Weren't No Good Times: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Alabama

by Horace Randall Williams (Editor)

Overview

From 1936 to 1938, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, hired writers, editors, and researchers to interview as many former slaves as they could find and document their lives during slavery. More than 2,000 former slaves in 17 states were interviewed. With Weren’t No Good Times, John F. Blair, Publisher, continues its Real Voices, Real History™ series with selections from 46 of the 125 interviews now archived in the Library of Congress that were earmarked as interviews with Alabama slaves. Also included is an excerpt from Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom, a memoir written by Louis Hughes. This selection reveals a different aspect of the Alabama slavery experience, because Hughes was hired out by his master to work at the Confederate salt works during the Civil War. Alabama was a frontier state and from the beginning, its economy was built on cotton and slavery. That its laws were fashioned to accommodate both becomes obvious when related through the experiences of Alabama’s slaves. A year after it obtained statehood, Alabama had a slave population of 41,879, as compared to 85,451 whites and 571 free blacks. By 1860, the slave population had swelled to 435,080, while there were 536,271 whites and 2,690 free blacks. When emancipation came to the slaves, Alabama’s slave owners lost an estimated $200 million of capital. These narratives will help readers understand slavery by hearing the voices of the people who lived it.

Horace Randall Williams describes himself as “among the last of Alabamians - black or white - who have memories of picking cotton by hand not for a few minutes to see how it felt but because I needed the few dollars I would get for a day’s hard labor under a hot sun,” an experience he says helped him recognize the cadences and dialect in the slave narratives. An Alabama native, he has researched and written extensively about civil rights, segregation, and slavery during three decades as a reporter, writer, editor, and publisher of newspapers, magazines, and books. He was the founder and, for many years, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch Project. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of NewSouth Books in Montgomery, Alabama. He recently authored 100 Things You Need to Know about Alabama.

"For a century and a half, these stories and the truths they disclose have been hidden from view. They are far too important to stay neglected and ignored. Williams has resurrected the last generation of America’s slaves and allowed them to speak in their own voices." - Elizabeth Breau Foreword Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780895872845
Publisher:	Blair
Publication date:	02/01/2004
Series:	Real Voices, Real History
Pages:	191
Sales rank:	1,157,034
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Horace Randall Williams describes himself as “among the last of Alabamians - black or white - who have memories of picking cotton by hand not for a few minutes to see how it felt but because I needed the few dollars I would get for a day’s hard labor under a hot sun,” an experience he says helped him recognize the cadences and dialect in the slave narratives. An Alabama native, he has researched and written extensively about civil rights, segregation, and slavery during three decades as a reporter, writer, editor, and publisher of newspapers, magazines, and books. He was the founder and, for many years, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch Project. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of NewSouth Books in Montgomery, Alabama. He recently authored 100 Things You Need to Know about Alabama.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xiii
	I Ain't Never Been a Slave	3
	Old Joe Can Keep His Two Bits	7
	Mules Be Eatin', and Niggers Be Eatin'	11
	They Planted the Silver in the Field	16
	Escapes Whipping	18
	Today's Folks Don't Know Nothin'	25
	Sho I Believes in Spirits	34
	I Runned Most of the Way	37
	A Conjure What Didn't Work	39
	The Yankees Was a Harricane	43
	We Et Like Li'l Pigs	46
	Cornshuckin' Was the Greates' Thing	49
	This Was That Long Ago	52
	Hongry for Punkin Pie	62
	I Had Many Masters	66
	The Patriarch Abraham Saw the Stars Fall	70
	How to Make Em "Teethe Easy"	73
	Cures and "Cunjer"	76
	Chasing Guinea Jim, the Runaway Slave	81
	Massa Had a Way of Looking at You	87
	Peter Had No Keys Ceptin' His'n	92
	These Uppity Niggers	98
	What I Keer About Bein' Free?	100
	I Loved to Pick That Box	102
	I Would Talk a Lot for a Dime	104
	Cabins As Far As You Could See	107
	In Slavery Time	110
	Ole Joe Had Real 'Ligion	113
	White Hen Is Heaps of Company	117
	Gittin' My Pension	119
	The Overseer's Mean	128
	I Heard Lincoln Set Us Free	133
	Sometime an Old Nigger Die	139
	Mad Bout Somep'n So They Had a War	143
	Us Gwine Walk Them Gold Streets	147
	Chillun Was Mannerable	150
	Hid Things They Ain't Never Found	155
	I Warn't No Common Slave	157
	The Court Jester	160
	I Can't Read No Writin'	163
	They Called Us McCullough's Free Niggers	166
	She Can Just Remember Her Husband's Name	169
	Homesick for Old Scenes	172
	Wed in the White Folks' Parlor	175
	Plantation Punishment	178
	Wealth in the Bodies and Souls of Men Was Slipping Away	182