While Sam and I were in charleston for the wedding, she picked up a book called “My folks don’t want me to talk about slavery” filled with stories by former slaves of what it was like for them and what emancipation was like. Thes stories came about because of one of the things governments can do that are good, public works projects. During the Depression, the government hired a bunch of out of work writers to travel across former slaveowning areas, find former slaves, and record their stories. Project Gutenberg has just published online, for free, an etext about the administrative process that led to this project and how the writers went about it. Sample text in in it also goes in about the religious beliefs and superstitions of the former slaves.

Interestingly, like a lot of old folks, many of these people reminisce fondly about how much better life was during “Slavery time.”