For this assignment, I listened to an interview with Fountain Hughes, conducted by Hermond Norwood. Over the course of the thirty minute interview, I was able to notice the value of his experience, and the ways that his experiences did and did not align with my expectations for his narrative.
Here is the timeline that I created based on Fountain Hughes’s interview.
Learning from a narrative
I believe that there is a lot of value within Fountain Hughes’s experiences. Through this interview, historians receive a firsthand account of what it was like to be an enslaved person in the United States during this time. Something that stood out as particularly poignant during the interview was how Fountain discussed slavery in terms of the 1940s. He speculates that some people now “would rather be slaves.”1
Fountain notes that he would rather kill himself than go back to being a slave. He notes that they were treated like dogs, and would never go back to that existence. This directly contradicts the narrative of the jovial slave that was spread by people in the argument that slavery wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Fountain Hughes claimed to be more than one hundred years at the time of this interview and had not been enslaved for more than eighty years. Still, the trauma of slavery stuck with him so strongly that he would not hesitate to resist in the most severe and permanent manner.
Additionally, Hughes’s narrative is valuable as a man who originally lived in the South before moving to Baltimore, leading to a unique construction of southern identity. In particular, his discussion of going to church in a log cabin and being led by an older preacher in the singing of gospel songs, adds to the idea of a southern identity2
I was actually surprised by Fountain Hughes’s reluctance to talk about some of the specific hardships he endured as a result of his enslavement and status both during and after the Civil War. He says he doesn’t like to talk about it because “it makes people feel bad.”3 While the goal of chronicling the narratives of enslaved people as a part of the Federal Writer’s Project was to understand what enslaved people endured4 , one can not account for someone who doesn’t feel comfortable sharing what they went through.
Still, this interview has limitations. As a result of Fountain Hughes’s advanced age, his memory of events may not be as accurate as it once was. Also, it is limited by his previously discussed reluctance to discuss topics that he believes will bring others down. Obviously, there is no reason to believe that Fountain Hughes is intentionally telling any mistruths, but as a result of his age, some aspects of context may have been lost to time. For example, during the interview he describes an occasion when, as a youngster, he and his brother slept in an automobile. But, based on his age, Fountain would have already been in Baltimore by the time automobiles became commonplace in this country. He may have been referring to a more recent event with his brother, or he may have been intending to say they slept in a place that was “like” or “the size of” an automobile.
Finally, I was a bit surprised by how much Fountain Hughes’s depiction of his own life relied on broader events as signposts. Multiple times during the interview, Fountain remembers an event by President Garfield being assassinated, or someone’s death happening during or after the Civil War, or how hard life was when he and his family had just become free. Currently, I don’t remember my own life in these kinds of terms. Then again, I’m 21 and not 101.
- Norwood, Hermond, and Fountain Hughes. Interview with Fountain Hughes, Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore, Maryland, November , 6, 1949. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1950037_afs09990a/.
- Tilton, Lauren. “Race and Place: Dialect and the Construction of Southern Identity in the Ex-Slave Narratives.” Current Research in Digital History 2 (2019). https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2019.14.
- Norwood, Hermond, and Fountain Hughes. Interview with Fountain Hughes, Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore, Maryland, November , 6, 1949. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1950037_afs09990a/.
- “An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives” The Library of Congress. Accessed October 22, 2019. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/.
