Chapter III.
REMEMBERING SLAVERY
THE BOOK
The book portion of Remembering Slavery compiles a variety of
accounts and transcripts of interviews with former slaves, who describe their
lives and experiences during and after slavery. The book is divided into five
sections, each focusing on a major theme. Each section begins with an
introduction discussing this theme; each individual narrative is also preceded
by a brief introduction highlighting particular issues, topics, and occurrences.
The Reading Guide includes five different Reading Sessions, each with
questions and activities geared to before, during, and after reading a chapter
of the book.
You are certain to find these narratives immediately engrossing;
however, they also make especially challenging reading for a variety of
reasons. Unlike fictionalized accounts of slavery, these narratives contain the
words of real people relating their experiences; unlike authors of fiction, they
have not planned a detailed, comprehensive, orderly "plot" for their
experiences, nor rewritten their narratives to clear up sketchy details. As a
result, some of the narratives are more loosely structured than the kind of
reading you might be accustomed to, skipping from one point to another,
sometimes beginning to describe one event and then abruptly changing topics
before returning to the original discussion later on. Moreover, as the
interviewees discuss their personal experiences, they do not always feel the
need to elaborate upon something that to them makes perfect sense but goes
unrecognized by the reader/listener.
As with the recorded interviews on the tapes/broadcasts, some of the
interviews and narratives in the book use words and phrases with which you
might not be familiar, and some interviews are transcribed in dialect. This
means the writer tries to capture the subject's particular accent and way of
speaking on paper -- a practice that, as the book's introduction points out, is
not always an accurate or favorable documentation.
The following reading strategies should counter many of these
challenges to ensure you get the most from your reading.