Before freedom, when I just can remember

the long version

During the 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project undertook the task of locating former slaves and recording their oral histories. The more than ten thousand pages of interviews with over two thousand former slaves were filed in the Library of Congress, where they were known to scholars and historians but few others. From this storehouse of information, Belinda Hurmence has chosen twenty-seven narratives from the twelve hundred type-written pages of interviews with 284 former South Carolina slaves. The result is a moving, eloquent, and often surprising firsthand account of the lost years of slavery and first years of freedom. The former slaves describe the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the houses they lived in, the work they did, and the treatment they received. They give their impressions of Yankee soldiers, the Klan, their masters, and their newfound freedom. In Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember, Hurmence makes accessible to the casual reader what many scholars and historians have long known to be a great source of our nation's history. Best Books for Senior High Readers. This is a collection of actual accounts of the lives and living conditions of 27 ex-slaves.