Stories from the Heart: Slave Narratives & African American Folktales

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1 Stories from the Heart: Slave Narratives & African American Folktales Gail Zachariah Keene Public Library Keene, New Hampshire

2 Keene, New Hampshire Keene is a great place to live. It s most famous for The Pumpkin Festival.

3 and for Keene s civil rights hero Jonathan Daniels

4 Our project was an extensive study of slave narratives & folktales ü Read a variety of African American folktales and slave narratives; ü Compared and contrasted African American tales to other tales both within the African American tradition and to tales from other cultures and traditions; ü Experienced firsthand as both listeners and tellers the importance of voice & pacing in folktales; ü Learned to interpret primary source oral history documents; ü Compared and contrasted life during slavery with life afterward; ü Learned to retell a folktale.

5 Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln s Journey to Emancipation Our project started in the summer of 2010 when our library hosted a library exhibit through ALA Public Programs.

6 Abraham Lincoln & Frederick Douglass Visited

7 Keene Chautauqua: Forever Free Lincoln & Douglass performed on stage and visited the community.

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9 Last summer, when this project first began, middle and high schools students and adults read and discussed slave narratives including Harriet Jacob s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and narratives by Frederick Douglass.

10 Younger children explored these and other accounts.

11 Slave Narrative Motifs Exposes physical and emotional abuses of slavery Exposes white owners' hypocrisy and inconstancy Describes repeated raising of narrator's expectations only to have them dashed by whites Describes quest for literacy Describes quest for freedom Includes vignettes of other character types and the experience of slavery: those who succeed and those who fail Makes appeals to imagined audience Details loss of significant family member(s) and the destruction of family ties

12 The slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. ~ Harriet Jacobs

13 "You wasn't no more than a dog to some of them in them days. You wasn't treated as good as they treat dogs now. But still I didn't like to talk about it. Because it makes, makes people feel bad you know. Uh, I, I could say a whole lot I don't like to say. And I won't say a whole lot more. (Fountain Hughes, age 101)

14 If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls. ~ Harriet Jacobs

15 ... When they sold her, her mother fainted or drapped dead, she never knowed which. She wanted to go see her mother lying over there on the ground and the man what bought her wouldn't let her. He just took her on. Drove her off like cattle, I recken. ~ from Interview with Will Ann Rogers

16 This photograph shows a group of ex-slaves or contrabands in Cumberland Landing, Virginia in 1862, the year after the Civil War began.

17 Group of Freedmen I found many [ colored people ], who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland - Frederick Douglass, A Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave

18 Reliving history online through slave narratives

19 Voices Connect Us to the Past

20 Folktales: Surviving Slavery and Passing On Culture

21 Trickster tales were a favorite with our digital storytellers.

22 Our digital storytellers worked collaboratively and independently to film and edit the folktales.

23 Bruh Rabbit & the Tar Baby

24 The library's traditional storytellers were mostly female. Her Stories appealed to them. They performed these on stage as readers theater.

25 These storytellers worked with the artistic director of the Edge Ensemble, a local theater company.

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