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My Folks Don't Want Me to Talk about Slavery: Twenty-One Oral Histories of Former North Carolina Slaves

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"My Folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery" is a book compiled of condensed life stories from former slaves who were still living in the 1930's.

This is not a book of white people's interpretation of what slaves had to say, rather it is a collection of interviews of former slaves. The interviewers were from the Federal Writers project, and they went around finding these old slaves and put on paper what they had to say!

All the accounts in this book were taken form North Carolina and total twenty one.

There are more than 2000 of these interviews and all can be accessed online (....at the library of congress....)

This book is very good as are all the other interviews that can be found at the above web site.
These interviews are unsophisticated, but do more than enough to let us glimpse, however slightly, what slavery must have been like.

My folks don't want me to talk about slavery is the perfect book to start a new generation reading about slavery.( it has 103 pages) Belinda Hurmences book gives you the real story from all sides. When Thomas Hall says "I dont like Mr. Lincoln and I hate Harriet Beecher Stowe". He is no less intense than Betty Cooper mourning for her Miss Ella for two years. I have collected slave narratives for years and Belinda Hurmence has given me one more reason to continue. The bibliography is helpful to old & new collectors and new readers of this important subject matter.

Out of the current collections of the WPA Slave Narratives for laymen, this is one of the best. Miss Hurmence has truly picked the best of the bunch of the North Carolina Narratives to use in this book. For one thing, there is a wide range here. We run the gamut here from slaves who cried when freedom came, such as the young lady who wished to stay with her master in a comfortable house than the shack where her mother lived. And we get Thomas Hall, who unrepentantly rebukes Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the interviewer to his face (Malcolm X would have loved him). This collection proves that as foul as it was/is to own another human being, the reality of American slavery was far more complex than we can understand. Plus, they make for good reading. Hopefully, this will encourage more people to read the uncensored WPA Narratives at the Library of Congress' website.

This book was perhaps overused in my senior thesis for college. The information was highly informational and very sincere. What stories were told in this book hit me like a pile of bricks. If only there were more people dedicated to destroying slavery! I would recommend this book for research or just for anyone interested in what really happened during slavery!

I picked up this book in SC while on vacation there last summer. The year before that we went to FL and stopped in Charleston on the way home, where I picked up two of the other volumes in the series. This year I also picked up one of the other books edited my Ms. Hurmence. For those who are even remotely curious about what slaves thought of slavery, this little book is the perfect place to start! Sometimes I think that people debate about whether slavery was the cause of the Civil War or not, or states' rights, or some other reason (one person told me "TAXES"!) and they miss the human element in all of it. These were enslaved HUMAN BEINGS whose only crime was being the wrong color in the wrong country. This book brings back the humanness to this period of history. The whole series is a wonderful set (I own four of the little volumes) that I recommend best read aloud. That's right! My wife read these to us on the trip home (with a couple of days in the car, it was a welcoming thing!) from vacation and I found myself wanting more - even after she finished them. In fact, she did read several of the stories more than once, bless her heart! A hearty recommendation.

These collections of actual interviews with former Plantation Slaves are an invaluable insight into American History. Too many times, we are caught up in the "dramatization" of history that is provided in film and literature. Here are the actual words of those who lived through the Civil War as slaves, and how they actually felt. I recommend them highly to any and all middle and high school history teachers to have for their students.

I had no idea that back in the 1930s there was an effort to preserve the memories of the last of the living slaves in this country. The Works Progress Administration created under Roosevelt established the Federal Writers Project that put writers and other unemployed people back to work, one of the projects the WPA funded was interviewing former slaves and recording their memories about slavery. The collected work is over 10,000 pages long, over with 2300 individual interviews.

The narratives assembled for 'My folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery' come from that body of work. This is a fascinating collection of first person accounts of what it was like to be a slave and how life under Reconstruction was often more difficult for slaves than living in slavery had been.

For anyone who has an interest in learning about slavery and our country's history I highly recommend reading these collections. 'My Folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery' was recommended to me by a good friend who uses this book in her classroom. I think other teachers across the country would want to do the same.

Belinda Hermence has assembled four books from the Slave Narratives and there are other collections available as well. 'Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives' edited by Norman Yetman is another collection taken from the Slave Narratives and intended for an adult audience.

If you're a reader who would rather read fiction set during the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction I would recommend 'March' by Geraldine Brooks.

I happened across this little book in the museum shop of Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville TN in June 2010. I purchased it out of curiosity and am glad I did. The book is transportive in the sense that the interviews literally transport the reader to a vastly different time and place, "slavery time" as the interviewees call it. The reader sees slavery as the multidimensional institution that it was. Oppression, severe punishments and "keep the n.....s down" by denying them education and books, to be sure. "Pattyrollers," authorized groups of feared white "patrols," sought and punished slaves found off premises without a pass from their masters - "We sometimes went to the neighborhood affairs if'n we was good, but if we wasn't and didn't get a pass the pattyrollers would sure get us. When they got through whupping a n....r, he knowed he was whupped, too." Yet also episodes of loyalty and even (non-sexual) love and affection between some masters and mistresses and ther slaves. The rough-hewn, ungrammatical uneducated language of the interviewees adds its own poetry and impact. And some of the comments are truly wrenching. For example, Patsy Mitchner in 1937 at age 84: "Slavery was better for us than things is now, in some cases. N.....s then didn't have no responsibility, just work, obey and eat. Now they got to shuffle around and live on just what the white folks mind to give them... They had no experience in looking out for themselves, and nothing to work with, and no land. ...Slavery was a bad thing, and freedom, of the kind we got, with nothing to live on, was bad. Two snakes full of poison. One lying with his head pointing north, the other with his head pointing south. Their names were slavery and freedom. The snake called slavery lay with his head pointed south, and the snake called freedom lay with his head pointed north. Both bit the n....r, and they was both bad."

What a fascinating look into the lives of slaves...from those who were actually slaves! You get their feelings, their fears, their hates and their pride. You also will discover that out of 21 slave narratives, only three are completely negative. Some are downright wishing to be back with their 'white folk' whom they loved very much. Some say that blacks were better off during slavery because they were better cared for. Almost all talk about how much food, clothing and how their housing was better in those days. Why isn't this information widely taught, especially to black young people who seem to think that all slave masters did was whip, starve and rape their slaves? Because, it's not politically correct to tell the truth about the slave days. Yet here, in this book, are the words of the slaves themselves. This book should be mandatory reading in all schools. Truth, a better educator than anything else that comes out of our educational system.