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T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker, eds. The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996. 541 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-8061-2859-3.
In the spring of 1990 an archivist at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City alerted researchers T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker to the existence of a cache of freedmen's narratives "that nobody ha[d] ever done much with." Research at the National Archives and m Oklahoma convinced the Bakers that this material, some never published, deserved to be coUected and disseminated. They proceeded to examine and edit what they had discovered in order to publish Ui a single volume all of the known Oklahoma freedmen's narratives from the 1930s. In bringing together and contextualizing these narratives they have done a great service to historiography.
At the outset it must be said these are not exactly "slave narratives," a term usually understood as a body of autobiographical writing in which nineteenth century blacks recounted the experience of suffering, escape, and deliverance from slavery. Such vivid depictions of what Arna Bontemps called "the Negro's suffering in his private hell of oppression" constitute a rich, indispensable source on the institution of slavery as viewed by the victims shortly after emerging from their ordeal. The classic slave narratives are stirring and often highly literary textualizations of human experience in extremis.
In contrast, the narratives before us are better termed "testimony." They comprise the entUety of those narratives extant for Oklahoma and were prepared by the Federal Writers' Project from interviews conducted with elderly former slaves from spring 1937 to early 1938, some seventy years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Though both are mediated narratives, the distinction between slave narrative (or autobiography or memoU) and testimony is a valuable one, I think, given that dUferent mental and confessional processes and constraints were at work in each and that they originated at dUferent historical junctures. Moreover, the nineteenth century narratives were meant to supply an effective weapon against slavery itseU, whereas the WPA narratives were commissioned to document the past. The production process, designed to elicit and set down the testimonies by freedmen, was complex, collaborative, and intended to provide answers for twentieth century Americans about what it means to live as a slave and what...