Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938

The initial response to this narrative is certainly the noticeability of the poor English that is used throughout. Undoubtedly, you can infer that the individual who wrote this was very illiterate and had most likely been raised as a child within the slavery culture just like his son. Clear spelling and grammar errors are made as he tries to express his recent activities initially stating, “we builds cribs and didn’ take long ‘fore we could buy some hosses and some mules and some good hogs.”. The fact that slaves were so illiterate is clearly shown in this narrative and supports the idea of a slave culture which had created clumsy, inept, non-critical learning and unassuming human beings. Whilst we cannot tell how old the writer of this was it is fairly likely he was a grown man that had been ‘infantilised’, therefore becoming so controlled and unaware of any other way of life.

 

         The narrative gives the reader an idea of what their day to day lives would be like with ‘building cribs’, ‘scrubbing dem wid lye soap’, ‘buildin’ better houses’. This suggests a fairly normal day’s work and even states his master was happy and perhaps is why there is a lack of brutality in this part of the narrative. This lifestyle traps the slaves into a very ordinary culture during this time and this person quite clearly doesn’t know any better as the narrative suggests so much normality. The lack of emotions shown also reveals another capability slaves had; or perhaps their illiteracy meant they couldn’t portray it with words.