1937 Ever since Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851), oral histories had been associated with the underprivileged, the relatively powerless, those whose political and cultural voices had been silenced or suppressed by the establishment. In America no group fitted this description better than African-American slaves.
The Popular Fronters and progressives of the New Deal, who had opposed lynching, promoted black voting rights and encouraged an interracial union movement, felt a kind of white collective guilt about slavery. So when the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) set out to collect American life stories (see 27 July), ex-slaves were a top priority. To add to the urgency, time was running out. By the second half of the 1930s no African-American who had once been a slave could have been under 70 years of age.
Trouble was, the progressives in Washington couldn’t collect the data themselves. For that they had to rely on fieldworkers – many in the South – who had their own biases, among which were a need to pretend that the Civil War and Emancipation hadn’t really made much difference. This is how Mary A. Hicks introduced her interview with ex-slave Betty Cofer in North Carolina:
Here, in 1856, was born a negro girl, Betty, to a slave mother. Here, today, under the friendly protection of this same Jones family, surrounded by her sons and her son’s sons, lives this same Betty in her own little weather-stained cottage. Encircling her house are lilacs, althea, and flowering trees that soften the bleak outlines of unpainted out-buildings. A varied collection of old-fashioned plants and flowers crowd the neatly swept dooryard. A friendly German-shepherd puppy rouses from his nap on the sunny porch to greet visitors enthusiastically.
That syntactical parallelism, ‘Here … Here …’ sets the frame for timeless continuity. Betty’s cottage may be ‘little’ and ‘weather-stained’, and her ‘unpainted out-buildings’ ‘bleak’ in outline, but they are redeemed by her continuing cultivation of the values with which she was imbued in her antebellum existence, as symbolised by the various ‘old-fashioned plants and flowers’ that soften the outlines of her otherwise harsh life after Emancipation.
You might expect the national office to be less than happy with this sanitised account of slavery days. Not at all. They loved it. In a letter to Edwin Björkman, state director for North Carolina, in May 1937, associate director of the FWP in Washington, George Cronyn wrote: ‘Mr Lomax and I found the story of Aunt Betty Cofer of great interest and well told. It has a rich human flavor and presents an authentic picture of the period.’
‘Mr Lomax’ was John A. Lomax, a musicologist and pioneering collector of (especially black) folk songs. Though nowhere near as liberal as his son John, he had written to state directors warning against ex-slave narratives that were nothing more than ‘a commentary on the benevolent institution of slavery’. So his approval of the Betty Cofer piece remains a mystery.
Maybe white folklorists, however racially liberal and open to disinterested inquiry into black cultural practice, could not escape their own cultural conditioning. Condescension to the African-American may simply have been too ingrained, perhaps derived from Gone With the Wind (1936) and Ulrich B. Phillips’s standard history, American Negro Slavery (1918), in which the institution was explained in terms of the African-American’s genetic and cultural backwardness.