For my interview I listened to Uncle Bob Ledbetter, who was around 79 years old at the time of the interview and lived in Oil City Louisiana. In mine specifically, Ledbetter only talked a little bit about slavery, mostly how he never got into trouble, but he was only 2 years old when emancipation happened. But I think that in any interview with an enslaved person we can learn a lot about them, and what being a slave was like because there’s no third part coming in and only taking out parts they believe are important. When there are direct interviews, it not only humanitizes them, but it also makes sure that any information they wanted to share, is shared.
A lot of Ledbetter’s big events happened at very different times than the national events. For example when he spoke about getting married around 1881, and in my timeline, there are many big events that happened around then. People experience history in a completely different way than it’s told which is why first hand accounts are so important.
I was surprised that the audio ended right before Ledbetter could say what presidential election he voted in, because I think that would’ve been interesting to hear about, and he might’ve explained why he voted the way he did which I would have loved to hear about. I was also surprised he really never talked about any big events in history, he just talked about his own personal life, which is great but unexpected. I think it’s unexpected to me because if I were to make an account of my life I probably would talk about some big events, but then again we live in a very different time and I am a very political person so that would change how the interview goes.
The interview is useful if you want to get to know more about daily life for a black person in the late 1800s to early 1900s but it has its limitations in that it‘s very short, so you don’t get a lot about their life, it’s hard to figure out dates, although I was lucky because Ledbetter talks about his age a lot in them so using that I can work backwards and figure out what year the events he talked about happened. However it can be really difficult to hear sometimes, and sometimes they talk over each other as well, so the transcript was very helpful but without one I think it’d be hard to understand everything they’re saying. It confirmed what I thought of oral history as a primary source, because it’s great if you want to know about the subjects life, but it’s also difficult to hear and you never know what answers you’re going to get so it’s best to have an open mind about whatever they’re saying.
Their voices added a lot of the meaning behind their words in the interview, and since Ledbetter would sing, it added another layer of exploring who Ledbetter was as a person, not just as an interviewee. Transcriptions definitely allow you to understand what people are saying, but they can take away some of the meaning behind the words. However it can also show the transcribers bias. The transcriber may over exaggerate some words and phrases that they think the interviewee might’ve used based solely on stereotypes, this is especially true if there is no recording because that makes it difficult to hold them accountable for changing what people have said 1.
The interview itself can’t tell us a lot outright because they’re usually talking about the past and not the time of the interview itself. However the way they interact and how they talk is history itself, which tells us a lot about the time period. Like how Ledbetter would still call Lomax, the white man interviewing him, “sir” sometimes, indicating that despite the 15th amendment and emancipation, many black men still felt like they had to be respectful to white men, because white people still had social power over black men. Some interviewees even thought the interviewers were government workers so they would change how they spoke to them, hoping to get government help 2.
- https://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
- https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/
