Mr. Ernie E. Sparks interviewed former slave, Ms. Celia Black, in the presence of her daughters, in October of 1974. Born in September of 1859, Celia was 115 years old at the time of the interview- an astonishing fact itself. The way that Ms. Celia Black narrates her experience growing up in an enslaved family seems surprisingly less harsh that I expected at first. She begins her narration with describing how wonderful her birthday was, and recounts the family she was raised with- Mr. and Mrs. Clay, assumed to be white slave owners. Celia describes being \u201craised in the fields\u201d picking cotton, but doesn\u2019t elaborate much further on the experience itself, other than noting it\u2019s importance in her early life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My first timeline<\/a> layer identifies some of the events from her childhood that Ms. Black noted, and while no specific dates other than her birthday were given, it wasn\u2019t too difficult to estimate the rest. Ms. Black\u2019s recollection of her childhood was astonishing, and being able to pull some of these events onto a digital timeline made her experiences feel all the more real. Adding the second layer of other significant events that occurred during Ms. Black\u2019s lifetime was surreal to look at- having known she lived from the time of Lincoln\u2019s presidency, to the resignation of Richard Nixon, and realizing she lived through almost off of the significant conflicts in American history- from the beginning of the Civil War to the end of the Vietnam War. Bringing the two timeline<\/a> layers together into one seamless product made me realize how valuable personal accounts can be. History so often looks primarily at the larger picture, but having personal accounts, oral or written brings back the personal, real aspect of history- it helps us reaffirm that everything\u2019s that\u2019s happened in history had a real impact on someone\u2019s life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most constricting part of the interview was simply the\nlack of specific dates, but given the age Ms. Black was when the interview took\nplace, the fact that she was able to recall events from her childhood over a\ncentury prior makes the interview an invaluable resource. Perhaps it was the\nrecording, or perhaps it was Ms. Black\u2019s age which made a transcript read-along\nnecessary to clarify everything that she was recounting. Even though the transcript\nwas incredibly helpful in accurate understanding, having the audio to listen to\nbrought together two histories would rarely intersect. Listening to the speech\npatterns of Ms. Black as opposed to those of her daughters was a beautiful\ncomparison in the way that the American dialect has changed over the centuries,\nregardless of race or geographic location. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Even though the Slave Narratives Project and these series of interviews was begun and completed for the most part in the 1930s and early 1940s, the fact that some interviews were still taking place much later in 1974 is again a testament to the importance of the root of the project- bringing light to a previously untold part of history, and allowing voices that had once been trampled and silences the ability to speak their truths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bibliography<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAbout This Collection \u00a0: \u00a0Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 \u00a0: \u00a0Digital Collections \u00a0: \u00a0Library of Congress.\u201d The Library of Congress. Accessed October 25, 2019. https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/collections\/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938\/about-this-collection\/.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Ernie E. Sparks interviewed former slave, Ms. Celia Black, in the presence of her daughters, in October of 1974. Born in September of 1859, Celia was 115 years old at the time of the interview- an astonishing fact itself. The way that Ms. Celia Black narrates her experience growing up in an enslaved family … Continue reading “A recounting of the incredible life of Ms. Celia Black.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-timeline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1036,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033\/revisions\/1036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u201cInterview with Celia Black, Tyler, Texas, October 11, 1974.\u201d The Library of Congress, 1974. https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/item\/afc1975009_afs17476\/.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"