never mentioned any direct abuse. However, we can imply that she was because she says ” But there ain’t nobody never have bothered me since I’ve been here, and none of my children. “. From this interview, we can also learn about how slave children were treated. Their parents obviously really cared about their children, but they could not really prevent them from being badly treated by others. They would receive “whoopings” from their owners. She also mentions how women received a great number of beatings. For example, in the interview, she tells the story about a plantations mistress who beat a woman slave in the “peach orchard garden” and she says they “snuffed out a pipe on her skin.”. 2. Through these stories, we can see how many bad experiences that the enslaved men, women, and children faced for a very long time.
Throughout the interview, I learned that most of the enslaved people did not hear about major monumental things that happened in history when they were enslaved. If they did hear, it was much later than everyone else. Laura brings up a very interesting example of this that I was surprised to read. She said that when the Civil War ended that she and all the other enslaved people were unaware that it happened. Their master failed to mention that they had been freed until a whole six months after. Historians categorize the past on these specific events, such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, or Worl War 1, etc. Historians always mention the monumental moments and mainly the great things that happened in the past. They tend to generalize the events whereas personal timelines go more in-depth. When Laura talked about her past she failed to mention any big moments in history when she was enslaved; probably because she was not aware of most of them. She tended to focus on the smaller events that happened to her and enslaved people.
The most surprising moment to me is when I learned that she did not know she was freed until six months later after the Civil War had happened. That is one thing that I never thought about that effected the enslaved people. They do not have much access to the outside world. I was surprised that they left out specific days and events. I could not really get a great grasp off of when certain things happened. The usefulness of this interview is that we were able to learn about enslaved people through one person. We could experience her enslaved life through the oral interview. I also like how we can hear her reactions to certain events that happened to her; it allows us to be more in touch with her emotion. One limitation that stood out to me was trying to understand the interview. When I would go to listen to the quality of the interview would be pretty bad at some points that I could not even understand what they were saying. It confirmed that oral history interviews may be hard to transcribe because of the quality that was used back then. I was able to look at the pdf files which was helpful, but even the transcriber for that was unable to fill in everything they said. I also had trouble with certain dates. However, I was able to guesstimate the years that things happened base on some of her answers in the interview. For example, in one section she mentioned the Civil War; so I was able to find a somewhat accurate date for that time in her life. She never mentioned specific years but she did mention how old she was at a few times in the interview. This helped me distinguish between certain events and how far apart they were which was helpful.
I believe this interview was comfortable for Laura. They did not seem to ask too many questions to the point that it would overwhelm her. The FWP treated the interview as if it was a normal conversation. Turning the interview into a conversation allowed Laura to open up more and go into depth about her past life. To me, this shows that the Federal Writers Project had the best intentions in all of their projects and wanted people to feel that they could be as involved as they chose to be.
Timeline link: Here is the other link since the embed link would not work.
https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1lAR_lIdLA1IZaAc3hWy9X0D2Uy6bMJTJq8QOFmsLMrc&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650
- Faulk, John Henry. “Interview with Laura Smalley, Hempstead, Texas, 1941 (Part 5 of 5) Library of Congress, 1941. https://cdn.loc.gov/service/afc/afc1941016/afc1941016_afs05498/afc1941016_afs05498b.pdf
- Faulk, John Henery. “Interview with Laura Smalley, Hempstead, Texas, 1941 (Part 2 of 5) Library of Congress, 1941. https://cdn.loc.gov/service/afc/afc1941016/afc1941016_afs05496/afc1941016_afs05496b.pdf
