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Roosevelts New Deal to resolve unemployment and poverty in 1933-38. 28 The WPA interviews took place to preserve and capture everyday American life in the past and were done as a form of nation building. The WPA interviews are made up of enslaved men’ s and enslaved women’ s autobiographies which show the sufferings in their past. The WPA narratives demonstrate how the lived experiences of slavery continued to shape formerly enslaved individuals present lives. Enslaved narratives demonstrate how the exploitation of enslaved women was not sporicidal but central to the profits and benefits of wealthy slaveholders in the antebellum South. Despite sympathies by some for minorities during the 1930’ s, there were still other political groups who felt hostile to African Americans. Therefore, the WPA interviews of the formerly enslaved sometimes do not describe their own gendered exploitation or their mothers in detail. Despite these considerations, enslaved narratives and interviews provide the historian a history from below, which is more difficult to recover from other forms of historic documents, especially those following a spatial analysis.
Whilst the brutalities of slavery were a huge part of an enslaved person’ s life, first-person narratives by formerly enslaved people demonstrate other aspects of enslaved life such as resistance and agency. Whilst agency and resistance are not the main focus of this research, there has been an abundance of literature that examines the extent to which enslaved women were able to, and in some cases, strived to resist despite the overbearing power and control inflicted upon them. 29 Stephanie Camp has
28
“ The WPA and Slave Narrative Collection,” Library of Congress, https:// www. loc. gov / collections / slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938 / articlesand-essays / introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives / wpa-and-the-slave-narrative-collection /
29
See, Stephanie Camp,“ The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861,” The Journal of Southern History 68, no. 3( 2002): 533 – 572. https:// link. gale. com / apps / doc / A90471645 / ITOF? u = keele _ tr & sid = bookmark-ITOF & xid = d8a21667 Stephanie Camp, Closer to freedom: enslaved women and everyday resistance in the plantation South( University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Stephanie Camp,“‘ I Could Not Stay There’: Enslaved Women, Truancy and the Geography of Everyday Forms of Resistance in the Antebellum Plantation South,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 3( 2002): 1-20. https:// doi. org / 10.1080 / 714005245 Also see, Emily West and Erin Shearer,“ Fertility control, shared nurturing, and dual exploitation: the lives of enslaved mothers in the antebellum United States." In Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies, ed. By Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Diana Paton and Emily West.( Routledge, 2020), 117-131. https:// doi. org / 10.1080 / 09612025.2017.1336849 Erin Fiona Shearer, " Women of violence: challenging perceptions of enslaved women’ s resistance in the antebellum United States, 1808-1861 "( PhD diss., University of Reading, 2024) 10.48683 / 1926.00115296. See for male enslaved resistance, Rebecca Fraser,“ Negotiating their Manhood: Masculinity amongst the Enslaved in the Upper South, 1930-