Stepney Underwood; from the Library of Congress Collection

Remembering Slavery:  Those Who Survived Tell Their Stories   And one more thing I want you to promise me:   that you's gonna tell all the children my story. --Papa Dallas Stewart Their Voices:  Audio clips are set to automatically begin; transcripts appear below.

 

John Henry  Faulk (interviewer)	Born in 1912                                   Interview Place: Madisonville, TX                                        Interview Date: 1979                                   Interviewer: Jeutonne P. Brewer
About the Project  Their Voices  Project Director  Consultants  Sources  Sponsors  Smithsonian Productions  Institute of  Language & Culture   The WPA and the    Archive of Folk Song   Links	With Laura Smalley, a great many people knew her there, and I talked with different preachers, and what-not in the community, told 'em what I was looking for. Said, Oh, you gotta see Miss Laura Smalley. She, she 'members back yonder, 'way 'fore anybody, she can 'member from way back yonder, a long time. So, that's, uh, it took, uh, I think I went to see Miss Smalley two or three times before she got completely comfortable, and I sat my machine there on the porch and I sat on the— I ran my machine by sittin' on the steps, and kept m'eye on it. 'Cause unfortunately you couldn't take your eye off of the machine a moment while it was recording, you had to keep the stuff swept back, the filings from the acetate record. And, uh, fortunately, as you discovered, Mrs. Smalley was very responsive, she got, uh, her f— eyes would kind of glaze over as she'd get to thinking, and ruminating on ... that's— yes, yes, yes, and then all of a sudden it would burst out. And her, the uniqueness of her speech is that you can see her, she is viewing this whole, the scene that she is describing in her mind's eye, uh, the old woman that looked after the children, the way the children got around, each one of them with a spoon, got around this big trough to be fed. Knock 'im back if he gets over on your side. Uh, her, her recall, when she'd get into those kind of trances was almost perfect, you know. She could give you a real scene.  JPB:How old was she?  JHF:She was somewhere, let's see, this was forty-one, and I— she was somewhere in, I think in her nineties. I did have that down, uh, I wrote it down, there was some dispute over whether she was ninety-one or ninety-two, or something of that kind. But this meant that by the time she, uh, you know, she was an adolescent when she was freed from serv— slavery. She remembered that.
	Gaston, Alice (AL)   |   Hughes, Fountain (MD)   |   McCrea, Billy (TX)  | McDonald, Joe (AL)   |  Moseley, Isom (AL) | Smalley, Laura (TX), beating    | Smalley, Laura(TX), child care     |  Smith, Harriet (TX)  |   Faulk, John Henry (interviewer)   |  Epilogue

              

These pages are maintained by Dr. Jeutonne Brewer and Timothy Flood for the Institute of Language and Culture.  So that they can be accessible by as wide-ranging an audience as possible, these pages  are frame-free and java-free   Last updated September 28, 1998.