Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives - Book Review

Black Issues Book Review, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Clarence V. Reynolds

foreword by Henry Louis Gate Jr., introduction by Spencer Crew and Cynthia Goodman Bulfinch Press/AOL Time Warner Book Group, February 2003, $24.95, ISBN 0-821-22842-0

"Lawdy, honey, yo' caint know whut a time I had. All cold n' hungry. No'm I aint tellin' no lies. It de gospel truf. It sho is.--Sarah Cudger, former slave.

The impassioned voices that speak of the past have a powerful way of haunting and inspiring the souls of later generations. This February, during the 77th celebration of Black History Month-Negro History Week, voices from the past will come forth once again to illumine the contributions, and the trials and tribulations that comprise the black experience in America. Following in the tradition of Roots, comes another landmark media event, Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives.

Unchained Memories--the book and the celebrity-packed documentary film of the same name, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg that will air on HBO in February--arrives in all its delayed but deserved veneration.

In the early 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP)--a part of Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration--set out to record the memories of surviving slaves. However, by the time the federal government actually initiated its program, several state agencies had similar projects already underway, collecting ex-slaves' oral testimonies. Under the FWP's efforts, the program came under much criticism. In 1939, the Federal Writers' Project came to a halt, and in the end more than 2,300 first-person interviews--including those gathered from other regional projects--became a valuable research tool for the study of slavery in America. The compilation of narratives, documents and photographs were gathered in 41 volumes and were fully published, under the title The Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal Writers' Project, in the late 1970s.

In Unchained Memories, more than 40 men and women who suffered a lifetime of abuse and were subjected to unimaginable indecencies recount in their own voice, in their own language, their experiences under the reality that was slavery. The book includes more than 50 heartrending photographs, mostly portraits of the storytellers and their environments, as well as newspaper advertisements of auctions and bills of sale.

It is sad that Unchained Memories, an effort of such historical richness and value, is only now presented, especially when we are in such desperate need of lessons about courage, perseverance and sacrifice.