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Reviews/Les critiques Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938, digital archive, Library of Congress https://bit.ly/2P9UTxw Review by Paul A. Minifee, San Diego State University To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves’ own folklore and folk-say of slavery.—B.A. Botkin, Chief Editor, Writers’ Unit, Library of Congress Project (1941) Since the 1970s, scholars have debated the authenticity and use fulness of materials housed in this digital archive, which includes over 2,300 narratives and 500 photographs of formerly enslaved people. Released in 2000 by the Library of Congress, it features the collabora tive efforts of the primarily white interviewers, writers, and editors of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a government-funded program tasked with documenting “America as a more pluralistic, in clusive society” in the 1930s (Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick, “Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21st Century,” Community Literacy Journal 7, no. 1 [2012]: 2). Because the database’s core contents have been scrutinized for decades, its “About this Collection” and “Articles and Essays” sections prove more valuable for students and scholars of history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology who can determine on their own how the slaves’ accounts could serve them. The title of this database might mislead some readers. While these slave narratives portray scenes of brutal punishments, rape, inhumane slave auctions, backwoods weddings, and ecstatic religious worship similar to those found in the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, the differences in their contextual and compositional constraints should be noted. Both sets of narratives involved editorial negotiations with socially and politically progressive white editors and publishers who sought to liberate African Americans from society’s prejudicial views and discriminatory laws; however, ide- ological conflicts and methodological inconsistencies among the FWP administrative staff who produced these early twentieth-century accounts warrant serious considerations that explain ongoing deliberations re- garding their historical significance. Organized on a state-by-state basis, each slave narrative includes the interviewer’s name and a brief introduction with their impression of the subject. These prefaces expose the interviewers’ biases toward the “informants,” generally in favourable terms that remind us of the white aboli tionists who endorsed nineteenth-century slave narrators. For example, writer Cecil Miller describes ex-slave John W. Fields as a “fine, colored man” and a “fine example of a man who has lived a morally and physically clean life.” However, the stylistic variations among entries reveal inconsistencies in the narratives’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 2 (Winter 2020–21) ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | doi: 10.3138/ecf.33.2.267 Copyright 2021 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University 268 Reviews production—including differences in questions posed, rhetorical framings, and editorial revisions or over-writing. In some cases, the interviewer acts as an amanuensis writing an objective transcription; in others, as an interlocutor who panders to the reader’s sympathies by sensationalizing the slave’s story through flowery, pathos-laden language. The anonymous writer of Sarah Graves’s story, for example, includes an epigraph by Shakespeare, “Sweet are the uses of Adversity / which like a toad, ugly and venomous, / wears yet a jewel in its head,” which clearly frames a compassionate depiction of Graves’s life. This writer, referring to themself as “the interviewer,” opens by describing Graves’s physical appearance (as many writers do of their subjects), including her hair, posture, smile, and clothing, and closes by glorifying the story of African Americans who survived slavery: “These children of a transplanted race, once enslaved, have through years of steadfast courage overcome the handicap of race and poverty.” The most objective entries resemble a transcription and only include a brief biographical abstract with the informant’s name, birth date and place, occupation, and current living situation. Notwithstanding the variations in each narrative’s rhetorical framing, style, and interlocutor influence, these slave narratives reveal at least two significant features about the genre that students of African American history and literature should consider. First, these narratives differ sub- stantially from their nineteenth-century predecessors in plot: they depict the experiences of emancipated slaves as opposed to escaped fugitives. Arguably, one of the most compelling elements of antebellum slave narratives was the portrayal of how the enslaved escaped—whether they outwitted their masters, physically out-duelled their overseers, craftily used their unlawful literacy, or benefitted from abolitionist rescuers. The FWP narratives, on the other hand, are not plot-driven and, therefore, lack the literary conventions of foreshadowing and climax that engage readers anticipating a dramatic tale. Rather, they feature loosely woven anecdotes (generally based on the interviewers’ questions), dialogues, and descriptions of living conditions. Students and scholars will find en- lightening the diversity of experiences, particularly depicting the intimate relationships between enslaved people, their masters, and their masters’ families. For example, Silas Abbott of Arkansas states that he and his master’s children (three girls and two boys) grew up playing together and that they “loved ’em like they was brothers.” Even more surprising, Abbott recalls how his mother disciplined their master’s children: “She whoop them when they needed.” In contrast, other stories illustrate gruesome scenes of beatings numbering five hundred lashes, with buckets of salt- and peppered-water poured on top of the wounds. The absence of novelistic plots in the twentieth-century narratives further underscores how dissimilarly emancipated slaves perceived their pasts when compared to escaped slaves’ accounts. As legally ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University Critiques 269 free(d) citizens, the FWP narrators watched a generation of time elapse between the Emancipation Proclamation, the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Great Depression, which allowed this resilient group to view their past experiences from unique perspectives. A number of the narrators wax nostalgic when recalling their pasts, and, because they sat in their own homes (captured in hundreds of archived photographs), they also expressed their current circumstances in terms of gratitude. At the same time, the fact that the narrators drew from memories over sixty-five years in the past should not be regarded lightly, and it poses a second factor that distinguishes the two centuries’ slave narratives: reliability of memory. Most nineteenth-century slave narratives were published within twenty years of the subject’s escape, and many of them entailed a strategic production process—drafting, editing, consulting with abolitionists, reading of contemporaneous narratives, and negotiating with publishers—which, undoubtedly, hard- wired fairly recent memories. An FWP interviewer, however, arrived at an informant’s home with a pen and pad, asked a few questions, and transcribed the responses. This impromptu setting forced the nar- rator to suddenly recall timeworn and long-forgotten memories and would not have allowed them enough time to compose a story. Rachel Adams, 78 at the time of her interview, addresses this point at the start: “Miss, dats been sich a long time back I has most forgot how things went.” Another informant, reflecting on how the abruptness of the interview affected his recollection of events, “expressed a desire to amend his previous interview to incorporate the following facts.” This second interview allotted Rev. W.B. Allen space for a more detailed and passionate testimony, which highlighted his spiritual conversion and calling to the ministry. Thus, scholars studying the effects of historical trauma on memory distortion, suppression, or supplementation would find these narratives useful. While the authenticity and usefulness of the narratives have long been contested, this archive of personal accounts, historical documents, and photographs nonetheless serve as empirical evidences of slavery’s multi- farious realities. Ultimately, the images of receipts for payment of slaves, makeshift slave graves, freed slaves living in “corn cribs” (a storehouse used to dry and store corn), and “bell racks” (contraptions used by slavers to prevent enslaved people from running away, consisting of a metal collar that fit around the neck and strapped onto the belt loop of the pants) stand out, as they depict the undeniably raw truth of the barbaric treatment endured by these surviving storytellers. Paul A. Minifee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State University and Vice President of Curriculum Design at ion Learning. ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University 270 Reviews Jane Austen in Context Broadview Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1554814398. https://broadviewpress.com/product/broadview-online-jane-austen-in-context Review by Nicole Mansfield Wright, University of Colorado at Boulder With thanks to Mariah Chao, Min Ling Chua, Ector Diego, Alison Durfee, Eva Kareus, Bruce Kaufman, Noah Mahoney, and Darya Navid With remote

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