Two eminent folklorists, John Lomax and Ben Botkin, were selected to administer the Slave Narrative Project, indicating that initially the collection was considered part of the study of folklore. Indeed, the Indiana slave narratives for the most part are folklore; they are orally collected legends and memorates (personal-experience narratives) relating the experiences of African American Hoosiers who lived under slavery. As Botkin points out, the WPA slave narratives belong to folk history:
The narratives belong to folk history—history recovered from the memories and lips of participants or eye-witnesses, who mingle group with individual experience and both with observation, hearsay, and tradition. Whether the narrators relate what they actually saw and thought and felt, what they imagine, or what they have thought and felt about slavery since, now we know why they thought and felt as they did. To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves’ own folklore and folk-say of slavery. The patterns they reveal are folk and regional patterns—the patterns of field hand, house and body servant, and artisan; the patterns of kind and cruel master or mistress; the patterns of Southeast and Southwest, lowland and upland, tidewater and inland, smaller and larger plantations, and racial mixture (including Creole and Indian). (Quoted in Rawick 1972: I, 171)
As Botkin stresses here as well as in the subtitle of Lay My Burden Down, the WPA slave narratives represent a folk history of slavery, but he also notes that the interviews with former slaves are folk literature:
The narratives belong also to folk literature. Rich not only in folk songs, folk tales, and folk speech but also in folk humor and poetry, crude or skillful in dialect, uneven in tone and treatment, they constantly reward one with earthy imagery, salty phrase, and sensitive detail. In their own unconscious art, exhibited in many a fine and powerful short story, they are a contribution to the realistic writing of the Negro. Beneath all the surface contradictions and exaggerations, the fantasy and flattery, they possess an essential truth and humanity which surpasses as it supplements history and literature. (Quoted in Rawick 1972: I, 171)
While the slave narratives themselves maybe considered folk history, within the narratives other genres of folklore abound. Many of the interviews incorporate family legends. For instance, Henry Clay Moorman related his own personal-experience stories as well as family legends handed down by his mother. Robert J. Cheatham said that his father often told tales of his journey from Virginia, and Cheatham retold these tales. Cheatham also passed on tales about his father’s experiences as plantation overseer and stories his parents had told him about the night of his birth. Dr. Solomon Hicks told a family story about his Uncle Jerry, who broke one of his mother’s prized forks while eating a coon at a family reunion: “Knowing a battle would be staged, he hid the fork under the tablecloth. Mother didn’t find it until after he left and, of course, couldn’t say anything to him.”
Folk beliefs, most corroborated in Puckett’s The Magic and Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, and belief stories can be found throughout the interviews, though these were not universally believed. For example, Ralph Kates, according to the fieldworker, was not “a believer in ghosts, haunts, or spiritual visitations, and in his youth scoffed when other blacks told stories of goblins. He has no fear of graveyards, cats, nor rats and harbors no superstitions. His parents always told him that those things were only believed by ignorant persons.” Bettie Jones likewise said that she did not believe in evil spirits, ghosts, or charms, though she remembered hearing friends pass along superstitions about black cats. Jones said some former slaves thought that building a new kitchen always was followed by a death in the immediate family, and a bird flying into a window also meant someone in the family would die.
John W. Fields, however, maintained that slaves were ardent believers in ghosts, supernatural powers, tokens, and signs; and he related several folk beliefs, including a tale illustrating that “A turkey gobbler sitting on a nest of green peaches is a bad omen.” Fields also said that throughout the South, possessing a horseshoe was considered good luck, hitting someone with a broom was bad luck, and carrying a buckeye in a pocket relieved “the rheumatics.” George W. Arnold, who worked as a roustabout, advised that one should “Always heed the warnings of nature. If you see rats leaving a ship or a house, prepare for a fire.” George Taylor Burns recalled similar superstitions of river men, but he had little faith in them: “It was bad luck for a white cat to come aboard the boat. Horseshoes were carried for good luck. If rats left the boat, the crew was uneasy, for fear of a wreck.” George Fortman said that he “never believed in witchcraft or spells,” but he recalled several weather beliefs and omens from family and friends. According to Fortman, “More than any other superstition entertained by the slave Negroes, the most harmful was the belief in conjurers. One old Negro woman boiled a bunch of leaves in an iron pot, boiled it with a curse, and scattered the tea made from the leaves, and she firmly believed she was bringing destruction to her enemies. The old woman said, ‘Wherever that tea is poured there will be toil and troubles.’“
Lulu Scott was full of familiar folk beliefs. She said that a child born with a veil over its face can see spirits, and people who are not born with a veil can see spirits by looking over the left shoulder of someone who was born with a veil. Scott said that a copper ring worn on the left ankle will ward off rheumatism, and a bag of asafetida worn on a string around the neck will ward off other diseases. She believed that a string tied to an ankle or wrist will keep a person from cramping in water. She pointed out that they did not have almanacs in the old days, but they “could just go out and look up and tell just what the weather goin’ be, tell by the elements.” Scott also related several death omens: a dog howling, rats gnawing, mysterious knocking, and sick people wanting to eat a lot all predict death.
Katie Sutton also was a reservoir of familiar folk beliefs. She said that the seventh son of a seventh son or the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter can heal diseases, and that a child born after its father’s death possesses “a strange and unknown power.” Sutton had some kind of power, too. She claimed that she once planted a tree and cursed her worst enemy, who then died the same year. She believed that a rabbit’s foot brought good luck, but only if the rabbit had been killed by a cross-eyed black person in a country graveyard in the dark of the moon, though that kind of rabbit’s foot could be found only once in a lifetime or maybe once in a hundred years. Sutton also scrubbed her back steps with chamber lye each day to ward off evil spirits and death, and she sprinkled salt in the footprints of departing guests “so they can leave no ill will behind ‘em and can never come again without an invitation.” During the interview, Sutton refused to lend a neighbor a shovel, explaining to the fieldworker that “She just wanted that shovel so she could hex me. A woman borrowed a poker from my mama and hexed Mama by bending the poker, and Mama got all twisted up with rheumatism until her uncle straightened the poker, and then Mama got as straight as anybody. No, ma’am, nobody’s going take anything of mine out’n this house.” Sutton also recalled that the slaveholder’s wife and daughter told the slave children that although white babies were brought by a stork, slave children were hatched from buzzards’ eggs, “and we believed it was true.” Sutton was indeed an active bearer of superstitions. She told the fieldworker, “Yes, ma’am, I believe in evil spirits and that there are many folks that can put spells on you, and if’n you don’t believe it, you had better be careful, for there are folks right here in this town that have the power to bewitch you, and then you will never be happy again.”
Several of the FWP informants related beliefs about dreams. Adah Isabelle Suggs said that her mother received directions for escaping from slavery in a dream, and Samantha Hough, one of the white informants interviewed by FWP fieldworkers, said, “I believe a little in dreams.... One time I dreamed my husband got his pension rejected, and everyone said that was impossible when I told it, but he did. Again I dreamed of a lost knife being in a certain place, and, sure enough, there it was.”
John Moore recollected that his grandfather had told his father that “It rained blood one day.” The slaves feared Goďs wrath because their owner forced them to work in the fields on the Sabbath. Considering this sinful, they prayed that they might be excused, and a storm broke out and rained blood. After that, the frightened slaveowner always allowed his slaves to rest and worship on Sundays. Moore also related a few folk beliefs that were handed down from parent to child: “If you don’t want a visitor to come again, sprinkle salt in his tracks, and he won’t come again. If a black cat crosses your path, go back home and start again; if he crosses your path again, go home and stay awhile and don’t try to go where you had started out to go.” Moore also recalled that slaves sprinkled chamber lye on their cabin steps at four o’clock in the morning to keep away evil spirits. Many slaves, he said, believed in the power to hex. If your enemy wanted to hex you, all he or she had to do was borrow or steal some object of yours and give it your name.
Sarah Colbert told three tales of witchcraft, including one about Jane Garmon, the village witch. Garmon, she said, tormented the slaves with her cat. The cat always showed up at milking time, and at night it would go from cabin to cabin putting out all the grease lamps with its paw. They tried to kill the cat but couldn’t until an old witch doctor told them to melt a dime, form a bullet with the silver, and shoot the cat with the silver bullet. Jane Garmon also bewitched the slaves’ chickens. The chickens were dying fast, and nothing the slaves tried could save them until they broke the spell by building a big fire and throwing the dead chickens into it.
Examples of both supernatural and natural folk medicine also show up in the slave narratives and in an ancillary text that FWP fieldworker Anna Pritchett collected from Lark Jones, son of John Jones, 2835 Boulevard Place in Indianapolis (also in Rawick 1977: V, 89–91, and Rawick 1979:I, 275–277). Pritchett said, “This story of the Hoodoo Doctor was told me by a man who knows all persons concerned and remembers perfectly, although just a boy, of having taken part in the ceremony”:
There was an old man who had been very sick, and no one seemed to be able to help him. The family decided someone had put a spell on him. They became alarmed about him and sent for the hoodoo doctor. The sick man was not to know of the hoodoo doctor’s coming, as he did not believe in him.
When the doctor came, he asked the wife of the sick man to give him a piece of clothing her husband had worn. She gave him a piece of his coat. The doctor took this piece and formed a little man, put the form in a bottle, poured a clear liquid over it, gave it to the wife, and told her to put it under the doorstep. The old man coming and going over the step many times during the day would cause the charm to work faster.
The time limit was nine days to break the spell. At the end of the nine days, instead of the spell being broken, the old man got worse. This excited the family very much, and someone told the wife if she would take the charm to a stream of running water, throw it in the water, and not look back, that would cast the spell back to the person who had put it on her husband. The son was sent with the charm to a nearby stream. He cast it in the water and did not look back, as he, too, was very anxious about his father’s health.
After nine more days, the old man was entirely well, but the hoodoo doctor had died. The family firmly believed the current of the stream was too strong for the hoodoo doctor to combat, throwing the spell back to himself, and the spell killed him.
One FWP informant, Robert McKinley, claimed that he was an herb doctor, and Elizabeth Russell told how her leg was crushed when a wagon she was riding in turned over and how “One of the old slaves gathered herbs and made what they called an ooze, and some of the men cut down a hickory tree and made splints for my crushed leg.” Joseph William Carter said that he did not believe in witchcraft but had once helped his cousin, who feigned that he was a folk healer, cure a woman of rheumatism: “He sent me into the woods to dig up poke roots to boil. He then took the brew to the house where the sick woman lived and had her to put both feet in a tub filled with warm water, into which he had placed the poke root brew. He told the woman she had lizards in her body, and he was going to wring them out of her.”
Many of the former slaves believed in ghosts and wandering spirits. Katie Rose, for instance maintained that she saw jack-o’-lanterns, also known as will-o’-the-wisps: “We often saw lights off in the woods, near the river. We called them jack-o’-my-lanterns, and we always tried to see how fast we could run home when we saw them. I was always afraid to even try.” The slave narratives teem with ghostlore. Lulu Scott contended that she could see spirits: “‘Course I can see spirits. Seed one just before Christmas. I seed this’n and knowed they was something I done forgot to do, something she want me to do before she died. Like as not I done forgot to do it, and she done come back to see.”
Elizabeth Russell saw two headless ghosts. Thomas Lewis told of a place haunted by the cries of the spirits of black people who were beaten to death. America Morgan was haunted by the ghost of the slaveholder’s mean wife knocking on the wall with her cane, and she maintained that after the old slaveholder’s death, his ghost returned once a week to ride his favorite horse, old Pomp, all night long. Morgan also contended that she had lived in several haunted houses since coming up north. Katie Rose said, “When I was a very young girl my stepfather died, and then I saw my first hant, or ghost.”
George Morrison told the fieldworker that he did not “really believe in ghosts, but you know how it is. I live by myself, and I don’t like to talk about them, for you never can tell what they might do.” Nevertheless, Morrison related an eerie experience that he “never could figure out.” He swore that “A man I knew saw a ghost once, and he hit at it. He always said he wasn’t afraid of no ghost, but that ghost hit him and hit him so hard it knocked his face to one side, and the last time I saw him it was still that way.” Amy Elizabeth Patterson recalled that many slaves were afraid of ghosts and evil spirits, but she did not believe in them until three years before the interview, when through a medium she received a message “from the spirit land.” She said she still did not believe in “ghosts and evil visitations,” but after that experience she became a firm believer in communication with departed ones “who still love and long to protect those who remain on earth.”
There also are several religious legends in the Indiana slave narrative collection. Elvira Lee told her daughter, Sarah Emery Merrill, that Sister Ridley, an aged black woman, believed that God had split her open, scraped her just like a hog, and washed out her insides with milk, which killed all her sins. Then God healed her, and she was all pure and white inside. Lillian Hunter related a family legend that her mother had often told her, about how her great-great-grandfather, a Scottish slaveholder who hated blacks, was punished by God. Hunter said that on a day when there was not a cloud in the sky, “my great-great-grandfather was standing by his dining room window when one of his slaves passed through the room. He immediately began cursing the man unmercifully, when a bolt of lightning struck him, killing him instantly.”
Other informants relate historical legends. For instance, Josie Harrell related a legend about buried treasure, and to illustrate a point, George Washington Buckner told a story about Andrew Jackson’s faithful slave, Sammy. Fieldworker Merton Knowles gives an account of Ben Moore, allegedly Davy Crockett’s servant, who escaped the Mexicans at the Alamo and finally wound up in Indiana. Knowles’s account of Moore includes familiar folklore motifs of strong men, including Motifs F631, “Strong man carries giant load,” and F615.0.1, “Death of strong man” (Thompson 1966). Suggestive of strong man Barney Beal, who strained and killed himself hauling in a dory, a job for four men (Dorson 1964: 53–57), late in his life, strong man Ben Moore lifted a clay mixer from a wagon, a job for several men, and died soon after from the strain.
Besides legends, there are plenty of humorous folktales in the Indiana slave narratives. George Beatty’s interview includes one of the most popular tall tale motifs in American folklore. Beatty said that between Hanover and Lexington there was a dense forest. In the fall, pigeons flew in such large flocks that the sun was hidden from view (Baughman 1966: X1119.1 [c], “Thick pigeons darken sky”). John Moore told a trickster tale that appears frequently in collections of African American folklore, including Botkin’s Lay My Burden Down and Dor-son’s American Negro Folktales (Dorson 1967: 143–145, 168). Moore said that the other slaves and the slaveholder often heard a slave named Isam praying to the Lord to take him to heaven from his awful situation. The slaveowner enjoyed tormenting his slaves, so one night he climbed to the roof and heard the prayer, “Oh, Lord, please come take poor Isam to heaven.” “Who’s there?” asked old Isam, hearing the owner on the shingles. “It is the Lord, come for Isam,” said the owner. “That nigger ain’t home tonight,” replied Isam, and that ended his prayers for deliverance for a long time (Baughman 1966: J217.0.1.1, “Trickster overhears man praying for death to take him”). Sarah Emery Merrill reported a version of the same tale that she had learned from her mother, Elvira Lee.
There are two other humorous tales of answered prayers in the Indiana slave narratives. In a story told by John W. Fields, two slaves apparently steal the slaveowner’s 250-pound hog, and one of the slaves hides in the attic when the owner shows up to inquire about his pig. The other slave confronts the owner, telling him, “Massa, I know nothing of any hog. I never seed him. The Good Man up above knows I never seed him. He knows everything, and He knows I didn’t steal him!” The terrified slave in the attic yells, “He’s a liar, Massa; he knows just as much about it as I do!” Another trickster tale that Elvira Lee told her daughter, Sarah Emery Merrill, has similar motifs.
In his narrative, Reverend Oliver Nelson draws on two anecdotes involving laymen taking a preacher’s metaphors literally (Motif J2470, “Metaphors literally interpreted”; cf. Motifs J1738.5ff [Thompson 1966]), including, in part, this one: “I was exhorting an older colored lady about heaven, reading to her from Revelations. ‘Aunt Sarah,’ I says, ‘when we leave this world we’ll go to a better world, one where there isn’t work, and our food will be milk and honey’ ‘Brother Nelson, is that all we’re going to have to eat in heaven? Milk gives me a pain in the stomach. Honey makes me sick, so I don’t know whether I want to go to heaven or not.’“
Folksongs also appear throughout the WPA interviews. Adah Isabelle Suggs recalled slaves singing and dancing together in the slave quarters after a day’s hard work. Their voices were strong and their songs sweet, she observed. Katie Rose mentioned that “The slaves sang songs when the moon was bright, and the young slaves danced and played games.” Rosa Barber said that slaves found consolation mainly in their field songs, and George W. Arnold recalled that roustabouts sang songs while loading boats with freight and provisions. Asked if he knew any boatmen’s songs from earlier days, George Taylor Burns replied that boatmen sang versions of the same songs to different tunes. Burns remarked that many boat songs were sung to the tune of “Dixie,” and a number of songs mentioned the name of a captain of some craft. To illustrate, he sang a version of “Dixie” that was sung on a boat captained by W. H. Daniels. George Fortman said that “Whistling Coon” was another popular song that boatmen sang to the tune of “Dixie,” and he provided a text of another song they often sang when nearing a port.
Lizzie Samuels sang “Old Saul Crawford Is Dead,” a song she had learned from soldiers, and Katie Sutton sang a lullaby for the fieldworker, who reported that Sutton’s voice “was thin and wavering, but she recalled an old song she had heard in slavery days.” Sarah Emery Merrill said that her mother, Elvira Lee, had taught her a couple of songs, of which she gave examples, and to her knowledge neither had ever been written down. Songs of blacks, she said, are different from songs of whites, as they are songs of experience. For example, slaves working in the plantation fields, often for a cruel slaveholder, sang for the Lord to take their souls to heaven or to give them courage to continue. Sarah said that the “notes of our music are peculiarly shaped because the rhythm is not perfect.” The songs were created “not according to a fixed rule but according to the rhythmical nature of our race.”
Sometimes a FWP fieldworker volunteered an item of folklore. For example, Merton Knowles, Fountain County fieldworker, recalled a version of “Run Nigger Run” (White 1965:168), which he calls a “Negro Folk Song,” from his own memory (see Ben Moore’s narrative for the text). He suggests that either immigrants from the South or returning soldiers brought the song to Indiana.
Many former slaves had still been children when they were held in slavery, and they remembered examples of slave children’s folklore, including folk toys and folk games. As a child in North Carolina, Rosa Barber said that she played with rag dolls or a ball of yarn, if she had enough old string to make one. She claimed that any toy considered educational was forbidden. Katie Rose described a game, “Rock Candy,” that young blacks played at parties. She said the game was popular among both whites and blacks, but “The preachers and church-going people hated for us to rock candy. They called it dancing, but that only made us more determined to play it.”
A children’s fict—a genre of folklore told to children to frighten them into behaving—appears in both of Candies Richardson’s obituaries, though not in her WPA interview. The Indianapolis Star (October 12, 1955) reported that Richardson recollected that during the Civil War children who misbehaved were told that Abraham Lincoln would get them: “They told us he was ‘a hairy man’ and we would run and hide in fear of him.” This was an interesting threat, since Lincoln became a folk hero. Elizabeth Russell, for example, said that one of the greatest events of her life was meeting Abraham Lincoln on one of his trips through the South. She related two versions of this family legend in her WPA interviews. In one account, she refers to a children’s traditional knee-riding game (cf. Opie and Opie 1955: 12–14): “the president sat Mima on one knee and me on the other, then trotted each of us on his foot with the nursery rhyme of ‘Trot, Trot to Boston.’ I will never forget how proud I felt to think I hadn’t only seen President Lincoln but had sat on his knee.”
The Indiana slave narratives include a number of references to popular entertainments and folk customs, both during and after slavery. Henry Clay Moorman reported that slaves gathered from various plantations and held parties and dances that sometimes lasted all night. Peter Gohagen described barbecues and beef shoots, and Alex Woodson also talked about the good times at barbecues: “Barbecues! My, we sure used to have ‘em. Yes, ma’am, we did! Folks would come for miles around, would roast whole hogs and cows; and folks would sing, and eat, and drink whiskey. The white folks had ‘em, but we helped and had fun, too. Sometimes we would have one ourselves.”
George Morrison provided detailed information about square dances, which, he said, like play parties, were more popular in the country than in towns. After slavery, whole families attended these affairs, which lasted from early evening until midnight in someone’s home. The playing of “Old Dan Tucker” usually signaled the last dance. Morrison said that he attended a square dance that was held near Saint Joseph, Indiana, one summer afternoon and was invited to perform a dance recalling plantation days. The fiddler played a hoe-down, and George performed a dance from slave days to an appreciative audience. “Yes, ma’am,” he told the fieldworker, “I had everybody laughin’. You could hear them for four miles.” He emphasized that he was better at it in the old days, though: “Lady, you ought to hear me rattle bones when I was young. I can’t do it much now, for my wrists are too stiff.”
Sarah H. Locke said that Christmas was a joyous time on her plantation, for slaves had a whole week to celebrate—eating, dancing, and generally having a good time. Lulu Scott added that at “Christmas time we’d hang up our stockin’s and get a glass-headed doll. And we’d have black cake and plum puddin’. Black cake was like fruitcake except it didn’t have no raisins or nothin’ in it. We had turkey, chitlins and everything—cook enough to last a week. And we’d go to church—the children in front and oľ folks behind.”
Henry Clay Moorman recalled a slave wedding on a southern plantation just before the end of slavery. He said that slaves on the same plantation seldom married among themselves, that male slaves generally courted and married women from other plantations. He said a male slave had to get the consent of three people before he could get married: the woman’s mother, the woman’s owner, and his own owner. If he could not get consent from all three people, sometimes a couple eloped, but Moorman said that caused problems. Generally, though, slaveholders encouraged couples to marry, and if the couple got consent from everyone, the wedding usually took place on Saturday night. Slaves from other plantations brought food and took part in the music and dancing. After the wedding, the groom returned to his master, but every week he was allowed to visit his wife from Saturday night until Monday morning. Only if one of the two owners bought the husband or wife could the couple live together. Children born in slavery became the property of the mother’s master, according to Moorman.
John Moore described the traditional wedding ceremony of his father and mother in the slave quarters of a Tennessee plantation. Both the bride and the groom had to jump over a broom handle held by two wedding guests. After jumping the broom, they were considered married, though later they remarried in a legal ceremony.
Details of slave funerals are lacking in the Indiana FWP interviews, but George Fortman provided a detailed account of a white funeral. Henry Clay Moorman recalled that there were two graveyards on the plantation—one for whites and one for blacks. Moorman could not remember any deaths among the whites living on the plantation, though.
George Thomas contributed a full account of folklife in Clark County, Indiana, after the war. He described house raisings, log rollings, food preservation and preparation, play parties, square dances, singing, games, and maple syrup making. Alex Woodson mentioned work bees, too, saying that they “Used to have rail splittin’s and wood choppin’s. The men would work all day and get a pile of wood as big as a house. At noon they’d stop and eat a big meal that the women folks had fixed up for ‘em. Them was some times. I’ve went to many a one.” Lulu Scott offered material on folklife, too, including food preservation: “Potatoes and carrots and cabbage and apples’d be buried in the ground, but the apples’d sometime have a groun’y taste, so sometimes we wouldn’t bury them. And we’d make a keg of sauerkraut; many’s the hour I spent makin’ sauerkraut. Why, just makin’ it, like you make all sauerkraut.”