Good Morning POU! We continue to look at the writings and legacy of Ophelia Settle Egypt.
Ophelia Egypt’s research and oral history of former slaves revealed far more than was previously thought as the most thorough research into life on former southern plantations by the Works Project Administration. Perhaps speaking to a black person was easier for former slaves, as many still felt there might be retribution for complete honesty on the brutality of slavery. This is revealed by further reading the manuscript of the Ophelia Settle Egypt papers housed at the Moorland-Springarn Research Center at Howard University.
An old man who realized that resistance of any kind failed to fit into the usual picture of slavery, added a statement which throws some light on how the runaway slaves managed to exist.
It is a remarkable thing to tell you, some people can’t see it, but I am going to tell
you, you can believe it or not but it’s the truth; some colored people at that [time]
wouldn’t be whipped by masters. They would run away and hide in the woods, come home at nights and get something to eat and out he would go again. Them times they called them “runaway niggers”. Some of them stayed away until after the war was over.
These people who preferred danger, death or severe punishment to conditions on the plantation are mentioned much too seldom by writers dealing with the slave regime. It would seem that they comprised a larger element in the slave population than is usually supposed.
Sometimes the slave’s running away was in protest against too much work, brutal whippings or injustice on the part of a master or a person to whom he had been hired. If the runaway was a good worker, he often had the sympathies of his master if he was mistreated as a hired hand. Some masters would go so far as to hide such a slave when he came to them because according to Tennessee law, the master could still collect the wages of the slave for the period of time named in the contract. Again, the master might send word to a slave, who had left him because of a particular grievance, that he had nothing to fear and might return to him without punishment.
There were also the slaves who returned of their own accord; sometimes because they were tired of the woods, sometimes because they were literally starving but most frequently because of fear of being caught. However, due largely to the activities of the underground railway, slaves often succeeded in effecting a permanent escape to the free states. In the collected documents, one finds examples of all these types of escape from the slave situation. Sometimes they were temporary, sometimes permanent, but always real and usually fraught with grave dangers.
From the Harvard Guide to African American History:
Former slaves who talked to black interviewers presented an entirely different portrait of their treatment from what they told white interviewers. Even white researchers realized that blacks were “able to gain better insight” into the lives of the former slaves than whites and that accounts they recorded were “less tinged with glamour” than those written by white interviewers. In other words, white researchers would hear what they wanted to hear. As a result, a glamorized version of the Confederate south and plantation life permeated throughout literature and the arts, far from the reality of American chattel slavery.
Former slaves talked much more freely to black than to white interviewers about miscegenation, hatred of whites, courtship, marriage and family customs, cruel punishments, separation of families, child labor, black resistance to whites and their admiration of Nat Turner. If one begins with the testimony collected by the predominantly black WPA staff at Hampton, by John B. Cade in Louisiana, by Ophelia Settles Egypt in Tennessee, Samuel Taylor and Pernella Anderson in Arkansas and by Minnie Ross and Ardella Dixon in Georgia and uses it as the standard of accuracy, many of the general distortions in the WPA collection and about slavery in the south in general, can be eliminated.