Federal Writers Research Articles

Contested Pasts and Mythic History: Formerly Enslaved Women, Francis Pickens, and the Federal Writer’s Project

ABSTRACT This article offers a unique examination of the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project interviews, focusing on the narratives of three formerly enslaved women – Matilda Brooks, Carrie Nancy Fryer, and Rachel Sullivan. They share the experience of having been enslaved by the same man, Francis W. Pickens, on his South Carolinian plantations. Through the lens of these narratives, the article investigates the complex interplay between personal memory and historical context, acknowledging the inherent challenges these accounts present due to their creation during the racially prejudiced era of the Jim Crow South and the economic hardship of the Depression. These interviews provide a singularly concentrated insight into the contest over the enslaved experience between those enslaved, their interlocuters, and their enslaver.

Verbal -s Variation in Earlier African American English

The origins of the variable - s-marking patterns of present-tense verbs in earlier African American English (AAE) have been widely argued, with one of the most common arguments stating that the pattern is indicative of the Northern Subjects Rule (NSR), a variable - s-marking rule common in the northern British Isles. I explored verbal - s in the Federal Writers’ Project ex-slave narratives to understand what patterns of - s-marking existed in earlier AAE and how these patterns differed across regions. Statistical analysis suggested no NSR influence in AAE as a whole or within any of the regions, but - s-marking still significantly differed between and within regions. I discuss other possible causes of this variation, including influence from other concord patterns, aspectual marking, and phonotactics, but highlight the difficulty of proposing concrete hypotheses due to change over time and a dearth of data.

Teaching Black Diaspora Stories with Digital Archives in the Classroom

One of the prime difficulties in the current teaching environment is educating students to make use of research skills that teach them not only how to be good historians but also how to be critical thinkers who can engage and evaluate sources. This piece focuses on the use of well-managed digital archives, which provide students with a focused set of research materials that help build a foundational point of historical inquiry. In addition to discussing the pedagogical benefits of such research, emphasis is also placed on specific assignments centered on several online databases, including “The Land Act Legacy Project Collection” of the South African History Archive (SAHA), the African Activist Archive of Michigan State University, and the “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938” of the Library of Congress. If these current times have taught anything, it is that digital literacy and proper research methods are essential components in understanding information during times of political and cultural change. By engaging with the stories in these digital archives, students learn about the diversity of opinions and opportunities that defined these stories of the Black diaspora throughout the twentieth century and beyond.

Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project ed. by Sara Rutkowski (review)

Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project ed. by Sara Rutkowski (review)

Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project by J. J. Butts (review)

Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project by J. J. Butts (review)

Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project, Edited by Sara Rutkowski

Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project, Edited by Sara Rutkowski

Folk Tradition at the Creole Red River

Recognized by the National Park Service, the Cane River Creole National Historical Park area of Natchitoches, Louisiana serves as a main intercultural backdrop of history as American, French, Spanish, and Native American traditions once occupied its banks. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Federal Writers’ Project, a byproduct of the New Deal documented new oral histories from the region. Nineteenth-century folklore from the Natchitoches Cane River area reveals that French, Cajun, and more importantly African influences cast allegories for the spiritual journey they interpreted. My paper uses African oral origin traditions in places like Natchitoches and elsewhere in colonial America to argue on behalf of a “Time Capsule Hypothesis” where forgetting history happens when the past is obscured and the future is apocalyptic. Preservation of landmark heritage sites through the Cane River’s origin folklore, architecture, and ecological history become a new esoteric medium. Reminiscent structures, such as the famous Magnolia and Melrose plantations on the Cane River have preserved a different history that focuses on conservation and cooperation. For us to understand the history of Natchitoches, Louisiana requires a new perspective on historical memory and technological sublime topics merging oral history and esotericism into an ecological time machine of Natchitoches. Creole Catholics emerged from Louisiana archdioceses and Black Christians became free by transforming mythic identities in their present moment to embrace creativity, literature, and technological acumen over their environment.

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Metanarratives of Slavery

I had to see. I needed to see how I had been taught to see. I decided to go back. —Robin Coste Lewis (“Epilogue” 146) In the late 1980s, Hortense J. Spillers observed that slavery had become “primarily discursive” (29)—known not through any sort of direct knowledge but through the “cultural units” of the stories that have attempted to describe the institution (32). Those units, as Spillers would demonstrate in her analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe, were heavily influenced by the white-supremacist imagination. Most recorded testimony from enslaved people has been mediated by the white gaze, either through the expectations of the white abolitionists who published antebellum slave narratives or the primarily white interviewers of the Federal Writers’ Project’s Slave Narrative Collection.1 Meanwhile, US popular culture has been dominated by sensational white-authored depictions of slavery, from blackface minstrelsy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1936). Mirroring the violence of official archives (Hartman, “Venus” 10), the resulting gaps and distortions in the popular imagination pose a challenge to writers and artists who wish to meaningfully grapple with enslavement. Some contemporary narratives of slavery have sought to redress the impact of white perspectives: The most famous example is Beloved (1987), which Toni Morrison has described as her attempt to “fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left” (“Site” 113) as a result of their “shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it” (110). Many contemporary depictions of slavery take a different approach, however. Instead of restoring what is missing in the record and reversing the historic influence of white expectations, these works seek to inhabit and examine that influence, creating frankly double-visioned art and literature.

Counterstorying as Shining a Light: Teaching about Slavery through Narratives

The article critiques schools’ current reification and overreliance on teaching slavery as a history of exceptional individuals and unbroken progress toward freedom. The authors explore how the counterstorying of narratives of formerly enslaved individuals in both preservice and inservice education coursework complicates and engages the histories and legacies of slavery. Thomas’ frame for critical race counterstorying (2020) and critical literacy (Janks 2013) form the theoretical lens for countering curricular violence. The authors focus on The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano as representative of the current canonical frame, then introduce interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans from the Federal Writers Project, Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, and the graphic novel Abina and the Important Men by Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke to demonstrate how counterstorying slavery shines a light on power and resistance.

Creating the South Caroliniana Library

Creating the South Caroliniana Library

Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist

Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist

Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist

Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist

Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project

Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Review: How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith

Review: <i>How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America</i>, by Clint Smith

Sonic Zora in Florida

In this media-enhanced excerpt from Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), Daphne A. Brooks delves into Zora Neale Hurston's 1939 experiences as the only Black woman on the staff of the Federal Writers Project's Florida Guide. A keen listener, interviewer, and ethnographer, Hurston, as heard in these recordings, was also a sonic interpreter of vernacular voices and performance styles.

Elizabeth Bishop and the New Deal: Queer Poetics and the Welfare State in Key West

Although our recovery of Elizabeth Bishop’s politics has involved seeing her as a resistant “outsider,” this essay argues that she was at her most challenging as an inhabitant of poetic institutions. Exemplifying the vexed status of the Depression-era writer after the crash of the patronage system, when Bishop settled in Key West, Florida, she was moving not to a cultural periphery but to a showpiece for government-sponsored social reform, where some of her most successful poems were stimulated by federal government policies. This productive interaction with agencies like the Federal Writers’ Project was cut short by World War II and by the sort of conservative backlash to the New Deal that drove the House Committee on Un-American Activities to investigate events leading to the postwar construction of an apolitical Bishop, abstracted from the politics that in fact conditioned much of her work. Ultimately, the essay suggests that relocating Bishops’s work in its New Deal context helps us see that, as one critic put it, “There’s something queer about the welfare state.”

The New Deal and Texas History: Saving the Past through Hardship and Turmoil by Ronald E. Goodwin

Reviewed by: The New Deal and Texas History: Saving the Past through Hardship and Turmoil by Ronald E. Goodwin Keith Volanto The New Deal and Texas History: Saving the Past through Hardship and Turmoil. By Ronald E. Goodwin. (Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. 200. Notes, bibliography, index.) The Works Progress Administration (WPA) played a key role in the New Deal's attempt to combat the nation's chronic unemployment problem during the Great Depression. While many elements of the agency's efforts are well known—its extensive construction projects that contributed [End Page 527] to the improvement of the nation's landscape and infrastructure, and many non-construction initiatives to provide work for unemployed actors, musician, and visual artists—the WPA also created less publicized work to pay the unemployed to preserve state and local history, as well as to probe communities in order to capture snapshots of Great Depression life for posterity. It is these activities that serve as the focal point of Ronald Goodwin's new book. For this undertaking, Goodwin extensively mines the Federal Writers' Project and Historical Records Survey files among the Texas WPA Records housed at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. The book is not an administrative history but rather a chronicle with analysis of the workers' collective findings. The most familiar initiatives conducted by the Writers' Project—its travel guides and slave narratives based on interviews with surviving freedpeople—receive extensive coverage, but so do the agency's "life histories" based on interviews with old-timers remembering their years in Texas; "folklore interviews" seeking to preserve stories of local history, customs, and mythology; "military guides" that provided basic military installation histories; and the "automobile tours" in which writers describe treks along country roads and major highways. The efforts of the Historical Records Survey to catalog and preserve valuable local records such as wills, land deeds, old newspapers, church archives, and birth, marriage, and death records also receive adequate treatment. The work does have some organizational, writing, and secondary sourcing issues. Coverage of different aspects of the slave narratives, for example, appear in three separate chapters rather than in a centralized location. Much of this material was originally published in their entirety as essays elsewhere, and readers would have been better served if an attempt had been made to unite the slave narrative information and analysis into a single integrated chapter. Another quibble is with a tendency to provide too many details from many of the files, such as the list of facts provided for the fort histories, instead of simply summarizing their contents. Such analysis would have offered a more efficient use of space. Finally, a perusal of the book's secondary sources reveals a noticeable lack of recent scholarship on the New Deal in Texas. In many instances, newer works should have been cited (and several missing sources should have been included), especially in an early overview chapter on the Depression in Texas. While the basic facts provided in the synopsis are correct, much has been written on the New Deal in Texas since Lionel Patenaude's Texans, Politics, and the New Deal (Garland Publishing, 1983), which Goodwin uses extensively as a source. Other aspects of the New Deal are explained but accompanied by questionable source choices in the endnotes, notably when Goodwin cites T. R. Fehrenbach's Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (Wings Books, 1991) as a source on the Agricultural Adjustment Administration [End Page 528] in Texas (full disclosure: this reviewer published an entire book on the subject in 2005). Although there has been a relative shortage of New Deal Texas scholarship over the years, the past two decades have witnessed noticeable improvement on this front, and authors now publishing need to demonstrate familiarity with this literature. Despite these issues, this volume adds much to our knowledge of the WPA's efforts in Texas and of the greater New Deal determination to guide the Lone Star State out of the grips of the Great Depression, while, as Goodwin reminds us, documenting Texas culture and preserving its history along the way. Keith Volanto Collin College Copyright © 2022 The...

Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project by J. J. Butts (review)

Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project by J. J. Butts (review)