To Be a Slave

On larger plantations, a “trusted slave would help the overseer” (18). This person was called a driver, and they could even be asked to whip other enslaved people.

In the 1930s, the history of slavery was quickly disappearing as the generation of former slaves died. Stemming from this context, the Federal Writers’ Project sought to preserve this history by interviewing former slaves. As part of this effort, and in a departure from previous record keeping, it deliberately preserved the language of the former slaves it interviewed. Lester makes extensive use of these archival interviews in his book.

In the accounts of former slaves, the term “Master” refers to the slave holder.

The term “Mistress” referred to the slave owner’s wife. On a plantation, “the whip was as often wielded by the slave owner’s wife as the slave owner himself” (18).

On a plantation, the overseer was “a poor white, who was hired to watch the slaves while they worked, to make sure that they weren’t lazy about the work and didn’t try to run away” (18). Like the slave owner and his wife, the overseer punished enslaved people by whipping them.

Paddyrollers were “white men […] hired to patrol the roads and woods surrounding the plantation to catch any slave who might be going to a gathering or trying to escape” (70). Enslaved people’s church services and dances were often interrupted by paddyrollers.

A plantation was “a world within itself” (37). While some enslaved people worked in slave holder’s houses, most experienced slavery as field laborers on a plantation. Plantations came in various sizes but generally comprised the slave owner’s house, called “the Big House”; the slaves’ quarters, often called “Slave Row”; barns and sheds; fields; and woods.

After emancipation, former slaves faced the problem of achieving economic independence. Without a way to provide for themselves, apart from the systems that had enslaved them, they would never truly be free. A few members of Congress recognized this and argued that every former slave should be given “forty acres and a mule” (43). These congressmen were called “the Radical Republicans,” and their ideas never came to fruition. The fact that they were deemed “radical” demonstrates that they were a political minority.

Immediately after the Civil War, political power in the South “returned to the former slave owners” (105). Laws were passed “restricting the movements and activities of blacks” (105), and this legal system was called segregation. In the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans challenged these laws, launching the civil rights movement.

When slave traders transported enslaved people on foot, the enslaved were “chained together into what was called a slave coffle” (28).