cultural anthropologists, cannot afford to reckon without. For the first
and the last time, a large number of surviving slaves (many of whom have
since died) have been permitted to tell their own story, in their own
way. In spite of obvious limitations--bias and fallibility of both
informants and interviewers, the use of leading questions, unskilled
techniques, and insufficient controls and checks--this saga must remain
the most authentic and colorful source of our knowledge of the lives and
thoughts of thousands of slaves, of their attitudes toward one another,
toward their masters, mistresses, and overseers, toward poor whites,
North and South, the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, religion,
education, and virtually every phase of Negro life in the South.

The narratives belong to folk history--history recovered from the
memories and lips of participants or eye-witnesses, who mingle group
with individual experience and both with observation, hearsay, and
tradition. Whether the narrators relate what they actually saw and
thought and felt, what they imagine, or what they have thought and felt
about slavery since, now we know _why_ they thought and felt as they
did. To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves' own folklore
and folk-say of slavery. The patterns they reveal are folk and regional
patterns--the patterns of field hand, house and body servant, and
artisan; the patterns of kind and cruel master or mistress; the patterns
of Southeast and Southwest, lowland and upland, tidewater and inland,
smaller and larger plantations, and racial mixture (including Creole and
Indian).

The narratives belong also to folk literature. Rich not only in folk
songs, folk tales, and folk speech but also in folk humor and poetry,
crude or skilful in dialect, uneven in tone and treatment, they
constantly reward one with earthy imagery, salty phrase, and sensitive