The ex-slaves interviewed during the Great Depression offered Americans a wealth of information on their lives. For example, many discussed the various ways—large and small—that they and their fellow slaves mounted resistance. In the following interview, Laura Smalley of Hempstead, Texas, tells the story of a runaway slave on the plantation where her mother lived. (1:11)
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Interview with Laura Smalley by John Henry Faulk in Hempstead, Texas, 1941. "Voices from the Days of Slavery" website: < http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/index.html > American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
Transcript
JOHN HENRY FAULK Well, did the slaves ever try a slip away, they ever try to run off?
MRS. LAURA SMALLEY No. Not none on, not, not none on the place where we was. I never heard them say they run off over there. Run off. Other places I heared them stay in the woods, and ah, so long until they wear the clothes off them, slip up. Now I heard mama say when she was a girl, when she was girl, you know, she, she, she because she brought from Mississippi, when she was a girl, they’d ah, they’d one old woman run off. She did run off. They beat her so she run off—and every night she slip home and somebody have her something to eat. Something to eat. And she’d get that vittles and go on back in the woods. Go on back stay in the woods. And they would—you know just a, they’d tell her, the other, you know, because you see, I don’t know what they name, “See so and so? Ever see them?” Say, “No.” “Well, you tell them if they come home we ain’t going whup them. We ain’t going whup them if they come home.” Well, that be all the way know they’d come. Said once that a man stayed in the woods so long, until his hair long on them like a dog.
Source: Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center.