My Folks Don't Want Me to Talk about Slavery: Personal Accounts of Slavery in North Carolina

Out of the current collections of the WPA Slave Narratives for laymen, this is one of the best. Miss Hurmence has truly picked the best of the bunch of the North Carolina Narratives to use in this book. For one thing, there is a wide range here. We run the gamut here from slaves who cried when freedom came, such as the young lady who wished to stay with her master in a comfortable house than the shack where her mother lived. And we get Thomas Hall, who unrepentantly rebukes Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the interviewer to his face (Malcolm X would have loved him). This collection proves that as foul as it was/is to own another human being, the reality of American slavery was far more complex than we can understand. Plus, they make for good reading. Hopefully, this will encourage more people to read the uncensored WPA Narratives at the Library of Congress' website.

"My Folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery" is a book compiled of condensed life stories from former slaves who were still living in the 1930's.This is not a book of white people's interpretation of what slaves had to say, rather it is a collection of interviews of former slaves. The interviewers were from the Federal Writers project, and they went around finding these old slaves and put on paper what they had to say!All the accounts in this book were taken form North Carolina and total twenty one.There are more than 2000 of these interviews and all can be accessed online (....at the library of congress....) This book is very good as are all the other interviews that can be found at the above web site.These interviews are unsophisticated, but do more than enough to let us glimpse, however slightly, what slavery must have been like.

This book was perhaps overused in my senior thesis for college. The information was highly informational and very sincere. What stories were told in this book hit me like a pile of bricks. If only there were more people dedicated to destroying slavery! I would recommend this book for research or just for anyone interested in what really happened during slavery!

My folks don't want me to talk about slavery is the perfect book to start a new generation reading about slavery.( it has 103 pages) Belinda Hurmences book gives you the real story from all sides. When Thomas Hall says "I dont like Mr. Lincoln and I hate Harriet Beecher Stowe". He is no less intense than Betty Cooper mourning for her Miss Ella for two years. I have collected slave narratives for years and Belinda Hurmence has given me one more reason to continue. The bibliography is helpful to old & new collectors and new readers of this important subject matter.