A Slave Narrative
The Story of Robert Fall

Lizzie Hill, one of many former slaves interviewed by the U. S. government in the 1930s
PHOTO: Library of Congress
In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) conducted interviews with former slaves. By that time, of course, the people being interviewed were all very old. Nevertheless some of the things they said tell us a lot about what it was really like to have been a slave.

One of the men interviewed was Robert Falls, who lived in Knoxville at the time but had been a slave as a young man growing up in North Carolina. Here are some excerpts from his interview:

"If I had my life to live over, I would die fighting rather than be a slave again. I want no man's yoke on my shoulders no more. But in them days, us ... didn't know no better. All we knowed was work and hard work. We was learned to say, 'Yes, Sir!' and scrape down and bow, and to do just exactly what we was told to do, make no difference if we wanted to or not. Old Marster and Old Mistress would say, 'Do this!' and we done it. And they say, 'Come here!' and if we didn't come to them, they come to us. And they brought the bunch of switches with them.
Slaves in Virginia in 1862
PHOTO: Library of Congress
"They didn't half feed us either. They fed the animals better. They gives the mules ruffage and such, to chaw on all night. But they didn't give us nothing to chaw on. Learned us to steal, that's what they done. Why we would take anything we could lay our hands on, when we was hungry. They they'd whip us for lying when we say we don't know nothing about it. But it was easier to stand, when the stomach was full.
This is an 1863 sketch of slaves leaving bondage, which appeared in Harpers in 1863
"My mother was sold three times before I was born. The last time when [slave owner] Old Goforth sold her to the slave speculator -- you know, every time they needed money, they would sell a slave -- and they was taking them, driving them, just like a pack of mules, to the market from North Carolina into South Carolina, she began to have fits. You see they had sold her away from her baby. And just like I tell you she began having fits . . . the slave speculators couldn't do nothing with her. Next morning one of them took her back to Marse Goforth and told him, 'Look here. We can't do nothing with this woman. You got to take her and give us back our money. And do it now,' they says. So Old Marse Goforth took my mother and give them back their money. After that none of us was ever separated. We all lived, a brother and two sisters and my mother, with the Goforths till freedom.
Alfred Jackson, who was born into slavery at The Hermitage
PHOTO: The Hermitage
"Old Marster was too old to go to the war. He had one son was a soldier, but he never come back home again. I never seen a soldier till the war was over and they begin to come back to the farm . . .It was a long time before we knowed we was free. Then one night Old Marster come to our house and he says he wants to see us all before breakfast tomorrow morning and to come on over to his house. He got something to tell us.

"Next morning we went over there. . . I just spoke sassy-like and say, 'Old Marster, what you got to tell us?' My mother said, 'Shut your mouth fool. He'll whip you!' And Old Marster says 'No I won't whip you. Never no more. Sit down thar all of you and listen to what I got to tell you. I hates to do it but I must. You all ain't [mine] no more. You is free. Just as free as I am. Here I have raised you all to work for me, and now you are going to leave me. I am an old man, and I can't get along without you. I don't know what I am going to do.' Well sir, it killed him. He was dead in less than ten months."

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