What The Archives Cannot Hold

I will never forget the first time I read Jane’s name.

I had been piddling around on Ancestry.com for several weeks, trying to trace my family tree. Parts of it were easy to locate: Confederate generals, early colonists, wealthy plantation owners abounded. Other parts—the parts that most reflect my identity as a Black woman—were much harder to find. I kept running into one dead end after another, intent on locating the names of my enslaved ancestors.

And then, I stumbled across the deed.

This is to certify that I Thomas Nelson of said state and county have this day given to my daughter Ann Haesettine Slater a certain negro woman named Jane, together with four children to wit, Sanders a boy, Laura a girl, Minerva a girl, and Eveline a girl, and I do by their presents confirm the rights and title of said woman Jane and said children and heirs and their issue, to my daughter Ann Haesettine Slater and her children for their own benefit in perpetuity against the claim or claims of all others whatever in witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and affixed my seal this 28th Sept 1858. using seraul (sp) instead of a seal.

I had found her. I’d also found my great-great-great aunts—Laura and Minerva—and uncle—Sanders. It was a boon to know their names and to capture parts of their stories.

But it did not escape me that I learned their stories first through the lens of their oppression.

You see, the archive isn’t a neutral space when it comes to Jane’s story. It is almost impossible to locate her outside of the oppressive realities of her existence. In Western historical practice, written history is the standard, and because of this, the legislated illiteracy of the enslaved often served to effectively cut off archival access to their history.

To my history.

To our history.

My discovery was not a novel one. Scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Marisa J. Fuentes, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, and so many others have pointed to this archival silence and its resulting erasure. And wherever our approaches vary, we all share Hartman’s dream: “to liberate [Black stories] from the obscene descriptions that first introduced them to us.”1 To restore Jane’s dignity even while discovering her story through a document that attacks that dignity.

This is why I love reading the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives.

The WPA’s Ex-Slave Narratives are over 2,000 interviews collected from the formerly enslaved during the 1930s. They were gathered as part of the Federal Emergency Relief Agency arm of the New Deal. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) Arts Projects were established to create employment opportunities for white-collar workers—mostly white writers, artists, actors, musicians, and others. The interviews were conducted in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Maryland, Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Ohio, North and South Carolina, Missouri, Virginia, Texas, and Tennessee.

Although they had a broad reach, the interviewers did not go into every area of slaveholding states, and some regions are notably absent. Some states also have many more interviews represented in the project than others—and that was often by design.

As such, the narratives are still full of archival obstructions. There were biased interviewers who recorded and edited the stories of the enslaved to fit their own agendas. For instance, in 1977, Jan Hillegas and Ken Lawrence found five hundred unpublished narratives in Mississippi, leading to a supplemental series that often illustrates how frequently interviewees’ words were manipulated.

And even when their words weren’t manipulated, the real and present threats of Jim Crow and the desperation of the Great Depression led to skewed reporting on the part of the formerly enslaved interviewees.

And yet—

These three thousand interviews offer us a unique opportunity to perform the liberation that Hartman hopes for. As Wells-Oghoghomeh argues, quite convincingly, part of our hang-ups with the WPA Narratives comes from prioritizing Western understandings of history and memory. Turning back to Africa, she states: “People collect knowledge and histories over time, via experience and comparisons to similar accounts, which offer a basis for the integration or rejection of new threads.”2

And here lies the beauty of the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives: we have thousands of threads and through-lines that add layers and texture to the stories of the formerly enslaved in the United States. We could spend all day talking about what might have been edited out of these narratives—but I’m more interested in what was left behind.

Our stories have a way of stubbornly slipping through the cracks of the archive, and the practice of catching them is a treasure hunt I’m excited to share with you over the coming weeks.

Further Reading

• Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives

• Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk

• Sadiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”

• Catherine A. Stewart, Long Past Slavery

  This is Part 1 of a series on how to read the WPA Narratives.