Timelines – Page 4 – The Digital Past Course Blog

The Life of Aunt Harriet

Aunt Harriet Smith, a soft gentle woman in Hampstead Texas, lived the life of a Texan Slave until she was 13.

Through the life of Aunt Harriet Smith facts of the lives of slaves are sparse and interspersed. Even though they had a hard life Harriet’s story reveals they had many religious traditions. The interviewer mainly focuses on the white people in her life. They asked about how the white people treated her, and if they beat her. Of course she said they didn’t, but her memories were distant. She had difficulty remembering some of the people she married or knew. Aunt Harriet also repeated herself many times. This indicates she may have dementia or another issue that comes with age. Even with the memory issues I was surprised she never went into detail about her parents or family life.

The most surprising moment was when Aunt Harriet’s first husband and his brother were murdered by a poor white man. Their murder did not surprise me, but the fact that she nursed this particular man as a child. That detail of close relation really twisted my stomach. Another moment that really highlighted the dangerous lives in her lifetime was the story of a young woman. She worker in a molasses mill, and she had her arm torn off while working. It’s details and small tidbits like that that show just how terrifying their lives could be.

This interview is incredibly useful in the sphere of understanding how Texan slaves grew after they were freed. They harbored a community/colony that was sold to them by a man named Reilly. It is, however, limited because the interviewer obviously was more interested in the white folk around her than he was in her story. He steered the conversation rather than expanding on the already existing storyline she was going with he kept redirecting her train of thought.

This interview definitely reinforced my pre existing knowledge of oral history. From readings in contemporary oral history I already knew oral history as a primary source needed important questions to be viable. The interviewer is just as responsible for the information as the interviewee is. Both sides must have a strong understanding of the topic at hand.

From this interview you can hear the soft gentle personality of Aunt Harriet, and these personality traits wouldn’t be apparent in a written format. Transcription can also lose certain dialectic history. Rather than write in her dialect just transcribers type in the full words. This makes it easy to read, but erases a part of minority history.

This interview shows that the FWP was concerned with the history of slavery, but the motive behind that concern is a bit hazy. The questions can be misleading and focused on her white folk rather than her. History is about proper questions. Some questions purge the very heart of societal issues, but some ignore it.

Mrs. Laura Smalley

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While Laura Smalley obviously suffered during her childhood as a slave, those recollections seem to be more distant to her. What she really recalls is the preachers, who “preached better then… now they [preach] by scripts most of the time. But then… they just preach, preach by the spirit”, or how they would cut and dry grass to make good bedding. The larger sufferings still remain, but Mrs. Smalley couldn’t remember any abuse that she herself took. ¹ Nor could she talk about slaves being sold like cattle, stating “us children never did know that, you know. We heard talk of it, but then I reckon that was after, after slavery I reckon.” It seems that slaves placed a high value on their children, on their community, and sought to shelter their children from its horrors. Of course, the horrors still shone through to her, such as when the plantation’s mistress beat a woman slave in the peach orchard and snuffed out a pipe on her skin; young Laura recalls having to grease her back afterward. ²

Laura was immune to monumental things like the end of Reconstruction, the labour reforms of Teddy Roosevelt, World War I, or the Great Depression’s onset, existing as mere gaps in memory. The tectonic shifts in America reached Laura and her community much slower than I would’ve expected; when the Civil War ended, her master didn’t even tell his slaves that they were free for six months (nor did any slave owner in Texas until Juneteenth). Even the race riots in the area passed by Laura; I was surprised that she was swift to recall “when colored folk [killed] one another for a while… Women killing other women about they husbands”, making me think the events are related. ³ ⁴

No community is immune to every social or political change, so I quickly deduced that the omissions of major happenings were Mrs. Smalley’s error. Throughout the interview, she came off as addled, and I frequently sympathised with the interviewers who kept angling their questions for meaningful answers– only for Laura to confess she knew nothing about what they were asking. Though I found value in hearing just what daily life consisted of for those enslaved– the oral account allowed for inflections and repetitions of speech to tell the story, elements I appreciated– there is a big asterisk next to that value concerning Laura’s advanced age.

I was fascinated by the interviewers’ frequent interjections. The Faulks remained professional, but when Mrs. Smalley went into detail about the treatment of some slaves, they never failed to exclaim ‘Good God’ or an assenting grunt. They added a very human element to their part, making the interview a true conversation. It made a difference to Laura, too, as she eventually grew more comfortable in how she spoke. While a transcript would clarify much of Laura’s dense dialect, it would take away her progression of comfort as the interview continued, the dynamic between interviewer and interviewee. It speaks to the ethos of the FWP that the Faulks turned the interview into a conversation, that they and the best of their peers wanted their history to be a dialogue. ⁵

Fountain Hughes’s Narrative

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.”⁵

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 identity⁶

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.”⁷ 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 endured⁸ , 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.