Creating a Living Historiography:

Abstract

In 1865 Sarah Gudger left her master’s farm in North Carolina to begin life as a free black woman. “Aunt Sarah,” as she was called locally, had seen fifty years of slavery and watched from her porch in Asheville as America transformed into an emancipated nation. In 1937, at what she claimed was the age of 121, Gudger recounted her slave experience for the Federal Writer’s Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Her riveting narrative, in which the WPA transcriber attempts to capture her southern dialect in detailed phonetic spellings, is replete with descriptions of nightmarish conditions, cruel masters, violent lashings, and watching her mother be taken away. Gudger assures the interviewer, “Law, chile, nobuddy knows how mean da’kies wah treated.” Sarah Gudger’s WPA slave narrative, available online from the Library of Congress, is a part of the most concrete and widely accessible evidence attesting to black women’s lives in America before Emancipation. However, while the WPA records and other