Reading the Transcripts

Reading the transcripts of the interviews of these formerly enslaved Americans is difficult for several reasons. First, many of the speakers describe brutal treatment—beatings, mutilation, imprisonment. Readers may recoil from the accounts and what they reveal about American experience.Readers may also be puzzled by some speakers’ apparent nostalgia for slavery or affection for those who had enslaved them. We cannot know how much those feelings are genuine and how much is a self-protective pose. Speakers were interviewed, often by strangers, in the height of the Jim Crow period and Ku Klux Klan activity. Many of those who were formerly enslaved still lived in the area where they had been enslaved and where those who had enslaved them still lived. Speakers may have been reluctant to speak candidly in those circumstances.

The language in the transcripts presents additional complications. Speakers frequently use terms that are now considered racist and deeply offensive. Those have been omitted from the excerpts or replaced with contemporary terms, such as “African Americans.” However, the challenges of the language go beyond individual terms. Interviewers were instructed that “interview should be reported as accurately as possible in the language of the original statements” and encouraged to “take[e] down as far as possible in the narrators' words.” Interviewers worked largely without recording devices or training in linguistics. The transcripts they produced reflect those limitations, as well as their own stereotypes about black speech. (Irregular spellings are noticeably absent from interviews produced by the Negro Writers’ Unit in Florida and a few others interviewers.)

For that reason, the excerpts on the Map avoid non-standard spelling and omit terms now considered racist. Readers can access the original transcripts through the link provided with each entry.