Photograph:Sarah Gudger, 121, of Asheville lived in slavery for about fifty years. Library of Congress

Asheville, NC
WPA stories of three of Asheville's last slaves — whether they worked the Swannanoa Valley fields or eked out a living in Asheville after Emancipation — being enslaved in their own words.
'Better to the animals than to us'
Sarah Gudger may have been the oldest woman in the United States at the time of her interview. (As best anyone in the area could calculate, it seemed Sarah was 121 years old. There were 70-year-olds who remembered Gudger being "old" when they were children). Toward the end of her life, Gudger lived at 8 Dalton Street in South Asheville — in what the Federal Writers Project interviewer describes as "the Negro section lying north of Kenilworth."

I never sleep on a bedstead till after freedom, no ma'am, till after freedom. Jes' an ole pile o' rags in the corner. Hardly nothing to keep us from freezin'. Lord, child, nobody knows how mean darkies were treated. Why, they were better to the animals than to us. . .

Ole Boss, he send us n------ out in any kind of weather, rain o' snow, it never matter. We had to go out to the mountains, cut wood and drag it down to the house. Many the time we come in with our clothes stuck to our poor ole cold bodies, but it warn't no use to try to get 'em dry. If the Ole Boss o' the Ole Missus see us, they yell: "Get out of here you black thing, an get your work out the way!" And Lordy, honey, we knew to get, else we get the lash. They didn't care how ole or how young you were, you never too big to get the lash. . .

All the slaves be in the field, plowin', hoein', singin' in the boilin' sun. Old Master, he come through the field with a man called the speculator. They walk round jes' lookin, jes' lookin. All the darkies know what this mean. They didn't dare look up, jes' work right on. Then the speculator see who he want. He talk to Old Master, then they slaps the handcuffs on him and take him away to the cotton country. . .

When the darkies get sick, they were put in a lil' ole house close to the big house, and one of the other darkies waited on 'em. There were very few doctors then. Only three in the whole section. When they wanted medicine they went to the woods and gathered hoarhound, slipperelm for poltices and all kinds of bark for teas. All this herbs bring you round."
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Federal Writers' Project
In the depths of the Great Depression, as unemployed Americans toiled away at infrastructure projects like the Blue Ridge Parkway and dams for the Tennessee Valley Authority, there was a different kind of public work in action. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal founded the Federal Writers' Project, a small army of out-of-work writers that roamed across the Southeast to gather testimony from the few remaining former slaves. Those interviews, numbering over two thousand, are held in the Library of Congress and available to read (and in many cases, listen to) online.

Part of the Federal Writers' Project mission was ethnography — the sociological study of people and their customs — so many of the interviews were transcribed phonetically to help preserve the speaker's distinctive accent, which sometimes held clues to their cultural origins. Since the phonetic transcriptions can be difficult to read, the passages below have been edited for clarity while staying as true to the original speech patterns as possible.