Master Narratives, Identities, and the Stories of Former Slaves [1 ed.] 9789027267108, 9789027249357

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Master Narratives, Identities, and the Stories of Former Slaves Jonathan Clifton and Dorien Van De Mieroop

studies in narrative 22

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Master Narratives, Identities, and the Stories of Former Slaves

Studies in Narrative (SiN) issn 1568-2706 The subject of SiN is the study of narrative. Volumes published in the series draw upon a variety of approaches and methodologies in the study of narrative. Particular emphasis is placed on theoretical approaches to narrative and the analysis of narratives in human interaction. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/sin

Editor Michael Bamberg Clark University

Advisory Board Susan E. Bell

Rom Harré

Jerome S. Bruner

David Herman

Jennifer Coates

Janet Holmes

Bowdoin College New York University Roehampton University

Michele L. Crossley

Edge-Hill University College

Carol Gilligan

New York University

Linacre College, Oxford Nort Carolina State University

Allyssa McCabe

University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Eric E. Peterson

University of Maine

Victoria University of Wellington

Catherine Kohler Riessman

Charlotte Linde

Deborah Schiffrin

Dan P. McAdams

Margaret Wetherell

Institute for Research Learning Northwestern University

Boston University

Georgetown University Open University

Volume 22 Master Narratives, Identities, and the Stories of Former Slaves by Jonathan Clifton and Dorien Van De Mieroop

Master Narratives, Identities, and the Stories of Former Slaves Jonathan Clifton University of Valenciennes

Dorien Van De Mieroop University of Leuven

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/sin.22 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2016004381 (print) / 2016016978 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 4935 7 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6710 8 (e-book)

© 2016 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents chapter 1 Introduction: Identity, narrative and context Identity  3 Narrative  5 Identity in narrative  7 Positioning analysis  8 Why a book on slave narratives?  10 chapter 2 The slave narratives: A historical background Slavery – a brief overview  15 Slave narratives – a selective history for the purposes of this book  18 Antebellum slave autobiographies  18 Interviews with former slaves  19 Criticisms of the slave narratives  20 The debate about the ‘usefulness’ of the narratives  24 The corpus  25 The interviews, interviewers and interviewees  28 The recordings  31 A word on transcription  33 Re-contextualization of the data  34 A note on reflexivity  37

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chapter 3 Narratives and the historical context of the interview: Heroes and villains in narratives of law and order 39 Introduction  39 Truth and narrative  41 Analysis  44 Analysis part one – (re)constructing white supremacist hegemony  44 Interview with Bob Ledbetter  46 Interview with Laura Smalley  49 Interview with Harriet Smith  53 Analyses part two – constructing an emergent inclusive American identity  56

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Story 1 from the interview with Charlie Smith  57 Story 2 from the interview with Charlie Smith  60 Conclusions  64 chapter 4 Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ and current dominant discourses Introduction  69 Analyses  72 Slave-as-cattle identities constructed by Fountain Hughes and Laura Smalley  73 The selling of slaves on slave markets  73 The emancipation of the slaves after the Civil War  77 Laura Smalley’s additional slave-as-cattle stories  79 Summary  82 (Former) slave-as-dog identities in the interview with Fountain Hughes  84 Summary  88 Conclusions  88 chapter 5 The white supremacy master narrative as an oeuvre civilisatrice: Navigating identities along the sameness-difference dimension Introduction  93 Analyses  95 Benevolent masters and happy slaves  96 Orienting to white norms then and now: The interview with George Johnson  104 Slavery times  104 Discussing music  106 Conclusion  111 chapter 6 An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race, obedience, and religion Introduction  113 Religion in the pre- and post-Civil War period  114 Religion and counter-narratives  118 Analyses  120 (Partially) untold stories  120 Narratives about religion  131

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Table of contents 

Making the ‘invisible institution’ visible through a ‘historical’ counter-narrative  132 Summary  137 A counter-narrative through “diachronic identity navigation” (Bamberg, 2011)  140 Summary  145 Conclusions  146 chapter 7 Remembering and forgetting: Master narratives and memories of violence 149 Introduction  149 Violence and the trauma of slavery  151 Memory  152 The role of the interviewer  153 The availability of master narratives  155 Analysis  156 Part one – constraining remembering  156 Extract one: Interview with Susanna Rebecca Wright Thompson  157 Extract two: Interview with Billy McCrea  158 Extract three: Interview with Sarah Garner  161 Extracts four and five: Interview with two former slaves from Virginia  164 Part two – facilitating remembering  167 Conclusions  171 chapter 8 Truth, falsehood, and master narratives: The case of Charlie Smith and the fritter tree Introduction  173 Narratives of personal experience, folktales, and truth and falsehood  175 A note on the data  178 Analysis  179 Conclusions  188

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chapter 9 Conclusions 195 The master narratives in our data  196 Different versions of white supremacy master narratives  196 A counter-narrative of the inhumanity of slavery and segregation  201 Other master narratives  201

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Inclusive American identity  201 Stories of religion  202 General observations about master narratives  203 Master narratives are neither monolithic nor fixed  203 Orientations to master narratives are in situ accomplishments in the here and now of storytelling  204 Master narratives are collaboratively negotiated  206 Master and counter-narratives interact with one another  207 Contradicting positions to potentially contradicting master narratives may co-exist within and across time and space  208 References

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Appendix Transcription symbols  225

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Index

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chapter 1

Introduction Identity, narrative and context Almost two decades ago, Johnstone stated that “it is precisely in narrative that people’s individuality is expressed most obviously, because the purpose of narrating is precisely the creation of an autonomous, unique self in discourse” (Johnstone, 1996, p. 56). In a similar vein, Linde claimed that “life stories express our sense of self: who we are and how we got that way” (Linde, 1993, p. 3). And indeed, a plethora of studies have demonstrated that telling stories and constructing identities go hand in hand (see for example the contributions in Bamberg, De Fina, & ­Schiffrin, 2007a). So, it is not surprising that a decade later, narrative is described as “a privileged locus” of identity construction, or, more precisely for “the negotiation of identities” (De Fina, Schiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006, p. 16). This emphasis on identity negotiation particularly highlights the interactional nature of identity as a form of collaborative work between interlocutors. Furthermore, identity is referred to in the plural, thus emphasizing that the question ‘who we are’ cannot receive a singular answer, as one person is – or rather can be – many different things and all these different identities can be drawn upon in narrative. These narratives are thus to be seen as “something like a playground – a ground that allows us to test out identity categories” (Bamberg, De Fina, & Schiffrin, 2007b, p. 6), which draws attention to the fluidity and relativity of the different identities that people can dynamically shift in and out of. Finally, yet another decade later, narratives themselves are more specifically described as “socioculturally shaped practices, interactionally drafted in specific local contexts” (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2015, p. 2), thus framing narratives not as texts, but as practices which are not only embedded in the local, interactional context, but also within larger, sociocultural contexts (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008) with which they engage in a complex interaction. Of course, this, in itself, is not new, as Linde’s 1993 definition, to which we referred earlier, continues as follows: Life stories express our sense of self: who we are and how we got that way. They are also one very important means by which we communicate this sense of self and negotiate it with others. […] Finally, life stories touch on the widest of social

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Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

constructions, since they make presuppositions about what can be taken as expected, what the norms are, and what common or special belief systems can be used to establish coherence. (Linde, 1993, p. 3)

However, even though the relation between narratives, identities and context has been a topic of investigation for many years now, it is only fairly recently that the “shift from texts to practices in narrative studies” (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2015, p. 3) has incited researchers to fully explore the link between the local level of narrative as an interactional accomplishment negotiated between interlocutors in the here-and-now of storytelling, and the mutli-layeredness of the sociocultural context surrounding these narratives. This resulted in an engagement with the relation between “little d” and “big D”-discourses – the former meaning “language-in-use or stretches of language (like conversations or stories)”, while the latter refer to “socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, valuing, acting, and interacting, in the “right” places and at the “right” times with the “right” objects” (Gee, 1999, p. 17). In narrative s­ tudies, such “preexistent sociocultural forms of interpretation” (Bamberg, 2005) are variously called “master narratives”, “dominant discourses”, “cultural texts” or, in Foucauldian terms “culturally available subject positions” (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012, p. 162). The exploration of this relation continues to further our insight into the ways in which narratives are shaped by “historical, sociocultural forces in the form of dominant discourses” (De Fina et al., 2006, p. 7) while at the same time, they also contribute to shaping and creating contexts, for example by challenging these dominant discourses through counter-narratives (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004). Such a perspective particularly highlights the dynamic nature of narratives, both at the local interactional level and at the social contextual level. These two levels should be regarded as reflexively linked, as big D-discourses are constructed in little d-discourse, while the former also contribute to shaping the latter. This implies an analytical lens that is, on the one hand, particularly focused on the turn by turn collaborative construction of meaning and the negotiation of volatile identities, while on the other hand being attentive to the larger Discourses that are mobilised through talk and which are potentially altered in the course of narrating. The differentiation between, and the integration of, these analytical levels is the particular focus of positioning analysis (Bamberg, 1997a; Deppermann, 2013), which thus provides a useful framework for this type of research. As the aim of this book is to analyse identity construction and negotiation in a particular set of narratives in relation to their social contexts – of which more details will be provided below –, we first set out to define and discuss the two concepts that are of central importance for this endeavor, viz. identity and narrative. We will then zoom in on positioning analysis, before elaborating on the actual



Chapter 1.  Introduction

focus of this book, which consists of exploring the myriad of interrelated ways in which identities are constructed and master narratives are made tangible in stories from the corpus of interviews with former slaves that this book draws upon (see Chapter 2).

Identity Identity has attracted attention from researchers working in many different ­disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, literature, and linguistics. Even within the latter discipline, it is a central analytical topic in a wide diversity of subdisciplines, such as for example conversation analysis, (critical) discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and interactional sociolinguistics. Even though this diversity implies significant differences in approach and focus across – and also within – these research domains, they are all built on the same underlying foundation of social constructionism, which views language as crucial in the creation of reality. This view has far reaching implications for the concept of identity, because, rather than considering identity as a person’s “stable core”, it is viewed as “constantly in the process of change” (Hall, 1996, p. 17), and as existing between rather than within people (Burr, 1995, p. 27). This highlights the fact that identity is viewed as a “process” rather than a “product” which, among others, “yields constellations of identities” (De Fina et al., 2006, p. 2) which are “continually shaped and reshaped through interactions with others and involvement in social and cultural activities” (Wetherell & Maybin, 1996, p. 220). In spite of this shared premise underlying research on identity, there are still “deep divisions” between “the ways in which identity is studied and theorised”, and this is also true for research on narratives (for a discussion, see De Fina, 2015, p. 352 ff.). In this book we adopt an approach that takes as its pivotal point of interest the way in which identities are interactionally talked into being and ­negotiated on a turn by turn basis. We thus bracket cognitive or psychological implications of this identity work and we do not attempt to “provide general models and p ­ rinciples of the interrelationships between individuals and social forms” (Widdicombe, 1998, p. 202). From a purely data-oriented analytical perspective, we thus rely heavily on insights from conversation analysis, which emphasise the locally occasioned nature of identity (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998). However, for the discussion of the implications of these analyses, we also tap into larger sociocultural discourses that do not necessarily ‘manifest’ themselves in the course of the interaction (see also De Fina, 2006, p. 355). This will be discussed in more detail below, when we go into the discussion of Level 3-positioning.

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Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

So, for the interactional analyses, we first of all draw on insights from conversation analysis, and in particular, from Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) (see e.g. Hester & Eglin, 1997). The origins of MCA lie in Harvey Sacks’ seminal work (1986), the so called ‘The baby cried. The Mommy picked it up’ article, which focuses on categorization as a resource for making sense of everyday life. In this article, Sacks asks the question: how is it we understand that is the mother of the baby who picked it up? In answer to this question, Sacks proposes that the world is understood in terms of membership categorization devices (MCDs) such as family, and within such MCDs certain categories are commonsensically made relevant. So that, for example, in the MCD ‘family’, categories such as mother and baby become relevant. Moreover, these categories have predicates (i.e., expectable characteristics, behaviours, states of mind and so on) associated with them so that, for example, babies have the predicate of crying and mothers have the predicate (and moral obligation) of picking up their crying babies. Despite criticism of Sacks’ early work on categorization (e.g. Schegloff, 2007), some researchers (e.g. Housley & Fitzgerald, 2002; Jayyusi, 1984; Lepper, 2000; Stokoe, 2012) have developed Sacks’ work to stress the doing of category work on a turn by turn basis. This research particularly emphasises the locally occasioned nature of these categories, thus highlighting that categories, as well as their category-bound features or predicates, are not prediscursive entities which can be presupposed on the basis of individuals’ demographic features such as ethnicity or gender, or their professional roles (Stokoe, 2009a), but that these categories emerge in, and are negotiated through, talk. Moreover, MCA’s focus lies in how the use of categories, and category-implicative descriptions and other naming practices work in interaction (Stokoe, 2009b). Furthermore, Sacks (1972) not only drew attention to the implied rights and obligations of categories, he also pointed out that categories-in-talk often take the form of pairs such as parent/child or teacher/student. These are called standardised relational pairs (SRPs) and they invoke a moral order because, as Sacks (1972, p. 37) notes, they provide “a locus for a set of rights and obligations”. To return to Sacks’ seminal article ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’ (Sacks, 1986), the mother not only has the right to pick up the baby, but because the SRP mother/child is made relevant, she also has the moral obligation to act in that way. Finally, such categorization work in interaction often talks into being group identities and presents them as a morally accountable matter (Jayyusi, 1984, p. 48), which is, of course, open to interactional negotiation by the interlocutors. Second, as well as the analysis of the interlocutors’ categorization work in interaction, researchers of identity also draw on the principle of indexicality (see e.g. Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), which connects linguistic forms to extra-linguistic reality, as such constructing identity positions. For example, within interactional



Chapter 1.  Introduction

sociolinguistics, many studies have pointed to the indexical value of particular linguistic codes or styles such as the use of slang (Bucholtz, 1999) or the switching from one code to another (De Fina, 2007). Another well-known example of a linguistic element with an obvious extra-linguistic meaning is pronominal usage. As a deictic form, the meaning of a pronoun is always inextricably linked to its specific local interactional context, but as well as identifying the ‘basic’ roles in the participation framework (Goffman, 1981) of speaker, hearer and so on, it may also be used to signal group membership in the case of the 1st person pronominal form for example (Van De Mieroop, 2014), and its referential ambiguity may also be used to the speaker’s advantage (De Fina, 1995). As well as linguistic codes and pronominal usage, there are many other linguistic forms that may obtain indexical value in the course of an interaction. So, for example the use of specific terminology may index an interlocutor’s epistemic authority regarding a particular topic or his/her membership of a certain ingroup. Consequently, the indexical force of an utterance is never prediscursively fixed, rather it emerges in the interlocutors’ turn by turn construction and negotiation of meaning. So, we will draw on the principle of indexicality as well as on insights from MCA to analyse identity at the local interactional level. Of course, an essential feature of this interaction is that we focus on interaction in which ‘people tell their story’. So we first go into a general discussion of what we understand by the term narrative, after which we will further elaborate on the particularities of identities as they are talked into being in the type of narratives that occur in our corpus.

Narrative When discussing the analysis of narrative from a linguistic perspective, it is selfevident to refer to Labov and Waletzky, as their seminal work on the structure of narratives (1966) has had a profound influence on decades of linguistic narrative research. They discern six elements that usually – but not always – occur in a ­prototypical narrative, namely: –– abstract (a summary of the upcoming story), –– orientation (a section orienting the listener in respect to person, place, time, and behavioural situation), –– complicating action (the main body of narrative clauses which usually ­consists of a series of events), –– resolution (the result of these events), –– coda (a device for returning the verbal perspective to the present moment), –– evaluation (the point of the story).

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Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

A crucial element of such narratives is the complicating event, which then leads up to a certain outcome, preferably creating some form of suspense. This makes stories tellable (Labov, 2006), and narrators have to juggle concerns of tellability/ reportability and their – often tense – relation to credibility, while also orienting to “community standards” by respecting the lower and upper boundary of tellability (Norrick, 2005). The lower boundary refers to a potential lack of newsworthiness, while the upper boundary brings to the fore the fact that in certain communities, some types of experience may be “too personal, too embarrassing or obscene” to tell (Norrick, 2005, p. 323). This view on narratives and tellability renders the following definition: Prototypical narratives, or stories, are narratives that tell past events, revolve around unexpected episodes, ruptures or disturbances of normal states of affairs or social rules, and convey a specific message and interpretation about those events and/or the characters involved in them. (De Fina, 2003, p. 14)

However, as De Fina adds, on the one hand, within this narrative genre, there is an immense variability, while on the other hand, there are “many types of narratives that do not fit the description given above” (De Fina, 2003, p. 14) and that thus fall outside of this genre of the canonical narrative of personal experience. Examples of other narrative genres are: generic narratives, emphasizing typicality and iterativity (Baynham, 2006); habitual narratives, which are “composed of thematically organised incidents that occur regularly, without a peak in action” (­Riessman, 1993, p. 18) and which thus sketch a holistic image of the past (Carranza, 1998); and chronicles which “simply list events in their temporal order without an explicit plot or ending” (Mishler, 2006, p. 33). These examples of other narrative genres make it clear that a more general definition of narrative is required, which allows for this variability within and across different narrative genres. De Fina argues that for a text to be characterised as a narrative, one would expect some sort of “temporal ordering, or sequentiality” (2003, p. 11). However, ‘time’ as the minimal feature that defines a narrative, may still not hold for all narratives. For example, in narratives of displacement (Baynham, 2015; Baynham & De Fina, 2005), ‘space’ may also form the constitutive element. This shift away from a sole focus on prototypical narratives of personal past experience, the opening up of the analytical lens to different narrative genres, and the formulation of a more inclusive characterization of narrative (in terms of temporal or spatial ordering) has led to a more comprehensive view of narratives which considers them as a contextually embedded form of social action. This new perspective has been particularly stimulated by the ‘small story’-approach. Initially, this small story approach was proposed as “an antidote” (­Georgakopoulou, 2006a, p. 123) to the longstanding research tradition that



Chapter 1.  Introduction

focused exclusively on canonical narratives, called “big stories”. The small story approach promoted the analysis of stories in everyday talk, spanning “the continuum from highly monologic to highly collaborative tellings; from past to future and hypothetical events, from long and performed to fragmented and elliptical tellings” (Georgakopoulou, 2007, p. 17). The particular focus of this approach is “on the present of ‘the telling moment’” of the narrative and on the way it is designed for its audience (Bamberg, 2006a, p. 140), thus explicitly bringing the interactional nature of storytelling to the fore. This emphasis on narratives in interaction has also rekindled the interest in interview-narratives as interaction. Even though the importance of the interviewer in the joint construction of meaning in an interview was demonstrated long ago (Cicourel, 1964), it is only fairly recently that this insight has found its way to narrative analysis (De Fina, 2009, p. 237). This surge of interest in the joint construction of narratives, has led to a thorough exploration of the interviewer’s role, for example in the management of topics (Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2014), the projection of categories upon the interviewees (Bartesaghi & Perlmutter Bowen, 2009), and the way answers in a narrative are elicited (Slembrouck, 2015). More broadly, small story research has generated a view of stories as “discourse engagements that engender specific social moments and integrally connect with what gets done on particular occasions and in particular settings” (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012, p. 117), hence framing narratives as contextually embedded practices. Such an approach can, of course, be applied to ‘typical’ small stories such as hypothetical or breaking news stories, but it can also provide an interesting way of tackling the analysis of research interviews, provided that one recognises that “interviews are complex communicative encounters, co‐constructed between researcher and researched, and they can therefore host different narrative genres – stories both big and small – for different purposes” (Georgakopoulou, 2015, p. 264).

Identity in narrative As discussed above, identities are regarded here as highly fleeting constructs which are negotiated among interlocutors on a turn by turn basis. When analysing narratives, matters are often even more complicated, as the narrator often constructs a storytelling self and the storyworld self (De Fina, 2015, p. 360). Especially when analysing narratives in interviews, the researcher has to take into account, what Freeman calls, “big story reflection”, meaning that “one has temporarily stepped out of the flow of (small storied) life” (Freeman, 2006, p. 133) and this has implications for the way events are presented in stories and how their meaning is “constantly being reframed within the contexts of our current and ongoing lives” (Mishler,

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Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

2006, p. 36). This is what Mishler calls the “double arrow of time”, by which he refers to the fact that when telling a story the events may be ordered ­chronologically, but they receive their significance and meaning in the reversed chronological order, namely by “their ways of ending”, as the plots are “governed as a whole” (Mishler, 2006, p. 36). So narratives are constructed retrospectively in the light of our current lives and the current contexts in which they are embedded. The result of this reflection has often been emphasised in the analysis of such “rehearsed selves” in big stories (Georgakopoulou, 2006a, p. 128), as studies have for example zoomed in on how narrators construct coherent identities (Linde, 1993). However, a narrator does not only tell “different stories about self […] at different times in the course of one’s life” (Bamberg, 2006b, p. 5), as the ‘double arrow of time’-concept suggests, but also “at the same point in life when confronted with different audiences” (Bamberg, 2006b, p. 5). This importance of the audience for the way stories are designed also makes a personal autobiography “through and through social and communal” (Bamberg, 2006b, p. 5). We have already discussed how interviews are regarded as encounters in which meaning is actively and communicatively assembled by both parties, viz. interviewer and interviewee (­Holstein & Gubrium, 2003, p. 68), but it is also important to highlight the fact that the interlocutors often also orient to the way they present themselves and to how they think other audiences, who may read or listen to the interview later, may perceive their identities. This reflexively links these identities to larger societal Discourses, and in order to explore this dynamic relation of mutual influence between locally emerging identities and master discourses, we draw on positioning analysis.

Positioning analysis The concept of positioning, first introduced in narrative studies by Davies and Harré (1990), has its roots in Foucault’s notion of ‘subject positions’ and in ­Hollway’s use of subject positions as an analytical tool in psychoanalytic social psychology (for a discussion, see Deppermann, 2013, 2015). Davies and Harré posited that the term “position” is an “appropriate expression” to refer to “the discursive production of a diversity of selves” which are “conjured up in the course of conversational interactions” (Davies & Harré, 1990, p. 48). As such, they not only emphasise the multiple and fleeting nature of these selves, but they also place them firmly in the interactional realm. However, in this sense, a position is also regarded as “a complex cluster of generic personal attributes […] which impinges on the possibilities of interpersonal, intergroup and even intrapersonal action through some assignment of such rights, duties and obligations to an individual as are sustained by the cluster” (Harré & Van Langenhove, 1999, p. 1). Hence, a position



Chapter 1.  Introduction

“limits […] the possibilities of action” (Harré & Moghaddam, 2003, p. 5) and this implies that it is assumed that there is a certain, but limited, amount of prediscursive subject positions that are available to a certain speaker within a certain context. And it is exactly this view of positions as a priori entities that are “ready to be taken off the shelf and to be reproduced and revealed in discursive action” that is problematic for researchers who particularly zoom in on how identities are locally accomplished in interaction (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012, p. 163). Bamberg’s notion of positioning (1997a) is specifically designed to tease out how narrators construct identities in narrative and, as such, it does justice to the locally emergent nature of positioning processes in interaction. Bamberg distinguishes three interrelated levels of positioning, focussing on the following questions: 1. How are the characters positioned in relation to one another within the reported events? 2. How does the speaker position him- or herself to the audience? 3. How do narrators position themselves to themselves? (Bamberg, 1997a, p. 337) These three levels relate to one another in the following way: By positioning the characters at the content plane with regard to one another, the speaker positions him/herself with regard to the listener; and this process works simultaneously the other way around. The coordination between these two planes [viz. positioning level 1 and level 2, own addition] results in the establishment of a moral position for which the speaker can be held accountable, irrespective of whether the speaker him/herself plays a role in what is being talked about, or whether the talk is merely about others. (Bamberg, 1997b, p. 335)

In this model, there is a clear orientation to how stories function in their local interactional contexts and the kind of identity work they do. However, some elements remain vague, for example regarding how exactly these three levels relate to one another (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012, p. 164). A further elaboration of Bamberg’s model has been provided by, among others (see e.g. also Wortham, 2000), Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2000) regarding levels 1 and 2. Level 1 is divided into two sublevels, namely the positioning of story characters vis-à-vis one another through reported speech, and by narrative design, which refers to the way narrators strategically craft the story and present the storyworld characters. Level 2 is unpacked by means of four sublevels, the first draws attention to the teller’s selfpositioning vis-à-vis his/her former selves by means of meta-narrative retrospective comments (level 2a); while the other sublevels explore the different kinds of interactional positioning. This interactional positioning focusses on the one hand

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 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

on how narrators design their stories (level 2b) and use meta-narrative activities to performatively position themselves towards the story recipients (level 2c), while, on the other hand, it also draws attention to how recipients co-construct the story with the teller (level 2d) (see also Deppermann, 2013; 2015). Of course, this circumvents the question of how these two levels are linked to big D-discourses (Gee, 1999) or, in Bamberg’s terms, Level 3-positioning. From a conversation analytic perspective, these D-discourses need to be made explicitly relevant in the interaction, and must therefore have some kind of procedural consequentiality for the development of the narrative (Deppermann, 2015, p. 382). However, from a broader, discursive perspective, it has been observed that interactants often implicitly interpret identity claims on the basis of shared understandings and “link local identities to shared ideologies and beliefs” (De Fina, 2006, p. 355). Ideologies and beliefs therefore form some sort of backdrop against which interlocutors do local identity work. Hence, positioning provides “a middle ground between CA based approaches […] and orientations that view identities from a macro perspective as already given in the social world and merely manifested in discourse” (De Fina, 2013, p. 45) and it also allows us to scrutinise “the fleetingness” as well as “the stability of storytellers’ positions” (Georgakopoulou, 2013, p. 91). In order to make this ‘elusive’ Level 3 tangible and in order to gain a deeper insight into the phenomena that are observed in interaction, researchers (De Fina, 2013; Georgakopoulou, 2013) suggest complementing local interactional analyses with insights from ethnographic research. And they also argue for an exploration of iterative patterns of action or “general tendencies in the way issues are viewed and dealt with by the communities to which individuals belong” (De Fina, 2013, p. 45). As such, this line of research moves “beyond the here-and-now storytelling event” to an exploration of, among others, the “circulation of a story in different environments as well as to the recurrence of a specific kind of story in similar social setting” (Georgakopoulou, 2013, p. 92). The full exploration of narratives on these three levels of positioning is one of the focal aims of this book, as we explain in the following section.

Why a book on slave narratives? When we initially came across the corpus of slave narratives that is publicly available through the website of the Library of Congress (see more detailed description in Chapter  2), our interest in these data was immediately aroused. This is not ­surprising, since as identity analysts, the idea of slavery touches the very core of our sense of self as independent human beings who are – to some extent at least – in control of our lives. As the slavery system so radically negated the slaves’



Chapter 1.  Introduction

i­ndependence and self-determination, this must be cause for interesting identity work in the narratives of individuals who were born in this system, freed, and who were then asked to tell ‘their story’ about their days in slavery. As discourse analysts, our focal interest lies in the way these stories are told, as such sidestepping the highly debated issue of the truth value of these narratives (see Chapter 2). Hence we embarked on the analyses, which lead us to study the way the narrators talked into being slaves-as-animals-identities (Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2011), how they ‘replayed’ interactions between storyworld characters through direct reported speech (Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2013) and how the interviewers co-constructed meaning with them (Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2012). The focus of the former two studies is clearly situated on positioning Level 1, while the latter zooms in on the analytical importance of positioning Level 2. These analyses are thus in line with the elaboration of Bamberg’s model of positioning by LuciusHoene and Deppermann (2000) concerning these two levels of positioning, as described above. However, it always seemed beyond the scope of a single paper to do much more than touch upon positioning Level 3 and attempt to briefly tap into these “pre-existent sociocultural forms of interpretation” (Bamberg, 2005), which are variably called – also in this book – ‘master narratives’, ‘dominant discourses’ or ‘big D-discourses’. However, as De Fina (2013) and Georgakopoulou (2013) have argued, in order to really explore this Level 3 positioning and the role of these master narratives, it is important to look at larger datasets from one community. In this way, the researcher can then try to discern certain recursive ‘patterns’ that are displayed in these data, and to gain a deeper understanding of the community under scrutiny by carrying out ethnographic research. As we have access to a set of narratives from a – geographically dispersed – community of former slaves, this thus allows us to systematically explore the master narratives that are made relevant by the interlocutors’ orientation to them. The recursivity of such orientations will then underline the importance of these Discourses for the way in which people are positioned by them, while also agentively positioning themselves vis-à-vis these Discourses. As the data set is of course too old to allow us to complement it with ethnographic interviews, we attempted to improve our understanding of slavery, as well as of the societal position of African Americans before and after the Civil War, by digging into the vast amounts of critical literature that exists regarding this topic. This, we felt provided us with ample opportunity to gain a deeper insight into the themes that are touched upon in the interviews. Some general insights that we obtained from this literature study are discussed in the following chapter, in which we provide a very brief history of slavery in the United States and the emergence of the racist ideology that underpinned it. In this chapter, we also focus on the emergence of the slave narratives, first as a literary genre in the antebellum period, and then more specifically we consider the



 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

emergence of interview data with former slaves that began to appear in the 1920s and which culminated in the Federal Writers Project which collected over 2,000 interviews in the late 1930s. We then zoom in on a description of the corpus that forms the basis of this book and that consists of audio-recordings of interviews with former slaves which are publically available on the website Voices from the days of slavery.1 We conclude chapter two by providing contextual information concerning the production of these recordings and their entextualisation on the website. Then, in each analytical chapter, both a narrative theoretical and a thematic focus is chosen, which are then combined, so that each chapter forms a goal-­ oriented coherent whole which can be read independently. Of course, the chapters also strongly relate to one another as they all share a focus on master narratives, as such contributing an answer to the overarching research question of this book, which is to fully explore positioning level 3 by looking at the identities interlocutors talk into being and how they relate these – and how they are related – to big D-Discourses that are available in the storyworld, the here-and-now of the interview and the wider socio-political context of the interview as a speech event. In chapter three, our focus is on how the socio-political context of the production of the interviews and how the master narratives that circulate in this context affect what can, and cannot, be said. More specifically, we take the theme of law and order, which is a recurrent theme throughout the corpus, and the identities of heroes and villains that these stories make relevant. In chapter four, we explore the identity of the slave-as-animal that emerges in some of the interviews. In general terms, such an identity clearly relates to the ‘Negro as beast’, thus orienting to master narratives of white supremacy. However, the interviewees refer to different animals (viz. dogs and cattle) and while the narrator that uses the slave-as-dog identity does so to challenge rather general white supremacy master narratives, we found that the cattle comparison is historically situated and invokes the slave-as-property identity. Hence, the interviewees in this case draw on a master narrative of the pre-Civil War period, which we call a ‘historical’ master narrative. Furthermore, by paying particular attention to agency in the navigation of identity, we particularly scrutinise how the interlocutors perform their identities in relation to these master narratives. We then look into narratives in which the former slaves talk into being three hierarchically ordered social groups, namely those of: the whites; African ­Americans who had received an education from their former slave owners; and the uneducated, wild African Americans. In this case, the interlocutors are found

.  Availabe at: 〈http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/ 〉



Chapter 1.  Introduction 

to particularly navigate their identities on the dimension of sameness/difference. In these stories, we found an orientation to a different version of white supremacy master narratives, as in this ‘version’, it allows for racial improvement through ­civilization, which is not an option in other ‘versions’ of white supremacy master narratives based on pseudo-scientific genetic theories of race. In chapter six, we then go on to discuss how the highly complex topic of religion is tackled. In the storytelling time, this topic evokes its own master narratives, namely that of the importance of church attendance and obedience to God for being a good person. However, in the slave system storyworld time, religion held an ambivalent position, as it was often used by slave owners to ensure the slaves’ obedience, yet at the same time dissident religious activities of African American churches challenged white superiority. This results in a complex intertwining of orientations to various synchronous and asynchronous master narratives, either concerning religion, racial (in)equality or slave obedience. In chapter seven, we zoom in on narratives of physical violence and the act of remembering and forgetting. Rejecting the archival metaphor of memory and considering remembering and forgetting to be interactional achievements that are constructed in the here-and-now of storytelling in relation to then-current master narratives, we analyse the way in which stories of physical violence are told. We pay particular attention to the situated nature of the production of the narratives and the way in which the interviewers either constrain or allow stories of violence and so either encourage remembering or forgetting. We also consider the tellability of stories and we analyse, how tellability affects what can, and cannot, be remembered according to available master narratives at the time of the interview Then, in chapter eight, we consider the ‘truth value’ of the slave narratives. Taking the example of a folktale that is presented as a personal narrative, we ­analyse how, despite not having witnessed the events, the interviewee constructs ownership of the story and rights to tell it. We argue that historical truth is not the key issue in narrative analysis, rather the significance of narrative lies in v­ erisimilitude, and the Discourse(s) that verisimilitudes evoke, rather than the reproduction of a historical event ‘as it was’. Finally, in the conclusions, we sum up the master, and counter-narratives that were talked into being and we offer some explanation as to why these particular master narratives are, in various forms, more or less, omni-present in the data and why there are so few counter-narratives. We also draw together observations from these findings and offer some broader theoretical considerations about the nature of master narratives.

chapter 2

The slave narratives A historical background Slavery – a brief overview Whilst it is far beyond the scope of this book to provide a detailed survey of slavery, it is important to situate our analyses of the interviews in relation to the historical Discourses of slavery and consequent Discourses of race that are potentially relevant in the storyworld, the interview world, and the recontextualisation of the interviews in the website Voices from the days of slavery. Slavery has been an almost constant feature of human existence, it is widely documented as existing in Biblical times, through classical Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, right up to the Nazi and Stalinist regimes of the mid-20th century. Moreover, it has certainly not been eradicated from contemporary societies as the persistence of slavery and slavery-like practices such as debt bondage, forced marriage, the sale or exploitation of children, human trafficking and forced labour attest. Indeed, a recent report1 (2013) from the Walk Free Foundation, estimates that there are between 28.3 and 31.3 million slaves worldwide. Further, not only has slavery been constant across time, but also geographically and culturally it has existed in almost every corner of the globe and has been justified, at one time or another, by every major religion and civilisation. This book concentrates on slavery relating to the plantation system that developed in the southern states of America in the mid-1600s. The institution of slavery flourished in the 18th and early 19th centuries and was not abolished in the United States of America until 1865 when the thirteenth amendment to the United States Constitution was passed. It was only then that slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished except as punishment for a crime. Until 1865 and the defeat of the Confederate States in the Civil War, slavery had been enshrined in state Codes that were set up to regulate all aspects of slavery. These Codes varied from state to state, but common to the Codes was the concept of chattel slavery whereby .  The Global slavery index, available at: 〈http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/report/?download 〉

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

slaves were the property of their owners: they could be bought and sold at will; they had no rights at all; and their offspring were also born into slavery. This version of slavery was underpinned by an Aristotelian ideology which argued that some humans are by nature inferior to others and so it is natural that they should be treated as animals and thus held under the rule and total control of a master. As Aristotle states, “it is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right” (Aristotle, 2008, p. 34). Further, in the case of American slavery, such Aristotelian thinking was merged with C ­ hristian thinking, and Christian apologists for slavery sought justification for slavery in the Bible (see also Chapter 6). Such apologists notably drew on the story of Ham (Genesis 9: 25) whereby Noah condemns Ham and his descendants to perpetual slavery. They saw in this, combined with frequent other references to slavery in the Bible, divine justification for slavery. Moreover, the curse of Ham became associated with ‘the Negro race’ who were regarded as the descendants of Ham and thus divinely ordained to be the white man’s slave. In short, through selective reading of the Bible, apologists for slavery were able to see it as a divinely sanctioned institution. Jefferson Davis speaking to the US Senate in 1850 for example was able to claim that slavery “was established by decree of Almighty God…it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation…it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts” (quoted in Dunbar, 1923, p. 315). Just before the Civil War, it is estimated that the slave population in North America was over 4 million (Walvin, 2007, p. 97). Therefore, given the extent of slavery in North America, it is not surprising that conditions varied greatly and differed according to the work that was required of the slaves (field worker, artisan, domestic, and so on). If the farms on which the slaves worked were fairly small, then the slaves might work side by side with their white owners in which case their lot might have been much better than that of slaves on larger exploitations where they may have been treated more harshly. Moreover, since the plantations were often managed as if they were mini-fiefdoms with the master having almost absolute power over his chattels, this could give rise to huge differences in the way that slaves were treated. On the one hand, as some of the accounts in the slave narratives demonstrate, there was an ethos of relative benevolence and some slaves in the narratives analysed in this book talk almost nostalgically of the days at the plantations. This can be seen for example in the slave narratives’ descriptions of life on the plantation of Jefferson Davies, President of the Confederate States during the Civil War. In these narratives Jefferson typifies the benevolent plantation owner who treats his slaves fairly; protects them from excessive punishment; teaches them to read; allows them opportunities for entertainment and so on.



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

On the other hand, within the slave narratives there is also evidence of extremes of physical and sexual violence meted out on a daily basis. However, whether benevolent as some apologists would have us believe, or sadistically violent as some abolitionists claimed, slavery in North America came to be viewed in purely racial terms which grafted an ideology of African American inferiority onto the de facto economic superiority of the whites (though interestingly some African Americans were indeed slave owners and not all slaves were African Americans (Stampp, 1956, p. 194)). Originally, as the North American colonies were established, labour was provided by indentured servants, convicts, and native Indian labour, but as this source of labour proved to be insufficient, landowners increasingly relied upon slave labour imported from Africa. Walvin (2007, p. 1) estimates that between the 1450s and the early 1800s 12 m ­ illion Africans were transported to the New World. This massive influx of Africans who were brought to north America to work as slaves led to the racialization of the institution of slavery so that in general “only black people could be slaves: to be black was to be enslaved, and to be enslaved was to be unequal and disadvantaged  – excluded from the formal fabric of social life” (Walvin, 2007, p. 134). Thus, the economic drive for cheap labour became intertwined with a racist ideology (Berlin, 1988, p. 10) which is exemplified in the words of a contemporary apologist for slavery: The status of the negro in American society – the social relation of the negro to the white man – which being in accord with the natural relations of the races, spring spontaneously from the necessities of human society; the white citizen is superior, the negro inferior; and therefore, wherever they happen to be in juxtaposition, the human law should accord, as it does in the South, with these relations thus inherent in their organizations, and thus fixed forever by the hand of God. (Van Evrie, 1868, p. 17)

This ideology was so strong that even after the abolition of slavery in 1865, it still dominated relations between African Americans and whites for the next 100 years. Even after emancipation, many of the former slaves had to return to work as share croppers living in abject poverty and under the constant threat of aggression from the Ku Klux Klan. And, when the Democrats regained power in the later part of the 19th century, the southern states enacted Jim Crow laws which set up the de jure segregation of whites and African Americans. In theory this would lead to ‘separate but equal status’, but in practice it consigned African Americans to the status of second class citizens. Thus even after the abolition of slavery, clashes between African Americans and whites occurred on an almost daily basis and lynchings as well as other incidents of racially inspired violence were fairly common. The legal system, educational opportunities, and almost every institution in

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

the South favoured whites. In short, even after emancipation, white supremacy was still in place and this would remain so until the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Thus even after the emancipation, the United States provided a glaring example of a society based on an ideology of white supremacy. In this society, distinctions were made primarily on the criteria of colour which led to racial segregation and the restriction of meaningful citizen rights so that race and colour became a “qualification for membership in the civil community” (Fredrickson, 1981, p. xi). Consequently, in the post-bellum period, a caste system, backed up by laws prohibiting interracial marriage, emerged and this made mobility from the oppressed non-white population to superior social status attributed to whites impossible. The enduring nature of such racist ideology and the commensurate repression of the African American population was so great that Stampp in the preface to his 1956 classic work on slavery was able to remark: “American Negroes still await the full fruition of their emancipation – still strive to break what remains of the caste barrier” (Stampp, 1956, p. vii). It was not until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that the Jim Crow laws were taken off the statute books and that a more egalitarian society began to be established. And even now at the time of writing this book, some would still argue that there is a long way to go before the scars of slavery and racist ideologies are healed.

Slave narratives – a selective history for the purposes of this book Antebellum slave autobiographies Whilst there is an enormous amount of historical data relating to North American slavery, it is not surprising that relatively little of this comes from the slaves themselves. Following the Slave Codes, it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. And even though some slaves were literate, it is also unsurprising that they had little access to pen and paper and so accounts of slavery written by slaves are few and far between. However, one genre that enjoyed great success in the antebellum period was the slave autobiography written by escaped slaves who resided in the Northern States. During the antebellum period slave autobiographies were so popular that they outsold work by contemporary white authors such as Herman Melville, ­Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. For example, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass written by Frederick Douglass in 1845 sold 5,000 copies within the first few months of publication (Douglass, 1845) and Solomon Northup’s ‘Twelve Years a Slave’ (1853) sold 30,000 copies in three years. These autobiographical narratives often followed a common chronological structure focusing on the journey from enslavement to freedom. The writers often began with descriptions of their days in



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

slavery, the abuse, heavy workload, beatings and sufferings. This was then followed by a realization of what slavery meant and the discovery of the possibility of a way out and escape to the North which preceded a critical incident such as resisting a beating and a decision to escape to the North. The authenticity of such autobiographical accounts were often underlined by the addition of ‘written by himself ’ in the title ‘(e.g. Narrative life and adventures of Henry Bibb, an American slave, written by himself)’ and they often included documentary evidence that added credibility to their accounts. However, it is also clear that within the context of the antebellum period, these accounts were a key weapon in the abolitionist armoury in the fight against slavery. They, thus, had a clear didactic and propagandist element to them which led some historians, notably Ulrich Phillips, to dismiss them out of hand. Phillips, for example states that “ex-slave narratives in general … were issued with so much abolitionist editing that as a class their authenticity is doubtful” (Phillips, 2007, p. 219). Whilst the historical truthfulness of these antebellum narratives is hard to discern amongst the abolitionist rhetoric of which they were an integral part, this type of narratives will not be considered here. This is because the primary concern of this book is the interactional construction of slave narratives. Consequently, interviews with former slaves form the basis of this book.

Interviews with former slaves From the 1920s onwards, a growing interest in social anthropology driven by people such as Boas combined with a growing interest in African American history, music and folklore (e.g. Lomax, 1993) led to several attempts to record the voices of former slaves. This was seen by the early ethnographers as a way of getting African American testimony of what it was like to be a slave and of getting insight into these former slaves’ attitudes, values, and beliefs. For example, between 1927 and 1929, Andrew P. Watson, a graduate student in anthropology at Fisk ­University, working with the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, carried out 100 interviews with former slaves. This interview data provided the source material for a book published in 1945 (God Struck me Dead) about the religious experiences of slaves (Fisk University, 1945a). Similarly, Ophelia Settle – also working at Fisk with ­Johnson – carried out interviews which were transcribed and published in a book, also first published in 1945, entitled Unwritten history of slavery. Autobiographical accounts of negro ex-slaves (Fisk University, 1945b). However, the best known and most expansive attempt to get access to the voices of former slaves through interviews was the Federal Writers project (FWP). The FWP was part of the New Deal of the Roosevelt administration. The ­primary goal of the project was to give employment to unemployed writers and journalists who were tasked to write guides of America with descriptions of industries, agricultural practices, cultural and social life, and so on in each state. This

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

involved extensive interviews with Americans as a way of accessing their local knowledge. As part of this massive project, slave narratives were also collected, and between 1937 and 1939 over 2,000 were collected from 17 states. These narratives were collated in Washington. In 1945, Botkin, the folklore editor of the FWP, published a selection of about 20 of the interviews in his book entitled Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Botkin, 1945). And some of the interviews were used as data for books produced by writers at a local level. For example, the state FWP of Louisiana published Gumbo Ya-Ya (Saxon, 1945), and the Virginia Writers’ program published The Negro in Virginia (1940). However, it was not until almost 30 years later that the narratives really came to public attention. This was as a result of Rawick’s publication of the whole collection in 41 volumes which began with his introduction From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community which appeared in 1972 (Rawick, 1972a). Since then, an enormous amount of ink has flowed concerning the narratives: they form the basis of many school programs; they have been used as a source for TV documentaries (e.g. Unchained memories, Bell & Lennon, 2003) and radio shows (e.g. Berlin, Favreau, & Miller, 1998); many of the interviews are now easily available online; and many anthologies and edited versions of the narratives have appeared (e.g. Bailey, Maynor, & Cukor-Avila, 1991a; Berlin et al., 1998). ­However, the interviews are not without their critics and many historians (e.g. Blassingame, 1985; Escott, 1985; Yetman, 1967) caution against any uncritical use of them and they warn against the naïve belief that these interviews represent a direct and unmitigated way into the minds of slaves and life as a slave in the a­ ntebellum South.

Criticisms of the slave narratives The first criticism, especially from an interactional perspective, is that the ­transcripts of the interviews are not verbatim. This is quite simply because most of the interviews were written up from field notes and, given the limited technical possibilities of the time, very few of them were actually audio-recorded. As Baker and Baker (1996, p. 4) note, “the narratives in reality consist of notes from interviews which were edited into more-or-less standard format and presented as if they had not been prompted by the field researcher’s questions”. Consequently, they often have a literary quality to them that is totally missing from a transcript of an actual audio-recording. This can be seen in the example below which is a preamble to the interview with Anthony Abercrombie conducted in Alabama, in August 1937.2 .  Available at: 〈http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mesn&fileName=010/mesn 0 1 0 . db & re c Nu m = 1 1 & ite m L i n k = S ? am m e m / m e s nbib : @ f i el d ( AU T HOR + @ o d 1 (Abercrombie,+Anthony))〉



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

Uncle Ant’ny sat dozing in the early morning sunshine on his rickety front porch. He is a thin little old man with patches of white wool here and there on his head and an expression of kindness and gentleness on his wrinkled old face. As I went cautiously up the steps, which appeared none too safe, his cane which had been leaning against his chair, fell to the ground with a clatter. He awoke with a start and began fumbling around for it with his trembling and bony hand.

More problematic from an interactional perspective, is the fact that the voice of the interviewer was usually edited out of the final text. Consequently, the written record of the interview appears to be the story of the interviewee without any prompting or intervention from the interviewer and so any insight into the joint and negotiated nature of the interview is simply lost to posterity. This can be seen in the extract below which illustrates Mrs. Richard Klob’s rendering of the interview with the former slave Dora Franks.3 It is noticeable that her own voice as interviewer is edited out. Consequently the topic change at the end of this extract appears to be entirely spontaneous. I ‘memebr one tile when dey all went off an’ lef ’ me wid a old black woman cal Aunt Ca’line what done de coookin’ ‘round de place some o’ de time. When dey lef ’ de house I went in de kitchen an’ ask her for a piece o’ white bread lak de white folks eat. She haul off an’ slap me down an’ call me all kin’ o’ names dat I didn’t know what dey meant. My nose bled an ruint de nice clean dress I had on. When de Mistis come back she asked me what on earth happen to me an’ I tol’ ‘er. Dey call Ca’line in de room an’ asked her if what I say was de truf. She tel ‘em it was, an’ dey sent ‘er away. I hear dat dey whup her so hard dat she couldn’ walk no mo’. Us never had no big fun’als or weddin’s on de place….

Further, to add to the lack of certainty of the exact relationship between the final written text and the actual interview, the texts were often edited either prior to being sent to Washington or by the editors in Washington themselves who had been tasked to review the interviews considering readability and believability (Hill, 1998; Musher, 2001). However, this editing process may have gone beyond ‘tidying up’ the interviews to make them more readable. As Baker and Baker (1996, p. 4) speculate, it may have been the case that some of the interviews may not even have made it to Washington “perhaps because they contained material at the time considered to be racially sensitive”. This editing process also led to the deletion of comments by interviewees that showed: evidence of masters treating slaves poorly, of freedmen existing during slavery, of black religious practices and games, of blacks contributing to the war effort, and of post-war life including experiences of reconstruction and encounters with the Ku Klux Klan. (Musher, 2001, p. 1) .  Available at: 〈http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/S?ammem/mesnbib:@field(AUTHOR +@od1(Franks,+Dora)) 〉

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Musher (2001, p. 2) also cites the example of an interview with a former slave in which the original transcript criticising the harsh treatment of slaves was modified. According to Musher, the original interview was written up as follows: I pray the Lord to let us be free always. God almighty nevah ment human beings to be lak animals. Us niggahs has a soul, an’ a heart, an’ a mine an we isn’t lak a dawg or a horse. I didn’t spec’ nothin’ outten freedom septin’ peace an’ happiness an’ the right to go my way as I please. An’ that is the way the Almighty wants it.

However, before the interview was submitted to the FWP in Washington, the local editor in Mississippi added the following lines to the testimony: “If all marsters had been good like some, the slaves would all a-been happy. But marsters like mine ought never been allowed to own Niggers”. Thus, the criticism of slave owners was considerably softened and made more palatable to white sensibilities. Not only have the existing narratives been criticised on account of the editing process that distances the existing texts from the original interaction, but they have also been widely criticised in terms of the accuracy of the descriptions of remembered events that happened over half a century prior to the actual interviews (see Chapter 7 of this book). And, it must be remembered that the former slaves were only children at the time of the events that they were recounting and so their memories might be faulty. On account of this, Spindel (1996, p. 252) for example claims that “the slave interviews raise a variety of evidentiary concerns, but the most troublesome hinge on the reliability of long-term memory”. She concludes that slave narratives based on memory do not “provide adequate or reliable understanding of the past” (Spindel, 1996, p. 261). Likewise, Yetman (2000, p. 3) argues that “the recollection of the past is always a highly subjective phenomenon, one continually subject to modification and distortion”. Though others, notably Escott (1985, p. 42), argue that the former slaves’ accounts were lucid and that failing memory is not an issue because the events they describe were so pivotal to their lives. Another point that is often raised is the issue of the problematic nature of the interaction between African American interviewees and (most often white) interviewers. As Vann Woodward (1974, p. 473) notes: In all probability, the most serious sources of distortion in the FWP narratives came not from the interviewees but from the interviewers – their biases, procedure, and methods – and the interracial circumstances of the interview. The overwhelming majority of the interviewers were southern whites.

Therefore, there is ample anecdotal evidence to the effect that former slaves were reticent to discuss certain subjects. This is usually attributed to the fact that “institutionalised racial discrimination dominated social life as pervasively and almost as harshly as slavery ever had” (Escott, 1985, p. 42). During the late 1930s



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

and early 1940s, when most of the FWP interviews took place, the lynching of ­African Americans was still not unheard of, and the Jim Crow Laws of the Southern States ensured that African Americans were very much second class citizens who were oppressed by the machinery of a white state. As a result of this, the African A ­ merican interviewees were probably very circumspect in what they said. ­Perdue (1976, p. xlii) quotes a former slave as having said: “Lord chile, ef ya start me I kin tell ya a mess’bout reb times, but I ain’t tellin’ white folk nuthin’ ‘cause I’m skeer’d to make enemies”. And when the former slaves did speak, for fear of upsetting their ­interviewer it was often just to “tell how kind their masters were and how rosy it all was” (Escott, 1985, p. 40). Thus, rather than getting to the ‘truth’, the predominantly white interviewers in the context of the 1930s American South were just hearing what their interviewees thought they might want to hear. This may have been compounded by the fact that during the 1930s depression, the ­African American population was often living in abject poverty and they may have regarded the government people as being able to help them with state aid (­Bailey,  1980, p.  402), or they may have relied on the goodwill of whites either directly or indirectly for their survival (Musher, 2001). Either way, poverty, dependence, or acquired deference may have led the interviewees to hide their true feelings and to offer a paternalistic interpretation of slavery that was susceptible to please their white interlocutors. Indeed, it is even possible that the depression hit the African American community so hard that the interviewees may have looked back with a certain degree of nostalgia that coloured their version of slave days (Vann Woodward, 1974, p. 474). Furthermore, there is also evidence that the predominantly white interviewers displayed racist and patronizing attitudes that again may have affected the dynamics of the interview so that a biased picture of slavery emerges. Blassingame (1977, p. xlvi) argues that the fact that many of the interviewers referred to the i­nterviewees as darkie, nigga, aunty, uncle or mammy perpetuated the plantation dynamics, and Dittman (1999) even quotes the case of one interviewer who in the introduction to the interview describes the former slave as “so black, he shines; all his teeth are gone. He looks more like an ape than any darky I’ve visited yet”. Consequently, it is argued that interviews with African American interviewers were more likely to get a more accurate picture of life as a slave and that the dynamics of the interviews between white interviewers and African American former slaves were so skewed that an unrealistic vision of slavery designed to please the interviewer emerged (Escott, 1979, p. 10). This is a claim backed up by Whooley (2006), for example, who claims that only 26% of those interviewed by whites described negative experiences whereas for those interviewed by an African American this was 39%. Significantly, all the above problems concerning the way in which the narratives were elicited and recorded may well have been compounded by interviewers

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

who were unemployed writers and journalists and thus had a sketchy knowledge, if any knowledge at all, of how to carry out ethnographic interviews. As Yetman (2000, p. 3) states, “many of them were unsophisticated in the use of interview techniques, expressed little concern for the sources of distortion inherent in the interview process, and were insensitive to the nuances of interview procedure”. Finally, many historians working with the narratives question the validity of the sampling. For example, a disproportionate number of the interviews come from states where there were few slaves. Such unbalanced sampling thus gives us a selection of narratives that do not truly represent the slave population as it was during the antebellum period. For example, as Cantrell (2004) points out, on the one hand, narratives from Arkansas account for 33% of the slave narratives whereas only 3% of the slave population came from Arkansas and on the other hand, Mississippi accounts for 1% of the slave narratives, yet had 10% of the slave population. Furthermore, as Blassingame (1977, p. li) points out, since the average age of a slave on the plantations was fifty, then the sample that lived to the 1930s may have consisted of those that had never suffered the full impact of slavery, the more so that they would only have been children at the time. Blassingame (1977, p. li) even speculates that the slaves interviewed may have been the most obsequious who were sought out by the white interviewers in the interests of getting interviews that were more favourable to their former masters. In short, as Yetman (1967, p. 535) argues, the existing slave narratives are not the result of rigorous ‘scientific’ sampling, and this observation must be taken into account when analysing the data from particular (e.g. historical, sociological) perspectives.

The debate about the ‘usefulness’ of the narratives Given the points raised in the prior section, it is not unsurprising that a debate has raged as to the ‘usefulness’ of the slave narratives as a way into the minds of the slave population and as to the ‘truthfulness’ of their descriptions. As already noted, the apologist Phillips categorically excluded slave narratives as a source for his oeuvre on the plantation system (Phillips, 2007). However, contemporary researchers seem to be more balanced in their approach to the use of the interviews. The consensus seems to be that even though the narratives do provide a unique and indispensable source for understanding slavery (Escott, 1985, p. 40; Yetman, no date), they should be used in conjunction with other supporting documents (e.g. Bailey, 1980). As Perdue (1976, p. xliv) argues, “their use by scholars must be tempered by extensive knowledge of the times in which the interviews were collected, as well as the times about which they relate”. In short, as with any form of historical data they cannot be used uncritically but must be used with caution and an awareness of their limitations.



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

However, we intend to sidestep many of these issues, since it is not the historical accuracy per se of the narratives that interests us, rather it is the way in which, truthful or untruthful, the interviewer and interviewee construct their recollections of slavery. Interestingly, historians seem to be aware that very little research has actually gone into the study of how the interviews were achieved as an interactional accomplishment and that this is a weakness of existing research into the slave narratives. For example, Whooley (2006, p. 296) has argued that “researchers must move beyond the text towards the production of it”. This book hopes to go some way to addressing these concerns and to use a fine-grained analysis of the interviews in order to shed light on the interviews as interactional accomplishments. Our interest is not in trying to reconstruct the historical truth of what happened, rather it is to study the ways in which the narratives are organised through the interactive and interpretive practices of interviewers and interviewees who jointly construct a socially-situated version of what happened and we also analyse how this version is affected by master narratives that they talk into being. Thus, given that the former slaves’ talk can never be taken as a literal unmitigated description of events, feelings, thoughts, and so on, it is essential that researchers pay attention to the way in which such versions of events are produced. So, taking a primarily linguistic rather than a historical perspective, we conceptualise the ‘issues’ surrounding the accuracy of the interviews in interactional terms and we bracket the issue of their historical truth. For example, we do not consider claims to remember clearly or to have a failing memory as evidence of a window into the mind of the interviewee, rather we look at claims to remember or forget in terms of the interactional work that such claims perform (see Chapter 7). Similarly, rather than taking descriptions of slavery as a direct and unmitigated link to memory, we consider how these descriptions of slavery are jointly constructed. We foreground what these descriptions are doing in interactional terms and consider the wider Discourse(s) that they access as they are constructed in the here-andnow of the interview. As such, our primary concern is not historical truthfulness, but rather the way in which identities in talk are constructed in the storyworld of the interviews and in the here-and-now of the recorded interaction, and we also consider what Discourses such identity work invokes. These issues are taken up in the analyses in particular by drawing on Positioning as a framework, as described in the preceding chapter.

The corpus The website: Voices from the days of slavery. The data for this book comes solely from the audio-recordings of former slaves that are held at the American Folklife Centre and which are available online. The collection, covering almost seven

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

hours of talk, entitled Voices from the days of slavery has twenty six surviving audio-recordings of interviews with former slaves and as such the collection represents a unique and highly important historical record of slavery within the United States. The site Voices from the days of slavery (see figure one below) is part of the American Memory project, which forms part of the Library of Congress. American memory is a portal into the library’s vast resources of over 9 million digitalised historical items such as photos, posters, audio-recordings, song manuscripts, maps, and so on. These artefacts are grouped into over 100 themes that range from military history through culture and folk life, towns and cities, to US presidents.

Figure 1.  Voices from the days of slavery

Even though the corpus is collected under the heading ‘Voices from the days of slavery. Former slaves tell their stories’, large sections of the interviews are not specifically related to the days of slavery. Since the bulk of the interviews were recorded in the 1930s and 1940s, much of the talk actually relates to the postbellum period and goes right up to the time of the interview. Thus, the position of African Americans during emancipation, reconstruction, the depression, and so on are often topicalised rather than ‘the days of slavery’ per se. And, even though



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

the collection alludes to ‘former slaves’, it is almost certain that despite recounting stories of slavery, at least two of the ‘former slaves’ who were interviewed in the 1970s had never been slaves. Charlie Smith was almost certainly born after slavery was abolished and Celia Black, despite being introduced as a former slave by the interviewer, recounts stories relating to her position as a servant in post-bellum America rather than as a slave during antebellum times. As such, these two testimonies do not directly relate to slavery at all. A chronological overview of the recordings in the collection is provided below. Table 1.  Chronological overview of the recordings available online at the Voices from the days of slavery-website4 Interviewee(s)

Interviewer(s)

Location

Date

Samuel Polite#

Lorenzo Dow Turner (and an unidentified woman)

St. Helena Island, South Carolina (Gullah)

1932

Susan A. Quall#

Archibald A. Hill, Lorenzo Dow Turner Mrs. John F. Ware

Johns Island, South Carolina (Gullah)

1932

Ann Scott#

Guy S. Lowman Lorenzo Dow Turner Mrs. John F. Ware

St. Helena Island, South Carolina

1932

Dave White#

Lorenzo Dow Turner

St. Simons Island, Georgia (Gullah),

1933

Wallace Quarterman

Lorenzo Dow Turner

St. Simons Island, Georgia (Gullah)

1933

Sarah Ashton Brooks# Archibald A. Hill

Albemarle County, Virginia

1934

Sarah Garner

Archibald A. Hill Guy S. Lowman

Virginia

1935

Phoebe Boyd#

Archibald A. Hill Guy S. Lowman Mrs. John F. Ware

Dunnsville, Virginia

1935

Wallace Quarterman

Mary E. Barnicle Zora Neale Hurston Alan Lomax

Fort Frederica, St. Simons Island, Georgia (Gullah)

1935

(Continued)

.  The interviews with interviewees marked with a ‘#’ do not come up in the rest of the book. Even though we included all the Voices from the days of slavery-interviews to the corpus that we scrutinised for the analyses, there were quite a number of interviews that turned out to be less interesting for our analytical purposes. This is not only because of the poor quality or limited length of some of the recordings, but also because some interviews focused mainly on songs, which is not surprising given the musicological interests of many of the interviewers, and contained few, if any, stories.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Table 1. (Continued)  Chronological overview of the recordings available online at the Voices from the days of slavery-website Interviewee(s)

Interviewer(s)

Location

Date

Mrs. Jessie and Mrs. Annie Williams

Roscoe E. Lewis, Mr. Saylor (and an unidentified woman)

Petersburg, Virginia

ca.1937–1940

Annie Williams#

Roscoe E. Lewis (and an unidentified woman)

Petersburg, Virginia

ca.1937–1940

Mrs. Williams#

Roscoe E. Lewis (and an unidentified woman)

Norfolk, Virginia

ca.1937–1940

Joe McDonald

John A. Lomax Ruby T. Lomax

Livingston, Alabama,

1940

Irene Williams#

John A. Lomax Ruby T. Lomax

Rome, Mississippi

1940

Billy McCrea

John A. Lomax Ruby T. Lomax

Jasper, Texas

1940

Bob Ledbetter

John A. Lomax Ruby T. Lomax

Oil City, Louisiana

1940

Alice Gaston#

Robert Sonkin

Gee’s Bend, Alabama

1941

Harriet Smith

John Henry Faulk

Hempstead, Texas,

1941

George Johnson

Charles S. Johnson Lewis Jones Mound Bayou, Alan Lomax Elizabeth Lomax Mississippi

1941

Isom Moseley

Robert Sonkin

Gee’s Bend, Alabama

1941

Laura Smalley

John H. Faulk (and an unidentified woman)

Hempstead, Texas

1941

Fountain Hughes

Hermond Norwood

Baltimore, Maryland

1949

Elmer E. Sparks

Tyler, Texas

1974

Elmer E. Sparks

Bartow, Florida

1975

Celia

Black#

Charlie Smith

The interviews, interviewers and interviewees Contrary to expectations and despite the centrality of the FWP interviews with slaves to the historiography of slavery, only five of the interviews in the corpus actually come from FWP projects. Three interviews in the collection were carried out by Roscoe E. Lewis who was head of the WPA Virginia Writers Project. Two interviews were recorded by Robert Sonkin who carried out research into the African American community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The other interviews on the website, recorded between 1932 and 1975, were the fruit of various research projects. Ten come from Linguistic Atlas projects that were carried out as part of the work of the American Dialect Society. Five of these were recorded by Lorenzo Dow Turner in 1932 and 1933 in the Gullah areas of



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

South Carolina and Georgia and five were recorded by Archibald A. Hill and Guy S. Lowman in Virginia in 1934/5. The remaining eleven interviews come from various ethnographic ventures. Four interviews come from John A. Lomax and Ruby Lomax’s research into folk songs in 1940. The Lomaxes were primarily interested in folklore and ethnomusicology rather than slavery per se and this is reflected in the frequent references to songs within the interviews and the request for the former slaves to sing. John A. Lomax (1867–1948) was an academic and founding member of the Texas ­Folklore Society who later became president of the American Folklore Society, and between1936 and 1938 he was the Folklore Editor of the FWP. His particular interest was folk songs and with the aim of collecting and preserving them, he carried out extensive fieldwork collecting over 10,000 songs which are now held in the archives of the American. His son, Alan, accompanied him on some of his field trips and in his turn he became one of America’s most prominent ethnomusicologists. Between 1937 and 1942 Alan Lomax was Assistant in Charge of Folksongs at the Library of Congress (see Cohen, 2011) and he went on to have an extremely illustrious career during which he collected many songs, interviewed many key jazz, blues, and folk musicians, wrote numerous books and articles (e.g. Lomax, 1993), and produced many records, TV, and radio programs. In the ­summer of 1935, he worked collecting ethnographic data in Florida with Mary E. Barnicle and Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom were eminent folklorists and were active in the Civil Rights movement. Alan Lomax also conducted one of the interviews with his colleagues Charles Johnson and Lewis Jones in 1941 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Johnson and Jones were African American academics from Fisk University which was, historically speaking, a leading African American university in Nashville, Tennessee. Prior to  the Second World War, significant ethnographic work relating to A ­ frican ­American communities was carried out under the auspices of the university and in the post-war period academics and students at Fisk University were in the forefront of demands for Civil Rights for African Americans. Two of the interviews were collected by John H. Faulk, an academic from Texas whose research interests focused on African Americans. The final two interviewers are somewhat enigmatic. One interview was recorded by Herman Norwood, a Library of ­Congress sound engineer, in 1949 in Maryland. The exact reason for this recording is obscure. And finally, Elmer Sparks, an amateur historian, conducted two interviews: one in 1974 in Texas and one in 1975 in Florida. Because of a lack of biographical data, most of the interviewees in the collection remain relatively anonymous. Charlie Smith is the exception to this rule and we elaborate on the background of this interviewee here as this will prove to be relevant for the analyses (see Chapters 3 and 8). The recording of Smith was

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

carried out by Elmer Sparks in 1975, in Bartow, Florida and it recounts his capture as a boy in Africa, transportation, sale and then subsequent life as a c­ owboy and lawman in the post-bellum period. It thus provides a jewel in the crown of the collection and a film version of his story was made in 1978.5 However, Charlie Smith, is perhaps the most controversial figure in this collection of slave narratives. In the recording, he claims that he is “hundred and forty-four years old now. My birthday, I gets a birthday card, I’m a hundred and forty-four last fourth day of July”. This would give him a date of birth of 1831. Contemporary newspaper obituaries give his age at the time of his death (5th October 1979) as 1376 which gives him a date of birth of 1842 and of course, the birth date of July 4th suggests a symbolic embellishment rather than historical accuracy. However, all this remains very speculative: another newspaper report states that “a Desoto county marriage certificate shows Charlie Smith married Bella Van in 1910 when he was 35”.7 If this report is true, this would give him an 1875 date of birth which would undermine many of Smith’s claims and indeed his claim to being a former slave. Brown (1987, p. 177) argues that “after questioning the people who knew him and reconstituting the parts of his known life history it appeared most likely that he had assumed his father’s age”. Yet, despite the doubts concerning his age, Smith still achieved ‘celebrity’ status as the oldest living American. He was the focus of many newspaper articles, two films were made about his life,8 and a biography was written about him. His biography, which is compiled from interviews, is uncritical of Smith and takes his adventures at face value, claiming that it is “a true story” (Byrd, 1978, p. 7). Amongst these adventures, are Smith’s claim to have been tricked onto a slave ship by the promise of seeing a fritter tree before being adopted by a rich white rancher from Texas called Charlie Smith who brings him up as part of the family and as a cowboy. After Charlie Smith senior’s death, Charlie Smith junior moves west and becomes an outlaw with Jesse James, a bounty hunter with Billy the Kid, and a federal detective. To what extent these stories are true is open to doubt. For example, the claim to have been captured in Liberia (Byrd, 1978, p. 7) is questionable since not only was the importation of slaves to America banned in 1808 – though some trade continued clandestinely – but as from the 1820s Liberia was colonised by freed slaves from America. Consequently, as Thorson (2013, p. 25) notes, “students .  “Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree.” 1978, PBS television. .  Sarasota Herald Tribune, 7th October 1979 .  The Ledger, March 21st 1979 .  “Charlie Smith at 131” 1973 in part of the BBC’s “Yesterday’s Witness” series and “Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree.” 1978, PBS television.



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

of black history would find his [Smith’s] claim to have been sold into slavery from Liberia doubtful”. Similarly, Smith’s reports to have been a cowboy, bounty hunter, outlaw, and lawman might be related to the speculation that he appeared as the “The Trigger Kid” in Western films when he was working in Hollywood.9 So these tales appear to be purely fictitious. For example, a clearly false story is Smith’s tale of tracking down and capturing Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, whereas, in fact, Guiteau surrendered to the police directly after the assassination. Consequently, it would appear, as reported in Life10 magazine, that “the fine line between fact and fiction sometimes seems to blur”, and as reported by The Sarasota Herald Tribune,11 quoting a friend of Smith’s: I don’t know where he gets those tales, but he loves to tell ‘em. …… He was in a side show at one time ….…… I think he gets a lot of tales from there. He was so used to hearing the barker tell all this things that this Charlie had done that Charlie started to believe them. He just likes to talk.

Thus, in sum, the ‘factual’ accuracy of Smith’s narratives, and indeed his claim to have been a slave, are extremely doubtful: at best they are exaggerated, and, at worst, they are blatant lies. Yet, despite this, they provide the focus of two chapters in this book (Chapters 3 and 8). This is because, as we argue consistently throughout this book, the production of the narratives as situated speech events, rather than their ‘truth value’, is our primary concern. As such, Smith’s narratives, even if historically doubtful, correspond entirely to our research criteria.

The recordings These data form the basis of this current study of slave narratives not only because, thanks to the efforts of the American Folklife Centre, it is available and easily accessible, but more importantly, because it is audio-recorded. Audio-recorded data allows us, as linguists, to study the turn by turn accomplishment of the narratives as an interactional event. Therefore as Blassingame (1985, p. 89) argues researchers should “begin by mastering the skills of a linguist and then systematically examine the internal structure of the interviews, the recurrence of symbols and stereotypes, the sequencing of episodes, and the functions they serve”. Yet, despite this call to action there has been little research into the interactional construction of the slave narratives. Whooley (2006) uses dialogic analysis to com.  Recordings available at the Department of Agriculture. Available at: 〈http://research.archives.gov/description/100990〉 .  Life Magazine October 13 1972 page 91 .  Sarasota Herald Tribune, 7th October 1979

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

pare two slave narratives, one from the antebellum period and one from the WPA collection. He analyses the narratives within the political context of their production and argues that narratives cannot be ‘dehistoricalised’, and should be understood within the context of their production. Similarly, Lee (2012) analyses WPA narratives (both audio and written) and reveals how the identity constructions of the interviewees were affected by the historical context of the interviews. In some of our own earlier work (2011, 2012, 2013), we have already drawn on the collection Voices from the days of slavery and published a series of articles looking at the situated construction of identities. In these articles, we analyse how power asymmetries and ethnic and racialised identities are talked into being during the interviews. Considering the relative dearth of research that looks into the interactional construction of the slave narratives, it is with this research gap in mind that we seek to develop our earlier articles into a monograph that aims to deepen understanding of the slave narratives from an interactional perspective. Moreover, we would argue that in order to understand the interviews adequately, one must look at the interactional dynamics between interviewee and interviewer, the context of their production, and the entextualization in the website. Failure to take these factors into account results in a poorer understanding of the production of the narratives which dilutes an appreciation of their significance as historical documents. From this perspective, we argue that the interviews themselves do not ­provide a straight forward window into the past. Rather, through storytelling the storytellers negotiate how they wish to represent themselves as having been, what they are now, and what they aspire to. The story itself will therefore not be a replica of the past as lived, but will draw upon aspects of the past that fit current identities and aspirations in the here-and-now of the present. And moreover, as P ­ asserin (1987, p. 60) notes, “the subjects realise that there are two levels, that is, that their story does not entirely tally with real life. But precisely because they are telling a story, they resort knowingly to the stereotypes which story-telling in their ­culture require”. In other words, they actively make use of cultural resources such as folklore, fiction, myth and so on to fashion the narrative to give it a kind of dramatic unity and coherence that may not have been present in the original event but that is in line with the “cultural plots” of the time of narrating (De Fina & ­Georgakopoulou, 2012, p. 149). It is therefore impossible to disentangle voices of the past form voices of the present, what is ‘fact’ and what is ‘fiction’. Indeed, to try to do so would be beyond the scope of any researcher. What interests us as researchers is the situated construction of the storyworld and identities within it, not the storyworld as a putative historical reality.



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

A word on transcription Many of the edited versions of the FWP interviews are represented in African American dialect. This was especially as a result of an initiative by Lomax, the National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP, who sent out guidelines which set out to harmonise the way in which the voices of the former slaves were to be represented in text. Lomax argued that the flavour of ‘Negro speech’ should be used but this should be mediated by readability. To this end he gave a list of what words could and could not be used. So, for example, goin’ could be used instead of going and ‘ligion could be used rather than religion (Perdue, 1976, p. xxvii). This may have led to distortions, namely that former slaves speaking in a more standard way were misrepresented to fit stereotypes that corresponded to the racial mores of the time and prejudices of many of the interviewers (Lee, 2012, p. 4). Thus even when the interviewee spoke without a pronounced dialect, the WPA interviewers recorded the talk as African American vernacular which had the effect of projecting blackness and difference onto the speaker (see ­Blassingame (1977, p. xliv) who gives an example of this practice). In short, as Bucholtz (2000, p. 1440) notes, “embedded in the details of transcription are indications of purpose, audience and the position of the transcriber toward the text. Transcriptions thus testify to the circumstances of their creation and intended use”. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the FWP narratives sought to give a transcription of the interviews that represented the prejudices of the time and that were possibly based on the literary tradition of representing ‘Negro speech’ that would have been familiar to the interviewers and the intended audiences. As Dillard (1993, p. 229) concludes, “we might ultimately be able to utilise the ex-slave narratives for what I think they are: representative examples of the literary tradition of black speech”. However, the possible misrepresentation of dialect apparent in the majority of the FWP collection will not be a major concern of this book. By using the transcripts of the audio-recordings of the interviews provided by the American Folklife Centre we have adopted an approach that does not attempt to capture the exact phonological representation of speech, rather it aims to strike a balance between readability and accuracy. In places we have refined – and even corrected – the transcripts so as to capture the interactional details (such as pauses, overlaps, changes in intonation etc) that are necessary for a fine-grained analysis. We do not claim that these transcripts catch all the nuances of the spoken interaction and we are aware that the transcription obviously fails to capture any non-verbal activity such as nods, changes in eye gaze and so on that may have affected the interaction. From this perspective, the transcripts are not the data, rather they are representations of the audio-recordings which are themselves representations of the original

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

interviews (Coates & Thornborrow, 1999). Moreover, considering the poor quality of many of the recordings and the often heavily accented and creolised talk of the informants, it is difficult for researchers working on the same texts to come up with the same transcripts (Rickford, 1991). Consequently, concerns about what actually was said and what should be transcribed abound. We thus concur with Bailey et al. (1991b, p. 14) who assert that the transcripts are not the linguistic texts in themselves but are analogues of linguistic texts that should be used in conjunction with the recordings. Consequently, they argue that the transcripts serve primarily as a guide to the contents of the recordings and as an aid to understanding them (Bailey et al., 1991b, p. 14). The transcripts presented in this book thus constitute a “research tool designed to illuminate some – but not all – aspects of the data” (Coates & Thornborrow, 1999, p. 596) and as such are incomplete and influenced by our own analytical preoccupations. The transcripts hence require a degree of reflexivity since they are not exact reproductions of the original events. Rather, the transcripts are interpretations, “and like all other interpretive acts they reflect the training biases and linguistic experiences of the transcriber” (Bailey et al., 1991b, p. 14). We used the Jeffersonian transcription system (Jefferson, 2004) to render the audio-recordings analysable in a way that suits a fine-grained analysis of talk in interaction. A full list of symbols used can be found in the appendix. Thus, while we recognise that this transcription system does not make visible all the distinctions that can be made in the analysis of speech, it does provide a transcript that is most appropriate to our research purpose of revealing the sequential properties of talk between the interviewer and interviewee.

Re-contextualization of the data The slave narratives that we analyse in this book are part of the Library of Congress American Memory project. The stated aim of American Memory is to provide: free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.12 (italics added)

.  〈http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/index.html 〉



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

From this perspective the ex-slave narratives are retextualised as part of American collective memory and so the African Americans take their place as Americans with other groups who are represented by this project such as the Chinese, pioneers trekking west, Native Americans, women, cowboys, and so on. Eyerman (2001, pp. 5–6) defines collective memory as: recollections of a shared past “that are retained by members of a group, large or small, that experienced it” (Schuman & Scott, 1989, pp. 361–362), and passed on either in an ongoing process of what might be called public commemoration, in which officially sanctioned rituals are engaged to establish a shared past, or through discourses more specific to a particular group or collective. This socially constructed, historically rooted collective memory functions to create social solidarity in the present.

The notion of collective memory therefore is not concerned with psychological representations of memory as an internal and asocial phenomenon; rather collective memory is concerned with remembering as something that inevitably takes place in a social environment. As Olik et al. (2011, p. 19) point out, “all individual remembering … takes place with social materials, within social contexts, and in response to social cues”. Thus, as the discursive psychologists Edwards and P ­ otter (1992) argue, remembering is less about accessing the truth of a past event ‘as it really was’, it is more about the rhetorical design of remembering to carry out actions in the present such as rendering one’s own actions coherent and accountable. Similarly, collective memory is not an asocial and direct route to the past ‘as it was’, rather it is constrained or enabled by what each group can reconstruct within its contemporary frame of reference and by the actions that the (re)creation of collective memory are designed to do. Significantly, one of the principal actions of collective memory is to enact a group’s self-knowledge in a way that leads to an awareness of its unity and particularity. In other words, it articulates the group’s awareness of what it is, and what it is not. As such, collective memory has both a formative and a normative function: normative in that it exemplifies how members of a group should live their lives, and formative in that it serves as an educational tool through which such normative values are propagated. To this end, collective memories are organised in institutional settings (such as websites, museums, remembrance ceremonies etc.) which constitute lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) where “memory crystallises and secretes itself ” (Nora, 1989, p.  9). Over time, such lieux de mémoire become symbolic elements in the construction of the heritage of a community. They are thus integral to the construction of the imagined communities that Anderson (1983) claims constitute nations. Such national entities are imagined “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1983, p. 6). And, following Cubitt (2007, p. 18): even if nations [ ….. ] are not in reality the carriers of an organic kind of collective memory which binds their present members together in a homogenous connection to a primordial and continuous past, the idea that they are, may be influential in structuring the way that understandings of the past are developed and formulated within particular societies.

Consequently, the website is part of this collective memory because, as indicated in the Library of Congress’ mission statement, it aims to “document the American experience”, provide “a digital record of American history and creativity” and to “chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape ­America” (italics added). Significantly, the African American is placed firmly within this imagined community. It is through giving former slaves their rightful place in the historical record that attention is drawn not only to the fact that they existed, but moral recognition of their interests and perspectives is also ­acknowledged. Thus, the African American community is actively classed as full participants in American history and not as incidental to white actors. The website, therefore, reflects a contemporary multiculturalist Discourse of America which celebrates the unique cultural heritage of different cultural, e­ thnic, racial or gendered groups and recognises their part in building the nation. As stated in the opening comments of the report One America in the 21st Century13 which set out President Clinton’s aspirations for a multiracial society, “America’s greatest promise in the 21st century lies in our ability to harness the strength of our racial diversity. The greatest challenge facing Americans is to accept and take pride in defining ourselves as a multiracial democracy”. Thus, whilst America is far from a raceless society as, for example race riots, discrepancies in housing and access to health care, and the disproportioned African American prison population suggest, nevertheless an official Discourse of multiculturalism now exists. And, as Banks (1993, p. 24) notes, the ‘e pluribus unum’14 is now considered to be an appropriate national goal in which “the unum must be negotiated, discussed, and restructured to reflect the nation’s ethnic and cultural diversity”. Furthermore, the site has a clear didactic, and therefore ideological, purpose. On the home page of the site, there is a link to “classroom resources for teachers”. The aim of such social pedagogy, as Kubiszyn (2009, p. 170) points out, is the .  Available at: 〈http://clinton2.na ra.gov/Initiatives/OneAmerica/PIR.pdf 〉 .  E pluribus unum, meaning ‘out of many, one’, was the original motto of the United States. It was replaced in 1956 by “in God we trust”.



Chapter 2.  The slave narratives 

analysis of the relationship between individuals and society. In their analysis of an oral history project in Poland which deals with the Jewish past of a modern Polish town, they note that such social pedagogy is essential if citizens are to have the necessary cultural and social competence that would enable them to participate fully in both local and national culture. In the oral history project that Kubiszyn analyses, the pedagogic aspect to the project is seen as an essential part of building a new multi-ethnic Poland which supersedes the denial of multi-ethnicity during the Soviet period and which supports the process of building an inclusive and multi-ethnic vision of Polish national identity. In a similar way, the pedagogic slant of the ‘Voices of from the days of slavery’ explicitly aims to build a version of ­American history in which African Americans have their voice. As Kook (1998) notes, until the Civil Rights period, African Americans were invisible in America history text books and if they were mentioned at all this was only in terms of their status as slaves. Their role in American history was therefore largely ignored and so they were excluded from being part of collective memory. It is not until the 1960s that African Americans became visible in text books and were treated more positively as being a part of the history of America. The Voices from the days of slavery website is thus significant because if the social and cultural heritage of a nation such as the United States has been formed by various ethnic, religious and gendered groups, the purpose of a multiculturalist slant to education is to help forge an inclusive American identity. And within such an inclusive American identity, there is a distinct socio-political intention to give a public platform to the voices of those who historically have been at the margins of American society. Yet, as will be seen throughout this book, somewhat paradoxically, on closer inspection many of slave narratives enact a Discourse of white supremacy that underpinned the segregationist South of the 1930s and 1940s and they often do not express the cultural trauma of the African American. In the following chapter, we take up this point and we discuss the effect of the historical context of the production of the interviews in more detail.

A note on reflexivity Finally, we would like to end this chapter by acknowledging our own re-­ entextualisation of the narratives in this book. The narratives which form the corpus of texts analysed in this book were elicited (mainly) in the 1930s and 1940s. They, as we will argue throughout the book, were produced within a specific socio-political climate that shaped them in certain ways and that was decisive for the master narratives available to the interviewee and interviewers. Yet, after their production, they were largely forgotten until the post-Civil rights political climate began to give the African Americans a voice and, it was not until 1972, with the publication of

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Rawick, 1972a), that the collection of slave narratives began to appear in its entirety. More specifically, the audio recordings that constitute the corpus analysed in this book, were made publically available on the website Voices from the days of slavery in the late 1990s. Thus, whilst the recordings in their current form are recontextualised as part of the American collective memory within the website Voices from the days of slavery, we acknowledge that this book’s selection of the narratives are re-entextualised as academic artefacts designed to illustrate our academic arguments, using particular methodologies and transcription conventions in which certain aspects are noticed and analysed, and others are not, according to our own research agenda. However, whilst acknowledging the tu quoque nature of our work, we nevertheless hope to make a valuable contribution to debates concerning the slave narratives as historical artefacts, to the emergence of (African) American identity in talk, and to contemporary debates concerning the use of narrative as a site for doing identity and (re)producing Discourses that enact moral orders.

chapter 3

Narratives and the historical context of the interview Heroes and villains in narratives of law and order “Rich white people don’t bother nobody” (Harriet Smith, 1941)

Introduction Through being publicly available on the website Voices from the days of slavery, some recordings of interviews with former slaves have been recontextualised as oral history. Such a recontextualization carries with it the “standard oral history frame [that] was based on the assumption that life stories of people who had actually experienced past events revealed a past ‘as it actually was’” (Kopijn, 1998, p. 142). However, this misses the fact that the past is not immutable; rather the meaning of events and experiences are constantly being reframed according to (1) the historical context of the interview, (2) the social context of the story’s telling, (3) the interaction between, and relevant identities of, the interviewee and interviewer, and (4) the imagined audience. Consequently, researchers must pay particular attention to the context in which the story is told and to the cultural frames of possibilities and constraints that the narrators draw up when telling their stories. Therefore, rather than being a direct and unmediated route to the past ‘as it really was’, narratives are always shaped in the here-and-now of the interview situation and consequently they are prone to (re)construct the social world as it was through a lens of accountability rooted in the here-and-now of the interview. For example, Kilvert, a Victorian diarist in England, felt free to make remarks in his diaries about the beauty of children and kissing school girls (Kilvert, 1977, pp. 38, 53). However, in the early 21st century, such stories would no doubt lead to criminal investigation and social pariah status. Thus, what a narrator reveals, and how he/she reveals it, is accountable to the socio-political context of the interview situation and to what Minister (1991) calls the ghostly audience. The ghostly audience is thus the imagined audience which, whilst not being physically present, is

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

nevertheless oriented to by both the interviewee and interviewer. Consequently, the interviewer and interviewees design their interaction for these imagined recipients under whose normative gaze they are operating. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to compare and contrast several narratives according to the context of their production. In the corpus, two of the interviews (those of Charlie Smith and Celia Black) stand out because they were recorded in the 1970s, whereas the other recordings were all recorded in the 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, in this chapter, we set out to investigate the extent to which the historical socio-political context of these recordings has an influence on the stories told. In order to achieve this we take the theme of law and order which is apparent in several of the interviews. We then compare and contrast C ­ harlie Smith’s narratives of law and order recorded in 1975 in the post-Civil Rights period with those of Bob Ledbetter, Harriet Smith and Laura Smalley which were recorded in the 1940s when white supremacist ideologies upheld a segregated and deeply racist society. More specifically, within these stories of law and order, we focus on the way in which the interviewees make relevant the identities of heroes and villains. Moreover, the moral identity work (Jayyusi, 1984) that the narrators do, talks into being particular versions of what is good and bad as displayed in the predicates (i.e., expectable characteristics, behaviours, states of mind and so on) occasioned as being associated with either heroes or villains. In this way, the narrators construct a particular version of society, both in the storyworld and the interview world that indexes the (potentially colour coded) moral order to which they orient. In his interview, Charlie Smith claims that after he was emancipated, he became a lawman and through this self-categorization, he makes the dichotomy black/ white irrelevant to the interaction. The identities that are relevant in his stories are those of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and these identities are occasioned through the predicates of abiding, or failing to abide, to federal laws. It is through this identity work that he evokes an American identity to which he claims ­membership. On the other hand, tales of lawlessness recorded in the early 1940s make African American and white identities relevant. This is true both in stories that reflect master narratives of white supremacy where whiteness equates with goodness and in counter-narratives where whiteness equates with evil and oppression (see also Chapter 6 for a discussion of counter-narratives). But, nevertheless, the heroes and villains in these pre-Civil Rights narratives are drawn up along strict colour lines reflecting and constructing a segregated society where colour matters. We aim to demonstrate therefore, that the socio-political context of the here-and-now of the interview situation combined with the accountability of the storyteller means that the stories of law and order from the early 40s, on the one hand, construct the segregated society of pre-Civil Rights America and the master narrative of white



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

superiority. On the other hand, Charlie Smith’s narratives construct an emerging American national identity that is inclusive of the African American population. Thus through the comparative analysis of the data we can see how the historical context of the interview affects the allowability and comprehensibility of n ­ arratives and orients to – either by acquiescing or by challenging – the master narratives of the storytelling time.

Truth and narrative The borders between truth and fiction can be very porous at times and a “narrative of a personal experience is not a clear route into ‘the truth’” (Atkinson & Delamont, 2006, p. 166). Indeed, one person’s truth is another person’s falsehood depending on perspectives. Thus the whole idea of one objective true version of events that is out there somewhere waiting to be found is something that is bracketed by a social constructionist approach to research. Rather, from a social constructionist perspective there are multiple truths (and falsehoods) waiting to be occasioned and constructed as the situation demands. The same is true of narratives. As Kopijn (1998, p. 142) notes, oral interviews “do not reveal objective truths, but the truths of the interviewee”. As discussed below, this may be so for various intertwined reasons: tellability; the merging of individual and group perspectives; context of telling; and available genres. Firstly, a story has to be tellable, and this tellability is often reversely ­proportional to a story’s credibility (Labov, 1982) – see also introduction and Chapter 8. Hence, ‘true’ stories do not necessarily make tellable stories. As ­Stewart and Maxwell (2010, p. 33) state, “truth, a criterion valued in most analytical endeavours, is not a critical criterion in narrative evaluation”. Therefore, the narrator might take liberties and he/she might privilege a ‘good’ story over a ‘true’ story. However, whilst this would tend to suggest that a good story (or a tall story) outweighs a true story, Portelli (1998, p. 38) argues that good stories and true stories are not necessarily mutually exclusive: a good story can be a way of telling other possible truths. In other words, a story can stand as proxy for something that the narrator considers to be true and therefore the story becomes a symbolic and poetic representation of historical experience, rather than an attempt to retell that particular experience as accurately as possible. Secondly, the teller might seek to merge his/her own personal experience with group experience to which he/she claims membership. Consequently, narratives are not necessarily individual (Brockmeier & Harré, 2001, p. 46). Through the articulation of belonging to a social group the narrators also articulate a collective perspective. Consequently, when narratives are strongly identified with a

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

group, the teller’s story may be expressed with the same narrative form common to master narratives relating to the group. Thus as Freeman (2001, p. 296) notes, “it is clear that we ourselves draw upon stories, upon prominent cultural narratives or myths, and, consciously or unconsciously, apply them to our own autobiographies”. Therefore, the (tall) stories told by individuals such as Charlie Smith may be a long way from some kind of historical objective truth, yet in other ways they may reveal other truths pertinent to groups that Charlie Smith occasions as being relevant to the narrative. Thirdly, conferring new meanings on past events is not necessarily to falsify the past event. Rather, the event is constructed within a broader interpretive scheme. In fact, as Stögner (2009, p. 208) remarks: It can be assumed that in a life story interview the memories of the historical witness are aimed not so much at the remembered past, but much more at the receiving present. This means that memories are not simply a communication of the past, but to a high degree the expression of the past in the present. Hence, life stories are always filtered by all which has happened between the time of actual experience and the time of narrating.

The past, as it were, takes place in the here-and-now of the present and is therefore subject to the moral approbation, accountability, and the normative gaze of the ghostly audience. Orientation to an imagined audience puts the narrators under pressure to construct themselves in a way that is not only tellable but which also renders themselves morally accountable. Consequently, the narrative should be considered more for its here-and-now accountability than for its there-and-then ‘truthfulness’ in the storyworld. Sehulster (2001) illustrates this point when he studies Richard Wagner’s claims to have had a vision during a trip to Italy. He observes that in contemporary diary entries Wagner makes reference to being sick during his trip to La Spezia, but he makes no mention of having had a vision. Consequently, Sehulster then argues that the version of having had a vision in La Spezia only emerged later and this account of events was in fact a retrospective interpretation of what happened driven by a need to illustrate his emerging identity as a musical genius. Similarly, Günthner (2005) analyses the telling of the same story of annoying neighbours in different contexts. She argues that the teller narrates different versions of the events which focus on different details and which present the antagonist in different ways depending on the circumstances of the story’s retelling and the action that the story is designed to ‘do’. Narratives can therefore be seen as a form of identity work that varies according to the target audience in terms of how the narrator seeks to retrospectively (re)organise the plots of his/her life. This is because, as Mishler (2006) argues, stories display an orientation to some kind of chronological progression (i.e., they have a beginning,



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

middle and end), but at the same time they are also constructed retrospectively from the here-and-now of the interview working back to the there-and-then of the act of telling (see also introduction). In short, somewhat counter intuitively, it is the present that gives rise to the past and not vice-versa. And not only does the ghostly audience affect the narrative, but the co-presence of the interviewer as an active participant in the interaction also shapes the story. As for example Van De Mieroop and Clifton (2014) demonstrate, the interviewer is not necessarily a passive conduit for the identity work of the interviewee. In some cases, especially in cases where the interviewer may also have a stake in the identity work, the interviewer might even actively contribute to shaping and managing the identity work of the interviewee. Further, the story is not only told through the lens of the tellers’ progression in the ‘journey of life’ and how they look back on that life when they reconstruct it in the present. Tellers are not operating in a social vacuum and they orient to the wider socio-political context of the interview. Thus, as Bruner (2001, p. 29) notes, the tellers render themselves accountable by presenting themselves in a ‘culture confirming way’ that aligns with master narratives of contemporary society in the here-and-now. Van De Mieroop et al. (2007) for example illustrate this in their analysis of a former member of Hitler’s bodyguard who, whilst having been a serving member of the SS, was at great pains during the interview to avoid displaying any knowledge of the Holocaust and instead stressed his lowly status in the military. One can only speculate as to how this story would have been formulated had the outcome of the war been different. Narratives therefore do not necessarily reflect past events as they actually were, but in rendering the narrator accountable to the ghostly audience, they can also be seen as descriptions of how one ought to live one’s life rather than as descriptions of how one actually lived. From this perspective, as Brockmeier and Harré (2001, p. 51) note, narratives “should be treated as a condensed set of rules, encapsulating what is coherent and plausible with a given culture”. These normative and prescriptive, rather than descriptive, aspects to narrative give rise to the notion that when one tells a story, one wants to present a good self (Linde, 1993) that is accountable to the moral zeitgeist of the context of the interview. As Freeman and Brockmeier (2001, p. 76) assert: “one’s identity, insofar as it is tied to the interpretive appraisal of one’s personal past as it takes place in autobiographical narrative, is inseparable from normative ideas of what life is, or is supposed to be, if it is lived well”. Thus narratives are not only a window into the normative values of the teller, but narratives also construct the moral order of the social world in which the interview takes place. This is because the teller is accountable (Garfinkel, 1967) in the here-and-now of the interview, and he or she has to shape the story so that it is perceived as being legitimate and intelligible according to available master narratives.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Finally, the teller is limited to narrating his/her story according to genres that are culturally available. Thus, the narrator’s tales are never wholly theirs alone, but are always informed, enabled or constrained by other voices and pre-existing narrative models such as oral traditions, genres, religious texts and so on that a culture provides. Consequently, as particular genres enter into the narrative repertoire of a culture, they then become a lens through which members of that culture come to see and reflect upon their own experiences. Thus, even the most supposedly personal and unique experience is enacted “in accordance with culturally prescribed genres and formats of expression” (Atkinson & Delamont, 2006, p. 169).

Analysis In the following sections, 9 fragments from 4 interviews are analysed. The extracts come from recordings with: Bob Ledbetter recorded in Oil City, Louisiana in 1940; Harriet Smith and Laura Smalley both recorded in 1941 in Hempstead, Texas; and Charlie Smith recorded in Bartow, Florida in 1975. The extracts were selected first because they allow a comparative analysis to be made between those recorded in the South at a time when a racialised society was still flourishing and Smith’s interview which was recorded after the Civil Rights movement at a time when de jure segregation was being dismantled in the United States, though of course de facto segregation was to remain for a long time and some would argue still exists today. All the extracts were selected because they have the same theme of law and order and refer to the same post-bellum period. The theme of law and order was selected because moral identity (Jayyusi, 1984) is particularly evident as the narrators position protagonists and antagonists in the roles of either heroes or villains.

Analysis part one – (re)constructing white supremacist hegemony In this section, we first sketch an image of the wider social context, and in particular regarding the position of African Americans in the post-bellum, but preCivil Rights society, before going into detailed analyses of stories regarding law and order from three interviews. After emancipation, many apologists for slavery argued that once the African Americans were left to their own devices without any benevolent white influence they would be unable to manage their own affairs and would collapse into anarchy and the primeval beast-like state in which they were found in Africa. As Hoffman (1896, p. 228), a well-known racist scholar in the post-bellum period, notes: emancipation failed to raise African American people to “a higher level of citizenship, the first duty of which is to obey the laws and respect the lives and property of others”. His ascription of lawlessness to the



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

African American community, backed up by figures1 which showed that most crime was committed by African Americans, gave a pseudo-scientific underpinning to the belief that criminality was inherent to the ‘Negro race’ to the extent that “African American criminality became one of the most widely accepted bases for justifying prejudicial thinking, discriminatory treatment and/or, acceptance of racial violence as an instrument of public safety” (Muhammad, 2010, p. 4). Thus, the African American as a lawless beast was a master narrative of the post-bellum period, and one that some would argue still persists today (see for example, Dixon, 2008). Carroll (1900) exemplifies this discourse in his book ‘The Negro a Beast’, in which he claims the African Americans are descendants of beasts rather than Adam and Eve. For example, he states that: To-day our wives and our daughters are not safe from their [i.e., African American] brutal assaults beyond the range of our shot-guns. They degrade our religion, demoralise our politics, debauch our youths, plunder our citizens, murder our officials, rape our women, and conduct themselves generally as the curse they are and will always be so long as they are allowed to defile our land with their presence. (Carroll, 1900, p. 123)

Thus, despite being emancipated, the post-bellum African American population was still caught in a web of racism in which they were oppressed by the white population. Such a discourse was backed up by pseudo-scientific racism which justified the inequalities between ‘races’ by recourse to science that explained that the world was divided into ‘natural’ categories of human types (Marks, 2008, p. 1). The justification for this was either based on a theory of polygenism or monogenism. Polygenism argued that the ‘Negro race’ was a separate act of divine creation that pre-dated Adam and Eve. This discourse is typified by for example Carroll (1900), cited above, who on the title page of his book argues that the ‘Negroes’ were a species of ape, rather than man, and that they were able to speak and do manual labour so as to be of service to their master – the white man. As such, whites and African Americans were completely different species, the former being superior to the latter. Conversely, the monogenist theory of evolution, inspired by Darwinism, argued that even though African Americans and whites came from the same act of creation and were thus from the same species, African Americans were further down the evolutionary scale. Thus as Dennis (1995, p. 244) argues, even though Darwin himself was an abolitionist and his book ‘The Origin of Species’ related almost entirely to the natural world, Social Darwinists such as William Sumner were able to (mis)use Darwin’s theory of evolution to show that .  For example, the 1890 census showed that African Americans made up 12% of the ­American population, yet 30% of the prison population was African American.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

natural selection and survival of the fittest applied to human society. Darwin’s theory of evolution was thus appropriated in order to justify the dominance of an inferior race by another superior race. The fittest, whether this was race, nation or class, would ensure progress to a more civilised world, whereas the inferior elements in society, inter alia the ‘Negro race’, hindered such progress. Either way, whether monogenesis or polygenesis, the result of such pseudo-­scientific theories of race was that white supremacists found a ‘scientific’ justification for slavery and segregation. And such pseudo-scientific taxonomies of races based on supposedly hereditary and unalterable genetic differences endorsed a racist ideology that condemned African Americans to perpetual ‘otherness’ and justified their dehumanization. Now that we have sketched the wider social context of the time of the ­interview,  we will go into a detailed discussion of three interviews, namely the interviews with Bob Ledbetter, Laura Smalley and Harriet Smith which took place in 1940–41. We will discuss them consecutively here and zoom in on stories regarding law and order. Interview with Bob Ledbetter In the course of this interview, a story comes up about Ledbetter’s relation with a merchant, Mr. Carver. The interviewer already seems familiar with this story, as can be seen in the prompt in line 91. In response to this question, Bob Ledbetter enters into a narrative of his good treatment, the evaluation of the story being that he has never been in jail because he is a good person. Moreover, whilst doing identity work that enacts a good self, he also claims that he has predicates that are associated with whiteness and so he (re)produces a master narrative of the ‘good white’ and the irresponsible, bad ‘Negro’. Consequently, he talks into being the ‘natural superiority’ of the white race and justifies the racist system of white supremacy which underpinned the segregationist South. Extract 3.1 (Bob Ledbetter) 91 IR Well now what was it the old merchant, what was it the 92 old merchant told you? You told the old merchant down 93 here that er 94 IE er mis[ter 95 IR [(Morinfort) 96 IE Me and him was talking now one day and uh (.) 97 wasn’t nobody in there but me. 98 IR Now say EXACTLY what you said ↓now 99 IE Yes sir. Wasn’t nobody in there but me and him 100 and his son and his son’s daughter. And I say “­Mister (Carver),” 101 I forgot what just exactly how old I was, but ­anyhow





Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

102 I said, “I’m sixty-one or two years old, and I never 103 had no trouble in my life.” I say “I never ask 104 the (Norris’) for a nickel what they didn’t give 105 it to me in my life and nary a one of them never 106 did cuss at me.” And say “I ain’t never been ↑­summonsed 107 and ain’t never been arrested, and ain’t never 108 been to the jail house but twice in my life and 109 I ain’t been to the courthouse but twice.” 110 He, he looked at me and he cussed. He said, 111 “Well, Bob, I be damn if that ain’t too much for 112 a nigga to say.” Said “there ain’t nary a white man can 113 say any better than that.” Said, “There ain’t.” 114 I say, “Well, I’m telling you the truth”, 115 I say, “You can ask these people all around 116 (Morinfort) that know me, and they’ll tell you 117 I ain’t never been no trouble since I been there.”

In lines 91–98, the interviewer appears to be ‘fishing’ for a story that is already known to him. In line 96, Ledbetter begins the orientation phase of the narrative by setting the scene: “me and him was talking now one day and uh (.) wasn’t nobody in there but me”. After a brief interjection by the interviewer who asks him to say “EXACTLY what you said”, Ledbetter continues with his story and, while rephrasing the initial orientation, adds that the merchant’s son and his son’s daughter were also present. The story then takes the form of constructed dialogue (Tannen, 1989) in which the ideologies of the protagonists are articulated (Bakhtin, 1981). In line 102, Ledbetter starts the constructed exchange with Mr.Carver by stating that “I’m sixty one or two years old, and I never had no trouble in my life.” He therefore self-categorises as a law abiding citizen and a good person and by stressing the word ‘life’ he insists on the habitual nature of his good character. This claim to a good self is supported by an appeal to consensus whereby others, notably whites, ascribe to him the identity of ‘a good person’ because they (the Norris family, his employers) always lend him money and “nary one of them never did cuss at me”. The habitual nature of this is again underlined by his emphasis on “in my life” which is spoken louder than the surrounding talk and the use of the adverbs “nary (never) a one of them never did cuss”. Further, he adds that he has never been summonsed, nor arrested, nor been to the jail house but twice. The use of ‘never’ acts as an extreme case formulation (­Pomerantz, 1986) which boosts the truth value of a statement by stressing its habitual nature and the three part list (summonsed, arrested and jailed) acts as a rhetorical device that presents the events as general rather than as isolated incidents (Potter, 1996). Thus, Ledbetter designs his story with a rhetorical eye to convincing the audience

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

of its truth value and its general applicability. Through these action-generated predicates of never being summonsed, arrested, or sent to jail, he talks into being a good self for himself, which is defined as being law abiding. This self-ascription of a good self causes consternation in his white antagonist who (line 111) states: “well, Bob, I be damn if that ain’t too much for a nigga to say”. This antagonist thus explicitly makes colour relevant, expressing surprise that a ‘nigga’ should have such a good self. This surprise is compounded by the fact that (line 112) “there ain’t nary a white man can say any better than that” which specifically makes law and order a black-and-white issue whereby normatively African Americans are bad and whites are good. The fact that Ledbetter claims the identity of a good law abiding citizen, an identity occasioned as normatively attributed to whites, is exceptional and is the cause of surprise (line 111: “I be damn if that ain’t too much for a nigga to say”). In line 115, Ledbetter orients to the prior turn in the constructed dialogue as a challenge and so defends the truthfulness of his statement by underlining the fact that he is telling the truth and appealing to consensus to resolve this issue (lines 115–117: “You can ask these people all around (Morinfort) that know me, and they’ll tell you I ain’t never been no trouble since I been there”). The key point of the story is that Ledbetter and the character with whom he interacts in the storyworld, construct the good, law abiding self along colour lines. In short, goodness equates with whiteness. It is expected that ‘niggas’ get arrested, get summonsed, and go to jail. This is a predicate of African ­Americans and so confirms the master narrative of ‘Negro as degenerate beast’. White people on the other hand may go to jail but this is not expected. Therefore, for a ‘nigga’ never to have been arrested, summonsed or sent to jail is a surprising event, worthy of a story. As such, Ledbetter constructs goodness and badness through the eyes of whites. Being bad is normatively a predicate of blackness since this is why African Americans end up in jail and being good is a predicate of whiteness because whites should not end up in jail. So, for an African ­American not to be sent to jail means that he is assuming the predicates of whiteness and as such, he receives the approbation of white people who always give him credit and never ‘cuss’ him. Thus, Ledbetter enacts a master narrative of white supremacy: whiteness rhymes with goodness and blackness rhymes with degeneracy. As Muhammad (2010, p. 10) notes, when the more prosperous African Americans sought credibility and approbation from whites, their talk of African American criminality and delinquency became indistinguishable from their white ­counterparts and they also enacted a discourse of colour-coded respectability. Similarly, Ledbetter enacts a master narrative of white superiority which espouses the racial ideology that underpinned the segregationist South of the mid-twentieth century.



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

Interview with Laura Smalley Smalley’s narrative also constructs the hegemonic discourse of white supremacy. Unlike Ledbetter, she does not claim predicates that are normatively associated with white identity. Rather, she produces the hegemonic discourse of ‘the delinquent Negro’ by providing an evaluation to her story that argues that African Americans were indeed the lawless beasts that white racist discourse, both popular and pseudo-scientific, portrayed them to be. Her narrative also comes close to legitimizing white-on-black violence consistent with white supremacist ideas that the whites, as a superior race, had to control the African Americans even if that meant using extra-legal means such as beatings, whippings and in extreme cases lynching. As Myrdal (1944) – writing more or less at the time of the interview with Smalley – notes, despite having its origins in slavery, white-on-black violence as a means of controlling the African American community was prevalent in the South and “continues to flourish because of the laxity and inequality of the administration of law and justice” (Myrdal, 1944, p. 558). In short, from the post-bellum period right up to the Civil Rights period of the 1960s, white-on-black violence was regarded as a legitimate and quasi-legal way of continuing white control of the African American community. In line 90, the interviewer invokes this issue of white-on-black violence. Extract 3.2 (Laura Smalley) 90 IR Just bother you whether you done anything [or not. 91 IE [((laugh)) 92 I wouldn’t know. That they used to call this, ah, Six-Shooter 93 Junction, you know. And I was sure enough scared (.) 94 But there ain’t nobody never have bothered me since 95 I’ve been here (.) and none of my children (.) But you 96 see, we always acts ↑RIGHT, you know, and treat 97 everybody right, you know. We had no, no, 98 no keep us coming, you know (.) to mistreat us (.) 99 0that a way0 (.) Now I had a son he get, ((loud noise)) 100 he get drunk. They put him in jail. He get drunk (.) 101 But then they=they turn him out, they never beat him up. 102 When they turn him out.

In line 90, the interviewer asks if the whites bothered the African Americans whether they had done anything or not. Whilst the referents remain vague since there is no subject in the question, it is clear from the prior text that the subject is ‘whites’. This thus occasions the relevance of colour to the upcoming narrative. Initially, Smalley displays a lack of knowledge on the subject (line 92: “I wouldn’t know”). In suggesting that she does not know, she mitigates the credibility of the

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

forthcoming talk and so sidesteps full accountability, as such displaying an orientation to the topic as a delicate (Schegloff, 1980). She then says that she used to be scared but since she has been here (i.e., in Hempstead) nobody has bothered her because she acts ‘↑RIGHT’. The word right is stressed and spoken with a rising intonation and as such it stands out from the surrounding talk. The implication is that if African Americans act ‘right’, the whites will not bother them. The whites are thus positioned as upholders of the law who have a position whereby they can ‘bother’ those who do not ‘act right’. She then shifts to a short narrative of her son who was put in jail for being drunk. Interestingly, jail is occasioned as a category of place which generates the relevance of the identities ‘law breaker’ and ‘law enforcer’. In this case, the identities of ‘law enforcer’ and ‘law breaker’ are colour coded through the category generated actions of whites (line 110 ff: ‘they’) putting people in jail and turning them out and African Americans being put in jail and being turned out. Moreover, the white law keepers (line 110 ff: ‘they’) display benevolence by not beating up their African American offenders when they release them. The white law enforcers thus punish, but do not mistreat. This brief story therefore humanises and normalises the behaviour of the paternalistic white law enforcers who can discipline African Americans when they do not act ‘right’. In line 103, the interviewer then probes for more information: ‘they whupped some of them’, as we see in the following fragment. Extract 3.3 (Laura Smalley) 103 IR They whupped some of them [(though often) some of them. 104 IE [Yes, they whupped some of them, 105 but you see I didn’t know. 106 They whupped some of them. Beat them around, 107 you know, they t-try to act tough and get drunk, you know, 108 and try to act tough, you know, and they beat some them 109 now I tell you. (.) And they did ah, women, some of them 110 around here they kick them and knock 111 them about, sometime. They get drunk, you know, 112 and wouldn’t listen at them, you know, what they’d say, 113 you know. They’d knock them put them in jail, 114 something like that (.) The biggest been doing around

In this fragment, in response to the interviewer’s question which probes for information on white-on-black brutality, Smalley minimalises any white brutality and within the turn she shifts topic to coloured folks killing each other. Consequently, the issue of white-on-black violence is side stepped and the issue of black-on-black violence and lawlessness is topicalised. In line 103, the interviewer states “They whupped some of them [(though often) some of them”. This statement potentially challenges Smalley’s categorization of the whites as benevolent law givers



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

and recategorises them as either brutal law enforcers, or just brutal. In line 104, Smalley agrees with this (“yes, they whupped some of them”). However, this is mitigated by an epistemic downgrade (line 105: “you see I didn’t know”). In suggesting that she did not know, she mitigates the tellability of any upcoming story since a story that is based on not knowing becomes unreliable. In this way, Smalley sidesteps accountability since, as Pomerantz (1984a, p. 609) points out, speakers are accountable for talk that proposes to represent an actual state of affairs, the more so if they claim direct first-hand personal knowledge of those events. Thus, by doing an epistemic downgrade, Smalley mitigates her accountability for what she is about to say and does not frame the upcoming talk as first-hand experience which would carry with it higher accountability for being ‘right’. However, despite the epistemic downgrade, she lists a series of cases of white-on-black violence: they whupped some of them, beat them, kick and knock around the women, and put them in jail. The whites are thus ascribed identities as perpetrators of violence. However, since putting people in jail is part of this list, it can be seen that such violence had a quasi-judicial aspect to it and that white-on-black violence was part of the extra-judicial means by which whites controlled the African American communities. Jail, as previously noted, being a place that generates the category ‘criminal’ thus makes relevant a standardised relational pair (SRP) of law breakers and law enforcers. In this case they (the whites) are the law enforcers who put the African Americans, implicitly categorised as law breakers, in jail. Further, this account of white-on-black violence is extensively mitigated by modifiers. For example: whupped some of them; beat some of them; and some of them around here they kick them and knocked them about sometime. Thus whilst she admits that white-on-black violence did happen, this is mitigated in several ways. First, the talk lacks epistemic certainty because Smalley frames it as something she did not know about. Second, the violence is mitigated by a series of downgrades (some, sometimes, round here). Third, the violence has quasi-judicial accountability since they (the white folk) also put people in jail which is normatively associated with punishment of lawbreakers. Smalley then carries out a shift in topic which moves away from white-on-black violence and shifts to black-on-black violence, which, by comparison, she frames as much worse. Extract 3.4 (Laura Smalley) 114 IE something like that (.) The biggest been doing around 115 here was (.) when coloured folk killing up one another 116 for a while, you know (.) Was killing up one another for a 117 while. Women killing other women about they husbands, 118 and all like that. 119 IR Uhmm. 120 IE That was the biggest doing (.4) m-m-men killing

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves



121 122 IR 123 IE 124 125 IR (2) 126 IE 127 128 129 130 131

wives right there in town. Is that right? Yes, sir. Man=the man killed his wife right there in town (.) > Right there in the ↑STREETS Right there in the ↑STREETS Right there in the ↑STREETS < which rises to a crescendo with the loudly spoken STREETS accompanied by a rising intonation adds further precision and adds to the truth value of the claim. The second interviewer then says “killed her” which provokes further stories underlining the fact that this was not an isolated event but was common practice. In line126, Smalley states that “another man would have killed a woman” but for the intervention of the doctor, and Smalley then adds an extreme story of her niece cutting her husband’s head off. Again, the proximity to the event (“right down there in this Bottom”), which she states is not more than five miles away, and the family closeness add credibility to the story. These stories of black-on-black violence thus contrast starkly with her prior stories of white-on-black violence. Unlike the stories of white-on-black violence which are mitigated by modifiers, the stories of black-on-black violence are (1) delivered with claims to proximity and direct first-hand knowledge of events, and (2) display extreme violence (­cutting heads off and murder). In line 131, Smalley, sums up the stories: “Them Niggas was killing up them=themselves”. In short, Smalley mitigates white-on-black violence and boosts black-onblack violence and lawlessness. The African Americans, in alignment with pseudo-­ scientific theories of race that shored up white supremacy, are thus constructed as



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

beasts with a natural inclination to violence. Further, in her minimalisation of white-on-black violence, she justifies the whites’ right to use racial violence as an instrument of ensuring public order. Smalley’s narrative therefore does identity work that supports a hegemonic master narrative of degenerate and lawless African Americans and the right of whites to use extra-judicial violence as a way of keeping the African Americans in check. Smalley’s hegemonic apology for white violence and exaggeration of black-on-black violence is all the more potent since she voices and normalises the ideology of the oppressor (Gramsci, 1971) and through this narrative she constructs a racist society based on a form of pseudo-scientific racism in which African Americans are little more than beasts who, being unable to manage their own affairs, needed disciplining by their white superiors. Interview with Harriet Smith Harriet Smith’s narrative contrasts with the preceding ones by Ledbetter and Smalley. Smith enacts a counter-narrative (Bamberg, 2004) in which white folk are ascribed perpetrator identity and in which African Americans are able to fight against their oppressors. However, the force of this counter-narrative is mitigated since she redefines the perpetrators of the violence as poor whites thus exculpating all whites and softening the general applicability of her racially defined category work. In line 99, the interviewer asks a question about the murder of Smith’s husband. Extract 3.5 (Harriet Smith) 99 IR Well what I was=what I’m trying to (.) to find out is, 100 how come him to kill your husband. Was it over politics? 101 IE Over politics and different things you know. 102 (0 0) Poor white people. 103 IR Did the white folks have your husband killed 104 or did uh, did he just, Walter (Beyer) just go 105 shoot him [( ) 106 IE [No, my husband went to cedar break that 107 day, and uh (.) and he=on his way back uh, 108 from the cedar break (.) he lay by the road and 109 killed him (.) And let’s see, there was something about 110 0a horse, I don’t hardly, how they done0, but the white people, 111 Walter (Beyer) and them, was the first one got to 112 him when he was killed=they had to shoot him, you know (.) 113 And they brought the 0news to us. My brother and me0. 114 IR What did they do to Walter (Beyer)? 115 IE Well, you know how that was. He lived up in there, 116 you know. They would tell any kind of tale. 117 They didn’t do nothing, didn’t hang him up,

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves



118 put him in jail about (.) 0seemed like ( )0. 119 But his brother-in-law killed him. 120 IR Is that right? 121 IE Sure. 122 IR They must have been a-shooting a lot of folk 123 up in them days. 124 IE Oh yeah, them peoples was poor peoples you know. 125 Rich white people don’t bother nobody. 126 IR Oh, it was the poor white folks. 127 IE Uh yes, it was poor (.)When they come down, 128 and his brother-in-law Sid Lawson killed him. 129 Sid his father moved away. Had a good home over there, 130 and then moved away, said they’d steal his life 131 just like they stole Bob and Jim’s. So, and his boy’s life, 132 so he left and went to Ok=Oklahoma. Yes (.3) 133 His brother-in-law kill him. He rode up to ( ) to 134 kill his brother-in-law.

In line 99, the interviewer asks, “how come him to kill your husband. Was it over politics?” This formulation detopicalises racial issues and suggests that politics was the reason for the killing. Smith responds to this by saying that he was killed over “politics and different things”. Thus, whilst accepting the interviewer’s projection of politics as a motivation for the murder, she then adds a vague increment (different things) which fudges potential racial issues. However, after a silently spoken and untranscribable word, she continues her turn and she announces that the murderers were “poor white people”. At this point, colour is thus made explicitly relevant to the interaction, but it is significant that the interviewee mitigates this: the perpetrators were poor whites. This saves the face of the white, but university educated, interviewer and it also mitigates the overtly racist nature of the killing, introducing within the category device ‘white’ the distinction between ‘rich’ white and ‘poor’ white which are later attributed the predicates good white and bad white respectively (line 124–125). The interviewee picks up on Smith’s racialised identity work and asks for more precision in the following line: “did the white folks have your husband killed or did uh, did he just, Walter (Beyer) just go shoot him” (lines 103–105). Significantly, the interviewer does not align with the dichotomy rich/poor white and he does identity work that returns to the category ‘white’. In fact, his question is hearable as an attempt to disambiguate Harriet Smith’s prior turn: Was it white folk as a group who were responsible for the murder or was it Walter Beyer acting as an individual? If Walter Beyer acted as an individual, and not as an instrument of white folk, then racialised identities may not be relevant to the story. However, in the next turn, Smith rejects the notion that “Walter (Beyer) just go shoot him”



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

and she confirms that “the white people, Walter (Beyer) and them” (line 110) killed her husband. Therefore, she implies that at the time of the murder, Walter Beyer was acting as a white person and so his identity and those of white folk are occasioned as mutually constitutive. This merger of Walter Beyer’s identity and the collective white folk occurs through a process of transpersonalisation whereby if “the actions of an individual can be seen as performed under the auspicious of that group membership then the characterization of the group and the individual are mutually constituting” (Jayyusi, 1984, p. 48). Thus, even though Walter Beyer pulled the trigger, white folk as a category were responsible for her husband’s murder. In line 114, the interviewer asks: “What did they do to Walter (Beyer)?” In line 116, Harriet Smith replies that “they would tell any kind of tale” which implies that they (the white folk) lied and as a result the perpetrator was not punished apart from being put in jail: “they didn’t do nothing, didn’t hang him up, put him in jail” (line 117–118). Consequently, even though Walter Beyer was a murderer, he escaped justice and so justice is perceived as being on the side of the whites, who are the law breakers. However, justice is finally rendered when her husband’s brother-in-law killed Walter Beyer. In line 120, the interviewer asks for confirmation (“is that right?”), to which he receives an affirmative reply. The interviewer then provides an evaluation to the story: “they must have been a– shooting a lot of folk in them days”. The pronoun is ambiguous but Smith orients to it as referring to (poor) whites when she states (line 124) “them peoples was poor peoples you know”. In the continuation of her turn, she adds “rich white people wouldn’t bother nobody” (line 125). Thus, the perpetrators in the story are poor whites which mitigates her ascription of perpetrator identity to whites as a race, yet it still keeps the racialization of the perpetrator/victim identities (i.e., poor whites and African Americans). The story ends in line 127 following, when the brother-in-law of the victim takes his revenge and kills Walter Beyer and then moves away to Oklahoma. In sum, then, Smith’s story is a counter-narrative in which an injustice is righted. The villains of the story are poor white folk, who initially escaped justice. Whites are thus ascribed the identity of the villains, but the story is mitigated and is not told along strictly racialised lines: the villains are more particularly poor white people. Thus, Smith modifies her challenge to the hegemonic master narrative of white superiority and softens its portrayal of whites as perpetrators since this action generated identity is not applicable to all whites. Yet despite this, it is still a story which revolves around colour and the colour coded identities of hero and villain. Consequently, it still talks into being the racialised world of the South and for the counter-narrative to work it assumes the relevance of a master narrative of racial superiority of whites who normatively have access to legal and extra-legal ways of controlling the African American population.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Overall, Ledbetter, Smalley and Harriet Smith’s narratives all make relevant racialised identities. Ledbetter and Smalley produce hegemonic discourses of white supremacy in which blackness equates with lawlessness and whiteness equates with moral rectitude. Harriet Smith’s counter-narrative, even though it is mitigated, challenges the discourse of white supremacy and constructs a storyworld of white lawlessness and of African Americans taking their revenge against their oppressors who are the poor whites. So either by acquiescing to (in the case of Ledbetter and Smalley) or by challenging (in the case of Harriet Smith), all interviewees orient their stories to a similar master narrative of racial inequality.

Analyses part two – constructing an emergent inclusive American identity In this section, we will zoom in on an interview that was recorded in 1975 and that thus took place after the Civil Rights movement which ended de jure segregation and which began to lay the foundations of a more inclusive society. In particular, we will focus on the interview with Charlie Smith, whose stories stand in stark contrast to the interviews recorded in the early 1940s and thus, as we will argue, have the potential to talk into being radically different master narratives. As Fredrickson (2002, p. 127 ff) points out, following the Second World War several factors favoured change in racially segregated America. First, following the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime, few people were prepared to espouse eugenics and the theories of racial superiority that had underpinned the Jim Crow segregationist South. Second, the Cold War and America’s positioning of itself as fighting for freedom against oppressive communist regimes rang hollow considering the blatant domestic discrimination against African Americans. Third, in the post-colonial world, the emergence of independent African states brought with it a challenge to colonial racist thinking. Thus, the post-war period ushered in the Civil Rights movement and momentous changes in the legal status and treatment of African Americans. The Civil Rights movement had two central objectives. First, it sought recognition for African Americans in a formal political sense through having access to the same rights as other Americans and, second, it sought recognition of African Americans in the social sense of being recognised as human beings who were not inferior in any way to other Americans (­Eyerman, 2001, p. 202). With these objectives in mind, the Civil Rights movement used ­non-violent protest such as mass civil disobedience in the form of boycotts of segregated transport, sit-ins of segregated restaurants, and peaceful marches such as the march on Washington which culminated in Martin Luther King Jnr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech which was delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of over 250,000 people. The speech famously proclaimed that, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’”.2 The result of this movement was far reaching legislation that acknowledged the civil rights of the African American population. Most notably, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in restaurants, hotels, theatres, and so on, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured that local jurisdictions could no longer impose restrictions on voting, such as literacy tests, which effectively disenfranchised many African Americans. In short, as Kook (1998, pp. 166–167) argues, these two acts “emerge as the critical watershed in terms of the inclusion of African Americans into the collective American identity”. Thus, the movement encapsulated a progressive narrative of inclusion which was based on: Enlightenment notions of individual autonomy and human dignity and the rights to full citizenship as guaranteed by law, the principles which inspired the French and American revolutions. (Eyerman, 2001, p. 19)

So, despite a white backlash which ranged from campaigns of delaying implementation of Federal Civil Rights legislation to intimidation, violence, ­ and assassinations, the Civil Rights movement laid the foundations for full civic ­participation and the recognition of African Americans as legitimate inheritors of the American dream. In short, it ushered in the master narrative of a multiracial and multi-ethnic society in which America was constituted by various ethnic, racial, and gendered groups each with their own unique contribution to make to, and stake in, the American dream enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”3 (Hall, 2005, p. 1252; Kook, 1998, p. 168). Story 1 from the interview with Charlie Smith In the first story from the interview with Charlie Smith, he recounts a story of his days as a lawman in which he and Billy the Kid arrest Charles Guiteau, the killer of President Garfield. The story is certainly fictitious. Guiteau was arrested immediately after shooting Garfield (as discussed in Chapter 2) and Billy the Kid was a criminal rather than a lawman who in any case was in jail when Garfield was killed. The observation that Smith’s stories are fictitious and the implications for this in terms of positioning at all three levels is taken up in more detail in Chapter 8. For the moment, we concentrate less on the implications of the a­ pparent fabrication of the story and more on the identity work that it achieves. .  Available at: 〈http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm 〉 .  Available at: 〈http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html 〉

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Extract 3.6 (Charlie Smith) 168 IR: You, you worked, you worked in Mississippi didn’t you? 169 IE: I’m a=I’m a state man mister. I work for the United 170 States. I go get bad people (.) I’m a state man and 171 will as long as I live. Here my folders right here. I’m a state 172 man (.) I’m the man went with, me and Billy the Kid, 173 the man went and got the man kill the President (.) 174 And the state name me. I got three name. The 175 United States, I work for the United States ↓now 176 (.7) Name me “Trigger Kid.” Me and Billy the Kid, went and

In line 168, the interviewer asks about Smith’s work in Mississippi (“you worked in Mississippi didn’t you”). Smith uses this prompt to launch into a story about his work as a US lawman. In the orientation phase to the story, he states that he is a state man (line 169). He then goes on to provide credentials of incumbency for this identity (i.e. a set of predicates that are occasioned as constituting this category (Jayyusi, 1984, p. 39)) which in this case are working for the United States (line 169) and getting bad people (line 170). Getting bad people thus implies a moral dimension since without bad people there can be no good people and this invokes an adversarial standardised relational pair (SRP) of good and bad. However, unlike in the interviews of the 1940s that we discussed in the previous section, good and bad are not predicates of race, but are predicates of the SRP law abiding citizen and law-breaker. This non-racial dimension to identity work is further underlined by the fact that he works with Billy the Kid, a white man, so that the identity state man is not related to colour. Rather, the identity state man is action generated through working for the United States. Paradoxically, (lines 174 ff.) Smith shows his allegiance to the United States by saying ‘the state name me [….] name me ‘Trigger Kid’. This is paradoxical since it is reminiscent of the renaming of slaves by their new masters which, as Walvin (2007, p. 128) notes, was “part of the broader process of recasting slaves in the planters’ mould and removing as far as possible all traces of Africa”. So, it is interesting that it is the United States as some sort of ‘new master’ that renames Smith as the ‘Trigger Kid’, thus placing his relationship to the United States as one of subordination.4 The attribution of a name to him by a third party is even more surprising since (line 194–195) he states that it is “a name I’ve hated’ which thus underlines his position of subordination. However, despite this somewhat paradoxical identity work, Smith displays his allegiance to the United States and so he claims an American identity which, as will be explicated below, .  Of course, we are aware that ‘Billy the Kid’ is also a pseudonym (viz. for William H. Bonney), but it is not presented as a name that is given by the state, as is the case for the interviewee’s pseudonym.



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

supersedes the racialised dichotomies of black and white. In lines 176 following, Smith moves into the story itself. Extract 3.7 (Charlie Smith) 176 IE (.7) Name me “Trigger Kid.” Me and Billy the Kid, went and 177 got the man kill the President, went and got him. Had a five 178 hundred dollar reward, anybody go get him. He kill the President (.) 179 Guiteau killed Garfield. Garfield the first President ever was killed 180 of the United State. And the man killed him name Guiteau and 181 went back over in his state where he come from. 182 IR That was Charles Guiteau wasn’t it? 183 IE And when they, put out the five hundred dollar reward anybody 184 would go get him. There was six men (.) right at the line of the 185 states. You had to get your authorities from them to go over 186 there. Everybody go over there and get them five hundred 187 dollars, them mens would kill them. Kill them. (0them six men0) 188 They’d kill you. If you go over there and get that man, the man 189 done the killing, he went back in that state because that was the 190 state he was born and raised in. And there’s six men right at the 191 line of the United States. You, you, you had to get authorities 192 from them to go any further in that state. And they done it, 193 and we, me and Billy the Kid, they sent us over there. This 194 United States name me “Trigger Kid,” but that’s a name I’ve 195 hated. I been working for the United=I work for the United 196 States now. If you bad, I get all bad people. That’s my job now. 197 White or black (.7) If you be do the wrong thing, and they send me 198 after you, only reason I won’t get you, I won’t see you. They 199 send us after him. The man kill the President. ((recording stops 200 briefly then interview starts up again and shifts topic))

In line 176, Smith begins the story: “Me and Billy the Kid, went and got the man kill the president, went and got him”. The complicating action comes in lines 183 following when Smith and Billy the Kid give chase to the assassin but are blocked at the state line because “there were six men right (.) at the line of the states. You had to get your authorities from them to go over there”. This complication is resolved in lines 192–193 since “they done it” (i.e., got the authorization) “and we, me and Billy the Kid, they sent us over there”. The story ends with the evaluation (lines 196 ff.) which sums up the point of the story: “If you bad, I get all bad people. That’s my job now. White or black”. Unlike the interviews in the previous section, colour is specifically occasioned as not being a relevant identity. Perpetrator identity is ascribed to Guiteau through his actions of killing the president and the law is enforced by Smith and Billy the Kid as state men which makes professional identity, rather than colour, relevant to the interaction in the storyworld. Further, bad

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

men are occasioned as law breakers, whether they are black or white, and in this case Guiteau as the perpetrator has the moral evaluation and the predicate ‘bad’ ascribed to him. In short, being a state man is occasioned as claiming membership of a morally self-organised group which can be defined as a group which is “specifically constituted by its members round some set of moral-practical beliefs, commitments, codes, values, interests, concerns, etc” (Jayyusi, 1984, p. 48). In other words, to be a state man one must assume a set of moral-practical beliefs and so on that are occasioned as being a criterion of belonging to the group. Thus, through Smith’s identity work, an American identity emerges which is open to anybody who embraces American values and recognises good and bad whether ‘white or black’ (line 196). The dichotomy of black and white is irrelevant and so Smith enacts a master narrative of an inclusive American identity based on values. This identity work is also democratic since Smith states (line 196) “if you be do the wrong thing, and they send me after you, only reason I won’t get you, I won’t see you”. The ‘you’ can be hearable either as oriented to the (white) interviewer or as a generic you referring to ‘any person’. Smith therefore infers that the law is not only colour blind, but that it is also universally applicable. His identity work is thus in stark contrast to the narratives of law and order form the early 1940s which make colour relevant (whether as master narrative or counter-­narrative) and which therefore construct the segregationist world of pre-Civil Rights America. Though it is also significant that Smith has to explicitly draw attention to the fact that the law is colour blind, hinting at the fact that even in the here-and-now of the interview world of the 1970s, this may not be taken for granted. Moreover, it is interesting that the identity that Smith makes relevant for himself, is that of lawman which represented the archetypal American who, within the genre of the western movie/novel, was on a quest to right wrongs and to triumph over evil. As Feldman (2001, p. 135) observes, until recently, “the cowboy story was our American national identity story”. Thus, following Briggs and Bauman (1992), through the use of such a genre, Smith does identity work that provides a powerful strategy for not only building what Anderson (1983) terms an “imagined community”, but also for building his own place within this nationally defined community in which colour is irrelevant. Story 2 from the interview with Charlie Smith A similar master narrative invoking an inclusive American identity can be seen in the second extract which consists of two stories in which Smith again assumes the role of the United States lawman who rights injustices. Even though the injustices described here are white-on-black, the grounds for dealing with them are to do with breaking federal law. In this case, Smith again invokes the identities of law enforcer and perpetrator, thus making race irrelevant. In line 274, the interviewer



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

asks if Smith wears glasses. Through a stepwise topic transition (i.e. an incremental rather than abrupt change in topic), Smith recounts a story of his days as a state man in which he rights an injustice.5 Extract 3.8 (Charlie Smith) 274 IR And you don’t=you don’t wear glasses. 275 IE No, I ain’t never wore none. 276 IR And you don’t wear a hearing aid, is that it? 277 IE I got hearing. I hear just as good now as I ever been hearing. 278 IR Oh, I believe that. 279 IE I can see good as I ever have. The United States takes care 280 of me (.5) The United States (.) If I=if they send me direction, 281 only reason I don’t get you, I don’t see you (.) 282 I’m the man st=straightened up (Wallshore). Sent me there. 283 Coloured people didn’t pass through there (.) You could go 284 up-town but you couldn’t stay in (Wallshore). I straighten it up. 285 The state sent me there to straighten it. Now the coloured 286 people own property there. Right between here 287 and (Wallshore). The coloured porter couldn’t get off 288 the train there (.5) White folks didn’t allow him to get 289 off the tr=coloured porter on the train couldn’t get off there. 290 The state sent me there, to straighten it up. I straightened 291 it so the coloured folks can get off there. Now coloured, 292 coloured people own, own property in, in (Wallshore). 293 I had to go to near (Oxford)

In the prior talk, Smith has said that he is 144 years old. The interviewer asks him about wearing glasses and having a hearing aid, both of which Smith says he doesn’t have. He then states that “I can see good as I ever have. The United States takes care of me (.5) The United States” (line 279). This hints at his identity as a member of the category device ‘American’, yet paradoxically it also hints at a benevolent master identity for the United States that is reminiscent of slavery times – so, on an utterance by utterance basis traces of contradictory Discourses may be found within stories as they progress. The fact that the United States is his ‘master’ is confirmed in the continuation of his turn when he states that “If I=if they [i.e., the United States] send me direction, only reason I don’t get you, I don’t

.  Interestingly, this story is reported in Smith’s biography (Byrd, 1978, p. 83) and in a report in The Ledger (January 18th, 1978). In both cases, there is no mention of Smith being a lawman sent to resolve the issue. In the biography and newspaper article, the town in question is Wauchula, Florida and in the story Smith settles down and lives there as the first coloured man in a non-segregated town.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

see you (.)”. He then begins his story as the man who ‘straightened out’ Wallshore. The complicating action is that “coloured people didn’t pass through there” (line 283), “you couldn’t stay in Wallshore” (line 284) and the coloured people and the train porter couldn’t get off the train there (lines 285). Without going into details of how the problem was resolved, Smith states that he “straightened it up” (line 289) so that now “coloured folks can get off there” and even own property in Wallshore (line 291). Thus, even though the situation concerns racial segregation, the solution is presented not as an African American man straightening out something that is wrong, but as a state man, acting under the auspices of the United States. Consequently, through a process of transpersonalisation, his actions become accountable in terms of his allegiance to the values of the United States. This makes colour irrelevant to the identities law enforcer and law breakers, who, in this case, are not named as white folk, but are constructed as being in opposition to the United States. In sum, an American identity emerges in which right and wrong and good and bad are not colour coded, but they are enacted in terms of abiding, or failing to abide, to federal laws. In line 293, Smith follows this story with a second similar story relating to a town called Oxford. Extract 3.9 (Charlie Smith) 293 IE I had to go to near (Oxford) 294 Sign was printed up there right at the depot (.) 295 What the sign say, “Read Nigger And Run.” (.) 296 That what was on the sign. The state sent me there. Say, 297 “Go tear that sign down.” Said, “If you need any help, 298 let us know that.”(.) I went there (.) The sign was right up 299 there (.) right at the depot. Said, “Read Nigger And 300 Run.” (.) He say, he ask me, “You, you got authority?” 301 I said, “Yeah. I got authority.” “Present your authorities.” 302 “Here my goddamn authorities, and here my help. 303 These forty-fives.” I tore it down. At, at, at (Oxford). I 304 tore it down (.) Anywhere the states tell me to go and do, 305 I does it. Now. Always did ever since I been working for 306 the U=I been working for the United States a hundred years. 307 But I’m grown older now. 308 IR Do you belong to the Mason Lodge?

Since there is no loss of continuity between the two stories, the identity that is still relevant is that of a US lawman who “had to go to near (Oxford)”. The modal of obligation ‘had’, marking it as his duty, thus indicates that the giver of the order was his employer ‘the United States’ which is confirmed in line 296, “the state sent me there”. The complicating action is that there is a sign “printed up there right at



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

the depot (.) What the sign say, “Read Nigger And Run.”“6 Thus, as with the previous story, the problem is presented as a racial problem, yet as will be explained, the resolution is framed in terms of a state man, representing the United States, straightening out those who defy the nation. Interestingly, as this defiance of the nation consists of a racist sign, and as it is the state that sent Smith there with the instructions to ‘tear that sign down’, he constructs the United States not only as colour-neutral, but also as anti-racist. When Smith arrives at Oxford to take the sign down, he is asked for his authority to which he produces his forty-fives,7 says “here my goddamn authorities”, and tears the sign down. The coda of the story is that (lines 304 ff.) “anywhere the states tell me to go and do, I does it. Now. Always did ever since I been working for the U=I been working for the United States a hundred years”. Thus, as with the prior story, the identity that is made relevant to the interaction is that of a state man working for the United States. Similarly, through a process of transpersonalisation (Jayyusi, 1984, p. 48), his identity and that of the United States become mutually constituting. So, by acting directly on the orders of the United States, any predicates occasioned as relevant for Smith can also be attributed to the United States and vice-versa. In this case, Smith is the hero who takes down the sign. The villain of the piece is the person who challenges Smith’s morally constituted authority. Smith, as a law enforcer, is morally good as is the United States, and even though the situation is partially defined in terms of colour, it is resolved in terms of the standardised relational pair state law enforcers and perpetrators in which colour is irrelevant – even when an African American law enforcer is tearing down racial signs and communicates with white racists, as is presumably the case in line 303. Consequently, the identities that are made relevant when the situation is resolved, are those of “a state man” and of those resisting the state. Therefore, as with the previous story, an American identity emerges that is open to those who share the same moral values as the United States. Moreover, as Smith’s membership of the morally organised group ‘the United States’ testifies, this identity is not colour coded, and those who construct it as colour-coded, are sanctioned by the United States through the person of Charlie Smith as law enforcer.

.  Interestingly, Rogers (1999, p. 121) reports a similar sign in a story which allegedly took place in a town called Sullivan’s Hollow in the Mississippi Delta. This would tend to suggest that Smith’s story is generic. .  Presumably a reference to the colt.45 revolver.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Conclusions As Whooley (2006, p. 295) points out, “the political relevance of narratives can assume different forms, given the different conditions under which narratives are produced” and that therefore, in order to grasp the political relevance of a narrative, one must understand the circumstances of its production. Making a comparison between narratives of law and order recorded in the early 1940s and comparing them with narratives from the mid-1970s, this chapter investigated the construction of identity-in-narrative in relation to law and order and the commensurate moral dimensions of good and bad, hero and villain. On the one hand, the analyses demonstrated that narratives dating from the 1940s do identity work that constructs the fundamentally racist nature of the United States of that time. Myrdal’s (1944) seminal work on the ‘Negro problem’ and American democracy makes it clear that in the 1940s, the whites found “the Negroes entire biological, historical and social existence as a participant American … an anomaly” (1944, p. xlv). As Myrdal (1944) notes, at that time, there was a dilemma whereby if, according to the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, then slavery would be against the founding principles of the constitution. The only way out of this dilemma was to attribute sub-human status to African Americans. Consequently, non-whites were treated as a lower caste that was outside a mainstream white America and simultaneously intra-racial white solidarity and democracy was established so that the lowest white had a higher social status than the highest African American. In short, African Americans were completely excluded from the American collective identity (Kook, 1998, p. 154) and America instantiated a Herrenvolk society whereby African Americans, however numerous or acculturated they may have been, were treated as permanent outsiders and aliens (Fredrickson, 1981, p. xi). This ‘othering’ was backed up by pseudo-scientific discourse of race which argued that racial characteristics were genetically determined and so African Americans were ‘naturally’ and inevitably inferior to whites. It is precisely this segregationist black/white dichotomy which is enacted in the interviews from the 1940s. Ledbetter’s narrative equates goodness with whiteness and so he enacts a master narrative of white supremacy. Smalley’s narrative comes close to justifying white-on-black violence as a means of holding in check ‘the baser traits of the less than human Negro’ and therefore she also talks into being a white supremacist master narrative that reflected the Jim Crow southern society of the 1940s. As such both these narratives are extremely hegemonic since the oppressed recreate a storyworld in which they are the villains and the whites are the heroes. Their narratives actually support the racist society in which



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

they are the victims because they establish a racial and moral order that reflects the belief that a racial hierarchy is natural and immutable. Thus, these narratives align with the ideological sensibilities of the invisible audience to which the interviewees direct their gaze and so create a storyworld that aligns with their white supremacist oppressors. As Kopijn (1998, p. 151) suggests “narrators more or less consciously select their subjects according to their perception of the interviewer’s purpose, their definition of what is permissible to say in this context, their play of memory and their relationship with the interviewer”. So, in the world of the interview, the interviewees also enact an identity that aligns with contemporary racist ideologies and they ‘do’ hegemony to the extent that they talk into being identities of the oppressed by espousing an ideology that denigrates them. On the other hand, Harriet Smith enacts a counter-narrative in which the whites are the villains of the piece and in which revenge is sought by African Americans. Thus, whilst this narrative does not enact a white supremacist master narrative, it does occasion a black and white dichotomy and so still creates a segregated social world, even if this world is one in which oppression can be fought. However, the force of this counter-narrative is somewhat mitigated as the villains are not white but are poor whites. As such she does facework that avoids threatening the face of the interviewer who, as a university educated white, would not be included in the categorizing of the villains. Indeed, rich white folk “didn’t bother anybody”. Charlie Smith’s narrative, even if it is almost certainly fictitious, does identity work that makes the black and white dichotomy irrelevant. The villains of the piece (whether African American or white) are those who do not respect federal laws. The heroes are the law enforcers (whether black or white) who, by acting on behalf of the United States, embody the United States and vice-versa. This i­ dentity is a moral one which is action generated through enforcing the law and “getting bad people”. So anybody who works for the United States, carries out its will, becomes an American. This, thus, talks into being a master narrative of inclusion whereby belief in the founding principles of the United States, rather than place of birth, race, or ethnicity, is enough to ensure that one is an American. The identity work that Smith performs in his narrative is commensurate with the changes that came with the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King’s dream that “one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood“.8 It was only in the 1960s that African Americans became visible in American society and began to take on an American identity. As Kook (1998, p. 169) notes, “the

.  Available at: 〈http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm 〉

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Civil Rights ­legislation and the voting rights bill incorporated African Americans into more than the circle of American-voter, it incorporated them into the definition of American identity”. African Americans became American citizens because ­American is an adjective that points to citizenship, not birth place, nationality, colour, or race of those who claim incumbency of the identity ‘American’. Thus, having an American identity is “rooted in the notion of citizenship and the mere belief in this notion is enough to serve as an inclusionary mechanism” (Kook, 1998, p. 156). After the Civil Rights period, citizenship and belief in American values thus became the criterion which allowed the individual, regardless of colour, to claim membership of the collectivity America. And this is exactly what Charlie Smith does: it is his belief in American values and his actions to enforce federal law that make him an American and allow him to transcend the colour bar. Though of course, the fact that in the storyworld Smith has to fight against segregation is also emblematic of the fact that even though the Civil Rights legislation abolished the Jim Crow Laws, racism and de facto segregation were still very much a part of American life. In conclusion, an analysis of these interviews from different periods of ­American history demonstrates how: (1) the historical context of the interview, (2) the social context of the story’s telling, (3) the interaction between, and relevant identities of, the interviewee and interviewer, and (4) the imagined audience affect the narratives. A (self-proclaimed) former slave telling a story which enacts white supremacy might not be well received in the mid-1970s (though see Chapter 8), nor would a narrative of an inclusive American identity be seen as acceptable by many in the 1940s segregated South where Jim Crow laws enforced an ideology of difference. Such an ideology of difference is the core of racism because it “directly sustains or proposes to establish a racial order, a permanent group hierarchy that is believed to reflect the laws of nature or the decrees of God” (Fredrickson, 2002, pp. 6, italics in original). Thus, taken together, these analyses support the arguments that narratives do not take place in a social vacuum: they are not a direct transmission of memories of the past ‘as it was’. Rather, these analyses indicate that they are moulded by the context of their production and as Mishler (2006, p. 36) argues, “the past is not set in stone, but the meaning of events and experiences is constantly being reframed with the context of our current and ongoing lives”. It is not surprising then that the identity work in the narratives analysed in this chapter is so radically different reflecting, and (re)creating, the political mores and moral order of the context of their production. As Linde (2001, p. 163) notes “knowledge about one’s identity as a group member and the practice of acting as a member of the group one belongs to is easily expressed in narrative”. So, the narratives from the 1940s make racial identity relevant to the interaction in the storyworld and therefore (re)produce the racist and segregationist moral order of the United



Chapter 3.  Narratives and the historical context of the interview 

States in the 1940s. By contrast, Charlie Smith’s narratives do identity work that (re)produce a post-Civil Rights society that was changing and gradually internalizing the view that whites and African Americans are both equal and are entitled to full membership of the category Americans. Through being ‘good’ law abiding people, both African American and white citizens fulfil the criteria of incumbency that enables them to have membership of the morally organised group American. So this membership is explicitly constructed as being based on belief in American values rather than colour, but the emphasis that is put on this highlights the fact that the master narratives of this post-Civil Rights society are still in transition and are not taken for granted. Finally, it is also significant that even though Smith’s stories of law and order talk into being an inclusive American identity commensurate with the Discourse of the Civil Rights movement, in other parts of the same interview, which we discuss in Chapter 8, Smith evokes a master narrative of white benevolence consistent with the ideology of the oeuvre civilisatrice. Similarly within the story of the hunt for Guiteau (Extract 3.6), Smith recounts how the United States named him ‘Trigger Kid’ which invokes a master narrative of white power and supremacy, yet it is embedded in a story that evokes an inclusive American identity. Thus, (1) on a turn by turn basis, different master narratives can become fleetingly relevant as the talk progresses within the same story and (2) different, and apparently contradictory, master narratives can be invoked within the same interview. We address the implications of these two observations more fully in Chapter 8.

chapter 4

Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ and current dominant discourses* “We didn’t have nothing only just er like your cattle, we were just turned out” (Fountain Hughes, 1949)

Introduction As discussed in Chapter  2, the vast majority of the interviews were carried out in the 1930s and the 1940s, thus long before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. In this chapter, we temporarily ignore the two interviews that date from the mid-1970s, and really zoom in on the narratives of people who were probably born as slaves and who had experienced the slave system, albeit as children or young adults. The three stories from the pre-Civil Rights time that were analysed in Chapter 3, make relevant a black-and-white dichotomy, thus reflecting the segregated social world in which African Americans occupied an inferior position. We showed that master narratives of white supremacy and full citizenship as a status reserved only for whites can be acquiesced to or countered, but all three interviews under scrutiny demonstrated an orientation to a racial opposition of black-and-white. In contrast to the previous chapter in which the stories that were analysed focused on the post-bellum period when the former slaves were free, we now focus mainly on stories directly related to slavery. More specifically, we refer to stories that look back to the antebellum period and to the Civil War, when the

*  The slave-as-animal identity was also the central topic of one of our previously published articles, namely Van De Mieroop and Clifton (2011). In this chapter, we not only take a different angle to this identity construction, but we also build upon our previous findings. Half of the extracts in this chapter were also presented in the article (namely Extracts 4.1, 4.2, 4.5, 4.7 and 4.8), but they are discussed from a different perspective here and complemented by the analysis of five ‘new’ extracts.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves .

interviewees were actually slaves, and to the emancipation immediately following the war. Furthermore, we select the stories on the basis of the presence of a particular identity that is talked into being, namely that of the slave-as-animal. Such an identity can almost be considered as an embodiment of white supremacy master narratives. In particular, the slave-as-animal identity seems to have a clear link to pseudo-scientific polygenetic theories and to racist interpretations of Darwin’s evolutionary theory in which African Americans and whites were grouped as one category (i.e. the homo sapiens), originating from a common ancestor, namely the ape. The white supremacist view of this theory would place whites at the top of the evolutionary scale, while African Americans occupied a position that was lower in the evolutionary hierarchy and hence they were much closer to this common ancestor, and thus to animals. Of course, as we think there is no single master narrative these interviewees can draw upon, we do not claim that these views ‘obliged’ the narrators to talk such slave-as-animal identities into being. Rather, one could say that there are a number of potential plotlines that all account for the inferiority of the ‘Negro race’ in comparison with the white race, and that allow for the construction of an identity of the slave-as-animal. Furthermore, this slave-as-animal identity is also closely related to the foundations of the slave system, which are based on “the assumed principle of human chattlehood, or property in man; casting the relation of owner and property – of master and slave” (Goodwell, 1853, p. 23). In this respect, the slave-as-animal identity may strongly invoke chattel slavery. This is because by casting the slaves in the role of animals, master narratives of the slavery system are invoked, in which slaves, like domesticated animals, were considered to be property that was under the total control of the masters. Of course, while white supremacy master ­narratives were still current at the time of the interview, slavery system master narratives of the slave-as-property were no longer current at the time of storytelling. In this respect, we will use the term ‘historical’ master narratives, which can thus be defined as master narratives that some – or all – of the interlocutors have (experiential) knowledge of but that either gradually evolved, or that dramatically altered due to historical events that made drastic changes to the foundations of these master narratives. Regarding our data, the Civil War caused quintessential changes to the status of African Americans in the south of the United States, as those who were enslaved were suddenly liberated from the yoke of slavery. However, as discussed in the preceding chapters, this did not imply racial equality: even though the former slaves were freed, they were still second class citizens. So after the Civil War, on the one hand, African Americans were not legally bound to slave owners anymore and thus they were freed from their status as property. On the other hand, as the slaves received “freedom and nothing more” at the end of the Civil War, their living conditions were still very poor and due to their illiteracy and



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

an overall lack of any form of professional training, they often did not have much choice other than to pursue the same type of agricultural labour as they had during the days of slavery (Rodriguez, 2007, p. 147). Furthermore, African Americans were not considered to be equal to the whites and held a second class status for many years to come, as for example discussed in Chapter 3. And thus, the major change between ‘historical’ antebellum master narratives and post-bellum master narratives of the time of the interview regarding the relation between African Americans and whites, consisted mainly of the matter of being someone’s property versus being a freedman, while the status of African Americans as inferior to the whites, remained largely the same. Of course, the orientation to master narratives relating to white supremacy is not a passive relation of a story reflecting what is ‘out there’ and in which narrators are “assigned certain subject positions by pre-existing structures (…) that are postulated a priori of specific interactions” (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012, pp. 162–163). Such a static way of looking at individuals’ positions as prediscursive entities that are then reproduced in discourse, as can for example be found in the work by Harré and Moghaddam (2003), is of course not in line with the social constructionist premise on which our analyses are based. Rather, we look at which positions are talked into being and how these relate to dominant discourses in a ­bi-directional agentive way. This bi-directionality of agency between dominant discourses and narrators takes the form of a dialectic movement between a speaker’s passive and active involvement in this process, which can described as follows: On the one hand, historical, sociocultural forces in the form of dominant discourses or master narratives position speakers in their situated practices and construct who they are without their agentive involvement. On the other hand, speakers position themselves as constructive and interactive agents and choose the means by which they construct their identities vis-à-vis others as well as visà-vis dominant discourses and master narratives. (De Fina et al., 2006, p. 7)

This continuum between the narrators’ active and passive involvement with positioning or being positioned vis-à-vis these sociocultural forces can also be reflected in their choice of discursive devices. These are emblematic for this agency dilemma (Bamberg, De Fina, & Schiffrin, 2011), since narrators can “either pick narrative devices that lean toward a person-to-world direction of fit, or they pick devices that construe the direction of fit from world-to-person” (Bamberg, 2011, p. 106). Hence, it is interesting to scrutinise these discursive devices on the agency dimension of identity navigation, as they can help identify the narrator’s position on the continuum between constructing oneself either as a “recipient”/“undergoer” or an “agentive self-constructer” (Bamberg, 2011, p. 106).

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

It is clear that this agency dilemma is closely related to the essence of some of the master narratives to which the interlocutors may orient: while pre- and postslavery master narratives are all concerned with racial inequality, the ‘historical’ master narrative of the slavery system revolves around the slave as property and thus a lack of agency by the slaves vis-à-vis their own lives. This changes after the Civil War, as the African Americans became freedmen and thus had a certain – although in practice often limited – amount of say about their own lives. In this chapter we will particularly zoom in on two interviews from the 1940s containing stories in which the slave-as-animal identity is made relevant. Throughout this chapter, the narrators’ identity navigation between the dimensions of agency will form a pivotal analytical thread. This will help us relate the way in which these identities are talked into being on the first and second level of positioning (i.e., in the storyworld and in the interactional context of the interview) to the way the narrators position themselves in relation to ‘historical’ master narratives of slavery and/or master narratives of white supremacy, which have a wider temporal applicability.

Analyses The identity of the slave-as-animal is especially prevalent in two interviews, namely the interviews with Fountain Hughes and Laura Smalley. In our analyses, we aim to uncover the discursive ways in which these slave-as-animal identities are introduced in the stories and how they are interactively constructed, foregrounded, or downplayed, consistently paying attention to the way in which the agency dilemma is negotiated by the narrators. Importantly, we divided this section along two types of animal comparisons that occur in these interviews, namely the slave-as-cattle and the slave-as-dog. While the former animal comparison occurs in both interviews, the latter only occurs in the interview with Fountain Hughes. So the first analytical section focuses on the slave-as-cattle identity. Given the many parallelisms between the ways in which this identity is invoked in the two interviews, we start by discussing both interviews together and focus on two stories that are related in highly similar ways by the two interviewees. Then, we zoom in on Laura Smalley’s interview and we particularly look at other cases in which the slave-as-cattle identity constructions are talked into being. Finally, in the second analytical section, we explore another animal comparison that Fountain Hughes invokes in his stories, namely that of the dog. In particular, we explore how this other slave-as-animal identity differs from the slave-as-cattle identity as discussed in the first analytical subsection, and finally we draw conclusions on the basis of these findings.



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

Slave-as-cattle identities constructed by Fountain Hughes and Laura Smalley Both interviewees use the slave-as-cattle identity in relation to stories revolving around two themes, namely the selling of slaves on slave markets and the emancipation of the slaves after the Civil War. Both interviewees construct these stories in fairly similar ways and they also engage in identity work that is relatively similar, which we discuss in detail here. As a final part of this section, we focus on some other stories that revolve around the slave-as-cattle identity that only occur in the interview with Laura Smalley. The selling of slaves on slave markets The interviewees frame these stories of the selling of slaves as hearsay stories in which they were not personally involved in the action. As such, they can potentially take a step back from these stories and relate them as narratives of vicarious experience. This is the case in the first fragment, taken from the interview with Laura Smalley, in which the interviewer explicitly asks about the interviewee’s memories of slave sellers and slaves being sold in the opening lines of this extract: Extract 4.1 (Laura Smalley) 242 IR1 Well, do you remember=remember 243 any of the slaves being sold? Do you 242 remember any slave sellers, you 243 know, men that would just buy and 244 sell slaves? 255 IE No, sir. I never did see it. Why I 256 never, us children never did know 257 that, you know. We heard talk of it, 258 but then I reckon that was after 259 (.3) after slavery I reckon. 260 IR1 0uhum0 261 IE 0We heard talk of it0 (.) I used to hear 262 them talk about, you know, you 263 putting them on stumps, you know. 264 Or something high, you know and 265 bidding them off like you did cattle. 266 IR1 uhum 267 IE Bid them off like you did cattle.

In lines 255–261, the interviewee repeatedly stresses her lack of any first-hand knowledge of slave markets and she downgrades her epistemic status to that of a child, as such evading full accountability as for example in Extract 3.2. Then she quietly repeats that she has hearsay knowledge of this topic (line 261) and embarks on a short story which consists mainly of the complicating action of the

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

selling of the slaves. Interestingly, throughout this description, the storyworld characters are left vague. First, the protagonists, the slaves, are referred to by the impersonal 3rd person plural pronominal form, which only occurs in object form (lines 263, 265 and 267: ‘them’). This talks into being the passive nature of the slaves’ contribution to the action, namely as objects that were traded. As ­Bamberg remarks, such a ‘low-agency marking assists in the construction of a victim role’ (2011, p.  106). Second, at the crucial point of the action (i.e. the bidding, see lines 265 and 267), the agentive subject of the sentence is dropped altogether, thus removing the agents, viz. the slave owners, from the act as well. Importantly, then, near the end of the fragment, the cattle comparison is inserted. It is initially voiced with marked prosody (‘cattle’ is pronounced in a louder voice in line 265) and it is subsequently repeated, thus giving it some emphasis. After this extract, the interviewer probes for a more personal story by asking if ‘none of your folks were ever sold then?’ (not presented here for reasons of space), but as the interviewee responds negatively, the topic is closed and abruptly shifted to where the interviewee was born. So, in this extract, the interviewee downplays her knowledge of this topic and then further distances herself from the story by framing it as hearsay. Furthermore, she uses generic pronominal forms as such blurring the agents and the recipients of this story, and at the end, the latter are then compared to cattle. By this comparison to domesticated animals, the interviewee highlights that they were totally dependent on their white master, as will be discussed in more detail later. Quite a similar story occurs in the interview with Fountain Hughes and the similarities in the formulation suggest that these stories were commonly told and shared among the slaves – as is also explicitly stated by Laura Smalley in lines 261–262 of the previous extract. As Hughes’ story is a bit longer, it is presented here in two separate fragments. Extract 4.2 (Fountain Hughes) 211 IE We were ↑slaves. We belonged to people. 212 They’d sell us like they sell horses and 213 cows (.) and hogs and all like that. 214 Have er a auction bench (.) and er put you on (.) 215 up on the bench and bid on you 216 just same as you bidding on cattle you know. 217 IR Was that in Charlottes that you were a slave? 218 IE ↑uh 219 IR Was that in Charlottes (.) or Charlottesville? 220 IE That was in Charlottesville 221 IR Charlottesville Virginia? 222 IE Selling women and selling men (1.5)



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

In response to the interviewer’s question ‘When you were a slave, who did you work for’ (not shown here because it occurred more than 30 lines before this fragment), Hughes gives an extended reply which covers several aspects of slave life and then towards the end of his turn, he shifts to the topic of buying and selling slaves. In line 211, the interviewee uses the ‘we’-form to foreground his self-­identification with the slaves, thus using a collective footing and assuming a speaking position on behalf of other former slaves as well. He then defines this by stating: ‘we belonged to people’ (line 211), as such contrasting the slave ingroup (‘we’) to the outgroup of ‘people’, in this case the slave owners. As such, he not only qualifies their relation in terms of property, but through this ingroup-outgroup opposition, he also implicitly dehumanises the identity of the ingroup members, who are thus constructed as ‘non-people’. In the following line, this ingroup-outgroup dichotomy is further emphasised by setting up an us-them opposition between the slave owners as the agents and the slaves as the passive recipients of the action (line 212: ‘They’d sell us’), thus positioning the slaves as ‘victims’ at the passive end of the agency continuum (Bamberg, 2011, p. 106). Then, by means of a comparison, the ingroup is labelled in terms of cattle, substituting the ‘us’ with ‘horses and cows (.) and hogs’ (lines 212–213). In the subsequent lines, however, the protagonists and antagonists are referred to in much less direct ways. On the one hand, the slave owners as agents of the action are obscured by the fact that the subject is dropped before the verbs ‘have’, ‘put’, and ‘bid’ (line 213 ff: ‘have er a auction bench (.) and er put you on (.) up on the bench and bid’). On the other hand, the slaves, as passive objects that are being traded, are referred to by means of the generic ‘you’-form (lines 214 ff: ‘put you on (.) up on the bench and bid on you’). However, in the final line of this turn, the referent of the ‘you’-form changes to a much more extended, but generic group (line 216: ‘just same as you bidding on cattle you know’). As such, the ‘you’form, which initially referred to the ingroup of slaves that were sold, now refers to the outgroup of slave buyers. This thus blurs the active agent – passive recipient dichotomy, which was set up so neatly (line 212: them-versus-us) in the beginning of the fragment. So, as soon as the slaves are equated with cattle, which is done by means of extensive wording and explicit terms (lines 212–213: ‘horses, cows, hogs and all like that’, line 216: ‘cattle’), the interviewee distances himself from the collectivity of protagonists by substituting all storyworld characters by the generic ‘you’-form, which, in turn, is then further blurred as its referent shifts to slave buyers in line 216. The interviewer then introduces a new question which presents a stepwise topic shift away from the selling of slaves to the location of the events. After a repeated question (line 219), the interviewee answers this question thus ratifying the topic change, but after the interviewer’s follow-up question (line 221), the

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

interviewee skip-connects to the previous topic and formulates a delayed coda (Labov & Waletzky, 1966). In this coda, he reframes the slaves-as-cattle as people (line 222: ‘selling women and selling men’). So at this point, he contradicts his initial opposition between slaves and people (line 211), but replaces the slavesas-­cattle by slaves-as-humans. This may function as a disambiguation, namely to clarify that the selling concerned humans instead of animals, or it may orient to the identity of slaves-as-cattle and the selling of human beings as problematic. Since this issue is not resolved by the participants, it remains ambiguous, but, importantly, Hughes continues his story as follows: Extract 4.3 (Fountain Hughes) 222 IE Selling women and selling men (1.5) 223 0All that (mm )0 >Then if they had any ↑bad ones, 224 they’d sell them to the ↑nigga traders, 225 what they called the ↑nigga traders. 227 And they’d ship them down south< (.) 228 and sell them down south. (2.0) 229 But u::h (1.9) otherwise if you was a good, good person 230 they wouldn’t sell you. But if you was ba::d and mean 231 and they didn’t want to:: beat you and knock you around, 232 they’d sell you what to the, what (they) call a ↑nigga trader. 233 They’d have a (regular) (.) have a sale (every) month, 234 you know, at the courthouse.

Even though this continuation does not contain any slave-as-cattle comparisons, it is important for our analyses as Hughes initially continues his story by inserting a conditional phrase about ‘bad ones’ that would be sold to the ‘nigga traders’. Again, these slaves are presented as property (line 223: ‘if they had any ↑bad ones’) and as the objects of the shipment and transaction (lines 224, 226 and 227: ‘them’). The slave owners are referred to by the third person plural pronominal form (line 223–225), but as the referent of this deictic form shifts in line 227 to the ‘nigga traders’, the specific agents of the action are slightly blurred. Interestingly, in the next line, the interviewee further elaborates on the selection of who was, and who was not sold, by setting up a dichotomy between good (line 229: ‘a good, good person’) and bad slaves (line 230: ‘ba::d and mean’) and causally relating the slaves’ behaviour to their potential selling. As such, the slaves become responsible for being sold, and the blame is shifted away from the slave owners, who are as such exculpated. This exculpation is further enforced by framing the selling of slaves to these ‘nigga traders’ as a way of avoiding violence (line 231: ‘they didn’t want to:: beat you and knock you around’), which implies that this is the necessary treatment of slaves that are ‘bad and mean’ (line 230). The interviewee then continues his story by giving more details about the frequency and place of these slave sales (line 233–234). After some further details about the prices that were paid, the topic



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

is then gradually ended by the interviewer’s follow-up question regarding whether the interviewee was ever sold, to which he responds negatively. This fragment thus talks into being a world in which good slaves were rewarded by not being sold, and bad slaves were punished by being traded to the ‘nigga traders’. Hence, the slaves are made accountable for their own potential sale by their behaviour, which can be either good or bad, and this accountability exculpates the slave owners. Furthermore, the latter are presented as eager to avoid violence, as they would prefer to solve the matter of ‘bad’ slaves by selling, rather than punishing, them. This talks into being a world in which slave owners have power over their slaves, but they use it in benevolent ways and it is actually the slaves themselves who should behave correctly according to the rules of the slavery system. So in both interviews, the slave-as-cattle identity is invoked in similar ways in the description of the selling of the slaves, and this particularly emphasises their status as property that can be traded at the owner’s will. However, in both stories, the agents of the slave sales are obscured by simply omitting them from the story (see Extracts 4.1 and 4.2) and, in addition, in the case of Hughes, mitigated by ­shifting the blame for them being sold to the slaves themselves (see Extract 4.3). So, in both Smalley’s and Hughes’ stories, they construct the identity of slaves-aschattel, thus making relevant their dependence on their masters. As the latter’s role is strongly mitigated, the interviewees do not denounce this situation and they thus acquiesce to the ‘historical’ master narrative of the slave as property. In the case of Hughes’ story, the white slave owners are even exculpated, thus also framing slavery as a benevolent system. The emancipation of the slaves after the Civil War Both interviewees discuss what happened when the Civil War ended and the slaves were emancipated. In their stories, they both use variations of the phrase ‘we were turned out like cattle’/‘they turned us out like cattle’. This not only constructs the slave-as-cattle identity, but it also links it to the membership of a collective group of slaves, as the interviewees use the 1st person pronominal form (‘we’ or ‘us’). Furthermore, it highlights the passive role of the group of slaves, since their role in the action is framed as that of the ‘recipients’ (Bamberg, 2011, p. 106) undergoing the emancipation process. This lack of agency is again underlined by the comparison to cattle and this foregrounds the slaves’ (former) position as property who were neither allowed – nor able – to take any form of initiative themselves. Further to these general observations about both interviews,1 it is particularly interesting to look into the way Fountain Hughes accounts for this animal

.  As the relevant extract from Laura Smalley’s interview was already discussed in an earlier article, we do not reproduce it here and refer the reader to Van De Mieroop and Clifton (2011).

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

c­ omparison and describes emancipation. In these two short examples – both taken from the middle of lengthy turns by the interviewee – the description of emancipation is elaborated upon slightly differently and these elaborations are quite telling regarding the way in which the interviewee orients to the ‘historical’ master narratives concerning the slavery system. First, the following extract frames the slaves’ emancipation as a story of deficiency. Extract 4.4 (Fountain Hughes) 263 IE Now, uh 264 (1.2) 265 IE after we got freed and they turned us out like cattle, 266 we could (.) we didn’t have nowhere to go. → 267 And we didn’t have nobody to boss us, 0and u:h0 268 we didn’t know nothing. There wasn’t, there was no school.

In this brief fragment, the interviewee initially refers to the slave owners as agents of the action by means of a 3rd person plural pronominal form, but he then shifts the focus to the collective group of slaves who are described in terms of what they lack, namely a place to go (line 266), knowledge (line 268) and, crucially, an owner (line 267). The latter is formulated here in slightly negative terms (line 267: ‘nobody to boss us’), as the verb choice underlines the slaves’ lack of f­ reedom. However, the position of this phrase in the middle of a three part list of deficiency gives it a relatively neutral character. As such, the lack of an owner is neither framed as an explicit advantage, nor as an important disadvantage. Significantly, a bit later in the interview, this absence of a slave owner is framed quite differently, namely in terms of the lack of a benefactor. Extract 4.5 (Fountain Hughes) 316 IE We didn’t have nothing only just er 317 like your cattle, we were just turned out 318 (.) and e:r get along the best you could. → 319 Nobody to look after us. 320 Well, we been slaves all our lives.

In this extract, deficiency is highlighted again, namely of the former slaves’ lack of personal property (line 316), and the absence of somebody who would ‘look after’ the ingroup of freed slaves (line 319: ‘us’). As the presence of the coherence building discourse marker ‘well’ (Schiffrin, 1987, p. 126) in the beginning of the subsequent utterance indicates, line 319 is then linked to, or even accounted for by means of an explicit collective categorization of the interviewee as a former slave. So, the freed slaves are not only characterised by material deficiency (line 316) and compared to cattle that are turned out (line 317), but they are also framed as in need of a benefactor. Even though the latter is not characterised further – only



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

in terms of utter absence by means of the extreme case formulation (Pomerantz, 1986) ‘nobody’ – the preceding and following lines firmly relate this utterance to the slave system in which the collective group of African Americans (line 319: ‘us’) is guided by white hands, that are presented as looking after the slaves here.  As such, emancipation is presented not only as a story of material deficiency, but also a lack of (white) owners, who ‘boss’ (Extract 4.4), but also ‘look after’ (Extract 4.5) the slaves. So, in both these fragments, the slaves’ identity is talked into being in collective terms, it is compared to cattle and the slaves are presented as undergoers of the action, rather than as agentive actors, who mainly ‘lack’ things and who do not take any initiative whatsoever. In this sense, the shift from presenting the slave owners as bosses (Extract 4.4) to framing them as carers (Extract 4.5) is relatively unimportant, as it does not change the essence of the slave-as-cattle identity as undergoers who are lost without (white) guiding hands. So, in these fragments, a ‘historical’ master narrative of slaves as property that were totally dependent on the whites, is talked into being. In the final part of this section, we focus on a few additional stories from the interview with Laura Smalley. These stories only emerge in this interview and they also have a more personal flavour than the – obviously commonly shared – stories discussed previously. Laura Smalley’s additional slave-as-cattle stories In the interview with Laura Smalley, the slave-as-cattle identity occurs right at the start of the interview, when the topic of the eating habits of the slave children is discussed. An interesting fragment occurs in Laura Smalley’s account of how babies and young children were cared for at the plantation where she grew up.2 After a stepwise topic transition, she self-initiates the specific topic of nursing, of which the beginning can be seen in the first line of the following extract: Extract 4.6 (Laura Smalley) 69 IE And they had certain times to come to them childrens. 70 I think about this like a: (.) cow out there 71 will go to the calf, you know. 72 IR2 Aha. 73 IE And you know, they’d have a certain time, you know, 74 cow come to his calf and at, at, at night. 75 Well, they come at ten o’clock. 76 Every day at ten o’clock to all them babies.

.  For another example, see the ‘slopping hogs’-story in Van De Mieroop and Clifton (2011).

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves



77 Give them what nurse, you know. 78 Them what didn’t nurse they didn’t come 79 to them at all, the old lady fed them. 80 Them wasn’t big, wasn’t big enough to (.) eat, you know. 81 She’d ah (.) the old mother had time, you know, to come. 82 When that horn blowed (.) they’d blow the horn for the 83 mothers, you know. They’d just come 84 just running, you know, coming to the children. 85 IR1 Out of the fields. 86 IR2 0 ( [ )0 87 IE [Out of the fields.

In this fragment, the interviewee discusses how slave-children who could not eat independently were either nursed by their mothers or fed by an old lady (line 79). The fragment starts with the description of the mothers (line 69: ‘they’) coming to their children. In the subsequent lines, by comparing the mothers to cows (line 70) who come to feed the calves (line 71), the interviewee immediately frames how she ‘thinks about this’ in non-human terms. Due to the nursing activity in which milk is an essential element, this is a self-evident comparison. The interviewee then elaborates on the exact time (lines 73–76), on who fed whom (lines 78–81), and on how the mothers knew when it was time to go to the children (lines 82–83). In the beginning of this description, the storyworld characters are explicitly named in dehumanised terms (line 74: ‘cow come to his calf ’) without framing it as a comparison. As such, the mothers are labelled directly as cows and the children as calves without any further negotiation or mitigation of this face-threatening animal categorization. At the end of the fragment, the comparison is made explicit in an emphatic way, as both the slower speaking pace and the increased speaking volume indicate (line 83: ‘They’d just come ’). The interviewee then adds some more detail by saying that the mothers came ‘running’, which increases the vividness of her description. This vivid image is further elaborated and co-constructed by the interviewer, who adds a situational aspect (line 85: ‘out of the fields’), that fits in perfectly with the comparison to cattle. The second interviewer then quietly starts a turn (which is unintelligible), but the interviewee overlaps to repeat the first interviewer’s addition, thus ratifying the completion of the vivid image of women, like cows, who come running out of the fields to feed their offspring. Throughout this fragment, some mothers are presented as agents of various actions (e.g. running, nursing) and this is opposed to other mothers who did not perform these actions because they did not nurse any children (lines 78–79: ‘Them what didn’t nurse they didn’t come to them at all’). So even though some mothers have an agentive role in this extract, they are not “agentive self-constructers”



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

(Bamberg, 2011, p. 106), as the initiative of coming to their children is not in their hands, but in those of the slave owners or the supervisors. The role of the latter in this process is referred to only briefly, namely in lines 82–83. Initially the formulation is agentless and the focus is shifted to the object instead of the agent (viz ‘the horn’, in: ‘when that horn blowed’), but this is then reformulated to an agentive formulation (line 82: ‘they’d blow the horn’). As the agents are only referred to by means of an unspecified third person plural pronominal form (‘they’), the referents are not explicitly made clear and so little attention goes to the role of these storyworld characters. As such, the interviewee again acquiesces to the ‘historical’ master narrative of slaves as property who lacked any self-determination and free will. A relatively similar process of agency avoidance occurs in the following, final extract, which focuses on the breeding of slaves. Interestingly, in this case it is the interviewer, instead of the interviewee, who projects a cattle identity upon the slaves. Extract 4.7 (Laura Smalley) 967 IR2 What about er, joining that er (.5) business of 968 er er taking=hiring some of the Negroes, 969 the good hands, you know. 970 Good women, good men, going off 971 and breeding them like cattle. 972 Do you remember anything about that? 973 IE No. I didn’t know ((5 lines omitted in which the IE states she only heard about that afterwards)) 979 but they say that was sure so< (.) 980 You know, just like a big, fine, looking woman, 981 big, fine, looking man, you know. 982 Old boss wants (.) you know, children’s farm, you know. 983 They just (.) fasten them up in a house or somewhere. 984 You know, go on off, them in there. 985 Want to breed them like they was hogs or horses, 986 something like that, I say. 987 (.5) 988 IR1 That sounds like it. 989 IE Yes, sir.

In the initial part of the fragment, the interviewer constructs the slaves-as-cattle identity (line 971). Despite the fact that the slaves’ position as a commodity is emphasised from the start (line 969: ‘the good hands’), this is mitigated because the interviewer also describes the slaves in human terms (line 970: ‘good women, good men’), and avoids attributing agency to the slaves that were used for ‘breeding’.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

However, the interviewer then initiates the comparison to farm animals (line 971), which is quite explicitly discussed and pronounced in an emphatic way (i.e. the higher speaking volume in ‘breeding’ and ‘cattle’ in line 971). After the interviewee initially distances herself from this practice by saying she only knows the story on the basis of hearsay, again reducing her accountability (see also e.g. Extracts 3.2 and 4.1), she assumes the role of an uncommitted bystander (cf. Schiffrin, 2000) who is certain of the truthfulness of the story (line 979). In the initial lines of her story (lines 980–94), the interviewee does not align with the slave-as-cattle identity projection, but speaks of the slaves in human terms (line 980–982: ‘woman’, ‘man’ and ‘children’). However, their role as a commodity is constructed as well, since they are qualified on the basis of their features which implicitly highlights their breeding potential. Given the exact repetition of these adjectives (lines 980 and 981: ‘big, fine, looking’), this receives emphasis. Also, the reference to the children is inserted in relation to the word ‘farm’ (line 982: ‘children’s farm’), which initiates the framing of her talk in terms of breeding slaves much in the same vein as breeding cattle. This is then further elaborated upon in line 985, in which the interviewee not only mirrors the verb use of the interviewer (‘breed’), but also replaces the umbrella term ‘cattle’, initially used by the interviewer in line 971, by two more specific hyponyms from this category, namely ‘hogs or horses’ (line 985). This enhances the vividness of the story, since the interviewee sketches a very particular comparative image here. The accuracy of this image is then downplayed in the subsequent line by means of a hedge (line 986: ‘something like that’), thus mitigating the force of this vivid image, after which the topic is collaboratively closed. It is important to note that the interviewer’s initial agency avoidance ­concerning the slaves in the breeding is consistently mirrored by the interviewee, who refers to the slaves in the object position (e.g. ‘fasten them up’, ‘breed them’). Furthermore, in the course of the story, the slave owner (‘old boss’) is constructed as the volitional agent of the action and this downplays the personal agency of the slaves even further, who are presented as the passive objects that were forced to breed by the will of the slave owner. However, this volitional agent is soon blurred as well, as the unambiguous reference ‘old boss’ quickly shifts to ‘they’ and to agentless phrases (‘go on off ’, ‘want to’), as such – once more – downplaying the agentive role of the slave owner in this process and acquiescing to the ‘historical’ master narrative of the slave as agentless property. Summary Overall, in both themed stories discussed in the initial part of this section, the slave-as-cattle-identity talks into being the slaves as property that can be traded and turned out like cattle without their own agentive involvement. Importantly,



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

no blame whatsoever is attributed to the agents of these actions, as they often remain invisible in the stories. Furthermore, in Fountain Hughes’s interview, they are even presented as carers and they are explicitly exculpated regarding slave sales, at which point the responsibility is shifted to the slaves themselves, who should behave well and so the slave system is framed as a benevolent endeavour. As such, both interviewees acquiesce to – slightly differing versions of – ‘historical’ master narratives of the slavery system in which slaves were property that was under the total control of the slave owner. This similarity in positions vis-à-vis this master narrative is not so surprising, as it emerges from  the resemblances in formulation on the first level of positioning in the ­storyworld. In turn, these similarities between the stories clearly indicate that they were shared stories, commonly told among slaves before and after the Civil War. However, in spite of their shared nature and the similarities that we observed, such stories do not automatically entail specific positions vis-à-vis particular ­master narratives. Such shared stories may just as well challenge master narratives and thus become a community’s counter-narrative against a dominant discourse shared by a societal outgroup (see Chapter  6), or they may acquiesce to a dominant discourse of the time, as is the case here and as we also see later in our discussion of Charlie Smith’s retelling of a collective story, in which case we argue that narrators may mobilise such shared stories in many different ways to support various positions in relation to different master narratives (see C ­ hapter  8). In any case, if they are reproduced quite consistently by the ­narrators, these shared stories may not offer much potential for idiosyncratic adjustments that could perhaps challenge dominant discourses in specific, ­personally agentive ways. This potential is definitely present in the stories that are discussed in the final part of this section, which focused on the more idiosyncratic stories that only appeared in the interview with Laura Smalley. But even in this case, the interviewee situates the slave-as-cattle identity at the passive end of the activepassive continuum, as such presenting the slaves as objects that are not only traded, but are also bred and milked. As the role of the slave owners as agents of these actions is almost consistently downplayed, they are not presented in a very explicit way either, and thus Laura Smalley’s stories in which slave-ascattle identities occur, strongly acquiesce to slavery as a system in which both sides (slaves and slave owners) simply acted out their part, without having any significant influence on the plotline themselves. As such, she orients and acquiesces to a ‘historical’ master narrative of slaves as property whose task was to carry out the slave owners’ orders, while the latters’ role was to guide, and use, their chattel.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

(Former) slave-as-dog identities in the interview with Fountain Hughes Interestingly, Fountain Hughes uses various slave-as-animal identities throughout the interview. As we have demonstrated above, the slave-as-cattle identity was invoked in relation to non-violent slave owners who were bosses as well as carers who looked after their good slaves. As such, he not only acquiesces to the ‘historical’ master narrative of slaves as property, but he also talks slavery into being in terms of benevolence (see also Chapter 5). These observations stand in sharp contrast to other parts of Fountain Hughes’ interview, in which he takes a much more critical stance towards slavery, as well as to other aspects of post-bellum society. While formulating these critical points of view, Fountain Hughes also draws on an animal identity, but, significantly, this is not the slave-as-cattle identity. In this case, he compares the life of a (former) slave to that of a dog, and he uses this comparison to illustrate the utter misery of this life. In this section, we discuss three short fragments in which these dog comparisons are used. A first example of the slave-as-dog can be seen in the following extract, which emerges within a lengthy turn by the interviewee that initially focused on the names of the slave owners of the interviewee’s grandfather, but then, by means of stepwise topic shifts, gradually moved to the discussion of the interviewee’s daily life as a slave. Extract 4.8 (Fountain Hughes) 351 IE Now (.5) if er (.2) if my master wanted send me (.5) 352 he never say (.) 353 you couldn’t get a horse and ride (.) 354 You walk, you know, you walk. 355 And you be barefooted (.) and (cold). 356 That didn’t make no difference. 357 You wasn’t no more than a dog to some of them in them days. 358 You wasn’t treated as good as they treat dogs now (.)

In the initial line of the fragment, the two protagonists of the story are foregrounded: the master and the slave. At this point, this is clearly a narrative of personal experience, since it is related using a personal footing, as the use of the 1st person pronominal forms (line 351: ‘my’, ‘me’) indicates. Also in the subsequent line, the interviewee retains this footing, since the master is referred to in the third person singular pronominal form (line 352: ‘he’). However, right after the verbum dicendi (line 352: ‘say’), which is expected to lead to the insertion of direct reported speech, the interviewee changes footing to an impersonal perspective, as the use of the generic ‘you’-form in the subsequent line illustrates (cf. O’Connor, 1994; Timor & Landau, 1998), thus shifting to a generic ­narrative



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

(Baynham, 2006). As such, he distances himself from the narrated events and continues to describe the regularly occurring daily characteristics of the slave’s life in a more generic way, omitting all agents from the interaction. He ends this description with two statements summarizing these harsh conditions in which the slave-as-dog identity is constructed by means of comparisons. Both statements are again related from a general perspective, as the generic you-form for the slaves and the 3rd person plural form (line 357: ‘them’) for the masters, illustrate. In line 357, the interviewee projects the slave-as-dog identity upon the generic group of slaves, framing it from the point of view of the slave owners (line 357: ‘to some of them’). The latter are thus not presented in an agentive way, which hedges the utterance, and this is further downplayed by means of the mitigation of the quantity of the slave owners who mistreated their slaves (‘some of…’). As such, the slave owners as agents of mistreatment are presented in a mitigated way. Then, in the subsequent line, the slave-as-dog identity itself is downplayed as well, since the interviewee reformulates the initial statement, in which the dog identity was phrased in quite existential terms (line 357: ‘you wasn’t no more than a dog’), to a statement in which the scope is limited to the treatment of the slave. Furthermore, the dog is now not directly related to the slaves anymore, but rather, it is used within a comparative time frame, comparing the treatment of slaves ‘in them days’ to that of dogs ‘now’. As such, the – already mitigated – initial summarizing statement is downplayed even more, thus partially repairing the slave-as-dog identity construction of the previous line. Still, this comparison to dogs is different from the slave-as-cattle extracts that were analysed in the previous section, as it clearly emphasizes the harshness and inhumanity of slave life and accuses the slave owners of mistreatment – or at least some of them. This slave-as-dog identity is a significant leitmotiv in Fountain Hughes’ interview, since he repeats it in one way or another several times in the course of the interaction. Interestingly, the scope of this ‘dog’-identity is not limited to slaves, but at other points in the interview, it is widened to African Americans in general. This is particularly the case when he discusses the grim reality of life after the Civil War. In this period, freed slaves often suffered from abject poverty and were second class citizens in a deeply segregated society (see also Chapter 3), thus ­making their predicament little better than their former lives as actual slaves. The following fragment contains a description of the difficult times the interviewee and his family went through after emancipation. It immediately demonstrates that the interviewee talks in very similar terms, namely also by means of a comparison to a dog’s life, about this post-Civil War period.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Extract 4.9 (Fountain Hughes) 271 IE And my father was dead and my mother was living, 272 but she had three, four other little children, 273 and she had to put them all to work for 274 to:: help take care of the ↑others. 275 So:: we had, uh, we had what you call 276 (2.0) 277 IE worse than dogs has got it now. 278 Dogs has got it now better 279 than ↑we had it when we come along.

In the initial lines of the fragment (lines 271–274), the interviewee sketches his family situation in quite neutral terms. This neutral description is then qualified in a concluding comment, initiated by the concluding conjunction ‘so’, pronounced in a prolonged way (line 275). After a few hesitations (‘uh’), reformulations (‘we had (…) we had’), downplayers (‘what you call’) and pauses (line 276), the interviewee formulates a temporal comparison between the situation of his family in the past (as indicated by the reference ‘when we come along’, which refers to the moment the slaves were freed) and dogs now (line 277, 278). This comparison is quite similar to the one in the previous extract and this parallelism between preand post-Civil War periods reflects the relatively minimal changes in the daily situation of African Americans before and after emancipation, except for the fact that there is no agent anymore who is blamed for this predicament – as ‘some of ’ the slave owners were in the previous fragment. Furthermore, it again functions as an illustration of the harsh and inhuman nature of his life, this time in the postbellum period. The final example occurs when the interviewee is again discussing post-Civil War life and states that some African Americans are ‘sorry they are free now’ and ‘would rather be slaves’ (in the lines preceding this fragment), which further emphasizes the difficulties African Americans encountered in this period. On the basis of this statement, the interviewer asks a follow-up question by means of which he shifts the footing from the general (as in Hughes’ preceding statements about a generic group of African Americans) to the personal. Extract 4.10 (Fountain Hughes) 384 IR Which had you rather be Uncle Fountain? 385 IE Me::? (.) Which I’d rather be? 386 IR ((laughs)) 387 IE You know what I’d rather do? 388 (2.2) 389 IE If I thought 390 (1.9)





Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

391 IE 392 (1.5) 393 IE 394 (2.0) 395 IE 396 (1.9) 397 IE 398 (2.7) 399 IE

had any idea that I’d ever be a sla::ve again I’d take a:: gun and just end it all right away. Because >you’re nothing but< a ↓dog. You’re but a ↓dog.

After the follow-up question, the interviewee asks a mirroring question in which he highlights the interviewer’s shift in footing from the general to the personal. This elicits laughter from the interviewer, after which the interviewee self-selects and shifts the focus of the question slightly, namely from what he’d rather be to what he’d rather do. The interviewee then embarks on a hypothetical mini-telling which is pronounced in a very slow speaking pace, with lengthy pauses after each utterance. This endows this hypothetical story with a certain degree of formality and it also gives it a deliberate character, since the pauses suggest that the interviewee is carefully measuring his words. Given the extreme nature of the action he envisages undertaking if he were to be a slave again (i.e. suicide, see line 395), the interviewee leaves no doubt about his evaluation of the slave system and his personal experiences as a slave. In the following lines, he then accounts for this definitive choice, as the initial use of the causal conjunction ‘because’ demonstrates. In this account, he constructs the slave-as-dog identity twice: first, he formulates it quickly, which he then repairs by repeating the phrase slowly and in an emphatic way, as the change from ‘nothing’ (line 397) to ‘not a thing’ (line 399) illustrates. This account is then elaborated upon in the lines subsequent to this extract in which Hughes gives examples of what he means by this slave-as-dog identity (e.g. in lines 402 ff: ‘if they want you to cut all night long out in the field, you cut’), after which this topic is closed. In the course of this extract, a number of extreme case formulations (­Pomerantz, 1986) occur (e.g. line 395: ‘all’; line 397: ‘nothing’; line 399: ‘not a thing’) and these, together with the hypothetical action of committing suicide if he were to be enslaved again, emphasize the interviewee’s highly negative evaluation of the slave system. Crucially, this fragment touches the extremes of the activepassive continuum of agency, as the interviewee claims he would take a highly agentive and drastic decision (viz. committing suicide) in order to avoid having to give up agency again, and being reduced to the passive and object-like role (cf. line 399: ‘a thing’) of the slave-as-cattle, as we discussed in the previous section. So this slave-as-dog identity is clearly not only used to underline the barbaric nature of the slaves’ life, but it also vividly talks into being the lack of any form of agency

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

implied in being a slave, as one is not able to take any personal initiative, just like a cow, a horse or ‘a thing’ cannot decide anything for itself. Summary First, if we compare the way the slave-as-cattle and slave-as-dog identities are talked into being in terms of agency, we observed different tendencies in this ­section. While the slave-as-cattle identity is clearly situated at the passive end of the agency continuum, in Extracts 4.8 and 4.9, the slave-as-dog identity navigates somewhat between agent and recipient roles, and in Extract 4.10, the interviewee really talks himself into being as an ‘agentive self-constructer’ by claiming that he would commit suicide if he were to be enslaved again. So there is not one consistent tendency of agency navigation in relation to the (former) slave-as-dog identity and this is already indicative of the different function of this identity in Fountain Hughes’ narratives. Second, concerning its function, we showed that Fountain Hughes consistently uses this comparison between dogs and slaves/former slaves to illustrate African Americans’ difficult living conditions before and after the Civil War. These are clearly formulated as criticisms of the mistreatment of slaves during the slavery system as well as of the predicament in which African Americans found themselves in the segregated post-bellum society. He thus shows that the emancipation did not drastically change the living conditions of former slaves and the consistency of the use of this slave/African American-as-dog identity is emblematic of the lack of significant changes between the antebellum and post-bellum situation. Furthermore, this consistency as well as the difference in agency navigation demonstrates that the interviewee is thus not orienting to a master narrative that is temporally situated in a specific period in the past, as was the case with the slave-as-cattle identity which was clearly linked to the antebellum period. Instead, his orientation is to the inhumanity of the living conditions of African Americans, which were the result of white supremacist ideologies that span a larger temporal period, including the pre- and post-Civil War era. Given his critical stance towards both eras, he challenges these master narratives that frame slavery in benevolent terms (see e.g. Chapter 5) and that project a second class status upon African Americans which renders their lives worse than that of a dog.

Conclusions So, in conclusion, we observed that both Laura Smalley and Fountain Hughes inserted slave-as-animal comparisons and identities into their interviews and that these can be related to particular master narratives that their stories evoke.



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

­ owever, we also demonstrated that it is worth digging deeper into the particuH larities of these animal comparisons. We argue that the type of animal that the (former) slaves are compared to is crucial: while Laura Smalley only refers to domesticated animals, such as cattle, horses, cows and hogs, Fountain Hughes uses these animal references as well, but he also inserts a reference to a dog which invokes significantly different positions, as we demonstrated in the previous section. The animals that are being invoked are thus emblematic of the type of position that is taken vis-à-vis particular master narratives. First of all, the cattle references are historically situated as they talk into being the slave-as-property identity which thus orients to the ‘historical’ master ­narrative of the slave system in which slaves, like cattle, were under the full control of their masters; they were milked, bred, traded and eventually, turned out. In general, we found that these slave-as-cattle identities go hand in hand with low agency marking and as such, the slaves are constructed as “recipients” or “undergoers” of the action (Bamberg, 2011, p. 106). Further, in the rare cases that they have an agentive role, it is made explicit that this role merely concerns the execution of an order or adherence to the norms of being a good slave. These actions are not taken on their own initiative or on the basis of their own free will. As such, the slave-as-cattle identity not only talks into being a semi-human, low hierarchical status for the slaves, as in the classic Aristotelian concept of slavery in which slaves are likened to beast of burden in need of a master (Aristotle 2008), but this category is also constructed as having a lack of any form of agency. This predicate is really enacted in the narrators’ stories, because in both interviews, the interviewees downplay the slave owners’ role, which is often made invisible through agentless sentences or the use of vague deictic forms. As such, very few storyworld characters are constructed as the agents of the action, and so the protagonists and antagonists are merely described as ‘fitting in’, rather than ‘acting upon’ the world. Through this lack of agency in most of these stories, no one is presented as ‘responsible’ – one could even say that this lack of visible ‘perpetrators’ hinders the construction of a ‘victim’-identity for the slaves (cf. Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2011). Rather, storyworld characters – both slave owners and slaves – seem to play their part without any significant agency of their own within a world that is laid out according to a ‘historical’ master narrative of slaves as property who were used at the master’s will. Due to the lack of challenges or criticism in the extracts in the first section, these narratives seem almost an example of “historical, sociocultural forces in the form of dominant discourses or master narratives [that] position speakers in their situated practices and construct who they are without their agentive involvement” (De Fina et al., 2006, p. 7). Thus, these stories can be seen as a strong acquiescence to the ‘historical’ slavery master narrative that defined the relation between owners and owned in which the latter were under the total control of the former.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Secondly, at times, Fountain Hughes takes this slave-as-cattle identity a step further by presenting the slave owners as benefactors, who cared for their slaves and would only sell them in case of misbehaviour. As such, he shifts the responsibility for slave sales to the slaves themselves and explicitly exonerates the slave owners from any blame or responsibility. By doing so, he orients to slavery as a benevolent endeavour, thus presenting a slightly different version of the ‘historical’ master narrative of the slavery. Interestingly, he also talks into being quite a different, contradictory position when he compares his standard of life during and after slavery times to those of ‘dogs now’. In contrast to the ‘historical’ master narrative of slavery in terms of benevolence that is talked into being in the first section, the slave owner is almost framed in opposite terms (see Extract 4.8) in the second section. The particular comparison with the dog here, instead of with cattle as in the first section, of course resonates with the expression ‘it’s a dog’s life’ which is used to refer to harsh and inhuman living conditions. Furthermore, as the interviewee also refers to the situation of dogs now and then, it is clear that he invokes a more general meaning than could be invoked by the historically situated comparison between slaves and cattle. Through this more general image, he also describes the activities of the (former) slaves (see e.g. Extract 4.8) as is the case when drawing on the slave-as-cattle identity, but the crucial difference with these slave-as-cattle descriptions is that the latter invoke an identity of property without any agency or capacity for criticism, while the latter slave-as-dog identity is specifically employed to denounce mistreatment and poor living conditions. As such, these two different slave-as-animal identities have a different temporal situatedness and they turn out to construct quite contradictory positions which invoke different master narratives. On the one hand, the slave-as-cattle identity positions itself vis-à-vis ‘historical’ slavery master narratives and even frames them as a benevolent system, thus acquiescing to the inherent ‘inferiority’ of African Americans. On the other hand, the (former) slave-as-dog identity orients to a different, then still current master narrative of white supremacy and takes up quite a different position in relation to that. Instead of doing acquiescence, the interviewee rallies the slave-as-dog identity to challenge the inhumanity of systems that are based on white supremacy. He does this by accusing the slave owners of mistreatment (see Extract 4.8), while also denouncing the African Americans’ predicament in the post-bellum period – in which case he refrains from blaming the whites (see Extract 4.9), which would of course potentially threaten the face of the interviewer as well as that of a white ghostly audience. Of course, ‘historical’ slavery master narratives and white supremacy master narratives are closely related, as the latter not only formed the basis of the segregated society in which the interviewee was living at the time of the interview, but also of the antebellum slavery system. Hence it is all the more surprising that



Chapter 4.  Different ‘slave-as-animal’-identities vis-à-vis different ‘historical’ 

the interviewee constructs such different positions in relation to these interrelated master narratives. One can wonder how it is possible that the same interviewee acquiesces to a master narrative of the slavery system as a benevolent endeavour in Extracts 4.2, 4.3 and 4.5, while he also challenges it explicitly in Extracts 4.8 and 4.10. In our data, such inconsistencies are not a unique case and we will come back to this issue in more detail in Chapters 8 and 9. However, for now, it suffices to conclude that the slave-as-animal identity indeed invokes master narratives of white supremacy in which African Americans have an inferior status. As we discussed in the introduction, these should not be considered as one master narrative, nor as a static entity towards which interviewees have a fixed position – as the case of Fountain Hughes clearly proves. Rather, these should be regarded as a plethora of potential plotlines all revolving around a central topic, namely, in this case, accounting for the inferiority of African Americans. We illustrated this in the course of this chapter by demonstrating how comparisons to different animals do quite diverse identity work against the backdrop of different versions of, or perspectives on, white supremacy master narratives. While some of these master narratives are more general and thus not related to a specific time and place, others can be considered ‘historical’, in the sense that they were no longer current at the time of the interview, but projected the listeners back into sociocultural forms of interpretation of the storyworld instead of the storytelling time. And, as a final note, we have to add that in our data, there are still other ways of mobilizing comparisons between African Americans and animals, as we will demonstrate in the next chapter.

chapter 5

The white supremacy master narrative as an oeuvre civilisatrice Navigating identities along the sameness-difference dimension “You know when a man ain’t got no education he ain’t got nothing.” (Wallace Quarterman, 1935)

Introduction Throughout the data, we detected another ‘version’ of dominant discourses of ­African American inferiority. Most views of white supremacy justified slavery and segregation on the basis of pseudo-scientific genetic theories of race (see ­Chapter 3) which did not allow African Americans to ‘overcome’ their lowly status as it was considered to be part of their genetic make-up that only evolved extremely slowly. However, others, such as the naturalist Lamarck, believed in a much quicker version of racial improvement through a mechanism of “behavioural responses to the changing needs of a changing environment”, causing “modifications in the ­structure of organisms” which could be “acquired in the lifetime of individual organisms” and these acquired characteristics might then subsequently be inherited (Stocking, 1962, p. 240). So this Lamarckian perspective on human evolution permits social influences to affect the genetic make-up of individuals and races (Fredrickson, 1971, p. 314), thus allowing for a progressive development of “backward races” (Fredrickson, 1971, p. 310). Either in its ‘pure’ or in an adapted – neoor quasi-Lamarckian – form, this principle of the possibility of racial improvement was adopted by many, often prominent, figures in American social science even to the extent that Lamarckianism gained prevalence in this field in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries (Stocking, 1962). From this perspective, then, the African American ‘race’ was still considered as inferior, thus aligning with white supremacy master narratives, but it also allowed for some form of improvement if the savage ‘Negroes’ were to be moulded

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

by white civilizing hands, which, through a “quasi-Lamarckian process of evolution”, could cause them to lose their “savage instincts” (Fredrickson, 1971, p. 55). However, it was often argued that such a civilizing process had certain boundaries, as it was still asserted that “innate racial traits limited his [the African American’s] potential development to a more or less tenuous state of ‘semi-civilization’” (­Fredrickson, 1971, p. 53). Furthermore, also from a social environmentalist perspective – which can be summarized as “the belief that human character and values are shaped or predetermined by social and cultural conditions” (Fredrickson, 1971, p. 16) – the view of African Americans as “degraded” was not regarded as a form of unchangeable innate inferiority. The consistent use of this adjective suggested that “there was some ideal of manhood from which the Negro had fallen or to which he might be raised”, and in line with this, efforts were made (in this case for African American convicts) to “raise their character to a level of whites” (Fredrickson, 1971, p. 5). However, this interpretation that the ‘black race’ was not inferior by nature, did not impede the perception that the ‘free Negro’ was ‘a social danger’, as, some argued, African Americans could simply not be or become socially equal considering the extent of racial prejudice to be found in the United States in the 19th century. This was a reason for certain Americans, such as the colonisationists1 (Fredrickson, 1971, p. 9 ff.), to argue in favour of the abolition of slavery (since they perceived it as a dangerous institution) and for the subsequent removal of the freed African Americans from American society by deporting them to Africa. This was mainly because they feared the social and political chaos that large numbers of freed, yet bestial, African Americans might present for American society, while they also believed that an African colony would aid the “redemption” of Africa through the missionary enterprise (Fredrickson, 1971, p. 7 ff.). These, as well as other colonial endeavours taking place in Africa and elsewhere, were often framed in terms of the oeuvre civilisatrice (see e.g. Cooper & Stoler, 1989, p. 610; Fabian, 1986, p. 42). Such a colonial civilizing process “was to be total”, as the goal was not only “to convey skills and kinds of knowledge; it had to form and transform the whole person in all respects” (Fabian, 1986, pp. 80, italics in the original) and the colonizers’ goal of this transformation was to make the African “into a lowlier, artless version of themselves” (Comaroff & Comaroff,

.  The Colonization Society originated through the initiative of a clergyman and it was supported by the evangelical establishment and the Calvinist clergy. This organization endorsed the cause of African colonization by freed slaves and sought support for the society’s Liberian colony, which received its first settlers in 1822. (taken and adapted from Fredrickson, 1971, p. 7)



Chapter 5.  The white supremacy master narrative as an oeuvre civilisatrice 

1991, p. 109). So, from these perspectives, African Americans could – to some extent – overcome their lowly status if they underwent a ‘civilizing process’ under the guidance of the whites. Such a ‘civilizing process’ does not contradict the white supremacist idea of African Americans as a degenerate race, as the expected result of it was not equality, but some semi-civilised state in between the uncivilised ‘Negro beasts’ and the fully civilised whites. Such an oeuvre civilisatrice hence frames white supremacy, even in the context of slavery, as a benevolent endeavour, and this was a widely held view from the late 19th century till the first third of the 20th century (Berlin, 1988). In particular, as an analytical focus we will zoom in on how the narrators navigate their identities vis-à-vis this master narrative in terms of the dimension of “sameness/difference”. More specifically, we will investigate how narrators negotiate their membership of particular groups, often by setting up comparisons between the ingroup and various outgroups, as such simultaneously highlighting one’s sameness to, and difference from, other people (Bamberg, 2011, p. 105). This way of viewing identity in terms of group membership is inspired by Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1981) which views social identity as “that part of the individuals’ self-concept which derives from their knowledge of their membership of a social group” (Tajfel, 1982a, p. 2). Through a process of intergroup comparison (Turner, 1975), which tends to emphasize the ingroup’s qualities in relation to the outgroup’s deficiencies, an individual’s group membership obtains its meaning and is evaluated positively. Such group memberships are described as dynamic processes (Tajfel, 1982b, p. 485) which individuals may shift in and out of. In spite of the fact that the framework of Social Identity Theory is not directly applicable to our analyses because it tends to view the link between individuals and groups in cognitive rather than discursive terms (e.g. Potter & Wetherell, 1987), nevertheless it will serve as an inspiration here, as it has done for many other studies (for a discussion, see Van De Mieroop, 2015). Thus, favouring a social-constructionist discursive approach, in this chapter, we explore how the narrators negotiate their membership of social groups and which discursive devices they mobilise to set up – and potentially polarise – ingroups and outgroups.

Analyses In the following sections, we discuss a number of interviews in which the ­narrators orient to this ‘version’ of the master narrative of white supremacy by framing it as a benevolent, civilizing enterprise. The way in which, and the extent to which, they position themselves vis-à-vis the Discourse of the oeuvre

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

c­ ivilisatrice is of course different for all narrators, and so we grouped them in two subsections. In the first subsection, three interviews are discussed in which stories are told of benevolent white masters educating their slaves, while in the second subsection, we zoom in on one lengthy interview in which we not only look into these pre-Civil War stories, but in which we also scrutinise discussions of general issues to see whether the orientation to this version of the white supremacy master narrative still surfaces. In the course of the analysis, particular attention is paid to the narrators’ negotiation of group memberships in terms of ‘sameness/difference’.

Benevolent masters and happy slaves In several interviews, the slave system is presented in a positive light, in which the slave owners are constructed as benevolent masters who treated their slaves well, which resulted in the latter’s happiness. It has been observed that this is quite a stereotypical identity construction (Whooley, 2006, p. 310). Crucial in this respect, is that interviewees who present the slave system in this way, often link this to their own upbringing and hence orient to the master narrative of the oeuvre civilisatrice. For example, in the recording of Isom Moseley’s interview, the tape starts with the interviewee presenting himself, as can be seen in the following fragment: Extract 5.1 (Isom Moseley) 1 IE My name is Isom Moseley. 2 Raised up in old time without a mother. 3 My old master and mistress (.) raised me. 4 ((child screaming in background)) 5 My master was named Lewis Moseley. 6 My mistress was name Blanche Moseley.

After mentioning his name, the interviewee immediately initiates the topic of his upbringing, which demonstrates the importance of this aspect for one’s self-­ presentation in the eyes of the teller. Significantly, as we also see in other interviews (e.g. Charlie Smith in Chapters  3 and 8), Moseley uses the name of his slave owners thus stressing the paternalistic quasi-family relationship that the ideology of the oeuvre civilisatrice evoked. Then, by means of a vague reference to the pre-Civil War period (line 2: ‘old time’), he shifts the time frame back to the slavery days and then, after factually stating the absence of his mother (line 2), the interviewee explains that he was raised by his slave owners (line 3), who are then identified by name (line 5). A couple of minutes later in the interview, at the end of a story in which the interviewee discusses how they made soap and tanned leather in these days, the interviewee very positively evaluates these slave owners.



Chapter 5.  The white supremacy master narrative as an oeuvre civilisatrice 

Extract 5.2 (Isom Moseley) 78 IE Now we was ↑children, good size children, 79 ( ) about, that shoemaker made shoes for we children. 80 And the old folk too. 81 We had mighty good white folks, 82 that is ↑my memory, (as) far as I can remember, 83 you know, mighty goo:d (.) mighty goo:d. 84 You know they must have been good=after 85 c- country surrendered,.hh didn’t none move, 86 more move there (.) after surrender. (.) 87 More mo:ved on the place.

The interviewee concludes the preceding leather tanning story by explaining that everybody got leather shoes. First, the children are mentioned as recipients of shoes, and the interviewee not only aligns with this ingroup, as the repeated use of the 1st person plural pronoun indicates (even used in collocation with the noun: ‘we children’ in line 79), but he also positively evaluates their size (line 78: ‘good size children’), as such implicitly referring to the good treatment they received. Second, he adds ‘the old folk’ to the group of shoe recipients. So all the slaves are described as receiving shoes, and, as it is implied that it is the slave owners who give them shoes, this further illustrates that the slaves were treated well – especially as for example Extract 4.8 from the interview with Fountain Hughes illustrates, shoes could be considered a luxury for slaves. After this implicit positive description, the interviewee shifts to an explicit positive evaluation of his former masters, who are identified on the basis of race (line 81: ‘white folks’). This evaluation is boosted (line 81: ‘mighty good’), thus further underlining its positive nature. In the subsequent line, the interviewee then inserts an epistemic downgrade of this evaluation, framing it as his personal opinion (hence the prosodically marked ‘↑my’ in line 82) and mitigating his full accountability (line 82: ‘as far as I can remember’). Now, instead of closing this topic here, the interviewee repeats his boosted positive evaluation twice in the subsequent line (line 83) and then continues by providing ‘objective’ proof for this claim in the form of a post-Civil War anecdote (line 84–87: ‘after c-country ­surrendered.hh’). As a preliminary to this anecdote, the interviewee repeats this positive evaluation, but by inserting the modal verb “must” (line 54: ‘they must have been good’), he gives his initially epistemically downgraded evaluation a much more peremptory nature. So, this repeated evaluation is then immediately linked to this account and this link is underlined prosodically by means of the latching between the evaluation and the evidential anecdote (line 84: ‘good=after’). First, the interviewee briefly formulates a temporal orientation phase (line 84–85), after which he relates the gist of the story, namely that nobody

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

left (line 85: ‘didn’t none move’), on the contrary, that other people came to the place where they lived (line 86–87). So this is an example of an inferentially evidential anecdote, since the listener is now expected to infer that it must have been very good there, since everybody either wanted to stay at or wanted to come to ‘the place’ (line 87). Through this anecdote the interviewee thus constructs the factual nature of the positive evaluation of the ‘white folks’, since it suggests that it is not only the speaker’s opinion, but that this evaluation is objective, i.e. independent of the speaker’s – perhaps faulty – memory, thus underlining its “out-thereness” (Edwards & Potter, 1992, p. 105). Thus, in these two extracts, Moseley on the one hand immediately highlights his upbringing by white masters when presenting himself, and on the other hand he goes to great lengths to objectively construct the identity of these slave owners as benevolent masters. So, in this – relatively brief2 – interview, these two elements are explicitly present, one as a crucial first point of the interviewee’s selfpresentation, the other in a very emphatic way, but the link between the two is never established. This is also demonstrated by the social groups the interviewee makes relevant: in these extracts, the interviewee polarises the group of slaves and the benevolent slave owners, and he constructs his membership of the former group (cf. line 81: ‘We had mighty good white folks’). As such, he talks race into being as a criterion for group membership (‘we’ (=African Americans) versus the ‘white folks’), without making any further distinctions on the basis of education or upbringing with the former group. In a number of other interviews, such a distinction is made relevant by the interviewees. For example, in the interview with Joe Mc Donald, the topic of the interviewee’s upbringing is also raised right at the beginning of the interview. Since the question was not captured on the recording, it is unclear how explicitly this topic was initiated in the interviewer’s question, or whether it was chosen by the interviewee himself. In any case, the interviewee’s turn in line 3 mirrors Moseley’s initial turn (see Extract 5.1), but, unlike Moseley, the interviewee uses a vague third person pronoun to refer to the agent of the upbringing (line 3: ‘him’). The interviewer bids to disambiguate this reference in line 4 and the interviewee ratifies this in the subsequent line. After this, the interviewee starts describing his upbringing (from line 5 onwards).

.  The recording only lasts for 10 minutes.



Chapter 5.  The white supremacy master narrative as an oeuvre civilisatrice 

Extract 5.3 (Joe McDonald)3 1 IE Yeah. 2 IR All right. 3 IE Yeah. I was rai:se in the house with him. 4 IR Mister [Felix McMillan 5 IE [Mister Felix McMillan, and uh, they taught me mighty good, 6 they teach me good. They said, I remember, 7 says, ‘Joe?’ I say, ‘0Yes ↓sir.0’ 8 (.) they said, 9 ‘we wants to raise you as an intelligent ↑nig↓ga. (.) 10 We wants you to have good friends like we have got.’ 11 >Say, ‘You’ll never be scratched by good rich, 12 sensible white folksyou know.= 1062 IR =Hmm= 1063 IE =My interest was in some brass band stuff.< 1064 IR Hmm 1065 IE >See, I always liked brass band. I played brass band myself.< 1066 IR Ah what ah what a what instruments did you have in the brass band?

So, in overlap with the interviewer, the interviewee explicitly expresses his lack of any memory of ‘those things’, and the demonstrative pronoun in this formulation almost literally shows the interviewee’s distance from this musical genre (Stivers, 2007). He then initiates the topic of brass band music, which he not only frames as contrastive (line 1060: ‘but’), but also as all-encompassing and t­imeless, given the use of the extreme case formulations ‘all’ (line 1061: ‘all my interest’)  and ‘always’ (line 1065). This newly initiated topic is first repeated after a latched-on

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

c­ ontinuer of the interviewer (line 1063). The interviewer then voices another minimal response (line 1064), after which the interviewee rephrases his formulation slightly, repeating the topic of brass band twice. In the subsequent line, the interviewer then aligns with this topic shift and asks a follow-up question about the set-up of the brass band. So the interviewee’s repetitions contribute to the success of this topic shift, as it is picked up in the final line of the fragment. Such topic shifts that move away from the musical genre under discussion to the genre of brass band music occur quite frequently in the course of the interview, but these are particularly interesting when the genres of the blues and jazz are being discussed. An example of this can be seen below, when the interlocutors discuss the interviewee’s memories of the first time he ever heard the blues. Extract 5.9 (George Johnson)6 1481 IR £what did it sound like£ 1482 IE Oh it wasn’t sound like nothing just some old (.) 1483 oh lord most of it wasn’t nothing. Just (.5) some Negroes (.) 1484 > Negro acting monkey< (.) Nigga act like he got shortcoming. 1485 That’s right. He shortcoming. He uncouth (.) 1486 ↑See (.) Nigga ain’t got some kind of stuff in his head. 1487 Why he just going to be er: (.3) a monkey all his life right? 1488 care about it. 1489 IR Naw, I like the blues. 1490 IE You ↑do I don’t care nothing about it. 1491 IR ((slight laughter)) 1492 IE nothing (.7) nothing about it want to get me to 1493 know something=like something you get a brass band 1494 start let’s go do a quickmarch out there 1495 show you what I’ll do (.) quickmarch

In line 1481, the interviewer asks what the music sounded like. In reply to this question, the interviewee dismisses the blues as ‘nothing’ (lines 1482 and 1483), thus evaluating it negatively. Then he explicitly links the blues music to race, downplaying it in a general way (line 1483: ‘just’) and in a more specific way by adding a quantity hedge (line 1483: ‘some Negroes’), mitigating the amount of people involved in it, thus setting up an outgroup of ‘some Negroes’ who like this kind of music. Then, from line 1484 onwards, the interviewee explicitly criticises this outgroup of ‘Negroes’ playing the blues for acting like monkeys (lines 1484 and 1487), ­having a ‘shortcoming’ (lines 1484 and 1485), being ‘uncouth’ (line 1485) and being ­brainless (line 1486). All these negative assessments of course express the

.  This extract was also presented in Van De Mieroop and Clifton (2012), but it was analysed from a different perspective.



Chapter 5.  The white supremacy master narrative as an oeuvre civilisatrice 

interviewee’s dislike for the blues and they characterise this outgroup in explicitly negative terms. Furthermore, these assessments implicitly invoke the interviewee’s orientation to a master narrative of racial inferiority in which African A ­ mericans are not considered to be much more than animals. Initially, this idea of the African American-as-animal is briefly mentioned in passing in the comparison between the African American musician’s behaviour and the conduct of monkeys, which is de-emphasised given the high pace at which it is pronounced (line 1484: ‘> Negro acting monkeyWell we didn’t have no houses like they got now, you know. 447 We had these what they call a lo:g ↑cabin.< 448 (3.0) 449 IE And they have one old c- one mayb- one o:ld coloured man 450 would be there, maybe he’d be as old as I am. 451 And he’d be the ↑preacher. 452 Not as old as I am now, 0but0 he’d be the preacher, 453 and we a::ll sit down and listen at him (.) talk about the Lord.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

So, in line 441, the interviewee comes up with the topic of religion quite abruptly by means of a question, probing for the interviewer’s knowledge of religious practices in the pre-Civil War period. This question contains the story abstract and it can be read as a preliminary, by means of which he implicitly bids for permission to take the floor for an extended story-telling turn. The interviewer aligns with this topic change by asking a follow-up question, on which the interviewee then latches the start of a lengthy turn. In this turn, he immediately embarks on the story in medias res, by describing the subsequent actions. These are framed as typical actions, as the use of ‘would’ suggests, and the story can thus be characterised as a habitual narrative (Carranza, 1998). Interestingly, the story of this habitual action is temporarily put on hold in lines 445 to 448, in which, in between two lengthy pauses, the interviewee gives more details regarding the location of the religious services. This elaboration is important, as it implicitly disambiguates the referent of the we-form, namely that it refers to the slaves only, who would typically not have had a church in which to hold their services, while the ‘official’ religion ratified by the slave owner would usually take place in a church in which African Americans and whites worshipped together, while sitting apart. When the interviewee picks up the thread of his story in line 449 (‘And they have one old c- one mayb- one o:ld coloured man’), the characterization of the religious gathering as a secret meeting organised by the African Americans is further supported by the fact that the preacher is described as a ‘coloured’ man who ‘would be’ the preacher (lines 451 and 452), thus suggesting that he did not have an official status as a preacher. The fragment ends with another elaboration on the preacher’s age (lines 450–452) and on their religious activities (line 453: ‘and we a::ll sit down and listen at him (.) talk about the Lord’). Then, in the following extract, the interviewee continues his description by means of direct reported speech to report the preacher’s words (lines 454–457) and those of the other attendees. In this reported exchange (Buttny, 1997), a few turns are quoted in which the desire to be free is discussed (lines 457–459). This, of course, further clarifies that the religious service is an example of the ‘invisible institution’, referring to the slaves’ secret meetings during which they, among other things, prayed for freedom through their songs. Extract 6.3 (Fountain Hughes) 454 IE “Well”, he’d say, “0well0” 455 (3.9) 456 IE “I wonder::u:h”, sometimes you say 457 “I wonder if we’ll ever be free.” 458 “Well”, some of them would say, 459 “Well, we going to go ask the Lord to free us.” 460 So they’d say, “Well, we, we going to sing 461 One Day Shall I Ever Reach Heaven (.) and One Day Shall I: Fly.”



Chapter 6.  An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race 

In this extract, the interviewee tells a story of the slaves’ resistance through underground religious activities, and this is thus a narrative that challenges the historical master narrative of slave obedience. Importantly, though, the interviewee cautiously positions himself vis-à-vis this resistance narrative thus displaying the delicate nature of ‘doing’ a ‘counter-narrative’. First, while in the preceding extract, the interviewee fairly consistently4 used the 1st person plural pronominal form to refer to the group of people who gathered for these prayer meetings, this changes drastically in this extract. In line 458, the interviewee shifts to the 3rd person plural form (‘some of them’) to describe the complicating action, consisting of the reported exchange initiated by the preacher in lines 454–457. As such, he distances himself from the group involved in the activity, and implicitly casts himself into the role of observer or bystander. As such, he blurs his involvement in this dissident activity of praying for freedom. Second, the dangerous and illegitimate nature of this discussion is also shown in a paralinguistic way, both in the utterances in direct reported speech itself, as well as in its enquoting text surrounding this reported exchange. On the one hand, within the direct reported speech utterances, the preacher’s question that initiates this topic of praying for freedom, clearly has a dispreferred turn shape, as the many repetitions (line 454: ‘well’; line 456–457: ‘I wonder’) and the hesitation (line 456: ‘uh’) indicate. This use of ‘well’ is mirrored in the second part of the adjacency pair, in which the prayer attendees answer the preacher’s question by means of a suggestion. This suggestion – except for the initial repeated ‘well’ – has a preferred turn shape, thus indicating that it is a preferred response to the preacher’s question, and the same holds for the closing turn of the reported exchange, in which ‘they’ suggest singing a particular song (line 460–461). This demonstrates that the prayer attendees largely agreed on this pro-freedom stance, and it constructs them as an outgroup, opposed to the dominating ingroup of white slave owners. On the other hand, in the enquoting text, the speakers uttering these words are blurred: the preacher is initially referred to as ‘he’ (line 454), but then the generic ‘you′-form (line 456) is used, while, in line 458, the interviewee says ‘some of them’ replied, thus blurring the issue whether the whole group agreed with these dangerous discussions of freedom and whether it really was a close-knit counter-group. Also, the frequency of these kinds of dialogues are downplayed by the insertion of the

.  This use is fairly consistent in lines 444–453 and it is only interrupted a couple of times (lines 446, 447 and 449) with a 3rd person plural pronominal form, which is typically a general, vague, timeless reference (e.g. ‘houses like they got now’). However, within the storyworld’s time and place, the unmarked form to describe the group of prayer attendees is clearly ‘we’ in lines 444–453.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

temporal adverb ‘sometimes’ (line 456), thus again mitigating the occurrence of these discussions. So, in this part of the fragment, the interviewee first of all distances himself from the group of prayer attendees, as such avoiding any stance taking regarding either slavery or religion – as taking part in prayers for freedom would be a clear indication of the interviewee’s disapproval of the slave system and of his active engagement in religion. Secondly, by means of a reported exchange, he seemingly “makes others’ words visible” (Buttny, 1997, p. 503) and ‘shows’ their preference structure through ‘constructed sequentiality’ (Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2013), suggesting on the one hand the difficulty of initiating such talk, and on the other hand the preferred nature of the response, consisting of a suggestion to pray for freedom. This implicitly constructs the prayer attendees as an outgroup, but thirdly, this is then mitigated again by the enquoting text which downplays the frequency of these discussions and it also leaves the question of whether all group members were involved or not unanswered. After having ended the reported exchange, the interviewee continues by recounting the details of when and for how long which spirituals were sung, as we see in the final part of this fragment. Extract 6.4 (Fountain Hughes) 462 Then they would sing that for about a ↑hour. 463 Then they, next morning they’d get up and say “Let’s sing a song, 464 We Gonna Live on Milk and Honey, Wa::y By and By.” 465 They’d, oh I can hear them singing now 466 but I can’t, can’t, uh, repeat it like I could in them days. 467 But some day when I’m not hoarse (.) I could tell you, 468 I could sing it for you, but I’m too hoarse now. 469 And then we would sing 470 (4.8) 469 IE I’m Gonna 471 (1.6) 472 IE I’m Gonna: 473 (6.2) 474 IE Sing Around the Altar. 475 Oh, I, I wish I could £si-£, I wish I could sing it for you 476 I’m Gonna Sing A[round the Altar. 477 IR [Well I wish you could too.

In the initial lines of this fragment, the interviewee sketches the duration (line 462: ‘for about a hour’) and the frequency of the singing (it starts again the ‘next morning’, see line 463), as such indicating its importance for the slaves. As the titles



Chapter 6.  An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race 

of these spirituals also suggest (e.g. line 464: We Gonna Live on Milk and Honey, Wa::y By and By), these songs express a longing for a better life, and as they were initially framed in the previous extract – through the consecutive conjunction ‘so’ in line 460 – as prayers for freedom, this continuation is clearly on-topic, although the link with a desire for freedom becomes more implicit. Gradually, then, the discussion moves through a stepwise topic shift to a focus on the interviewee and his inability to reproduce the songs. Interestingly, the interviewee still constructs the identity of a bystander who observed the activities of an outgroup, as he recounts ‘hearing them sing’ (line 465) and being able to ‘repeat’ their songs ‘in them days’ (line 466), but not as somebody who sang along and who thus joined in this dissident religious activity. But then, after having offered the interviewer another chance to hear him sing ‘some day’ when he is not ‘hoarse’ (line 467–468), the interviewee shifts back to the 1st person pronominal form. The referents of this form are quite unclear though: it could refer back to slavery times, shifting to the habitual ‘would’ again, or it could refer to the future, when perhaps the interviewer and the interviewee could sing together. The subsequent turns do not disambiguate this matter, as the interviewee continues by hesitatingly formulating another song title and expressing the wish to sing it for the interviewer, who agrees in overlap in the final line of the fragment. The discussion of spirituals continues for quite a while, but in these discussions, the interviewee does not hint at the subversive nature of these activities anymore. Rather, he focuses on the way these spirituals are sung at the time of the interview in comparison to slavery times. So, the preceding extracts contained a story in which underground religious activities are discussed. Because through such dissident activities the slaves ­disobeyed their owners, they thus formed an outgroup which challenged the norms of the slavery system. As this narrative thus counters the ‘historical’ master narrative of slave obedience, it can be considered a counter-narrative. However, the interviewee constructs quite an ambiguous position towards these dissident prayer groups: on the one hand, he self-initiated this topic and thus implicitly framed it as important for his recounting of slavery times, but on the other hand, he refrains from constructing himself as a member of the prayer group, rather, he quite consistently talks into being his role of bystander. Consequently, he constructs himself as a neutral observer who relates what he saw and who merely repeats the spirituals that were sung by others. As such, he does not produce a ‘stereotypical’ counter-narrative in which a narrator constructs his membership of an outgroup to challenge a dominating ingroup. This reticence to express personal involvement is not a typical feature of this interview, as elsewhere in the interaction, the interviewee is critical of slavery

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

times, as we have demonstrated before (see Chapter 4). Rather, other factors seem to come into play here: first, the interviewee is well aware of his contemporary audience and, as he says elsewhere in the interview, he recipient designs his talk in order not to upset people: Extract 6.5 (Fountain Hughes) 359 But still I don’t like to talk about it. 360 Because it makes (.) makes people feel bad 0you know0. 361 Uh, I, I could say a whole lot I don’t like to say. 362 0And I won’t say a whole lot more.0

This extract comes immediately after Extract 4.8 and the ‘it’ in line 359 thus refers to slavery. In this brief fragment, the interviewee clearly displays an orientation to members of the ghostly audience who may ‘feel bad’ (line 360) when critically discussing slavery times. And, as became clear from Extract 6.1, critical discussions of religion are also constructed as problematic during the time of the interview. It is particularly in these instances that the role of the interviewer, as a representative of the ghostly audience, is crucial, as we already observed in Extract 6.1 and as will be discussed more extensively in Chapter  7. This is clearly an issue here as well, as the interviewer, who did not probe for the topic of antebellum slave religion in the first place, never asked any follow-up questions regarding the slaves’ religious services and their relation to emancipation. Consequently, it is not surprising that this story is not developed further to form an elaborate counter-narrative. Rather, as the story is unratified by the interviewer, it evaporates as quickly as it appeared, and it is replaced by a discussion of related, but much safer topics – such as how, rather than why these spirituals were sung. So, in the interview with Fountain Hughes, the interviewer is found not to ratify or encourage critical discussions of religion and so he may be seen as silencing stories that potentially challenge master narratives of white supremacy, slave obedience, or the importance of religion. However, it is not always the interviewer who silences stories, in the corpus, there are also a few examples of interviewers who particularly probed for stories of resistance to the slave owners through dissident religious activities but whose bids for such stories remain unanswered by the interviewees. An example of this can be found in the interview with Charles Johnson, in which the interviewer probed for the interviewee’s experience of religious meetings, his ideas about the preacher, and ‘what kind of songs’ were sung in church. The interviewee answers this last question by naming, and subsequently singing, Mercy Seat. The excerpt starts with the interviewee’s evaluation of the song (line 631) which occurs right after the interviewee has finished singing.



Chapter 6.  An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race 

Extract 6.6 (George Johnson) 631 IE That’s one of our favourite son[gs. Yes, sir right in church. 632 IR [0Mhmm0 633 IE And all the women shout: ‘My Lord, oh mercy.’ 634 ? ((laugh)) 635 IE 0(Yes, sir)0 636 IR Di- di- did they have these things in church 637 then that they called the shouts? 638 IE Oh yes, sir. Yes, sir. They shout without end. 639 IR Well, I don’t mean when the::y, 640 when they £ju, ju, jump£ up and shout, 641 but these, these kind of singings they called the shouts (.) 0then0? 642 IE No, sir. I don’t think we did. No (sir). Not in my day. 643 IR Di- di- did they have any Baptist on your plantation? 644 IE Yes, sir. We had plenty Baptist. Plenty Baptist. 645 Main church we had there (was) Baptist Church. 646 IR Di- did they do any different singing and things 647 from what you all did? 648 IE >Mighty little. Mighty little.< 649 IR You all sang about the same things t[hey did? 650 IE [Yes, sir.

In the initial lines of the fragment, the interviewee concludes his singing and adds how it was reacted to by ‘the women’ who shouted ‘My Lord, oh mercy’ (line 633). This is picked up by the interviewer who asks a follow-up question in line 636–637. This question, however, is framed differently, namely as ‘things’ they might have had which ‘they called the shouts’ (line 636–637). This indicates that the interviewer is actually initiating a new topic, thus executing a stepwise topic shift. This is further supported by the use of the 3rd person plural pronominal form, since it implicitly sets up a distance between the agents of these ‘shouts’ and the interviewee and his ingroup of fellow singers (as referred to for example in line 631 by means of the 1st person plural pronominal form ‘our’), thus also shifting the focus to a new topic. However, the interviewee interprets this 3rd person plural pronominal form as a reference to the women that were shouting a response to the song (line 633). Then in the next turn, the interviewer corrects the interviewee explicitly, by first formulating which activity he does not refer to (line 639–640) and then further disambiguating what he meant by his question about ‘the shouts’. It is clear from this disambiguation that the interviewer is probing for a particular genre here, as he refers to specific ‘kinds of singing’ which carried this specific name (line 641: ‘they called the shouts’), so we can be quite sure that the interviewer refers to what is known as the ‘ring shout’. This can be defined as a spiritual that is not

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

only sung, but that is expressed while engaging “the whole body in hand-clapping, foot-stamping, head-shaking excitement” and dancing a “counterclockwise, circular shuffle”, causing the singers to move into a religious trance (Raboteau, 1999, p. 52). It is quite certain that the interviewer had knowledge of this ‘ring shout’, as Alan Lomax, who was also present during this interview, had recorded such a ring shout in 1934 (Raboteau, 1978, p. 70), thus several years prior to this interview. As it is a style of religious worship that has a very clear link to the slaves’ African heritage, it was obviously not a practice in the official churches that were controlled by the slave owners. Hence, it is clear that the interviewer is probing for a more dissident type of religion than the type that the interviewee had described previously. So, the interviewer is trying to elicit a story about underground forms of religion that could have fostered the slaves’ resistance, but he is unsuccessful as the interviewee responds negatively to his question in line 642, by means of a four times paraphrased expression of negation. The interviewer then pursues the topic of religion further by asking ‘Di- di- did they have any Baptist on your plantation?’ (line 643). He thus shifts the focus away from the Methodist church, which the interviewee attended, to the Baptist church which was another well represented religion on the slave plantations (Raboteau, 1999). And, after an affirmative response by the interviewee (line 644–645), the interviewer probes for any potential differences from the interviewee’s religious practices. The goal of his question is very open (line 646: ‘any different singing and things’), thus clearly emphasizing that the focus is on different – possibly more underground – practices of religion, and this setting up of a potential difference is further underlined by the interviewer’s use of ‘they’ (line 646) versus ‘you all’ (line 647) which creates an ingroup-outgroup distinction between Methodists and Baptists. This distinction on the basis of religion is maintained in his follow-up question in line 649 (‘you all’ versus ‘they’), in which the interviewer further pursues a potential difference in the topic of the spiritual songs. As the interviewee had ­previously selected Mercy Seat for singing, of which the lyrics5 do not have any well-known double meaning as is the case of other spirituals (Sullivan, 2001, p. 24), the interviewer is again potentially orienting his question towards an account of other, perhaps covertly rebellious, songs. Again, the interviewee does not go into this and confirms that they all ‘sang about the same things’, as the interviewer had formulated it in line 649. The discussion then gradually moves to the particular songs that were sung in the field. .  These lyrics are: “There is a calm, Oh, sure to be. It’s underneath the Mercy Seat. Oh, Mercy Seat. Oh, Mercy Seat. Calm to be, Oh, Mercy Seat. There is a calm, Oh, sure to be. Around a calm, Oh, Mercy Seat.”



Chapter 6.  An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race 

So, in this extract, the interviewer explicitly (regarding the ring shouts) and implicitly (regarding ‘different practices’ between Churches) probes for other accounts relating to religion. Given the inherently double sided nature of this topic, as well as the interviewer’s own orientation to religious expressions honouring African heritage (viz. the ring shout), one could argue that he is probing for stories about the slaves’ underground religious practices. The interviewer’s questions are open-ended, thus leaving opportunity for the interviewee to initiate a related topic. Yet none of these bids for stories are topicalised by additional stories in the interviewee’s answers. So this can be read as displays of a lack of willingness by the interviewee to develop the candidate topics that are offered to him. Of course, the interviewee may not have encountered any form of dissident religious practices and may thus not have any knowledge of it. The extent of the interviewee’s knowledge is – self-evidently – something which we cannot know. Still, the result is that potential stories of the slaves’ own religious practices, which could have been formulated as counter-narratives resisting the slave system’s dominant discourse of white supremacy and obedience to the slave owners, remain untold in spite of the interviewer’s effort to elicit these through his questions. In this section, we aimed to demonstrate how telling counter-narratives often requires collaborative discursive work by the interviewer and the interviewee. If either one of the two parties does not encourage or ratify the topic raised by the other party, this topic may evaporate extremely quickly. This is especially so since counter-narratives offer a dissident view on what is culturally shared by the dominant ingroup. As in most interviews, since the interviewer is a member of such an ingroup – namely that of the whites – it is quite face threatening for an interviewee to challenge white supremacy master narratives. Thus initiating such a topic implies many threats to the interlocutors’ identities and so many of these stories may remain either untold or undeveloped. This is an important issue we will elaborate on more extensively in Chapter 7. But now, it is time to turn to the stories that were told.

Narratives about religion As mentioned before, religion was a complex matter during slavery times: on the one hand, because it could legitimise the slaves’ call for emancipation and freedom, the slave owners feared notions of equality that some saw as being inherent to Christianity. Hence they created churches in which the – often white – preachers incited the slaves to be obedient to their slave owners, arguing that this would ensure the slaves their place in heaven. On the other hand, Bible stories about the Israelites freeing themselves from the yoke of slavery were an inevitable inspiration for the slaves, who gathered in secret meetings to find comfort and pray for

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

freedom – as, for example, we have already seen in the story of Fountain Hughes discussed above. Either way, no matter what the personal experience of the interviewees was, religion is a topic that is prone to invoke narratives that oppose something. Such narratives of religion could be considered as counter-narratives either because during slavery times, the ‘invisible institution’ of secret religious gatherings were a form of rebellion against the slavery system’s dominant discourse of white supremacy and slave obedience, or as counter-narratives because after slavery times, the former slaves found out that religion had been used – and abused – as a tool of oppression by the whites. In the corpus, we found an example of each of these types of experiences, which we will discuss here. While the first section contains a story of resistance during slavery time, the second section focuses on a story in which the interviewee discusses how she found out later that religion was used to keep the slaves ignorant and to ensure their obedience. Making the ‘invisible institution’ visible through a ‘historical’ counter-narrative In the interview with Laura Smalley, there is quite an extensive discussion of religious practices in the antebellum period. As narratives are always collaboratively constructed with the other interlocutors (see previous section), it is important to note that the interviewer is demonstrably not opposed to entering into a discussion of underground religion by the slaves and that he also displays considerable knowledge of this topic.6 This is first of all demonstrated by the fact that the interviewer does not avoid topicalizing songs that were known for their analogies between Biblical themes and the situation of the slaves. For example, he probes for the interviewee’s knowledge of the spiritual Go Down Moses7 (line 630) and of the oppression song Deep River8 (line 638). This demonstrates that he considers songs reputed for their role in dissident slave activity to be allowable contributions (Levinson, 1992, p. 69) to the interview. Second, he also displays knowledge of specialised terminology relating to religion, as we see in the following extract containing a discussion of church services by the slaves themselves.

.  This is not surprising, as records show that the interviewer is actually an academic who studied African American sermons for his MA. .  This spiritual had really acquired a reputation as a song whose the lyrics were easily applicable to the slaves’ predicament. .  This song was typically used by the slaves to announce a secret meeting by the river and its lyrics have a metaphorical meaning of escaping to freedom (Ellison, 1989; Haskins, 1987).



Chapter 6.  An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race 

Extract 6.7 (Laura Smalley) 543 IE They used to didn’t have no church, you know (.) 544 in no house, you know, they always had it in the tree::s. 545 IR2 0In the trees0? 546 IE Under the trees. Under the trees. Yes, ma’am. 547 Under (the) trees. → 548 IR1 Brush arbours? 549 IE Yes, sir. Some, if they didn’t have no brush arbours, 550 they just had it under the tree.

In the initial line, the interviewee states that ‘they’ (viz. the slaves) held their religious services ‘in the tree::s’ (line 544). Important in this fragment is that in line 548, the interviewer probes further for the setting of these services, and he does so by initiating the term ‘brush arbours’ (line 548). The use of this term, referring to ‘shelters of cut branches also called “hush harbours”’ (Raboteau, 1999, p. 47), demonstrates the interviewer’s knowledge of these secret meetings during which “the slaves made Christianity truly their own” (Raboteau, 1978, p. 212). Furthermore, it also illustrates that the topic of these secret religious meetings is constructed as open for further elaboration and is ratified to be a legitimate topic for discussion – unlike in, for example, the interview with Fountain Hughes (see Extracts 6.1 and following above). Hence, it is not surprising that in this interview, a narrative of resistance by means of religion occurred as all interlocutors have a demonstrable interest in, and knowledge of, these underground religious practices. We will now go into the discussion of this narrative of resistance, which emerged after the interviewer initiated the topic of how the slaves got married. As the narrative is quite long, it is presented in four extracts which immediately follow one another. Extract 6.8 (Laura Smalley) 493 IR1 Well, did they ha:ve a church? Did the: sla:ves 494 have a chu[rch? 495 IE [No, I, I never remember no church. 496 Momma ↓said (.) the o:nly church, 497 I (didn’t remember that part of) (the only) church 498 we would have be a ↑tu:b (.) a tub of water, 499 sitting just like this thing is, you know, 500 and that would ↑catch your voice. 501 And they would, they would have church around that tub 502 all (of) them get around the tub. (.) Get around the tub.

The interviewer’s question is related to the specific way in which the slaves married (which was discussed prior to the fragment), but the interviewee orients to this question as a topic shift and starts discussing her lack of memory regarding a

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

church (line 495). This is then further disambiguated not as a memory issue, but as a clear memory of a lack of a church building. The interviewee then introduces her mother, and by using a quotative, she seems to embark on a direct reported speech sequence. However, after a brief pause, whether the following words are quoted or not remains vague. In any case, this is quickly broken off by a – hard to understand – comment regarding the interviewee’s memory. She then picks up the thread again and describes the ‘only church’ (lines 496 and 497) the slaves had, namely as an activity of sitting around a tub of water that would ‘catch’ their ‘voices’ (line 500). This was a commonly known practice for absorbing the sounds during the slaves’ secret religious gatherings (Raboteau, 1978, p. 215), as has been described above. Thus, the activity that the interviewee describes is immediately framed as an underground religious service, to which the interviewee refers by the expression ‘to have church’ (lines 497–498 and line 501). Consequently, on the one hand, this widens the scope of the interviewer’s question to church services instead of church buildings. On the other hand though, the interviewee is quite specific in her description of this pivotal element in the church services (namely the tub), as she describes its content (line 498), its appearance (line 499), its purpose (line 500), and the way it was used (lines 501–502). In this way, she is also complying with the orientation of the interviewer’s question towards a description of the church. Finally, in describing this activity (line 501: ‘they would have church around that tub’), the interviewee uses the 3rd person plural pronominal form, thus distancing herself from the group of church attendees. As such, the interviewee assumes the role of a non-involved narrator here. Her position towards these dissident religious activities is thus quite similar to that of Fountain Hughes as discussed in Extracts 6.2–6.4, in that she also constructs a non-committed observer’s identity vis-à-vis this story which challenges the ‘historical’ master narrative of slave obedience. Interestingly, this changes quite drastically in the next extract, which directly follows this fragment. Extract 6.9 (Laura Smalley) 503 IR1 Old master didn’t want to have a church. 504 IE We don’t have no church. No. We didn’t have no church. 505 And erm, old master come along whi- w 506 there, 507 having church around the tub and 508 we (was) down ↑praying (.) And say he’s down 509 and and he come in and 511 he gave it to all of (t-) >“Get up from there.”< 512 We didn’t get up, we just a pra::y (.)



Chapter 6.  An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race 

In his follow-up question, the interviewer paraphrases his initial question about the absence of a church, but in his formulation, the focus shifts to the cause of this absence, namely that the slave owner did not want a church for the slaves. He thus makes relevant the slave owner-slave relation, in which the latter was the powerful agent, forcing his will upon the former, who were in a powerless position and who had to obey. So, this question, even though it is still on-topic regarding the absence/presence of a slaves’ church, implicitly shifts the focus to the oppressive slave owner-slave relation, thus also picking up the thread that the interviewee had implicitly woven into her story about secret religious meetings which were held against the master’s will. In her answer, the interviewee first confirms the absence of a church in a triple expression of negation (line 504) and in her answer she – importantly – shifts footing and constructs herself as a member of this group by using the we-form. In the subsequent line, she shifts the focus of her story to the other aspect of the interviewer’s question, namely the role of the master in the slaves’ religious meetings. As such, she reframes her prior answer to the previous question (Extract 6.8) as an orientation phase to her story, and she thus now moves directly into the complicating action consisting of the slave owner visiting a clandestine religious meeting around the tub. In the initial lines of this part of the story, the storyworld characters are presented, namely: –– the slave owner, who is described as entering the scene (line 505: ‘old master come along’); –– the group of worshippers, who are referred to by means of the 1st person plural pronominal form and whose action is described, with prosodic stress on the last word, as ‘down ↑praying’. Once the scene, these main characters, and their activities are laid out, the interviewee actually repeats this set-up, but now in a strongly performed way, as she shifts to a soft voice, uses a lower speaking pace and voices a – consistent (see lines 509, 510 and 512) – lengthening of the verb ‘pray’. These serve as contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1992) to evoke the prayers of the slaves and the sacredness of the atmosphere, which is brutally broken off by the intrusion of the master who engages in some sort of activity (line 511: ‘he gave it to all of (t-)’) and orders the slaves to ‘get up from there’ (line 511). As these words are uttered more quickly than the surrounding talk, it clearly sets them apart from the slaves’ religious activity. Then in the subsequent line, the interviewee factually states that the slaves did not respond to this order, again using an extended vowel while expressing the verb ‘pray’ (line 512). So, the contrast between the repetitive soft- and slow-spoken description of the slaves’ praying activity and the direct quote of the master are really performed,

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

as such playing out the scene in front of the interviewer’s eyes. As the interviewee consistently uses the we-form here, she constructs herself as a member of this dissident praying group, who disobeyed the slave owner’s order and as such, challenged the ‘historical’ master narrative of slave obedience. This disobedience is further described in the final part of the fragment, which takes a slightly different trajectory: Extract 6.10 (Laura Smalley) 513 IE And say (to) old master (come   ) 514 We (kept) praying again and asked the Lord 515 (to) have mercy on old master. (.) 516 “Lo::rd have mercy on old master. (.) 517 Lo::rd have mercy on old master=old master oo(oh   )” 518 (2.2) 519 IE (that’s how) to have mercy on old master. 520 Said old master (   ) >wouldn’t get up, 521 you know. Just flinch, you know, it’s like (   ) 522 you know, when (   ) hit you, you know, you just flinchand she’d have them riding, grandma would ride to Mountain City to church< They had ↑white preachers there. (.) 0uh0 Mister Porter, he was one of the preachers (.) that lived across from us.

In the first line of the extract, the interviewer initiates the topic of the content of the preacher’s sermons during slavery times. The interviewee initially responds evasively, claiming first that she has no knowledge of that, but then she sets up an answering format (line 107: ‘He’d preach about’), which she fills with hedged and vague empty words. These are also formulated in a muffled voice, further blurring their content. From his reaction, we can suppose that the interviewer interprets this lack of a clear answer not as a memory problem, but as a way to parry the question. So, he overlaps the final part of the interviewee’s vague answer by probing for differences between the way preaching now differs from the past (line 109–110). The interviewee confirms this difference between then and now and she accounts for it by naming the lack of education (line 111) as a reason. This account of ‘education’ neutralises the issue, since she thus refrains from framing her answer in more controversial terms, such as for example race (African Americans versus whites) or power (the powerful slave owners’ preacher versus the powerless slaves). After some hesitation and some mumbled words (line 112), she then continues the story and explains the content of the sermons. Initially, the interviewee formulates this in neutral terms (line 113: ‘how to get along’), as preaching about

.  From the context, it is clear that this refers to the slave owners’ name, but the full name could not be retrieved from the recording.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

how people should behave is a typical practice of (Christian) churches in general. However, in the subsequent line, the interviewee reformulates this general topic of the sermons to a more specific topic, namely ‘how to treat the white people’ (line 114). She thus makes race relevant in her description, and implicitly also invokes a power dimension here, as ‘white’ equals power in the slave system. She then continues by naming other things they did in church (viz. reading the Bible) and closes this topic by a general conclusion about her good memory of slavery (line 116). In the subsequent line, she executes quite an abrupt topic shift to how the slaves went dancing, but then she breaks off her turn. The interviewer continues with a follow-up question which further moves away from the topic of religion to the treatment of the slaves by the white folks (line 118). In the following lines, the interviewee explains that the slaves were treated well (line 120–126), and she illustrates this by explaining that some – probably elder – slaves were allowed to ride a horse13 (line 127–130). Interestingly, the occasion during which the slaves could ride this horse was when they went to church, thus linking the topic back to the earlier discussion. The interviewee then even elaborates on the topic of the church, saying that there were ‘white preachers there’ (line 131). After a hesitation and two pauses, the interviewee further explores this topic by giving details about the preacher (line 133–134). The fact that she refers to him as ‘Mister’ talks into being a different hierarchical status, thus already implying that the preacher was not ‘one of them’, as would have been the case in underground religious practices. So, in this extract, the interviewee first describes the slaves’ religious services in neutral terms, but in line 114, she starts making race relevant and continues to do so when labelling the preacher as ‘white’ in line 131. Up till this point, she thus orients to general master narratives of a segregated society in which race was omni-relevant as it was directly related to power and hierarchy. As she does not challenge this, but frames her story as a neutral description, she acquiesces to white supremacy master narratives. However, this changes in the following fragment, in which the interviewer picks up the topic of religion again and mirrors the interviewee’s qualification of the preacher as ‘white’ (line 135: ‘white preacher’) in his question. Thus, his question is framed now in terms of race and implicitly also in terms of power (by being told how to behave, see line 136).

.  As was discussed in other interviews (e.g. in the interview with Fountain Hughes, see Chapter 4), this was quite a privilege and so it serves as an illustration of the owner’s benevolence.



Chapter 6.  An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race 

Extract 6.13 (Harriet Smith) 135 IR Well would the white preacher tell you 136 to behave yourselves and be: = 137 IE =O::h yeah, 0the[y 00( )00 138 IR [Be good to your ↑maste[r and mistress?] 139 IE [ye:::::::::::::::::s] 140 that’s what they preach. 141 We ((laugh)) d- £↑didn’t£ know there was any such thing (.) 142 as Go:d and, and, and Go:d, you know, 143 we thought that was uh (.) the different man, 144 but he was ↑our master=uh 145 >our white folks you know< 146 preachers would (   ) to the white folks, master, 147 0and so on (and that way) (.) 0 148 IR [mm 149 IE 00(Didn’t know no) better.00

After a latched-on affirmative answer by the interviewee, the interviewer overlaps to finish the formulation which he had started in line 136. In this second part, the interviewer asks whether the slaves were told to ‘be good to your ↑master and mistress’ (line 138) and thus he explicitly makes relevant the power differential between the slaves and their masters. He thus orients not only to master narratives of white supremacy, but also to the ‘historical’ master narrative of the norms of the slave system and slave obedience. It is only after the interviewer has made this orientation to the latter master narrative relevant, that the interviewee embarks on an account of the proslavery sermons of the preachers. First, by means of a stretched vowel, she confirms the interviewer’s question in overlap (line 139), after which she explicitly frames the interviewer’s utterance as the preachers’ words (line 140: ‘that’s what they preach’). Then the interviewee continues by explaining that the slaves were kept ignorant regarding the concept of God. In lines 141–142, the interviewee says that they ‘didn’t know there was any such thing (.) as Go:d’. By using the reference ‘thing’ in this sentence, she implicitly refers to the non-human, divine status of God that the slaves did not know of. She then contrasts it with what they were taught by the preacher, namely that God ‘was uh (.) the different man’ (line 143). She continues to explain that the slaves thought that God was just another slave owner, as they were all called ‘master’ by the preachers (line 141–147). So the gist of her story is that the slaves were kept ignorant as to the existence of a divine being such as God and they only learnt about God’s supernatural status after the Civil War (see below). As such, the interviewee constructs the identity of the ‘Sambo’ or stupid slave here, but she also distances herself from this former ‘self ’, which is shown by the insertion of a laughter token and a smile voice at the start of this explanation (line 141).

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

So, in her explanation, the interviewee is quite elaborate: she not only states that the slaves did not have any knowledge of the concept and divine status of God (line 141–142), but also what they thought instead (line 142–144) and why they reasoned in that way (line 144–147). The source of this misconception is the preacher, who is said to ‘preach that way’ (line 147). Furthermore, she consistently uses the 1st person plural pronominal form to refer to the slaves, hence stressing their collectivity and emphasizing that it was a general belief among the slaves. As such, it is implied that instead of it being a coincidence of miscommunication, it was a particular strategy that was used to ensure the slaves were kept ignorant so that they would not fully understand the implications of the existence of a divine being and of religion – viz. that all men are equal. After having repeated that the slaves ‘didn’t know no better’ (line 149) and were thus kept in ignorance, the interviewee enters into a discussion of post-­ slavery times during which preachers taught the former slaves about the real s­ tatus of God, not as a man but as a divine being, as we see in the final extract of this fragment. Extract 6.14 (Harriet Smith) 150 IR ((chu[ckles)) 151 IE [All of them, all of them would go up by the church(es). 152 Then after we come to be ↑free, you know, 153 they (came) to (.) preach us you know. 154 They, (we begin to) know, you know, 155 there ↑was a God (.) 0and so on.0 156 IR Well, well, while you all were slaves did they teach you 157 to read and write? Did you a[ll go to school any? 158 IE [Nuh huh.

The preachers are referred to by means of a vague reference (‘they’¸ line 153) and their doctrine is summarised by an existential formulation (line 155: ‘there was a God’), which is further emphasised by the pitch rise at the start of ‘was’ (line 155). So, this confirms the interviewee’s earlier explanation that before the Civil War, the slaves did not know of the existence of the God at the time and were thus deliberately kept ignorant by the whites. As such, with hindsight, the interviewee challenges this practice and thus also the historical master narrative of slaves as property who were to be obedient and who could be tricked into believing anything as long as it served the slave owners’ goals. By criticizing this, she thus challenges the idea of slaves as objects who could be used in any way the master wished. Furthermore, by claiming that they were deliberately kept in ignorance by the whites, she implies that ignorance is not an inherent quality of African Americans and as such she also challenges the ‘Sambo’ identity and master narratives of white supremacy.



Chapter 6.  An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race 

While in line 156, the interviewer acknowledges the interviewee’s account by repeating the discourse marker ‘well’, it also functions to signal doubt about the truthfulness of the interviewee’s words. This is confirmed by his next question which probes for the slaves’ education. He repeats his question twice, soon after this fragment (line 159: ‘Did you all go to school any?’ and line 164: ‘They sure didn’t teach you any reading and writing?’ – not presented in the fragment for reasons of space). By repeatedly doubting that the slaves were not taught to read, he implicitly resists the projection of blame on the preacher for keeping the slaves ignorant, since, if they knew how to read, they could have read the Bible themselves and could have corrected their misconception concerning the status of God. As such, the interviewer attempts to counter the interviewee’s challenge of white supremacy master narratives. Summary So in this interview, the interviewer encourages the interviewee to tell her story about how the slaves experienced religion. He even specifically probes for whether the preachers told the slaves to be obedient. But, when the interviewee elaborates on this topic by accounting for the slaves’ ignorance – while also distancing herself from this ‘former self ’ –, the interviewer also challenges this by repeatedly suggesting that they were taught to read and write, and so had the ability to clear up the misunderstanding themselves. The interviewer’s ambivalent position can be related to the fact that at the time of the interview, African Americans were still regarded as inferior in many ways. And so it is not surprising that the interviewer may be probing for a narrative that uncovers the injustices of the slavery system and thus counters the ‘historical’ master narrative of slavery, while also aligning with current master narratives of white supremacy. Hence, this account by the interviewee can be regarded as a partial counternarrative. On the one hand, by denying any responsibility on the part of the slaves for the misunderstanding of the concept of God, it counters the interviewer’s white supremacy views, which represent a dominant discourse of the time of the interview as well as of slavery times, namely that African Americans are – among others, intellectually – inferior to whites. By resisting the interviewer’s claims concerning the slaves’ ability to read and by her “diachronic identity navigation” away from this ‘Sambo’ identity of the ‘ignorant Negro’, the interviewee counters this dominant discourse of the (intellectual) inferiority of African Americans. On the other hand, the account also counters the ‘historical’ dominant discourse of slavery times that slaves were objects that could be treated as the slave owner wished. In particular, she criticises the fact that as a tool to ensure the slaves’ obedience (e.g. Genovese, 2003), the masters even employed something as sacred as religion and that they did not refrain from selectively reading the Bible to stress

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

parts of it that emphasised obedience and which thus corresponded to their own ideological needs. Interestingly, in this case, the interviewer co-constructs this line of reasoning with the interviewee. Through this, both interlocutors acquiesce to post-bellum dominant discourses regarding the importance of religion and that everyone should have access to the Bible and a ‘true’ form of religion – hence implying that lying about the concept of God is unacceptable. So, at the same time, the interviewer and interviewee co-construct a narrative that aligns with the dominant discourses of the time of the interview concerning the importance of religion for all human beings. Both interlocutors thus resist the ‘historical’ dominant discourse that the slaves’ obedience is of such importance that it was acceptable to employ a censored version of religion to achieve this goal. To sum up: this narrative has a multi-layered relation with dominant discourses. This is because it not only challenges the dominant discourse of white supremacy, but it also counters the ‘historical’ dominant discourse of the primordial importance of slave obedience, and at the same time it aligns with the then current dominant discourse of the importance of a ‘true’ religion. As the story is about the slaves’ ignorance and the resulting compliance with this proslavery version of religion, it is thus not a ‘historical’ counter-narrative, like the story by Laura Smalley discussed in the previous section. So the countering aspect against the ‘historical’ dominant discourse of slave obedience emerged only through the reflective vantage point of the interviewee in her narrative of a current self, looking back at a former, much more naïve, version of the self. By scrutinizing these differing orientations to current and former dominant discourses, the complexity of countering and complying with these master narratives, as well as their interrelated nature, is brought to the fore. As such, it further demonstrates the complexity of the intricately interwoven orientations to differing current and former Discourses.

Conclusions We started this chapter with the observation that there are very few stories in the corpus in which the interviewees openly talk about how they resisted the slave owners, or how the African Americans were – and still are at the time of the ­interview – oppressed by the whites. This can be related to the local interactional context, in which some stories are encouraged and others silenced, and also to the global context of narrating. In previous chapters, we focused in particular on the dominant discourse of white supremacy and observed few counter-­narratives that challenge these ideas, showing that the interviewees largely complied with this master narrative of racial inequality. Intriguingly, the few narratives that  – sometimes



Chapter 6.  An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race 

very cautiously – referred to a form of resistance or challenged certain dominant ­discourses, mainly related to religion. This is not surprising, first, because we have to take into account the role of religion in the slavery system, namely as a double-edged sword for the slave owners who replaced its potential for egalitarianism by obedience, and for the slaves as a means of finding comfort and fostering hope for freedom through the forbidden ‘invisible institution’ of underground religious gatherings. Second, at the time of the interviews, religion was generally regarded as important, and stories that challenge that idea, were blocked by the interviewers (cf. Extract 6.1). Furthermore, we can assume that the implied egalitarian ideas of Christianity were generally known at the time of the interviews, even though they would only reach full bloom later when preachers such as Martin Luther King took the lead in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. So, this endows these narratives with a great complexity and a potential for complying with some, while at the same time countering other, dominant discourses from both the time of the interview and from the past. We particularly aimed to demonstrate this by means of the narratives selected from the interviews with Laura Smalley and Harriet Smith. It is particularly in these narratives, that the complexity of countering and acquiescing to different dominant discourses situated in different times emerges most clearly. Furthermore, when combining the insights from the analyses of both the interviews with Harriet Smith and with Laura Smalley – which were carried out by the same interviewer – we can also hypothetically deduce that it may be mainly because of this particular topic of religion, that stories of resistance to the slave system are allowable. This, we argue, is because these narratives of religion display an orientation to the culturally accepted frame – however fragmented that may be (Bamberg, 2004, p. 360) – of the importance of religion and obedience to God. So it is through the compliance to this master narrative, that cautious counters against the dominant discourses of slave obedience and white supremacy are observed, even though they still remain rare in this corpus. As such, resistance stories relating to religion are a typical case of “a violation of the folk-psychologically canonical that is itself canonical” (Bruner, 1991a, p. 72), or, in other words, one may attempt to criticise certain dominant discourses (viz. regarding the balance of power in the slavery system and – although to a lesser extent – the idea of white supremacy) because it is through an orientation to something else which is canonical (viz. the dominant discourse of the importance of religion). By violating one, but at the same time acquiescing to another dominant discourse, the unmentionable may become accessible for discussion. In this case, Harriet Smith’s and the interviewer’s co-­constructed ­narrative criticizing the selective sermons of white preachers are oriented to the dominant discourse of the importance of accessibility to a ‘true’ religion to all human beings, while Laura

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Smalley’s counter-narrative about disobedience to the slave owner, is framed as a narrative complying with a religious dominant discourse of the importance of religion through obedience to God. In both narratives, traces of counter-narratives challenging white supremacy are found as well, but these are neither picked up, nor even challenged, by the interviewer and thus these counters are silenced. This further emphasises that orienting to master narratives is a collaborative process and that the role of the interviewer is truly essential in this. We will elaborate on this point further in the following chapter. But, to conclude for now: what unites the two very different counter-narratives by Smith and Smalley presented in this chapter, is that they both successfully counter something by acquiescing to something else. This vividly illustrates the fluidity and especially the relationality of “what is dominant and what is resistant” (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004, p. x), highlighting that master- and counternarratives are not prediscursively available Discourses waiting for a narrator to take them off the shelf and insert them in their own talk in a monolithic, preestablished form, but rather they are in situ accomplishments which can take variable forms and nuances and which interact with one another across the temporal barriers of storyworld – and storytelling- time.

chapter 7

Remembering and forgetting Master narratives and memories of violence “If I couldn’t get it done why he whop ↑me.” (Sarah Garner, 1935)

Introduction As Brockmeier (2002, p. 15) makes clear, from a traditional psychological perspective remembering and forgetting have been conceived of as opposing concepts. Remembering is seen as the ‘hero in the limelight’ which can shed light onto the past and forgetting as the ‘shady villain’ which obscures access to the past. From such an archival approach to memory in which interviewees simply have to retrieve their memories in response to the interviewer’s questions, memory is constituted as a neuro-psychological phenomenon that is independent of the interview context. Furthermore the language which enacts such memories is traditionally considered to be a passive asocial conduit for the transmission of memories that have a prediscursive and independent existence. However, such a psychological approach to memory is being contested (e.g. Antze & Lambek, 1996; Brockmeier, 2002, 2010; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Halbwachs, 1992). Rather than treating memory as prior to, and separable from, talk, in this chapter we take an interactional approach to memory and so consider it as something that is co-managed and co-constructed within the interaction between interviewer and interviewee. Remembering and forgetting are thus studied as actions and the narrative itself is taken to be an act of remembering and forgetting that is a situated accomplishment. From such a discursive perspective, the ways in which the former slaves remember cannot be coherently understood unless the influences that govern the context of remembering are thoroughly examined. In this chapter we thus aim to analyse how remembering and forgetting are achieved in talk in the slave narratives. In particular, we explore how these processes relate to the different master

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

narratives of the storyworld and storytelling time, as described in the previous chapter. To do this, we – again – draw on positioning theory, as described in detail in Chapter 1, which implies that we analyse the narratives at three levels. Firstly, we scrutinise how the storyworld of the remembered event is talked into being. Secondly – and of specific importance for the angle of this chapter – we look into the interaction between interviewer and interviewee, with special attention being paid to asymmetric access to category-bound discursive resources available to the interviewer which can be used either to constrain or to facilitate the act of remembering. And, thirdly, we analyse how the discursive accomplishment of remembering, or forgetting, acquiesces to, or challenges, particular master narratives. In this chapter, we especially zoom in on the master narrative of slavery as a benevolent institution which was still current in America at the time of the interviews, as we discuss below. This research therefore adds to prior research on the slave narratives which, considering the age of the interviewees and the distance from the events they narrate, has drawn attention to the problematic nature of remembering. However, most of this research (e.g. Spindel, 1996) has taken a psychological approach to memory and has not sought to establish how remembering and forgetting are interactionally achieved and how these processes are potentially related to master narratives. Therefore, an interactional approach to the construction of remembering and forgetting in relation to the slave narratives is a relatively novel approach and adds significantly to our understanding of the narratives. This is because such an approach explores how some stories get to be told and others remain partially or fully untold – a topic which was already touched upon in Chapter  6 – and whether this interactionally negotiated selection process talks into being a particular orientation to certain master narratives. In order to better understand the interactional construction of remembering and forgetting, we focus on narratives of violence. Narratives of violence and the trauma of slavery are particularly pertinent since during the antebellum period, “white Northerners and white Southerners began to depict slavery as a benign and even benevolent institution, echoing themes from the planters’ defence of the antebellum order” (Berlin, 1998, pp. xiii–xiv), and it is this master narrative that became pervasive during the early and mid-20th century. Therefore, as many authors (e.g. Dawson, 1999; Thomson, 1998; Zur, 1999) recognise, memories that sit uncomfortably with widely accepted master narratives have a tendency to be forgotten. Consequently, it is interesting to see how narratives of violence and trauma are co-constructed in the racialised America of the 1930s and 1940s and to consider whether they are constructed so as to ‘do’ either remembering or forgetting.



Chapter 7.  Remembering and forgetting 

Violence and the trauma of slavery Whilst the treatment of slaves no doubt varied according to a variety of factors such as the historical period, the geographic location, and the idiosyncrasies of the individual slave owners, there can be little doubt that, as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous abolitionist writer remarked, slavery “is despotism, of the most unmitigated form” (Stowe, 1853, p. 121). Over and above the total submission of the slave, as chattel, to the owner, the most salient point of such despotism was the unlimited violence and oppression that a slave master could legitimately inflict upon his bondsman. In the case of slavery in America, this legitimization of violence was enshrined in the Slave Codes which governed the legal status of the slaves (Waldrep & Bellesiles, 2005, p. 115). Whilst each state had its own code, the basic principle behind these codes was that the slave was the property of the owner and thus the owners had almost unbounded powers with which to control the slaves and force them to work. As a result of such legal principles, on the one hand, the owners could resort to the most brutal extremes of punishment as long as the slave survived and, on the other hand, the slaves were placed in a position of absolute and unconditional submission to their masters and they had very little, if any, recourse to legal representation. In effect, the slave was denied the protection of common law and was placed under the “absolute control of white despots” (Fede, 1985, p. 150). Punishment of slaves usually took the form of whipping, but could also include burning, mutilation, and sale. Moreover, owing to the almost absolute powers that the slave owners had, violence was not necessarily in the form of ‘legitimate’ punishment. Punishments were often wanton and, as the public nature of much of the violence attests, they was often used as a means of symbolically displaying power. As such, physical violence, whilst certainly not being the only source of trauma, is emblematic of the trauma that African Americans suffered during slavery. Whilst acknowledging trauma as the psychological effect on the individual; trauma, to paraphrase Dawson (1999, p. 184 ff), is also a metaphor that can be usefully applied to the past. First, it implies that a psychic dimension to history exists whereby a form of profound suffering that has been inflicted upon certain communities is articulated. Second, trauma also implies that the scars of such a harmful past have not healed and are carried into the present. Third, trauma implies a relation to memory whereby suffering and victimisation in the past can either be remembered through forms of cultural representation and commemoration in lieux de mémoire, or it can be forgotten through a process of historical amnesia. Memory thus plays a key role in the articulation of the trauma that the slaves suffered. Simply put: the cultural trauma of slavery is not a prediscursive entity, rather it is a process of

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

meaning making as various groups struggle to define the situation (Eyerman, 2013, p. 43), and part of this struggle is carried out in the domain of remembering.

Memory Prior studies of the slave narratives have raised the issue of memory (e.g. Bailey, 1980; Covey & Lockman, 1996; Soapes, 1977; Yetman, 2000). Some researchers, such as Escott (1985, p. 42), argue that memory is not a problem in relation to the narratives since the events that former slaves talk about were pivotal in their lives and therefore the memory of such events remains good. However, most of these authors draw attention to the fact that the former slaves were extremely old at the time of interview and that their memory was possibly unreliable. Vann Woodward (1974, p. 472) for example argues that the age of the former slaves, two-thirds of whom were over eighty at the time of interview, raises several serious questions about failing memory and the veracity of their testament. Vann Woodward (1974, p. 473) also points out that 16 percent of the WPA interviewees were under six at the time of emancipation and thus “their testimony about slavery has to be considered largely hearsay” and hence unreliable. Similarly, Spindel (1996) argues that the age of the former slaves at the time of the interview calls into question both their ability to recall events and the accuracy of such descriptions. Consequently, she concludes that the fallibility of memory casts “serious doubt on the use of their narratives as a valid historical resource” (Spindel, 1996, p. 259). However, common to these commentaries on the validity of the interviewees’ testimony is a psychological approach to memory in which memory is conceived of as a cognitive mechanism that assimilates, stores, and retrieves information (Spindel, 1996, p. 255). Little, if any, of this research considers the ‘problem of memory’ from anything other than the perspective of the archive metaphor in which memory is considered to be a private and personal matter that is governed by asocial neurocognitive operations. However, as Brockmeier (2010) points out, since the 1990s, there has been a paradigm shift away from such an archival model of memory towards a conception of memory as something that transcends the isolated human brain and in which memory is located in a broader framework of social and cultural practices which are discursively constructed. Consequently, as Brockmeier (2002, p. 27) also notes, “memory practices, to a large degree, are narrative practices or, at least, intermingled with and surrounded by them” (italics in original). Therefore, narratives are an excellent way into the analysis of remembering and forgetting in relation to the former slaves. From this perspective, memory is considered to be an action, a verb or process rather than a noun. Therefore memory should not be seen as the “pregiven object of our gaze but as the act of gazing and the object



Chapter 7.  Remembering and forgetting 

it generates” (Antze & Lambek, 1996, p. xii). The corollary of this is that, first, remembering, and forgetting, should be considered as achievements that are discursively co-produced in the here-and-now of the interview and are thus affected by the asymmetric distribution of discursive resources between the interviewer and interviewee. And, second, what is said is subject to the gaze of the ghostly audience (Minister, 1991) and the socio-political context – and its master narratives – at the time of remembering. Memories, as we discuss below, as discursive constructions, are thus mediated by (1) allowable contributions of the interviewer and interviewee and (2) permissible narratives vis-à-vis the master narratives within these social contexts.

The role of the interviewer In terms of access to discursive resources, the interviewee may be placed in a position of inferiority vis-à-vis the interviewer and this may also prevent certain forms of remembering. Portelli (1998), for example, argues that the interviewee is in a less powerful situation because the interviewer usually asks the questions and so guides the interviewee’s talk. This is because, through a process of turntype pre-allocation (Atkinson 1982), certain turns at talk are the prerogative of certain participants who are incumbent of certain identities. In this case, the right to ask questions is typically restricted to the interviewer, while the interviewee is expected to answer these. Consequently, when the interviewer and the interviewee enact their default identities (i.e., identities that are generally recognised as being relevant to a particular context, and to which participants in talk would normatively be expected to orient (Richards, 2006, p. 60)), the actions of asking and answering questions are neatly divided. In these cases, the interviewee can only act in response to an agenda set by the interviewer’s questions. This is because questions and answers come in adjacency pairs (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973) whereby the second utterance in the pair (i.e. the answer) is functionally dependent on the first (i.e. the question). In this way, a questioner can control the talk in much the same way as a teacher in a classroom (McHoul, 1978), a talk show host in a radio or TV studio (Hutchby, 1996a), and an attorney in the courtroom (Matoesian, 1993). Similarly, in an interview situation it is the interviewer who has the normative right to ask questions and so he/she is in a position to control topic development through such discursive rights. Moreover, in a classic interview situation, the interviewer not only uses questions to initiate topics, but the third turn (i.e. the turn after the interviewee’s response) is also available to the interviewer who can use this either to continue topic or to change topic by asking a question that is not tied to the prior talk. Thus, through the normative sequential properties of talk, control of topic is firmly in the hands of the interviewers who, wittingly or

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

unwittingly, assert enormous influence on the choice and development of topics and so can use this power to control which memories are expressed and which are repressed. In short, the power of remembering, in the sense of discursively co-­ constructing memories, and forgetting, in the sense of interactionally repressing such a discursive construction of memories, is skewed in favour of the interviewer’s access to discursive rights to initiate topic and control topic flow through the use of questions. More specifically, in the context of interviews with former ­colonials in the Belgian Congo, Van De Mieroop and Clifton (2014) demonstrate how the interviewer (himself a former colonial rather than a social scientist) enacts discursive rights to control topic development in an interview. Through such control, the interviewer polices any narrative development that might be critical of a positive view of the colonials in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s and 1960s. Interestingly, the data that Van De Mieroop and Clifton (2014) use relates to a former colonial acting as interviewer – a situation that is comparable to the predominantly white interviewers conducting the slave interviews and who potentially also have an interest in presenting a certain image of slavery in line with white supremacist master narratives. Similarly, Anderson and Jack (1998) note how interviewers may unwittingly fail to encourage interviewees to develop their own agenda by the insensitive use of questioning. For example, they argue that by asking questions in too rapid succession, the interviewer is encouraging the interviewee to give a rather limited account of what happened (“tell me about your experience but don’t tell me too much”). Further, failure to allow the interviewee voice, especially in the case of narratives of trauma, can also occur because the interviewer simply fails to understand the extent of the trauma and so is unable to empathise with the interviewee (White, 1998, p. 174). Finally interviewers might simply be so obsessed by their own agenda (as in Extract 7.4 in this chapter) that they are insensitive to the voice of the interviewees and as such, they seriously constrain opportunities for the interviewees to express themselves. Consequently, there have been calls for a more sensitive form of interviewing that allows more space for the interviewees to develop their own voice. Anderson and Jack (1998) thus argue for a methodological shift away from the narrow mindedness of ‘information gathering’ towards a more dynamic and unfolding interview process that places more emphasis on encouraging the interviewee’s viewpoint. However, as will be demonstrated below, the interviewers who collected the data from former slaves often missed opportunities to allow the interviewee to open up. This is because, as discussed in Chapter 2, many of the interviewers did not deal with the interviewing process very professionally (Yetman, 2000, p. 3). This tendency was compounded by the fact that, as many analysts (e.g. Bailey, 1980; Vann Woodward, 1974) observe, the interviews were mainly carried out by whites in whom their African American



Chapter 7.  Remembering and forgetting 

informants were unlikely to confide. Furthermore, it is also possible that the white interviewers did not want to hear stories that did not coincide with master narratives that framed the slavery system in benevolent terms and that were prevalent in America at the time of most of the interviews. In short, the social distance between interviewee and interviewer often led to a lack of empathy which curtailed the voice of the former slaves. At a linguistic level the process of empathizing with an informant comes down to the interviewer’s willingness not only to align (i.e., cooperate at a structural level) with the interviewee by ratifying and participating in the topic development proposed by the interviewee, but the interviewer must also affiliate (i.e., cooperate at an affective level) with the interviewee by displaying an affective stance that coincides with that of the interviewee (cf. Stivers, ­Mondada, & ­Steensig, 2011, p. 20 ff). Consequently, as will be seen later in the analyses, interviewers show maximum empathy with the interviewee when their views match the interviewee’s evaluative stance which reflexively entails alignment with the progression of talk and topic development.

The availability of master narratives Memories are not only constrained and enabled by the discursive resources available to interviewer and interviewee, they are also influenced by the permissible narratives and the pre-existent sociocultural forms of interpretation – or master narratives – available at the time of the interview. From this perspective, memory takes place in the here-and-now of the interview, not in the past, as it is governed by the “double arrow of time” (Mishler, 2006), as was discussed in Chapter 1. The upshot of this is that they are governed as much, if not more, by the situation that tellers find themselves in and the Discourses available to them in the present as the actual past events. The participants’ orientation to the situation in which the interview takes place and the ghostly audience to which remembering is directed thus act as a form of social control which regulates which memories are tellable and which are not. For example, Thomson (1998) using data from Gallipoli veterans and Lorenz (1999) using data from the Malvinas/Falklands War, both analyse the tellability of war veterans’ stories in relation to the acceptable master narratives of the time. They conclude that the telling of these memories is seriously constrained by the availability of master narratives that provide, or fail to provide, appropriate affirmation of the veterans’ experiences. Similarly, Zur (1999) illustrates how, by suppressing remembering, the Guatemalan government attempted to impose forgetting on the widows of the victims of the dirty war (La Violencia 1978–85) which had been waged by government forces against the largely Mayan indigenous population. Thus, the ability to remember certain events in certain ways becomes an ideological battlefield between master narratives as varying political

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

forces struggle to impose their version of the past. Considering the importance of remembering and forgetting in the struggle for political dominance, it is not surprising that the recollections of the former slaves are also subject to socio-political forces that encourage certain kinds of remembering and discourage others. As Fabre and O’Meally (1994, p. 3) note, “blacks and whites – historians as well as other professionals, along with front porch observers – have been engaged in a struggle over what to say about America’s past and how to say it”. Yet this struggle for memory is often uneven, since out of fear, shame, or fear of not being heard, the victims frequently remain reticent to articulate their memory, and so in certain circumstances forgetting is privileged over remembering. In sum, then, as regards remembering and forgetting and the discursive production of memories in the slave narratives, it is necessary to take up Blassingame’s (1985, p. 89) challenge (see also Chapter 2) to engage in a fine grained examination of the properties of talk in this corpus. This is because it is through talk that the interviewers constrain the discursive construction of the memories of the former slaves so that they fit with master narratives that are publically acceptable given the racialised nature of American society at the time of most of the interviews. Thus, on the one hand, remembering can be achieved when the interviewers do empathy by aligning and affiliating with the interviewees which allows them to voice their memories. On the other hand, forgetting is achieved when the interviewers fail to either align or affiliate with the emerging memories. This has the effect of limiting topic development, or even closing it down, and as a result the memories fail to fully emerge from the interaction.

Analysis Part one – constraining remembering The first section of the analysis deals with extracts in which a common pattern emerges of the topic of physical violence being initiated (either by the interviewee or the interviewer) which positions the slaves as victims and the slave owners as perpetrators. However, in these extracts, we observed that the topic of violence is not developed. Either the interviewee appears to be reticent to develop it (as in Extract 7.4), or more usually, it is the interviewer who restricts topic development. In these cases, either the interviewer exerts his or her right to ask questions and so constrains topic development, or the interviewer simply abruptly changes topic to something that is less contentious. The effect of this is that the topicalisation of slave owner violence towards the slaves and the construction of the identity slave-as-victim are extremely limited. Consequently, because of this failure to



Chapter 7.  Remembering and forgetting 

topicalise issues of white-on-black violence, the interaction does forgetting rather than remembering and as a consequence, this contestation of the master narrative of slavery as a benevolent system is not developed. Extract one: Interview with Susanna Rebecca Wright Thompson The first extract comes from an interview with Susanna Rebecca Wright Th ­ ompson and it exemplifies the interviewer’s failure to topicalise issues of bad treatment which thus constrains remembering and is more conducive to forgetting. Extract 7.1 (Susanna Rebecca Wright Thompson) 25 IR1 Did they look after you well back in those days? 26 IE Yes. First thing they have (   ) to look after the people. 27 Some would look after them and some wouldn’t. 28 Some of them suffered mighty bad. ↑SOME, some 29 would look after them and (.) some wouldn’t. 30 IR2 How did you and your mother get along? 31 IE Oh, we got along, got along alright because we to 32 (so much, so much) raised be good gals. (0.3) 33 Yes, Sir. On down here to (  ) on down on (Linden).

In line 25, the (white) interviewer asks, “did they [presumably, the slave owners] look after you well in those days?” The ‘you’ is ambiguous here; it could either be a generic you, referring to slaves in general, or a 3rd person singular ‘you’ ­referring specifically to the interviewee. In either case, in the subsequent line the interviewee replies affirmatively, but then continues her turn by stating that “some [slave owners] would look after them and some wouldn’t” (line 27), which introduces the possibility of mistreatment. She then upgrades by stating that “some of them suffered mighty bad”. The adverb ‘mighty’ and the stress on ‘bad’ boost the extent of the suffering. Thus, in the storyworld, the interviewee makes relevant the standardised relational pair (SRP) of slave-as-victim and owner-as-perpetrator. The initial evaluation that “some would look after them and some wouldn’t” (line 27) is then repeated almost word for word. However, in this repetition ‘some’ is again repeated: first in a loud voice with rising intonation (‘↑SOME’) and then it is repeated with the stress falling on it (‘some’). This emphatic prosody thus marks out the modification of the fact that it was only some of the slave owners who treated the slaves well. This is followed by a micropause and the assessment that some would not treat the slaves well. So, the last assessment of the utterance topicalises the slave owners who would not look after their slaves well and this therefore talks into being the identity of the slave owners as perpetrators of violence. As Pomerantz (1984b) points out, assessments make additional assessments by the other interlocutors a conditionally relevant response. However, in this case, through not giving such an assessment in his turn, the interviewer disaligns with the interviewee and fails both to develop

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

the topic of bad treatment and to align with the identity work that has positioned some of the owners as perpetrators of mistreatment. The interviewer thus neither affiliates with the stance of the interviewee nor aligns with the sequential progression of talk and instead of giving an assessment, the second interviewer asserts his right to the next turn and asks a follow-up question which changes topic from the slave owners to the slaves, zooming in on the relation between the interviewee and her mother. This topic change therefore avoids development of the topic of slave owners who did not look after their slaves. In sum, the interviewer’s initial question in line 25 about whether or not the slaves were well looked after opens up the possibility of discussing bad treatment and of making the SRP victim/perpetrator relevant. Initially, the interviewee replies that she was looked after. Not claiming to have the ability to look into the mind of the interviewee, whether this is truthful or whether she is concerned about protecting the face of the (white) interviewer is beyond the scope of the analysis. In the continuation of the turn through the assessment that some slave owners treated the slaves well and some treated them badly, the interviewee opens the possibility of topicalising bad treatment and of positioning the slave owners as perpetrators. However, the second interviewer disaligns with this possible shift in topic and asks a follow-up question about Susanna and her mother’s relation, thus sidestepping the issue of bad treatment. As Anderson and Jack (1998, p. 161) note, questions in succession have a double message – “tell me about your experience, but don’t tell me too much”. And in this case the possibility of topicalising bad treatment and of positioning the slave owners as perpetrators is closed down by a second question which asks about the interviewee’s relationship with her mother. The interviewer thus effectively polices what stories can, and cannot, be told (cf. Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2014). As such, through not developing this narrative, he orients to the topic of mistreatment as a taboo and so enforces a form of historical amnesia (cf. Zur, 1999). As a result of not aligning with the interviewee, the interviewer exerts control over the interaction and discourages any talk that is critical of the slavery system, as such displaying an acquiescent orientation to a master narrative of slavery as a benevolent system. Extract two: Interview with Billy McCrea A similar failure on behalf of the (white) interviewers to develop the topic of punishment, thus limiting the discursive construction of memories of violence inflicted upon them, can be seen in the following extract which comes from an interview with Billy McCrea. In this extract, the interviewee is initially asked an open question “what do you remember about the, when slavery was over”. In an extended turn the interviewee talks about the arrival of the Yankees and his work for his master hauling cotton. He then carries out a self-initiated topic transition



Chapter 7.  Remembering and forgetting 

to the topic of the old log court house and through a series of stepwise topic transitions, he ends his extended turn with a story about a whipping. Extract 7.2 (Billy McCrea) 61 IE And I remember I can tell you some more about slavery time (.) 62 Right down, (   ) right down close to Miss, uh, 63 Mrs May’s place there was an old jail house there, 64 old log jail house (.) old log jail house was there. 65 That=that’s only, that’s all, that’s the, that’s the way, 66 and wasn’t no, wasn’t no court, wasn’t no, uh, some kind 67 of courthouse, I recollect it. And used to put prisoners 68 in that jailhouse (.) And me (.) me and another young white fellow 69 I believe his name (Cauley McCrea) (   ) and we used 70 to go home to people that worked in the kitchen. 71 We used to go home and steal bread and stuff and 72 poke it through them little bars to the prisoners. 73 We was boys. That’s right here in Jasper. And it was an old log 74 jailhouse (.) and all around (  ). And I recollect one time, 75 we all was looking at it. And they, and they brought 76 in=they had hounds (.) And they brought them hound in 77 and brought three niggas (.5) with them hound, runaway niggas, 78 you know >caught in the woodSay, she wasn’t hurting old mistress. She used to old mistress, 10 I’m hoping she started down< But, but the thing that old woman, 11 poor old woman < carried her to the peach orchard> (.) . And, you know, just tied her hands this way, 13 you know, around the peach orchard tree. I remember that just as well, 14 look like to me I can. And around the tree (.) and whupped her. 15 Well, she couldn’t do nothing, but just kick her (  ). 16 Just kick her feet. But they, they just had her clothes off pull 17 her to her waist, you know. Yes, didn’t have her plum naked. 18 But they had her clothes down to her waist. And every now 19 and then they’d (whup her). You know, and then, 20 snuff the pipe , you know. Snuff the pipe out on her. 21 You know, with embers in the pipe. (I don’t believe we) ever seed 22 (seen) the pipe smoking. 23 IR Blow them out on her? 24 IE Hmm. Hmm. 25 IR Good God. 26 IE (  ) 27 IR Did she scream?

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

Unfortunately, the sequences of talk prior to the story were either not recorded or they are unavailable. The recoding starts when Smalley announces one of the antagonists of the story “Mrs Adeline our mistress” and the protagonist Martha Albert (the slave) who “catched her (i.e. Mrs Adeline) by her wrist this way, you know (.) Both of them pushed down in a rocking chair”. The description of events is very detailed, drawing attention precisely to where she was caught, the exact way in which she was caught, and the fact that the chair was a rocking chair. As various authors point out (e.g. Edwards & Potter, 1992, p. 42; Wooffitt, 1992, p. 40), giving detail in an account is a way of establishing its credibility and of establishing a warrant for the authenticity of the memory. For the next part of the story, Smalley shifts into reported speech which, as Holt (1996, p. 230) points out, is often used to give an utterance an air of objectivity and veracity. As we observed earlier, “from an interlocutor’s perspective, one of the fundamental functions of direct reported speech is the creation of a suggestion of accuracy and evidentiality” (Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2013, p. 55). Moreover, in this exchange, Martha Albert is reported to have said that (line 9), “she wasn’t hurting old mistress” and to have given her version of events (line 9–10: “she used to old mistress, I’m hoping she started down”). The denial of hurting the mistress is ignored, and in line 11, the victim is carried to a peach orchard and whipped. This therefore underlines the unjust nature of the treatment of the slave since she is being whipped for something that she claims she did not do, and so in the thereand-then of the storyworld it clearly talks into being the SRP of slave-as-victim/ slave owner-as-perpetrator. In the continuation of the telling of the memory of the whipping, Smalley is explicit about the way the slave is ‘whupped’ and how her hands were tied. In line 13, she adds to the veracity of the story by stating “I remember that just as well, look like to me I can”. Thus, through an explicit claim to clear memory, she again reinforces the rhetorical design of the talk so as to make it convincing to a potentially sceptical audience (cf. Edwards & Potter, 1992, p. 40 ff). The specific reference to remembering combined with the detail of the description and the reported speech casts the memory as a vivid eye witness account of events and so displays strong claims to knowledge. It is also significant that during her narrative, Smalley uses the expression ‘you know’ nine times in this extended story-telling turn. ‘You know’ can be hearable as a way of drawing the interviewer into the account by constructing it as something that is intersubjective and obvious, and thus believable (Korobov & Bamberg, 2007). In short, this extended story-telling turn does identity work that talks into being the identities of slave-as-victim and slave owners as the perpetrators of the violence towards them. Furthermore, this memory is also constructed using numerous techniques which build up its veracity and thus make it more convincing.



Chapter 7.  Remembering and forgetting 

Significantly, at the end of the interviewee’s turn, she adds another aspect to her description of the violent treatment of the slave, namely that they “snuff the pipe out on her”, which is paraphrased a few times in lines 20–22. The interviewer, referring to the embers of the pipe, then asks “blow them out on her?” (line 23). This question aligns with Smalley on several levels, since it not only aligns with Smalley’s topic selection, but it also seeks to continue the exploration of the trauma she is expressing and, by probing further for details, co-constructs factuality. When Smalley confirms that the embers were blown out on the slave (line 24: hmm hmm), this is followed with an evaluation “Good God” which affiliates with Smalley by showing empathy with the plight of the slave. Smalley’s next turn is impossible to transcribe, and is followed by an aligning question from the interviewer (line 27: ‘Did she scream?’) which continues to probe for more details of the whipping. Extract 7.7 (Laura Smalley) 27 IR Did she scream? 28 IE YEAH I think she was. I ↑think she did. But you see 29 there was we was daring to go out there, where it was, 30 you know. Because ah, our old master would whup us 31 and then, Uncle Saul, Uncle Saul would whup us. 32 You see, that is the overseer, Uncle Saul. 33 Her papa was a overseer (.) but he had to whup her. 34 He whupped her too. He really sure did whup her. 35 Well, he ah, he ah whupped her so that at night 36 they had to grease her back (.) grease her back. 37 I didn’t know what kind of grease we had, but they 38 sure greased her back (.) at night you know, that way. 39 We just grease her back. And ah (.5) so after him=after 40 so long on them, so, whupping being so long, that way they quit. 41 They quit (.) and give her her dinner. Late that evening 42 they her dinner. Late that evening of course she been whupped 43 so bad then, you know, she didn’t want to eat, you know. 44 If for they whupped you half a day, you ain’t want to 45 ↑eat (  ) you know. 46 IR That’s right.

The interviewer’s question ‘did she scream’ (line 27) encourages topic development and so aligns with the emerging story. In line 28, Smalley responds affirmatively and emphatically (‘YEAH’) but then adds “I think she was. I ↑think she did”. These epistemic downgrades appear to contradict her pervious assertion (line 13: ‘I remember that just as well, look like to me I can’). Smalley then accounts for  this epistemic downgrade by means of a vague statement which does not

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

c­ larify whether the slaves dared to go out there despite the threat of being whipped themselves and so were clandestine witnesses, or whether they did not dare to go out there for fear of being whipped and so were not eye witnesses (line 28–30). Regardless of the vagueness, Smalley implies that she may not even have been a witness to the entire process of whipping the slave. This therefore underlines the constructed nature of the description and reported exchange in the previous Extract (7.6), which claim eye witness truth value. Nevertheless, regardless of her proximity to the events, she then carries out a stepwise topic transition to the fact that Uncle Saul, the overseer and father of Martha Albert, also whipped her (line 33–35). The severity of this whipping is underlined. First, Smalley underlines the extent of the whipping (line 34: “he really sure did whup her”). Second, she underlines the duration of the whipping (lines 39 and 40: “so long”). Third, she points out that the slave was whipped to such an extent that “they had to grease her back” (lines 36 ff.). Finally, she concludes the story with the fact that after the whipping, the victim did not want to eat and that “if for they whupped you half a day, you ain’t want to ↑eat (  ) you know”. This final comment is presented in unmitigated terms which, also through the use of the generic ‘you′-form, casts it as simply ‘the way the world is’. Therefore, the interviewee once again attests to the factual nature of her account, her knowledge of such events, and thus her rights to tell the story. Thus again in this extended turn, Smalley does identity work that positions the slaves as victims of extremely harsh punishment carried out by the slave owners. At the end of this extended story-telling turn, the interviewer aligns (line 46: ‘That’s right’) and he also affiliates because he shows an understanding of the interviewee’s prior turn. This is the end of this story, since in the following turn, Smalley shifts topic to another story. In summary, Extract 7.6 is unusual in the collection because it presents an explicit description of a harsh punishment. In the there-and-then of the storyworld, this story does identity work that talks into being the identities of slaveas-victim and slave owner-as-perpetrator of unjustified and extreme violence. Moreover, compared to Extracts 7.1–7.5, this account is also relatively long and detailed. This is because in the here-and-now of the interview, the interviewer does not make use of his category-bound discursive rights to questions that could potentially limit topic elaboration. Conversely, through aligning at a sequential level and affiliating at an affective level, he allows the interviewee access to an extended turn. Consequently, the interaction between an aligning and affiliating interviewer and a talkative interviewee lead to the co-construction of a detailed remembering of a traumatic experience that challenges the master narrative of benevolence, which is unusual in the collection. Furthermore, this act of remembering is presented using rhetorical devices such as reported speech, detailed accounts, statements of generalised truths, and explicit claims to remembering



Chapter 7.  Remembering and forgetting 

which establish its veracity. Interestingly though, in the second part of the story (Extract 7.7), Smalley seems to suggest that she was in fact not an eye witness. Paradoxically, this underlines the constructed nature of the first part of her recollection (Extract 7.6) and suggests that it is specifically designed to convince a sceptical audience. Thus, we can speculate that when recollections of violence are described in detail, they may be recipient designed to anticipate the scepticism and lack of sympathy of the ghostly audience.

Conclusions Working from the premise put forward by Brockmeier (2002) that narrative practices are memory practices, the purpose of this chapter has been to investigate how memories (in the form of narratives) were interactionally co-constructed in interview talk. More specifically, this chapter focuses on the identity work that the act of remembering performs and how it relates to master narratives that frame slavery as a benevolent system. First, in the there-and-then of the storyworld, the stories of violence, as is to be expected, all do identity work that makes relevant the identity of slave-as-victim and slave owner-as-perpetrator. Moreover, in places this is boosted by the fact that the punishments were often described as unjust and unmerited, and the interviewees draw attention to the severity of the punishments meted out. However, whilst violence is mentioned, topic penetration is often limited. This is because the default identities of interviewee and interviewer are relevant throughout the interaction. Orientation to these identities means that the interviewer normatively holds category-bound rights to ask questions. This discursive right means that he/she can control the interaction by controlling what topics get talked about and how these topics are developed. In Extracts 7.1–7.5, the interviewers use their discursive rights, wittingly or unwittingly, to control the talk so that the topic of violence remains relatively undeveloped. This is because even though they may align with the topic by asking questions that sequentially develop this topic, they do not affiliate with the developing talk by displaying a sympathetic stance. Moreover, through asking questions in relatively rapid succession, they limit topic development (Extract 7.5). Also, the interviewers exercise their discursive rights to the third turn (i.e. the turn after the interviewee has provided a response to the initial question) either to abruptly change topic to less contentious issues (Extracts 7.1, 7.3 and 7.4) or simply to close down the topic (Extract 7.2). As a result of these discursive practices, the memories of violence remain relatively under-developed and so this leads to – at worst – forgetting, and – at best – a rather limited form of remembering and these processes thus do not challenge the master narrative of benevolence.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

However, Extracts 7.6–7.7 are an exception. In these extracts, the interviewer both aligns sequentially and affiliates affectively with the interviewee. Thus, in these extracts, the interviewer uses his discursive rights to encourage the act of remembering and so consequently a fuller memory of violence towards the slaves is developed. Furthermore, when memories of violence are relatively well developed (Extracts 7.2 and 7.6–7.7), these narratives of violence are constructed as counter-narratives, enacted using a series of rhetorical techniques that are designed to convince (e.g. making explicit claims to remembering, giving details of the events, and using reported speech). In this way, the interviewees display an orientation to the recipients (both the wider ghostly audience and the immediate audience of the interviewers) as a sceptical audience that needs to be convinced of the veracity of the memory and who are characterised, in their default status, by an unwillingness to hear narratives that challenge the master narrative of benevolence that was prevalent in America at the time of most of the interviews. The observation that the former slaves displayed an orientation to the scepticism of the audience, underlines the fact that “the remembering and forgetting of trauma is necessarily a communal process centred upon a struggle for social recognition” (Dawson, 1999, p. 186). At stake is the recognition of the fact that slaves were victims of the plantation system rather than its beneficiaries. Failure to remember this would lead to a form of institutionalised amnesia, of the kind enacted in the interaction in the Extracts 7.1–7.5, which privileges ‘sweeping of the trauma of violence under the carpet of forgetting’. Therefore, the uniqueness of the co-constructed act of remembering stories that challenge this master narrative of benevolence, exemplified in Extracts 7.6 and 7.7, is emblematic of the prevalence of this master narrative at the time when the interviews took place. It is also significant to note that what is, and is not, a counter or master narrative can change over time. As Berlin (2004) points out, the contemporary 21st century master narrative as regards slavery is one of trauma, violence, and resistance and this is reflected in cultural artefacts such as the recent box office success of the film 12 Years a Slave which graphically portrays the horrors and brutality of slavery. So, Smalley’s story of brutality would now be considered a master narrative, yet because of its scarcity in the corpus it is oriented to as a counter-narrative in the 1940s and it is only drawn out through the co-construction of an exceptionally sympathetic interviewer. And conversely, as witnessed by their apparent abundance in the corpus, putative stories that are oriented to as potential counter-narratives to the ideology of white benevolence are suppressed either through the actions of the interviewers or the interviewees’ reticence to tell and so they are forgotten.

chapter 8

Truth, falsehood, and master narratives The case of Charlie Smith and the fritter tree “Should have felt the boat moving, but we thought we was going back up there to the fritter tree” (Charlie Smith, 1975)

Introduction As already pointed out in the introduction to this book, the ‘truth value’ of the slave narratives has been widely discussed: until the 1970s the historical value of slave narratives was largely ignored, and it was not until their publication in 1972 by George Rawick (Rawick, 1972b) that they became a topic of debate. Some researchers were sceptical of the narratives (Blassingame, 1985), and others (e.g. Escott, 1985; Vann Woodward, 1974; Yetman, 1967) took a more nuanced stance, arguing that, as with any historical document, their truth value had to be c­ arefully considered. The underlying implication of such debates was that the narratives could potentially provide an unmediated way into the past and into the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of the former slaves. As Atkinson and Delamont (2006, p. 166), talking about the narrative turn in social sciences, note: All too often, we believe, narratives are collected and celebrated in an uncritical and unanalysed fashion. It is a common failing, for instance, to imply that informants’ voices ‘speak for themselves’, or that personal, biographical materials provide privileged means of access to informants’ personal experiences, or their sense of identity.

Relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which the narratives are achieved as interactional accomplishments and the way in which the local context affects the construction of these narratives. Although, Cicourel (1964) made this point many decades ago, it is only fairly recently that more explicit attention is being paid to narratives as interactional accomplishments (De Fina, 2009) in which the interviewer plays a crucial role (e.g. Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2012, 2014), as we also discussed in Chapter 1. We have adopted this perspective

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

throughout the book, but the specific purpose of this chapter is to focus on how the co-constructed and contextually-driven nature of the slave narratives affected the ‘truth value’ of the narratives. More specifically, in this chapter, we zoom in on the interview with Charlie Smith, who, as we discussed in Chapter 2, makes some claims (e.g. that he is 144 years old at the time of the interview) which cast huge doubts on the credibility of his ‘personal narrative’. In particular, we scrutinise Charlie Smith’s story of the fritter tree, which recounts his capture as a young man in Africa, transportation to America, and sale. Such a tale of Africans being tricked onto the slave ships with promises of receiving exotic goods is a widely recounted tale. Thus, all things considered, it is beyond reasonable doubt that Smith is telling a well-known tale that is disguised as a personal narrative (Graham, 1991, p. 141), something that we have chosen to call a pseudo-personal narrative. We therefore focus on the notion of story ownership and consider how it is that Charlie Smith manages to claim ownership of an apparently traditional tale that is well known in African American folklore. Ownership of a story is intrinsically linked to rights to tell that story and, as Sacks (1992, pp. 242 ff., quoted in; ­Shuman, 2015, p. 43) points out, people have differing rights to own, and thus narrate, experiences depending on their relation to the events: people who have directly witnessed events, have more rights to tell that story and can tell the story in a different way compared to people who are reporting events that they have only been told about. Thus entitlement to tell is intrinsically linked to the teller’s epistemic status of having either first-hand eye witness knowledge or secondhand knowledge of the events. As Shuman (2005, p. 3) argues, individuals who can ­display first-hand knowledge are granted a privileged position as knowers who therefore have a legitimate stake in the interpretation of their own experience and rights to tell it. Further, not only must a story teller negotiate rights to tell, but he/ she must also establish the story’s tellability (i.e., what bears telling (Shuman, 1986, p. 2)). This is because a reportable/tellable event is one that, according to the context of its delivery, is relevant and newsworthy (Norrick, 2005, p. 134) and which thus merits the attention paid to it by the audience (see also Chapter 1). Thus tellability is linked to the notion of a breach of canonical scripts, because for a story to be worth telling it must recount something that is unusual and thus newsworthy (Bruner, 1991b, p. 11). In sum the story teller must negotiate his/her rights to tell and the tellability of the story. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an analysis of the identity work that allows Charlie Smith to tell an almost certainly fictitious story as a personal narrative. We also consider the consequences of such a pseudopersonal narrative in terms of the (mis)appropriation of the voices of the slaves vis-à-vis master narratives of racial inequality and the benevolent role of whites in ‘civilizing’ Africans. This is especially important because for a pseudo-personal narrative to be carried off in the here-and-now of the interview world, we would



Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

expect it to be recipient designed so that it adheres to acceptable master narratives that the interviewer and ghostly audience would consider believable and tellable.

Narratives of personal experience, folktales, and truth and falsehood With any personal narrative the question of whether it is ‘true’ or not, or the extent of its truthfulness, can become an issue. For example, Eyerman (2001, p. 8) anecdotally recounts the story of a Holocaust survivor whose recollections of an infamous Jewish guard in a Polish ghetto clash with a historian’s account which argued that the guard could not have been present in the camp as the survivor attests. Similarly, Atkinson and Delamont (2006, p. 168) discuss the book I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian woman in G ­ uatemala (Menchú 1984). The book is a collection of testimonies related by Rigoberta Menchù, a Guatemalan woman who was involved in the struggle against the US government and corporations and the indigenous political and military elites. However, the contents of the testimony were later hotly contested for their lack of ‘historical’ truth and political bias. This then raises the issue of the relation between ‘truth’ and personal narrative. As Bamberg (1997a) points out, there are two possible interpretations of narrative and its links with personal experience, and therefore the historical truth. On the one hand, narratives of personal experience are considered to be relatively unmediated representations of something that once happened and as such they provide direct access to the events, which is only affected by the teller’s ability to remember clearly. On the other hand, the act of narrating is perceived as mediating between the actual experience and the story. As researchers such as De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2012, p. 14), and Kopijn (1998, p. 142) discuss, until recently, the former approach was the dominant paradigm in the social sciences which favoured the standard oral history frame which was based on the assumption that life stories of people who had actually experienced past events could, and did, reveal these past events as they actually were. It is only recently, that such an approach has been seriously challenged by researchers such as Atkinson and Delamont (2006), who argue that social scientists need to pay more attention to the situated achievement of narrative as an interactional accomplishment (cf. Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2012who discuss this issue specifically in relation to the slave narratives), thus really taking up the challenge to look at narratives as “socioculturally shaped practices, interactionally drafted in specific local contexts” (De Fina & ­Georgakopoulou, 2015, p. 2). Taking away the assumption of the asocial transparency of narrated events, the question then becomes not what really happened, but how discourse is organised to portray the world in certain ways. Truth

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

and falsehood, rather than being some kind of prediscursive facts that are out there somewhere waiting to be found, become relative: they are achieved in talk (Potter, 1996; Potter & Edwards, 1990; Smith, 1978; Wooffitt, 1992). This is not to deny the possible existence of an objective reality independent of discourse, but the point is that narratives of objective reality are always subjectively constructed and socially situated. For example, in their seminal article, Nigel Lawson’s tent. Discourse analysis, attribution theory and the social psychology of fact, Potter and Edwards (1990) demonstrate how varying accounts of the same event (a politician’s and the journalists’ versions of events) are constructed as being truthful accounts of reality. Therefore, from this perspective, the fundamental research question moves away from trying to work out what is true or false, to the way in which narratives are organised so as to come off as true (or undermined as false). More specifically, in relation to the concerns of this chapter, as Bauman (1992) points out, what makes a narrative event the recounting of a traditional tale is that the narrative is contextualised and oriented to as traditional by the participants. Conversely, this opens up the possibility that if a traditional tale is contextualised as a personal narrative based on first-hand experience, then it will be constructed as such by the participants. Of special interest in this chapter is the juxtaposition of folktale with personal narrative, and as Dorson argues: American Negroes (and whites) relate local traditions, family history, and personal experiences with as much gusto as any folktale – and sometimes these localized and personalized narratives prove to be folktales in disguise. (Dorson, 1956, pp. 84–85, quoted in Graham, 1991, p. 142)

Thus, there is no clear cut division between folktales and personal narratives (Stahl, 1977), rather they are on a continuum with those stories that are more or less folktales at one end and those that are more or less personal narratives at the other. At one end of the continuum would be the personal narrative that borrows some elements from folktales, collective stories, hearsay, anecdotes, and so on and so blends different narrative modes. Conversely, Smith’s narrative of the fritter tree could be situated at the other end of the continuum as an example of a folktale presented as personal narrative. On the one hand, Smith’s rendition of the folktale as personal narrative could be considered an outright lie, thus having no validity in terms of truth. Yet, on the other hand, the folktale, even if it is told as a pseudo-personal narrative, remains a lieu de mémoire in which the collective memory is articulated. Consequently, whilst it may not pass a historian’s threshold of ‘truth’ which insists on proofs and corroborating evidence as a condition sine qua non of constructing an event as historical ‘fact’ and in which uncorroborated testimony does not of itself constitute a ‘historical fact’ (Nora, 1989), it does represent a socially constructed, symbolic truth that “defines the ‘essential’ qualities of



Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

the performer’s culture – the resources that make the culture (and its people) what it is” (Stahl, 1977, p. 13). Further, as was also discussed in Chapter 1, the life story, as elicited in interview, is what Bamberg (2006b, p. 64) defines as a ‘big’ story. Big stories are: typically stories that are elicited in interview situations, either for the purpose to create research data or to do therapy – stories in which speakers are asked to retrospect on particular life-determining episodes or on their lives as a whole, and tie together events into episodes and episodes into a life story, so that something like ‘a life’ can come to existence. (Bamberg, 2006b, p. 64)

Thus, the research interview allows for reflection on life, and any life story from this perspective, including the pseudo-personal narrative of Smith, is a meaning making act which seeks to give a sense to the narrator’s life. Further, in order to give sense to life, it is possible that the narrator reorders it, removes any inconsistencies, and even partakes “in outright fictionalization” (Freeman, 2006, p. 132). And, as Linde (1993, p. 122) argues, “perhaps the most important function of reflexivity is to establish the moral value of the self ”. “People do not want just any objectifiable self; they want a good self, and a self that is perceived as good by others” (Linde, 1993, p. 122). However, what counts as a good self is situated in the context of the interview, and thus making sense of one’s life to create a good self is grounded in the here-and-now of the interview situation, and is context sensitive and accountable (Garfinkel, 1967). Therefore, a good self in a life story is not necessarily a ‘true’ identity that surges up from the depths of being (Freeman, 2006) in a social vacuum, rather it is an identity that is recipient designed so as to be accountable in the context of its production and in relation to current master narratives. As such, the self that is presented in a life story is not necessarily a ‘true’ self. As Freeman (2006, p. 132) states, life stories: cannot help but falsify the past: because narration occurs irrevocably in the present and because the ordering of the past inevitably partakes of fictive (if not outright fictional) designs, wrought by whomever is doing the narrating, there is no re-presenting the past (i.e., the past present) “as it was.” Consequently, the argument generally goes, narratives are untrue to “life itself.”

Moreover, because of the double arrow of time (Mishler, 2006), the narrative is as much aimed at the present as the past, and so identity work is recipient designed for the interviewer and the imagined audience. Thus, as Linde (1993, p. 122) argues, narratives are sites of construction of a good morally accountable self and this good self is necessarily oriented to the context of the interview and the larger social contexts in which it occurs. A good self in a life story is not therefore a ‘true’ identity in some kind of essentialist psychological sense, rather it is an identity that is carefully crafted so as to be accountable in the context of its production

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

and that takes up a position in relation to current master narratives. Therefore, the identity work of the former slaves in the narratives does not give us access into some objective reality of ‘what it was really like to be a slave’, rather such data gives the researcher an insight into how the former slaves (re)construct their thoughts, feelings, memories, and identity when interviewed (Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2012, p. 166). And, more problematically in the case of Smith, his narrative ­provides an account of how somebody claiming the identity of a former slave constructs, through recounting a well-known tale, an account of slavery, and, through this fictitious account, talks into being a certain world view that makes relevant particular master narratives.

A note on the data As already pointed out in the Chapters 2 and 3, it is highly probable that Smith was not in fact a former slave. Therefore, it can be safely claimed that Smith is drawing on folktales of capture and transportation rather than actual personal experience. In Smith’s version of his capture, he claims that he was lured onto the boat by the slave traders who promised to show him a fritter tree – a mythical tree that grows fritters. Whilst reports of native Africans being tricked into slavery appear as historical fact (Hawthorne, 2003, p. 106), the story of capture falls within the genre of the West African trickster story, as Gomez (1998, pp. 199–202) points out, and the African American version of the initial capture through trickery was well known throughout the community. Indeed, stories relating the way in which A ­ fricans were tricked onto the slave ships appear in several of the WPA narratives (e.g., Charlie Grant, South Carolina; Josephine Howard, Texas; and John Brown, ­Oklahoma). Similarly, the story of a mythical tree that grows syrup or fritters was also a common theme in American folklore. Therefore, as Graham argues, there is little doubt that Smith is telling folktales dressed up as personal narrative. As he says: the only informant who tells folktales is Charlie Smith, and even then they are disguised as personal narratives. It is difficult to know if, at his advanced age, Charlie’s mind could distinguish his own experience from those he had heard as a youth. (Graham, 1991, p. 141)

Yet, as previously argued, the juxtaposition of folktale and personal narrative is not always a clear cut matter. What is important in this mixed genre of folktale merged with personal narrative is not perhaps the truth value per se, but the telling of what the African American community perceived as an essential truth concerning their collective experience. And, as Gomez (1998, p. 199) argues, “this is critical, for the presentation of facts alone, to the African way of thinking, cannot communicate



Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

the full meaning of an event. What physically happened and the deeper meaning of what happened are very different things”. Therefore, from some points of view, a blending of personal narrative with collective stories can be used to reveal ‘deeper truths’ that would otherwise be hidden.

Analysis The entitlement to tell a story, its tellability (i.e. what bears telling (Shuman, 1986, p. 2)) and its storyability (i.e., who has the right to tell a particular story (­Shuman, 1986, p. 2)) are contingent on the identities that are made relevant to the i­nteraction. Following Zimmerman (1998), identities exist at three different levels: discursive, situational, and transportable. Discourse identities, such as story teller, story recipient, questioner, listener, and so on are invoked on a turn by turn basis. Reflexively, they make relevant to the interaction wider situated identities such as former slave, historian, Texas rancher, and so on. Transportable identities are identities that are usually visible and thus assignable on the basis of physical or culturally based insignia, such as African American /white, male/female, old/ young, and so on which travel with individuals across situations and which are potentially relevant – to greater or lesser extents (Schiffrin, 1996, p. 199) – in any given situation. The interplay of such identities are therefore relevant in terms of who gets to tell what story. At a discursive level this is to do with orientation to storytelling rights and the negotiation of an extended turn through which a story can emerge (Jefferson, 1978). And at a situated level this is related to the notion of category entitlement, which Potter (1996, p. 133) defines as: the idea that certain categories of people, in certain contexts, are treated as knowledgeable. In practice, category entitlement, obviates the needs to ask how a person knows, instead, simply being a member of some category – doctor, hockey player, hospital worker – is treated as sufficient to account for, and warrant, their knowledge in a specific domain

Thus, individuals incumbent of certain identities have rights to tell certain stories. For example, as Bartesaghi and Perlmutter Bowen (2009) argue, the category ‘Holocaust survivor’, as a situated identity, has to be made relevant before entitlement to bear witness to the Holocaust is acquired. Similarly, as will be explicated below, for Charlie Smith to be entitled to tell a story that bears witness to firsthand experience of capture, transportation, and sale, category entitlement must first be negotiated. However, once the identity of eye witness has been negotiated, “a person who has taken part in an event, or has first-hand information about it, is in principle entitled to tell a story about it” (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012,

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

p. 107) and has ownership of it (Sacks, 1992, p. 424). Smith’s category entitlement to tell the story is negotiated at the beginning of his interview as discussed below. Further, category entitlement to tell must be sustained through the establishment of credibility (Labov, 1982). In other words, the epistemic authority of the story teller is not only achieved through category entitlement, but to make the story credible, discursive techniques such as reported speech, first person pronouns, and attention to detail must be used to bolster the category entitlement to tell the story and to make it appear as an “eye witness” account. All these elements will be investigated in the analytical part of this chapter, which we now start by scrutinizing the first words that are recorded of the interview with Charlie Smith. Extract 8.1 (Charlie Smith) 1 IR 0↑ready0 (0.5) The following is an interview (.) between 2 Elmer Sparks, Texas ranchman and historian (.) and (.) 3 with Charlie Smith old-time slave of Bartow Florida (.) 4 ((crackling on recording)) uh (0.7) we’ve already got on 5 the introduction on it 6 IE okay 7 IR is it turning? 8 IE Yes 9 IR Uh (0.5) mister Smith, what is your full name? 10 IE Charlie Smith 11 IR 0Charlie Smith0 12 IE The man that raised me name me Charlie Smith. 13 My first name, first name what my mother name me, 14 is Mitchell, Mitchell Watkins. That’s what my 15 mother and father name me, Mitchell Watkins, 16 I was raised in that, uh,

In line 1, Sparks classifies the forthcoming event as ‘an interview’ which sets up expectations for norms of conduct: the discourse identities that are made relevant are those of interviewer and interviewee with the commensurate discursive rights and obligations to ask and answer questions. Sparks also ascribes to himself the situated identity of ranchman and historian (line 2) and he projects the identity “old time slave” onto Smith. The interviewer’s right to ask questions explicitly makes relevant Sparks’ situated identity of ‘historian’ and Smith’s obligation to respond to these questions is performed under the relevance of the identity ‘former slave’. These situated identities thus become default identities (Richards, 2006, p. 60). Moreover, these identities carry with them predicates (i.e. expectable characteristics, such as states of knowledge, ways of thinking, and so on). One of the predicates made relevant in the interaction for the identity ‘former slave’ is thus first-hand knowledge of slavery, which Smith makes relevant throughout the



Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

interaction and which attributes storytelling rights to him. On the other hand, the ascription of the category historian in the context of a research interview makes the desire to know about ‘history’ a relevant predicate for Sparks, and Smith recipient designs his talk in a way that displays an orientation to the relevance of the identity ‘historian’. In other words, the standardised relational pair historian/former slave sets up a series of expectations (or norms) as to the respective rights and obligations, so that together Smith and Sparks construct a ‘research interview’. This can be seen in the display questions (i.e., questions to which Sparks displays prior knowledge of the answer (see e.g. Brock, 1986)) such as “what is your full name?” (line 9). Charlie Smith orients to this question, not as a request for his name, but as a cue to give his life story which, by tying his answer to his childhood, begins in line 12. Further, because Smith’s situated identity as a former slave and Sparks’ situated identity as a historian have been invoked, Smith is morally obliged to produce talk that has something that bears telling (Shuman, 1986, p. 2) for a historian. Smith orients to this obligation by ‘doing a life story’ which starts with his birth and childhood in Africa and progresses chronologically to his present situation. However, since, as argued before, the likelihood of him having been a slave is slim, he is obliged, in the interests of tellability and the expectations that have been co-constructed with Sparks, to ‘do’ a pseudo-personal narrative and dress up a folk story as personal narrative. Indeed, as will be argued later, Smith responds to these category-generated expectations in the interview world by providing a performance – defined by Bauman (2000, p. 1) as “a special mode of situated communicative practice, resting on the assumption of accountability to an audience for a display of communicative skill and efficacy” – that is worthy of the situation and in which the performance of a culturally sanctioned collective narrative is delivered as if it were a narrative of personal experience. Lines 17 to 43 have been omitted because they do not directly concern the story of the fritter tree which begins in line 43, when the interviewer asks for more precisions about Smith’s capture. Extract 8.2 (Charlie Smith) 43 IR Now how did, how did you come to be on the block, 44 get out and brought over here? Was you brought over 45 by surprise? 46 IE Yeah, they, they, they brought me over here (.) 47 the=the=the=the North, the people, sold the coloured people. 48 IR Did they trick you to get you on the boat? 49 IE What? They fool you on the boat (.) They fool the coloured people 50 on the boat (.5) I ask my mama could I go down to the boat 51 landing (.) to see that white man (.) I was raised in Galina (.) Africa.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves



52 That was in Africa. 53 IR Yeah. That’s where I was raised and born there in Africa. 54 IR Yeah. 55 IE And the white folks (.) didn’t no white people stay in Africa, 56 south part of Africa. 57 IR Yeah.

In the interviewer’s question, it is significant that Sparks specifically asks if Smith was brought over ‘by surprise’ (line 45), which points to his familiarity with the story. In line 46, Smith provides a conditionally relevant second turn, which on the one hand confirms the interviewer’s question, but which on the other hand does not go into this aspect of ‘surprise’. So in the next turn, the interviewer asks for more precision (line 48: “did they trick you to get you on the boat?”). This second question orients to the key information, viz. the way in which Smith was tricked onto the boat, and this further indicates that the interviewer is directing Smith to tell a particular story that he is already familiar with. Initially, Smith displays a lack of understanding (line 49: ‘what?’) but then provides a conditionally relevant answer to the interviewer’s question (line 49–50: “They fool you on the boat (.) They fool the coloured people on the boat”). The verb (‘fool’) is spoken louder than the surrounding talk, thus stressing the key element of trickery and thus also confirming the interviewer’s suggestion. Significant here is also the fact that through the second person pronoun (line 43–44: ‘you’) Sparks sets up the forthcoming story as a personal narrative. Through his use of ‘me’ (line 46), Smith aligns with this and so confirms that the forthcoming narrative is a personal narrative. Both Sparks and Smith thus orient to Smith’s identity as a former slave which gives him the epistemic authority and entitlement to recount a story that is crafted as a firsthand personal narrative of slavery. However, the use of the first person in the narrative which stresses the personal nature of the experience is immediately mitigated in line 49. First, Smith states: “they fool you on the boat”, and then after a slight pause, “they fool the coloured people on the boat”. The shift to the generic ‘you’ generalises the experience and depersonalises it (Shuman, 2005, p. 80), and the signifier “the coloured people” further distances himself from displaying membership of the collective identity defined in terms of race. In this way, Smith mitigates his claim of personal involvement in the trickery of the slave traders. After a slight pause (line 49), the story continues. Smith now shifts back into the first person, thus once again framing the story as a personal event narrative (line 50: ‘I ask my mama could I go down to the boat landing to see that white man’) and he also adds biographic data (line 53: ‘I was raised and born there in Africa’). The interviewer backchannels ‘yeah’ (lines 54 and 57), thus aligning with  the emerging story and so co-constructing it as a personal narrative. It is



Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

at this point that ‘the white man’ is introduced to the story: first, in line 51, he is mentioned as the object of Smith’s curiosity and the reason why he wanted to go to the landing, and second, he accounts for his curiosity by stating that “the white folks (.) didn’t no white people stay in Africa, south part of Africa” (line 55). However, after this initial reference to white folks, in the upcoming story he downplays their involvement in the slave trade, as can be seen below in Extract 8.3 in which he uses the indeterminate pronoun ‘they’ and constructs a geographical distance between them (‘in the north part’ (line 58)) and the slave trading action (line 59–60: ‘in the south part of Africa’). Extract 8.3 (Charlie Smith) 58 IE They stayed in the north part of Africa. And that 59 where they so:ld the coloured people, in the south part 60 of Africa (.3) They put you up on a block and bid you off

Through the use of ‘they’, the slave traders are not specifically categorised as white, though their identity as white folk has been made relevant in the abstract to the story (line 51). This therefore mitigates the white folks’ role in the slave trade because, by leaving the second part of the SRP (slave/slave traders) vague, the identity of the perpetrators is obscured and so no explicit victimisation of the slave by the white slave owners is constructed. Conversely, the first part of the slave/slave traders SRP is defined in racial terms (line 59: ‘the coloured people’). This reference also serves as a distancing device by which Smith mitigates his membership of the collectivity ‘slaves’. This is further supported by the use of the generic ‘you’-form in line 60. This has the effect of distancing himself from the experiences of the enslaved Africans and thus fails, as before, to fully align with their plight. However, as the story progresses in the subsequent line, Smith, through the use of the inclusive 1st person plural pronominal form (line 61: ‘us’), makes his membership of the collectivity ‘enslaved Africans’ more explicit. Moreover, because this now makes the narrative explicitly personal and something that he claims to have lived, as an eye witness, this adds credibility to his pseudo-personal narrative of capture. This is developed further in the following extract: Extract 8.4 (Charlie Smith) 61 IE (.) And the way they got us on the boat, he said, 62 “Come right in here!” That what they said. “Come in here” (.) 63 “Coloured in here, all the coloured (.) Over in that country (.) 64 you don’t have to work (.) If you get hungry, all you got to 65 do go to the fritter tree.” Had the fritter tree on the boat (.) 66 claim that the fritter tree. “You go to the fritter tree.” 67 Same thing now we hear people call in the United States,

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves



68 call them pancakes, they call them flit[ers]. And them flitter 69 IR [uh] 70 IE tree, bared the=the tree bared the flitters, they claim. 71 “↑here the flitter tree. It’s on the boat.” We got on. 72 Carried show us the fritter tree on the boat (.) “Come 73 on down here!” Called the lower deck on the, on the called 74 the flitter tree. Then he show us the syrup tree. 75 “Here the syrup tree,” and it was on the boat 76 (.) too (.) “Come on down here!” And the hole on the 77 lower deck on the boat, they keep calling the hatch hole. 78 “Come on down here in that hatch hole!” They showed us 79 something down there. Got down in the hatch hole, we 80 Should have felt the boat moving, but we thought we was 81 going back up there to the fritter tree (.) And they are leaving 82 (.) And when it landed, it landed in New Orleans

In line 61, Smith begins the narrative of the actual capture. To do this, he ­consistently uses the collective ‘us’ which reinforces the personal aspect of the narrative as a ‘lived experience’ and foregrounds his self-identification with the enslaved Africans. This collective reference is continued throughout the narrative of the enslavement (lines 71–80). However, through the pronouns ‘he’ (line 74) and ‘they’ (lines 61; 62; 77; 78; 81), and an agentless verb (line 66: ‘claim that the fritter tree’), the slave traders’ identity still remains vague. This identity work, as previously discussed, continues to mitigate the role of the whites in the trickery. Further, Smith makes extensive use of direct reported speech to tell this part of his story. As Schiffrin (2003, p. 549) argues, the use of direct reported speech “adds a tone of authenticity and veracity” to his story. First, this is because reported speech suggests giving “recipients ‘direct access’ to an event” (Stokoe & Edwards, 2007, p. 339) which therefore confirms the narrator’s status as an eye witness with first-hand knowledge. Second, direct reported speech also acts as a performance device which brings the story ‘to life’ by adding vividness and so makes the narrative more convincing (Wooffitt, 2007, p. 267). Third, direct reported speech also helps listeners to identify themselves with the protagonists (De Fina, 2006, p. 372). Consequently, by dramatizing the events, direct reported speech is a powerful way of “showing” rather than “telling” the audience what happened (Buttny & ­Williams, 2000, p. 122). Further, as Smith repeats much of the reported speech and raises his voice as he utters it, these direct reported speech utterances are distinguished from the surrounding text, and are given a rhythm which adds to the dramatization. Finally, as well as the use of reported speech, credibility is also added to the story by using a high level of detail. For example, in line 77–78, the hole is described as the “hatch hole”, and as Wooffitt (1992, p. 40) states, the inclusion of such details to a narrative adds to its authenticity and credibility.



Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

In lines 83 and following, as discussed in Extract 8.5 below, Smith continues the story and recounts his arrival in the United States. Extract 8.5 (Charlie Smith) 83 IE (.) And when it landed, it landed in New Orleans. 84 That where the coloured people was sold at (.) Sold. 85 They bringing us from Africa over here, the coloured 86 folks want to throw me off. “Throw him overboard (.) 87 throw him overboard.” And the white, mister=mister 88 (  ) say, “Don’t you throw that boy out there!” “Throw 89 him overboard!” “Goddam, let the damn whale swallow him 90 like he done Jonah.” That what they said. Going to throw me 91 off the boat, bringing me from Africa in the ↑U↓nited States.

In line 84, Smith refers to his fellow slaves as ‘the coloured people’ which as before (cf. lines 47, 49, and 59) distances himself from membership of the collective ‘enslaved Africans’. However, in the next line, he shifts back to the collective 1st person plural pronoun (line 85: ‘us’). Thus once again Smith shifts from the use of distancing devices to a first person narrative which stresses his personal involvement in the story and thus reconfirms his rights to tell it as an eye witness who ‘owns’ the experience. Through the use of the indeterminate pronoun ‘they’ (line 92: “they bringing us from Africa”), the tricksters who fooled and transported ‘us’ still remain vague. Though implicitly the sellers of the slaves are white (cf. line 51), this aspect of their identity is fudged through the use of the agentless passive form (line 84: “the coloured people was sold”). This vagueness, as previously noted (see also Chapter 4), minimises the responsibility of the whites and obscures their involvement in the slave trade, hence obscuring the relevance of race to the story. After having performed identity work that minimises the ascription of perpetrator identity to the whites as slave traders, in the continuation of his turn, Smith foregrounds the ‘coloured people’ who now become the perpetrators because they want to throw him off the boat. Thus, whilst having obscured the role of the whites as perpetrators in a possible victim/perpetrator SRP, Smith talks into being ‘the coloured people’ as perpetrators of violence. Moreover, this is dramatised through the use of reported speech which is repeated and stressed for emphasis. (line 86: ‘throw him overboard (.) throw him overboard’). The saviour of the situation is a ‘white mister’ who saves Smith from drowning and being eaten by a whale ‘like Jonah’ (line 87–89).1 Again, a reported exchange is used to add verisimilitude to

.  In the version of events based on his interview with Byrd and recounted in his biography, it is the captain of the ship who saves Smith. The perpetrators are his fellow captive Africans who wanted to kill him because “his whimpering got on the nerves of the other natives, and they made up their mind to throw him overboard” (Byrd, 1978, p. 18).

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

the narrated events (cf. Moita-Lopes, 2006, p. 301). Moreover, in the following line, to further underline the truthfulness of this statement, returning to the hereand-now of the interview and addressing the interviewer and imagined audience, Smith adds “that what they said” (line 90). As Briggs and Bauman (1992) argue, this is a device that story tellers use to address possible disbelief and to add to the credibility of the story itself. The result of Smith’s identity work is that a colour coded version of the storyworld is talked into being. In this world, the whites are the heroes and the coloured folks are the villains. Interestingly, this is in stark contrast to Smith’s identity work discussed in Chapter  3 in which deracialised ‘hero and villain’ identities were made relevant based on compliance to federal law, or not – we return to this apparent contradiction in Smith’s identity work later. ­Further, Smith, talks into being his identity as the victim of the perpetrators of this violence, namely “the coloured folk”. Conversely, the role of the white folk in the capture, transportation, and sale of the slaves is obscured and the whites disappear as active agents in the brutality of the slave trade. The same is true of Smith’s ­narrative of the slave auction as discussed below. Extract 8.6 (Charlie Smith) 92 IE That was when we had the slavery. Just put you on the block 93 and sell you. Put you on a stage, but well they called it a block. 94 Put you up on a stage. Then man would buy you. 95 The highest bidder gets you. [Bid on you. 96 IR [I’ve heard of that.

In lines 92 following, the role of the whites in slavery, and more specifically the slave auction, is further minimised through fudging the involvement of the whites in the auctioning of the Africans (see also Chapter 4). This is achieved in two ways: (1) through using agentless verbs (lines 92–95: “put you”, “sell you”, and “bid on you”); and (2) through the use of colour neutral referents as agents (line 94: “man would buy you” and line 95: “highest bidder gets you”). Also, Smith distances himself from personal involvement in the narrative by using a generic ‘you’ to describe the slaves. This depersonalises the events described and in this way Smith distances himself from identification with the African slaves being sold. The next 9 lines have been omitted since Smith digresses to the causes of the Civil War, and we pick up his narrative in line 105 when the interviewer brings the talk back to Smith’s life story by asking who bought Smith. Extract 8.7 (Charlie Smith) 105 IR And who was it that bought you? Do you remember who 106 bought you? 107 IE Bought me? 108 IR Yeah. 109 IE Oh. I was in, in uh, when they went to New Orleans (.)





Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

110 that’s where they sold the people. The man that raised me, 111 he didn’t buy me. The man raised me. They would try to 112 put you up on the block to sell you. He was Jake (.) The 113 man was Jake. He name me. that’s the name I go in now. 114 Charlie ↓Smith. He name me. When he, uh, I uh 115 when he took me. He raised me, in Texas=Galveston, 116 Texas where I was raised in. And the man that raised me, 117 he name Charlie Smith, and that’s the name he give [me ]. 118 IR [uhu] 119 He gave me Charlie Smith=and always teach me and his children. 120 He treated me just like he treated his children, in everything, 121 not one thing, everything. We ate together, we slept together. 122 All the boys now, we just talking not about the women now (.) 123 ((turns continues to relate his life as a cowboy))

In response to the question, “who bought you”, Smith responds that he was not bought, he was raised (line 110–111).2 First, he recounts the sale of the slaves and, as before, by using the indeterminate pronoun ‘they’ (lines 110 and 111), he fudges the issue of the identity of the sellers. And the objects of the sale are also vague: in line 110 it is “the people” and in line 112, the generic ‘you’ is used. Moreover, it is not even sure if the sale was a success since Smith states “they would try to put you up on the block to sell you” (line 111), not that they actually sold you. Thus the whole issue of who sold whom, and whether they actually succeeded in doing so, is fudged. Then, Smith shifts emphasis in the story away from the sale to the fact that he was raised by Jake. This storyworld character is not specifically constructed in racial terms, viz, as being white, but since the white owners often renamed their slaves (Puckett, 1990, p. 171), the fact that he names Smith is a category generated predicate of whiteness. Moreover, as Patterson (1982, p. 55) notes, “the changing of a name is almost universally a symbolic act of stripping a person of his former identity”. So, Smith, in repeating this three times, draws attention to a naming practice that symbolically takes away his African identity, as he also did in the story of his work as a state man which we discussed in Chapter 3 (see Extract 3.6). Moreover, in the rest of the fragment, Smith stresses the collectivity of his family/kinship ties with the white man who raised him and educated him (line 119: “always teach me and his children”) in an egalitarian way (line 120: “treated me just like he treated his children”). This claim is boosted by an extreme case formulation (i.e. line 120–121: “in everything, not one thing, everything” (­Pomerantz, .  In his biography, it is stated that he was put on the block three times but because he was so small he was not sold. Charlie Smith Snr. (not Jake, cf. line 112) then takes him to Texas. Smith is reported as not knowing if he was actually bought, but he supposes that he was (Byrd, 197, p.22).

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

1986)) and it is followed by two examples (line 121: “we ate together, we slept together”). This therefore stresses the truth value of his identity work. Further, the outgroup now becomes gendered since, as Smith points out, “all the boys now, we just talking not about the women now” (line 122). Thus the collectivity to which he claims membership is that of the “boys”, and his coloured transportable identity is not made relevant in the SRP boys/women that is set up. Consequently, in this part of the story, Smith does identity work that claims kinship with a white family. It thus stresses the benevolence of the whites towards him: he is educated by them and he is brought up as one of them, as such displaying an orientation to the master narrative of the oeuvre civilisatrice in which African Americans are constructed as benefiting from the civilizing actions of the whites (see Chapter 5). His transportable identity of African American is thus made irrelevant and he claims membership of a white family.

Conclusions In this chapter, we discussed how Smith uses a pseudo-personal narrative to take ownership of a folktale of capture, transportation, and sale. As previously noted, it is very unlikely that Smith actually lived the events that he narrates. The first question is therefore, how is it that such a blatantly non-personal narrative is accepted as a narrative of personal experience? The answers to this lies at the beginning of the interview when the interviewer makes relevant the situated identities of ‘old time slave’ and historian, which become the default identities throughout the interaction. Thus, at a turn by turn level, the discourse identities of interviewer and interviewee exist in an SRP which requires that the interviewer asks questions, and that the interviewee responds. At a distal level, the situated identities made relevant are the SRP former slave/historian. Through accepting, and orienting to, these ascriptions of identities, Smith claims entitlement to tell a story ‘from the days of slavery’. Moreover, rather than challenging this default identity, the interviewer encourages the telling of the life story of a former slave through his question design and backchannels. As a consequence of this identity work, Smith aligns with the obligation to tell the life story of a slave. And since it is highly unlikely that he was ever a slave, he thus talks himself into being as a former slave by colonizing a traditional tale from the days of slavery and delivering it as if it were a personal narrative. As Bauman (1992), in his discussion of Icelandic legends, points out, what is, or is not, a traditional tale, can be argued according to its decontextualised structural qualities, but what is especially important is the way in which the participants themselves make a tale ‘traditional’ by contextualising it as such. Conversely,



Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

in the case of Smith, the narrative is not contextualised as a traditional folktale. Rather, because the identity ‘former slave’ is made relevant to the interaction, this gives Smith storytelling rights as owner of the experience (Sacks, 1992). And even though Smith oscillates between an eye witness account and a more distanced account, both Smith and Sparks contextualise the story as a personal narrative and orient to the relevance of the default identities of former slave and historian. Through doing this, Smith is erasing the voice of the slaves and he is speaking on their behalf. Further, given the dramatic performative nature of the narrative, Smith displays an understanding of his moral obligation as part of the SRP historian/former slave to tell a story that has tellability. Therefore, it is not any old banal story of life as a slave, but it is a dramatic and memorable one which breaches canonical scripts by being unusual and newsworthy. As Bartesaghi and Perlmutter Bowen (2009, p. 235) note, it is important for the interviewee to understand and orient to what they term “the rules of the game”. In this case, the rules of the game are the moral obligations inherent in the relevance of the discursive SRP interviewer/ interviewee and the situated SRP former slave/historian. It is Smith’s orientation to the relevance of these identities that makes the dramatic pseudo-personal narrative an allowable contribution to talk (Levinson, 1992). Because Smith almost certainly has no direct personal experience of the events he narrates, he has to fall back on a well-known tale and pseudo-personal narrative which provides the interviewer with a narrative which has tellability. Moreover, the interviewer aligns with the telling of the story and so co-constructs Smith’s rendering of it, confirming that the narrative has tellability and that Smith has storyability. So in this case, given the SRPs that are set up, it is possible that Smith also seeks to entertain and thus shifts to a theatrical frame which transforms him into a stage performer whose role is to entertain the audience (Goffman, 1974, p. 124). This can be seen in Smith’s use of the dramatic techniques such as reported speech, repetition, rhythmic delivery, and so on which are characteristics of performance (Tannen, 1989). However, despite entertaining in a theatrical frame, the story also ‘does things’ which can be seen in the identity work that the story, whether historically true or not, achieves. As Bauman (2000, p. 4) states, performances “represent for ­participants an arena for the display, contemplation, and manipulation of salient elements, practices, and relationships that allow language to serve as a resource for the expression of identity” (our italics). The ‘truth’ value of the narrative therefore resides not in the fact that Smith’s narrative passes some kind of test of documentable historical credibility, but rather it is in the practice of storytelling in relation to the local interactional and the more global context. In the there-and-then of the storyworld, Smith makes relevant various identities: paradoxically through allowing themselves to be tricked, the Africans are talked into being as naïve and easily

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

duped, yet, through wanting to drown Smith, they are also talked into being as murderous beasts. Through this paradox, Smith manages to talk into being two racialised master narratives which have come up repeatedly in the course of this book, namely those of the ‘Sambo’ – or ‘stupid Negro’ – and the ‘Negro as beast’. The whites, through their actions of saving and later educating Smith, are talked into being as the heroes of the piece, the saviours, and the redeemers, and so the story also displays an orientation to the master narrative of the oeuvre civilisatrice. Any category generated predicates that could detract from such a benevolent categorization of the white folk, such as enslaving the Africans, selling them, and tricking them, are played down through the use of passives, indeterminate pronouns, and agentless verbs. Thus, whilst the Africans are partially portrayed as victims, the second part of the SRP perpetrator/victim is never made explicit so that criticisms of the white folk’s role in the slave trade are minimised (cf. Van De Mieroop & ­Clifton, 2011). Indeed, perpetrator identity in the narrative is most clearly linked to the Africans who wanted to drown Smith, thus stressing black-on-black violence and the ‘beast-like nature of the Negro’ as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. So, Smith constructs this story not as one of oppression and violence but as one of redemption through being civilised by the whites. Even though the story is being told in the 1975, the folktale on which it is based refers to the 1840/50s and possibly even further back since the trading of slaves from Africa was officially banned in 1808. Consequently, Smith uses the voice of the slaves to produce master narratives of white hegemony. Thus, the tale orients to a master narrative which was possibly obsolete at the time of the telling, but which was certainly prevalent at the time in which the story originates. Of course, this orientation to such a master narrative does not come as a fixed and unalterable component of the tale, as other tellings of the same story show. For example, in the written accounts that are preserved – but which do not form part of our corpus for reasons discussed in Chapter 2 –, Josephine Howard, interviewed in Texas, integrates the same story of trickery and capture into her interview. However, she makes relevant a religious master narrative that characterises the whites as liars and cheats and she condemns them for their sinfulness. Conversely, other slave narratives that retell the trickery of the capture of the slaves (e.g., John Brown of Oklahoma) align with the master narrative articulated by Smith and present oeuvre civilisatrice master narratives of progress from savagery to civilisation. So it is significant that in retelling this pseudo-personal narrative, Smith orients to master narratives that are aligned with a Discourse of white benevolence that acted as an apology for slavery. Now, as Mishler (2006) notes and as we have repeatedly discussed throughout this book, the story is as much directed to the present audience as it is about the past. We have observed that many of the slave narratives orient to the racist and



Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

segregationist socio-political context of the 1930s and 1940s in which they were produced. In this case, Smith’s story, which produces a morally colour coded universe, is, on the face of it, surprising since it was related in the 1970s at a time when attitudes to race were supposedly changing and emerging post-civil rights master narratives in the 1970s increasingly drew attention to the brutality of slavery (Berlin, 2004). For example, Alex Haley’s best seller Roots which was published in 1976 and adapted for television in 1977 (Haley, 1977), thus only a year or two after Smith’s interview, showed in explicit detail the dehumanizing violence of capture, transportation, and sale of African Americans and thus stands in stark contrast to the master narratives of the archetypal ‘Sambo’ identity, the ‘Negro as beast’ and of white benevolence to be found in Smith’s tale. We can of course only hypothesise as to why Smith orients this story in this way: maybe the shift to the theatrical frame resulted in the performance of this pseudo-personal narrative as a kind of ‘play’, viz. as a historical artefact situated in a different era with its own, different master narratives, in order to enhance the story’s credibility. Or maybe Smith himself still oriented to white supremacy master narratives at the time of the interview, perceiving the good African American self (cf. Linde, 1993) as somebody who orients to the moral ascendancy of the white population. This would therefore emphasise that shifts in master narratives are lengthy processes that are never total: so in spite of the fact that de jure full civil rights had been granted to African Americans, Discourses of racial inequality and white supremacy still circulated in American society. In this case, it is particularly important to also open up our analytical lens to the rest of the interview with Charlie Smith. Next to this story in which we observed that Smith makes relevant Discourses of white hegemony, we argued in Chapter 3 that Smith’s identity work makes an inclusive American identity, rather than a racialised identity, relevant to the interaction. At first glance, this shift from a master narrative of an inclusive American national identity to a white supremacist Discourse in the same interview is somewhat confusing, as this means that two conflicting master narratives are being articulated by the same person in the same interview. A social psychological approach to identity would argue that one has certain beliefs and opinions that remain constant and which are verbalised in talk, and that unless one is lying or deliberately obscuring what one really thinks, feels, or believes, such attitudes and opinions will be visible in talk. Such an approach therefore takes an essentialist stance to identity in which there is an inner-self which is waiting to be revealed and in which an individual’s attitudes, beliefs and world views are understood to be a relatively enduring and consistent mental state that is easily accessible through language (Potter & Wetherell, 1988, p. 52). However, as we have argued consistently throughout this book, from

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

a social constructionist perspective, identity is not something we have, rather it is something we do (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998), and it is therefore inherently unstable and fleeting depending on the context that the individual orients to (see also Chapter 1). Consequently, as Potter and Wetherell (1987, 1988) argue, it is not unusual for interviewees to display different, and sometimes contradictory attitudes, opinions, and beliefs. As they say: One of the most striking features of interview transcript is the inconsistencies which develop over time. Discourse which sounds perfectly reasonable reveals on closer examination many different twists and turns and the flexible contradictory nature of everyday argumentation. (Potter & Wetherell, 1988, p. 54)

Thus, we find nothing unusual in the fact that in the story of law and order discussed in Chapter 3, Smith makes colour-coded identities irrelevant to the interaction and so evokes a Discourse of an inclusive American identity, whereas in the earlier part of the same interview discussed in this chapter, he makes racialised identities relevant to the interaction and so evokes a hegemonic Discourse of white superiority. The identity work that Smith performs and the master narrative that such identity work talks into being is dependent on the topic and the evolution of the story and means that at different times in an interview the interviewee can access quite different, even contradictory, master narratives. This implies that the interviewee does not have to produce consistent identity work or be consistent in the Discourses that he/she makes relevant. This is because, following Potter and Wetherell (1987, p. 49), we do not take for granted the social psychological notion that “accounts reflect underlying attitudes or dispositions and we therefore do not expect that an individual’s discourse will be consistent and coherent.” Rather, from a social constructionist perspective, the identity work that the stories perform and the attitudes and beliefs that this identity work instantiates are dependent on the turn by turn development of the interview. Consequently, variability and inconsistency are the norm rather than the exception, and this explains why it is possible for two conflicting master narratives to be made relevant by the same interviewee in the same interview. Finally, as argued throughout this chapter, whilst the truth value of Smith’s story is in doubt, this is not the real issue from a discursive perspective (cf. Bamberg, 1997a). Rather, the talk is seen as mediating between the interview and the actual event. Thus, even though Smith’s story may not literally be true, it nevertheless displays a version of the world that proclaims a symbolic truth in the form of a master narrative of how the world is, was, or should be. As Kelly (2000, p. 2), writing of the truthfulness of Primo Levi’s testimony of the Holocaust, notes:



Chapter 8.  Truth, falsehood, and master narratives 

the truthfulness of an account lies not merely in its accuracy but more so in the ability of the narrator to get to the heart of the nature of the event for the individual, and also render that account in such a way that its significance may be comprehended by those who have not participated in it. Thus the historical value (…) resides not in its documentary accuracy, not in any reliance on dates, figures and fact, but in its personal, subjective nature, its recounting of the experience of the individual, and, in so doing, its reconstruction of that experience in such a way that the reader – any reader, at any time – can come to some understanding of it.

Thus, it is the symbolic truth of the narrative that is important rather than its historical accuracy. As Bauman (1992, p. 128) argues, traditional tales should be considered “as a symbolic construction by which people in the present establish connections with a meaningful past and endow particular cultural forms with value and authority”. Thus Smith’s pseudo-personal narrative conveys an ideological, rather than a historical, truth. As De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2012, p. 34) note, “truth and the narrative reproduction of reality are often not merely impossible to establish, but also, not equally relevant to all narratives”. Truth in the slave narratives may not lie in the exact relation to what could pass as historical fact, but in the symbolic capital that they evoke. This is equally true for the pseudo-­narrative of Charlie Smith discussed in this chapter: it almost certainly does not represent a historical truth, but it does talk into being a particular version of the world as Charlie Smith constructs it in the context of a research interview recorded in 1975. Consequently, Smith’s narrative provides the researcher with truths that may not stand up to demands for documentary evidence and corroboration, but which nevertheless are truths about Charlie Smiths’ performance of what the world is, was, or should be in the context of a research interview.

chapter 9

Conclusions As De Fina (2013, p. 46) argues “establishing the relevance of Discourses to local identity displays involves paying attention to recurring patterns of data from the same community”. Following this observation, we argue that a significant advantage of this monograph is that it allows us the space to bring together a larger corpus of data, rather than working on individual stories. Thus, this book enabled us to analyse common themes that emerge across storytellers within a particular community and so we could move with more certainty from the particular to the collective. Furthermore, we also embarked on moving from the analysis of positioning on level 1 regarding the narrated self and on level 2 regarding the self of the teller (Deppermann, 2015, p. 379) to positioning level 3 and the exploration of “the teller’s sense of self as pertaining beyond the local telling context” (­Georgakopoulou, 2013, p. 91). In particular, we aimed to uncover which master narratives – which can be defined as “socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, valuing, acting, and interacting, in the “right” places and at the “right” times with the “right” objects” (Gee, 1999, p. 17) – were made recursively relevant and how they functioned in relation to one another as well as to the interlocutors’ identity work, thus scrutinizing “the dialogic interaction of global social structure and local social practice” (Kiesling, 2001, p. 113). As discussed in Chapter 2, this corpus enabled us to access the voices of former slaves across geographic locations (though, of course, the interviews were mainly recorded in the southern states of the United Sates), across time (though, of course, most of the interviews come from the 1930s and 1940s), and across various members of the African American community (though, of course, from some perspectives there are ‘sampling’ issues as discussed in Chapter 2). Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings, we did have access to a unique corpus of interviews that provided us with the opportunity to do in-depth qualitative analyses of the identity work that the diverse storytellers perform, and whilst we recognize that this may not – nor can it ever – be the ‘full’ story, we argue that it does provide us with insight into some of the ways that the community of former slaves build their identities and how, through this, they instantiate master narratives which reflexively construct, and are constructed by, the (racial) ideologies of the time.

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

We first give an overview of the master narratives that were oriented to in one way or another in our data and we also discuss the prevalence of these master narratives in the corpus. After this, we go into the broader theoretical implications of this study.

The master narratives in our data In this section, we give an overview of the master narratives that were talked into being in our data. We first discuss a recurrent master narrative in the corpus, namely that of white supremacy and zoom in on variants of this master narrative that were found in the data. Then, we move to a discussion of a Discourse that countered the hegemonic white supremacy ideology. Finally, we focus on two other master narratives that were oriented to by some of the interviewees, namely a master narrative that invokes an inclusive American, rather than racial, identity and master narratives relating to religion. In this overview, we refer back to the analytical chapters by inserting examples from our data that illustrate each particular master narrative.

Different versions of white supremacy master narratives A general observation that could be made from the analyses is the fact that race is almost consistently made relevant throughout the interactions. This is true both in the stories of the interviewees as well as in the questions of the interviewers. By making this aspect of one’s transportable identity (Zimmerman, 1998, p. 90) almost consistently relevant to the interaction in one way or another, a window is provided into larger extra-situational resources (Georgakopoulou, 2006b, p. 96) available to interlocutors, thus linking “locally expressed identities and more global, socially-shared identities” (De Fina et al., 2006, p. 14). So, by making race consistently relevant, the interlocutors talk into being a colour-coded universe in which the relevance of race to social groups is hardly ever questioned. From the way in which interlocutors talk these racialised societal norms of the storyworld into being, it is clear that they almost systematically orient to a master narrative of white supremacy. Of course, such a master narrative formed the foundation of the slavery system, and hence it is not surprising that these social structures of the antebellum period were also oriented to at a local level in the interviews in our data. But what seemed surprising at first was the ubiquity of acquiescent positions vis-à-vis such master narratives of white supremacy, and the framing of these Discourses in terms of benevolence in the post-bellum period as well. This is especially ­counterintuitive



Chapter 9.  Conclusions 

to the contemporary ghostly audience because, as Berlin (2004, p. 1264) argues, the dominant master narratives of slavery in the early 21st century are those of physical and psychological suffering and of resistance to such treatment. This is in stark contrast to the prevalence of master narratives of slavery as a benevolent endeavour that come from almost all the stories of the former slaves. Thus, on the first level of positioning, in the storyworld, the former slaves tend to talk into being a hegemonic belief system and power structure that work against their own interests and keep them in subservience (Gramsci, 1971). For example, in Chapter 8, Charlie Smith recounts that whilst he was almost thrown off the slave ship by the ‘coloured folk’, he is eventually saved by the whites, who are framed as his benefactors and who later bring him up and provide him with the benefits of a ‘white education’. Furthermore, in Chapter 4, we observe how in the there-and-then of the storyworld, the identity work of the former slaves talks into being their agentless identity of chattel (notably: cows, hogs, and horses) treated as the property of the slave owners. In their stories, the role of the slave owners in the actual buying and selling of slaves is often obscured and they are sometimes even talked into being as benevolent and looking after the interests of their slaves. This identity work therefore talks into being a master narrative of white supremacy and benevolence. However, such stories of chattel slavery and their orientations to ‘historical’ master narratives positioning the slaves in the role of agentless property cannot work after the emancipation which brought about the end of chattel slavery. So, we observed that in the stories that refer to the post-bellum period, the slave-as-cattle identity and the orientation to the master narrative of the slave as agentless property was abandoned and replaced by orientations to other master narratives as discussed below. Intriguingly, in these other master narratives, we also observed that race was still consistently made relevant and white supremacy was almost always acquiesced to. For example, in her stories of law and order discussed in Chapter 3, Smalley minimizes the extent of white-on-black violence during the post-bellum period and she comes close to justifying it on the grounds of the need for the ‘bestial and violent instincts of the Negro’ to be controlled by the civilizing hand of the whites. She thus makes relevant a master narrative of the ‘Negro as beast’ who benefits from white control (Chapter 3). Similar master narratives, taking various forms, run through many of the interviews. For example, when George Johnson expresses his dislike of typical African American music such as the blues, he does so by claiming that the ‘Negroes’ are acting like monkeys and that their music scares ‘civilized’ African Americans – at least those who have been raised by the whites (Chapter 5). Likewise, Wallace Quarterman sets up a similar hierarchy between three groups, with violent, uneducated African Americans at the bottom – who would ‘just kill one another’ –, educated African Americans at the intermediate level, and white people at the highest level (Chapter 5).

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

So, the main iterative pattern present in these data was that of an orientation to one version or another of a white supremacy master narrative. With a few exceptions, these orientations tended to acquiesce to the Discourse of the racial inequality and inferiority of African Americans. This may be face-threatening for the interviewees themselves and so this tendency may thus, indeed, seem surprising, but we argued that it is quite understandable given the social structure of the storytelling world, the teller’s self in this world, and the interaction with the interviewer at positioning level 2. However, we also saw that the former slaves dealt with this potential face-threat by distancing themselves from the ‘wild Negroes’ through talking into being the dichotomy of educated and uneducated African Americans and claiming incumbency of the former group. We see this for example in Bob Ledbetter’s story in Chapter 3 in which he equates whiteness with goodness and distances himself from ‘badly educated Negroes’. Further, as discussed in Chapters  2 and 3, most interviews took place in the 1930s and 1940s, in which American society was still deeply segregated and African Americans typically held an inferior position. And so these stories of ­slavery and the post-Civil War era tell as much about the antebellum slavery storyworld as about post-bellum American society in which they were recorded and in which racial inequality was still deeply entrenched. This demonstrates that “the past is not set in stone, but the meaning of events and experiences is constantly being reframed within the contexts of our current and ongoing lives” (Mishler, 2006, p. 36) and thus, in this case, as we argue throughout the book, the slaves (mainly) orient to the normative gaze of the ghostly audience of the 1930s and 1940s and so are reticent to criticize the slave system. Similarly, the interviewers also have a crucial contribution in the orientation to certain master narratives, and the silencing of other sociocultural forms of interpretation which may be less ‘convenient’ to the ghostly audience of the 1930s and 1940s. We briefly discussed this in Chapter 6, but scrutinised it in particular in Chapter 7, in which we zoomed in on stories of violence – about severe and often unjust and unmerited punishments of slaves – which typically make relevant the identity of slave-as-victim and slave owner-as-perpetrator. In Chapter  7, Laura Smalley’s story of harsh punishment is the only explicit story that positions the slaves as victims and the slave owners as perpetrators. We argue that, due to the interviewers’ control of topic initiation and development, the other stories of white-on-black violence are not developed. Thus, for example, we see that the interviewers: stick to their agenda and so fail to topicalise or develop stories of brutality; change topic when putative stories of violence begin to emerge; and close topic abruptly when stories of violence have emerged. Consequently, any hint of a counter-narrative is immediately shut down through the interviewer’s asymmetric discursive rights which allow him/her to control what is topicalised and how it is developed.



Chapter 9.  Conclusions 

So, in conclusion, the specific way in which the master narrative of white supremacy is made relevant takes many forms, and the positions that the former slaves take vis-à-vis these master narratives, differ as well of course. In sum, in the former slaves’ narratives under study here, we found the following different versions (set out below) of the white supremacy master narrative across the different temporal indexicalities of the interviews. –– During slavery times: 1. A master narrative of chattel slavery that corresponds to the classic Aristotelian version of slavery We observed this in interviews in which the slave-as-cattle identity was talked into being, which orients to the master narrative of the slave as agentless property. Especially in extracts from the interview with Laura Smalley discussed in Chapter 4, it was shown that the storyworld characters are presented as merely playing their part without any significant agency of their own. This master narrative can only be enacted in the there-and-then of the storyworld relating to the antebellum period. This is because after emancipation, the African Americans, whilst still having a lowly status, were no longer regarded as property and so the slaves-as-cattle identity no longer had any validity. We have called this a ‘historical’ master narrative, as it cannot survive outside the context of its historical existence. –– During and after slavery times: 2. A master narrative of slavery as a benevolent institution a. In general When the slave owners are presented as benefactors vis-à-vis their slaves, who were thus protected and cared for, the slavery system is presented as a benevolent institution. We observed this in the interview with Fountain Hughes, who presents the whites as carers who would only sell ‘bad and mean’ slaves, thus exonerating the slave owners from any responsibility for the slaves’ predicament (Chapter 4). b. More specifically: a master narrative of slavery as a benevolent oeuvre civilisatrice We see this in stories relating to upbringing and education during the times of slavery where the whites are talked into being as benefactors of the “uncivilized” African Americans, who are in need of white civilizing hands. For example, in the interviews with Isom Moseley and Joe ­McDonald which we discussed in Chapter 5, both interviewees emphasize that they had ‘mighty good white folks’ who taught them ‘mighty

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

good’. This master narrative was often also used more generally as the former slaves not only discussed their memories of how they were raised by the white slave owners, but they also made this relevant for the here-andnow of the storytelling time. For example, George Johnson and Wallace Quarterman construct an ingroup of educated African Americans, which allowed them to construct, and consecutively set themselves apart from, the outgroup of ‘wild Negroes’ (Chapter 5) and Laura Smalley (Chapter 3) argues that if the African Americans act ‘right’ they will not be bothered which again distances herself from those ‘uncontrollable Negroes’ who were subject to white extra-judicial control. 3. A master narrative of white superiority and African American inferiority a. Through the identity of the ‘Sambo’ (‘the stupid Negro’) The archetypal identity of the ‘Sambo’ talks into being a master narrative of white supremacy, as the whites are presented as being far more intelligent than the inferior African Americans. In Charlie Smith’s folktale of the fritter tree (Chapter 8), the Africans’ gullibility is an essential element in the story. Similarly, Harriet Smith’s story about the slaves’ misconception of God as just another slave owner (Chapter 6) is another story in which the slaves’ naivety is emphasised. However, rather than conforming to a master narrative of white supremacy, through distancing herself from this ‘Sambo’ identity, she uses it to challenge the slavery system in which the slaves were deliberately kept ignorant. Thus, we see a case of the intermingling of master and counter-narratives. In this case, a master narrative of the ‘Sambo’ is contradicted because, on account of the narrator’s reflective vantage point, Harriet Smith argues that keeping the slaves in ignorance of the true nature of God was a deliberate ploy by the white slave owners and so was not as a result of the inherent ignorance of African Americans. b. Through the identity of the ‘Negro as beast’ Many interviewees present African Americans as bestial and violent, thus constructing the identity of the ‘Negro as beast’. This happens for example in stories of black-on-black violence both in the antebellum and the postbellum period, as we demonstrated in Laura Smalley’s story of ‘coloured folk killing up one another’ (Chapter 3) and Charlie Smith’s tale of the fritter tree in which he was almost thrown off the boat by ‘the coloured folks’ (Chapter 8). Both stories construct African Americans as violent, degenerate and lawless people who are in need of control by the whites, thus normalizing the ideology of the oppressor.



Chapter 9.  Conclusions 

A counter-narrative of the inhumanity of slavery and segregation Although it is largely undeveloped in the data, for reasons we discussed above, we found (traces of) brief stories in which the slavery system and post-bellum racial segregation were challenged by counter-narratives. By comparing life as an African American to that of a dog, as Fountain Hughes did (Chapter 4), the barbaric living conditions of (former) slaves are exposed. Furthermore, Harriet Smith relates that her husband was murdered by ‘poor white people’, thus – though in a mitigated way – exposing post-bellum white-on-black violence (Chapter 3). Criticisms of the slave system are also seen in the – often partially silenced – stories relating to antebellum violence discussed in Chapter 7. Except for Laura Smalley’s story of the whipping of Martha Albert, we noted that that there were few stories in the corpus that addressed this topic extensively. Most stories about violence discussed in Chapter 7 were curtailed in some way on account of the interviewers’ lack of alignment and affiliation with emerging counter-narratives. This suggests that counter-narratives in general may be much rarer than master narratives, as they are in this corpus. This may simply be because both interviewees and interviewers tend to orient to the zeitgeist of the time of the telling and thus stories that align with accepted Discourses are more likely to emerge than those that challenge the status quo. Thus, within the corpus, stories that orient to counter-narratives of slavery and the post-bellum segregated society and which emphasise the psychological and physical suffering of the African Americans are noticeable by their absence. This is, of course, something that is counterintuitive considering the contemporary master narrative of slavery which highlights the total inhumanity of the system (cf. Berlin, 2004). Moreover, it is also significant to note that in these counter-narratives no claims are made to argue for racial equality, and the fact that such an ideology was never explicitly voiced by any of the interviewees is emblematic of the local interactional context, in which usually white interviewers – or at least a partially white ghostly audience – were the story recipients.

Other master narratives Of course, as our analyses have shown, these are not the only master narratives that are oriented to in the data. In this section, we discuss two other master narratives that are talked into being in the corpus, but which occurred much less frequently in our data. Inclusive American identity First of all, and partially relating to one of the master narratives as discussed above, we observed that Charlie Smith in his story of law and order made relevant the identity of lawman for himself, which represented the archetypal American who

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

was on a quest to right wrongs and to triumph over evil. Thus, he orients to a master narrative of the irrelevance of race and of an inclusive American identity (Chapter  3). Yet, interestingly, we see that the master narrative of an inclusive American identity that he evokes in his stories of law and order are at odds with the master narrative of benevolence which he talks into being in the ‘fritter tree story’ (Chapter 8). Significantly, in the ‘fritter tree story’, Smith claims to have been raised by a white family and this might therefore explain his claim to being incumbent of an inclusive American identity. If this is so, we could speculate that this master narrative of American inclusion can be seen as emanating from the oeuvre civilisatrice master narrative in which Smith’s membership of an interracial ingroup of lawmen would then be framed as a result of his upbringing by whites. Further, as we noted in Chapter 3, within the stories of law and order there are traces of the white supremacy discourse; namely, Smith states that, even though he did not like the name, he was called the ‘Trigger Kid’ by the state. This act of naming in the storyworld is reminiscent of naming as a practice of ownership that was current in the days of slavery. Consequently, even within a story of inclusion, there are still traces of other master narratives that emerge on a turn by turn basis. A similar hint of a benevolent master narrative is also present when Smith claims that the United States takes care of him (Extract 3.8). Thus, a degree of instability and contradiction is seen both within, and between, stories told by the same narrator in the same interview. However, despite these inconsistencies, the master narrative of an inclusive American identity present in Smith’s law and order stories can be seen as indexical for the post-Civil Rights period in which it was possible to talk into being a world in which being American supersedes any racial identity, while still implicitly orienting to white supremacy master narratives. As this is the only interview from the 1970s in which there is an extensive discussion of these topics, these findings may be very idiosyncratic and so it is of course not possible to make any definitive claims regarding the emergence or prevalence of such a master narrative in this time period. But for our particular purposes, Smith’s ­stories were specifically useful from a comparative temporal perspective. Stories of religion Secondly, there is another master narrative that is not related to a specific antebellum or post-bellum period, namely that of the importance of religion. As religious songs were often topicalised in the interaction – and as the collection of these was often the reason for the interviews – it is not surprising that the topic of religion also comes up in quite a few interviews. Both in stories that are told, as well as in traces of untold stories, the interlocutors orient to Church membership and belief in God as important, regardless of the historical time, or place. However, given



Chapter 9.  Conclusions 

the interviewees’ diverse experience with religion in slavery times, this also results in quite different stories and this elicits an intricate web of positions vis-à-vis different versions of this master narrative. For example, in Harriet Smith’s interview, the selective sermons of white preachers in the antebellum period were criticized and this made relevant a dominant discourse of the importance of accessibility to a ‘true’ religion to all human beings. On the other hand, Laura Smalley’s story of the slaves’ prayers for the slave owner while being whipped by him, talks into being a master narrative of the power of religion and the importance of obedience to God. In spite of these differences, these two stories are also similar, as they both play these religious master narratives off against one or another version of a white supremacy master narrative, thus illustrating the fluidity and interrelatedness of master and counter-narratives, as we discuss in more detail below. So, as previously noted, the advantage of this monograph using a corpus of interviews that is spread out temporally (between 1930s and 1970s) and geographically, is that it allowed us to tease out in more detail which master narratives are mobilized according to the different time periods (1) that they refer to in the storyworld and (2) – though to a more limited extent – the different times of production. Our analyses clearly demonstrated that there is no one single master narrative that is relevant but a series of master narratives and counter-narratives that at times are intertwined, variable, volatile, existing on a turn by turn basis as the stories progress or as different stories are told in a series. We discuss these processes in more detail in the next section.

General observations about master narratives In this section, we bring together a number of general observations concerning the way in which master narratives are talked into being in narratives and how these function in relation to the interlocutors’ identity work.

Master narratives are neither monolithic nor fixed As we demonstrated extensively above concerning white supremacy master narratives, there is not one version of this master narrative. The white supremacy master narrative does not exist. Rather, it is a conglomerate of slightly different versions within a similar, abstract frame of understanding that may easily co-exist. These versions share a common ‘baseline’, one could say, namely, in this case, that not all races are equal. This baseline can be considered as a “pre-existent sociocultural form of interpretation” (Bamberg, 2005), but we demonstrated that the specific way in which this interpretation is talked into being may differ considerably as

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

people may do many different things with these master narratives. These differences not only occur when different people tell their stories, but there are also intrapersonal differences, which can even occur within the same interview. It all depends on what identity work the interlocutors are doing at a particular point, with whom, and how the ghostly audience is perceived and oriented to. This was also illustrated in Kiesling’s work on Discourses of masculinity, in which he demonstrates that there are “multiple competing hegemonic forms” of a hegemonic Discourse available to interlocutors “at any time”, who can selectively “draw on more than one of them, even if they are in conflict” (Kiesling, 2006, pp. 269–270). Furthermore, master narratives may change over time, but these processes are very diverse as well. While the master narrative of the slave as agentless property changed dramatically due to the alterations in the legal status of African Americans after the Civil War (cf. the ‘historical’ master narrative of the slave-as-cattle, see Chapter 4), other changes, for example to the most abstract ‘baseline’ white supremacy master narrative, seem to be lengthy and scattered, thus resulting in a chaotic myriad of orientations to different (versions of) master narratives by (different) members of society. This was for example shown by the diverse – and contradictory – orientations towards master narratives in the interview with Charlie Smith, whose tales are related to different periods of time (see Chapters  3 and 8). His ‘fritter tree story’ talked into being a Discourse of white benevolence and supremacy, whereas his ‘law and order stories’ talked into being a Discourse of an inclusive American national identity commensurate with that of the Civil Rights movement, yet even within his law and order stories there are traces of white supremacist ideologies. Finally, what is a master narrative and what is a counter-narrative may also evolve over time. This may typically occur when power relations are subverted, and the formerly oppressed obtain positions of power. But even without drastic societal changes or extreme reversals of power relations between oppressors and oppressed, ideologies evolve of course. In particular, we demonstrated this point with the Discourse of the inhumanity of slavery (see e.g. Chapter 7), which was a counter-narrative in the 1930s and 1940s that interviewers typically – consciously or unconsciously – stifled, but which became the dominant discourse regarding slavery in the 21st century, as contemporary cultural artefacts such as films, museums, docudramas and so on demonstrate (cf. Berlin, 2004, p. 1251 ff).

Orientations to master narratives are in situ accomplishments in the here and now of storytelling At first sight, and in line with the previous observation, we considered the prevalence of – different versions of – white supremacy master narratives to be quite



Chapter 9.  Conclusions 

surprising, especially as contemporary Discourses of slavery focus on the physical and psychological suffering of slaves and their refusal to be dehumanized by such oppressive treatment (Berlin, 2004, p. 1264). It is therefore, for a contemporary ear, a bit unexpected that these voices of former slaves overwhelmingly produce variations on these (almost) omni-present hegemonic master narratives of white supremacy. However, considering the local context of production this is not surprising at all, as we argued extensively in the course of this book. As master narratives are “materially mediated ideational phenomena” (De Fina, 2013, p. 43), it is clear that the researcher has to pay attention to the material, political and institutional environment in which they operate. Therefore, De Fina (2013) and others (e.g. Deppermann, 2013, 2015) call attention to the need for ethnographic work in order to understand this local context of the production of the stories. However, in some cases, such as ours, ethnographic work is not possible anymore, but working with such historical data as analytical material also has advantages. More specifically, as Whooley (2004, 2006) argues, since much research on narratives uses contemporary data, the socio-political circumstances of the collection of the data is often taken for granted and hence rendered invisible. Importantly, such a lack of analysis of the wider socio-political environment in which the stories are told is to the detriment of the analyses. When drawing on historical data, as we did here, it became almost immediately clear that more insight was needed into the wider social context of the storyworld, and the storytelling time. Considering the pivotal position of slavery in American history, and the wealth of research on slaves and slavery and more specifically the slave narratives, it was possible to establish a historical panorama that allowed us to situate the there-and-then of the storyworld and the here-and-now of the storytelling world of the interviews so that, on the one hand, we acquired analytical leverage into the identity work that the former slaves perform in stories. On the other hand, we also obtained an insight into the socio-political circumstances – the zeitgeist – of the production of the interviews which allowed us to gain both an understanding of how and why the stories were collected and a historical overview of the main themes that were addressed in the stories and of the lieu de mémoire in which they are now embedded. Such a historical panorama allowed us to consider how the master narratives of the storyworld change in relation to the time of storytelling in the interview world and reflexively how the master narratives shape the talk and how they are reflexively shaped by the talk. Thus by interweaving a discursive analysis of the narratives with a concern for the historical Discourses that were potentially available to the participants both in the there-and-then of the storyworld, and in the time of the interview world, we were able to obtain a fuller understanding of how these stories function as locally situated practices. Of course, in spite of a thorough scrutiny of the relevant literature from other scientific disciplines such

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

as history, sociology and anthropology, it remains important to keep looking for different (nuances of) master narratives other than those that are expected. This is because each interaction may entail the local emergence of yet another (version of a) master narrative.

Master narratives are collaboratively negotiated The production of master narratives is vividly interactionally negotiated by the participants in the interaction. First, we argue that an emic orientation to the identities of interviewer and interviewee sets up asymmetric category-bound constraints on allowable contributions. This places power in the hands of the interviewer who can effectively police the interview. Power, from this perspective, is defined as the way in which interviewees and interviewers design their talk so that discourse strategies of greater or lesser power are differentially available to each of them, thus implying that power can be viewed as an ‘emergent feature’ of the interaction (cf. Hutchby, 1996b, p. 482). Thus, for example, Chapter 7 illustrates how potential stories of mistreatment of the slaves are not developed. Consequently, rather than doing remembering, stories of mistreatment are ‘swept under the carpet’ and forgotten, which is quite convenient as it silences voices that could challenge master narratives of benevolence. Furthermore, we showed that it is also the former slaves themselves who tell stories that are acceptable to their interlocutors and the overhearing audience and that thus align with master narratives of the time. Thus, even without the interviewer’s policing of the interviewee’s contribution, the stories often develop in line with master narratives that were acceptable at the time of the telling and which conform to the normative gaze of the ghostly audience. This was the main theme that we developed in Chapter 3 by arguing that the interviews of Bob Ledbetter, Harriet Smith and Laura Smalley that were recorded in the 1940s all talk into being – in some way or another and to differing extents – a master narrative of white benevolence. It is only in the interview with Charlie Smith that, as we argue, the changing zeitgeist of the 1970s, which brought with it the post-Civil Rights era, opened up the possibility of new master narratives of an inclusive American identity in line with religious and political ideologies of equality between races that had come to the fore in the previous decade. Whilst, of course, on the ground America was not, and still is not, a raceless society, nevertheless the Civil Rights’ progressive narrative of inclusion had become an allowable contribution to talk by the mid-1970s. So, this clearly shows that orientations to master narratives are collaboratively achieved and negotiated amongst interlocutors on a turn by turn basis. Finally, whether the interviewer and the interviewee are members of an ingroup that is made relevant in the interview may also have implications for the



Chapter 9.  Conclusions 

way orientations to master narratives are talked into being and whether a Discourse is locally considered as dominant or as a counter of another dominant discourse. For example, when members of a societal outgroup interact with one another, as for instance in the interview with George Johnson in which the interviewer is also an African American, they may jointly orient to a non-hegemonic master narrative. In this case, such a joint orientation – in spite of the interviewer’s efforts – does not occur (see Chapter 5), but we can hypothesize that if such orientations to a non-hegemonic master narrative were to occur repetitively in a community, this may become the ‘locally dominant’ discourse of this outgroup. As such, master narratives’ ‘dominance’ depends on the interactional context in which what is dominant and what is not, is negotiated locally. This brings us seamlessly to our next point.

Master and counter-narratives interact with one another Master narratives are often intricately related to one another. While different versions of the white supremacy master narrative may highlight different aspects, they all, in essence, draw on a similar baseline, as we explained above. As Bamberg explains, “those smaller, everyday-employed master narratives are part of the fabric of such grand récits, and vice versa” (Bamberg, 2004, p. 361) which complicates matters further when trying to tease out which particular master narratives are oriented to in interaction. Furthermore, while these different versions of a master narrative may on the one hand feed off one another, they may on the other hand also be oriented to in different ways by the same interlocutor. This depends on which nuance is brought more to the fore in one version compared to another and how such nuances interact with the interlocutor’s own identity work and the identity implications that are as such projected upon the (ghostly) recipients. For example, Fountain Hughes’ dog comparisons discussed in C ­ hapter  4 denounces the treatment of slaves during the antebellum period and the situation of African Americans in the post-bellum era, but while he explicitly projects the identity of perpetrator on the slave owner, he refrains from projecting such an identity in the post-bellum story. As such, the post-bellum story is one of inhuman living conditions in general, while the antebellum story is one of mistreatment, and this slightly different plotline for the post-Civil War era protects the face of the white interviewer and the ghostly audience who could feel attacked by this denouncement. Furthermore, master narratives that are not intrinsically related, may be locally interwoven by interlocutors in order to enhance the acceptability of certain positions vis-à-vis particular master narratives. We particularly demonstrated this in Chapter 6, in which we analysed stories that challenged master narratives

 Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves

related to white supremacy by acquiescing to another master narrative, in this case relating to religion. As such, countering and acquiescing to master narratives can go hand in hand.

Contradicting positions to potentially contradicting master narratives may co-exist within and across time and space In our data, both Fountain Hughes and Charlie Smith are found to take up contradicting positions to different master narratives within the space of a single interview. Both interviewees at one point oriented to the master narrative of white supremacy and slavery as a benevolent system, but while Hughes challenged this master narrative again at other points in the interview, Smith orients to a contradictory racial equality master narrative through another story, in which there are, almost ironically, also traces of a white supremacy story. This is because, paradoxically, despite claiming to be a state man, he says that the state has given him a name that he did not like and so he positions the state as his new master thus evoking a Discourse of paternalistic white supremacy. This indicates that different positions and contradictory master narratives can exist side-by-side in the same interview, and even within the same story. This also demonstrates that master narratives, far from being fixed, are volatile and are dependent on turn by turn development of stories that are embedded within the speech event – in this case a research interview. Furthermore, it also underscores the importance of a discursive approach to identity as something that we do, rather than something we are or have (see discussion in Chapter 1). When rejecting this essentialist and psychological notion of the ‘true self ’ residing in an individual and containing fixed attitudes and beliefs, this entails that master narratives are extremely fluid and changeable as well, even to the extent that they can be contradictory within the same interview or story. Naturally, this also entails that people may take up different positions vis-àvis master narratives when they interact with different, more or less sympathetic audiences, in different times and spaces. Especially when telling stories about the past, narrators may hold a reflexive vantage point and this may allow for asynchronous countering of, or acquiescence to, certain master narratives. Hence, the positions they talk into being in the storyworld and the storytelling world may be incongruent. For example, when Harriet Smith relates how she and other slaves were kept in ignorance regarding the essence of religion in the antebellum period (see Chapter 6), she tells a story of how she, as a naive slave, acquiesced to master narratives of slavery and the African American as an inferior ‘Sambo’ in the storyworld. However, when looking back at this from the storytelling world, she constructs a more knowledgeable identity and challenges the morality of these



Chapter 9.  Conclusions 

practices, thus asynchronously countering these master narratives related to white supremacy. In sum, a narrator’s positions vis-à-vis master narratives may be contradictory in a synchronous as well as in an asynchronous way, demonstrating that, just as people do not have one fixed identity, they also do not have one fixed attitude or belief that indexes one particular master narrative. Rather, narrators may access different, yet contradictory master narratives according to the local interactional situation and the wider societal context, thus talking into being their own, locally emergent version of more abstract, socio-culturally shared ways of interpreting the world. In turn, once such ‘new’ locally emergent versions are adopted by various members of a community, they may start occurring so repeatedly that they gradually gain general acceptance and as such, they may become increasingly entrenched in the abstract Discourses of a community. This process may then eventually lead to changes in these dominant discourses, and, once people start interacting with one another again, these will then be submitted to locally emergent adaptation, and possibly, yet again, to this recursive process of change. Thus, whilst this book reveals a gradual paradigm shift from historical discourses of chattel slavery, through the white supremacist Discourses prevalent in both the  antebellum and post-bellum periods, to the Discourse of an inclusive ­American identity (partially) expressed in the 1970s, we can only hope that as the 21st century progresses, ­Discourses of inclusion that reap the legacy of the Civil Rights movement will increasingly become the master narratives of our time.

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Appendix Transcription symbols (.) micro-pause (0.2) timed silence in tenth of a second [ overlapping utterances = latching: when there is no interval between adjacent utterances - sudden cut off : extension of a sound ↓word spoken with falling intonation ↑word spoken with rising intonation Word spoken with stress WORD spoken more loudly than surrounding talk °word° spoken more softly than surrounding talk .hh aspiration spoken more slowly than surrounding talk >word< spoken more quickly than surrounding talk (  ) untranscribable word (word) unclear – transcriber’s best guess ((action)) comments on the scene → indicating focus of analysis £word£ spoken with a smile voice

Index

A accountability  4, 39, 43, 51, 77, 82, 97, 177 acculturation of African Americans  64 adjacency pair  153 affective stance  155 affiliation with  155, 166, 170, 172, 201 agency  12, 71, 82, 87, 89–90, 199 agency avoidance  81–82 agency continuum  75 agency dilemma  71–72 alignment  155, 201 allowability  41 allowable contribution  132, 153, 189, 206 American Memory project  26, 34 apologists  17 Christian apologists  16 assessment  109–110, 157–158 audience ghostly audience  39–40, 42–43 imagined audience  39, 66, 177 authenticity (construction of)  168, 184 B backchannels  188 Baptist church  130 Botkin  20 brush arbours  116, 133 C canonical scripts  147, 174, 189 categories category entitlement  179–180 category predicates  180 Membership Categorization Analysis  4

self-categorization  40 Christianity  113–116 Christian egalitarianism  147 chronicles  6 Civil Rights movement  18, 29, 56–57, 65–66, 116–117 conditional relevance  157 constructed sequentiality  126 contextualization cues  135 counter-narrative  119, 131–132, 201–208 credibility  180, 184 criminality  45 Crow, Jim  17–18, 66 D Darwinism  45–46 decontextualization  188 deixis  5 dichotomy active/passive dichotomy  75 education dichotomy  198 good/bad dichotomy  77 racialised dichotomy  40, 59–60 rich/poor dichotomy  54 discourses little d and big D  2 distancing  139, 183 dominant discourse  2, 11, 71 Douglass, Frederick  18 E emic/etic  114, 119 entextualisation  12, 32 epistemic authority  5, 180 epistemic downgrade  51 epistemic status of eye witness  174, 184 ethnomusicology  29 eugenics  56 evidential anecdote  97–98 evolution theory  45–46

exculpation  76–77 extreme case formulation  47, 87 F facework  65, 112 falsehood  175–178 Federal Writers Project  12, 19, 23, 33 fiction  31, 33 folktale  175–178 footing  84, 135 G Garner, Sarah  161–164 generic ‘you’  60, 84–85, 157, 182 gullibility  200 H hegemonic master narratives  205 history of slavery  15–18 Hughes, Fountain  73–79, 84–88, 121–128 I identity  3–5, 197–201 bystander identity  82, 127 collective identity  182 diachronic identity navigation  140–145 discourse identity  179, 181, 188 essentialist views on identity  177, 208 hero/villain identity  40 inclusive American identity  56–63, 65–67, 191–192, 201–202 navigation: agency  71–72 navigation: sameness/ difference  95 ‘Negro as beast’-identity  200 perpetrator identity  51–60, 156–171, 185–190

 Master Narratives, Identities, and the Stories of Former Slaves racialised identity  192 Sambo identity  143–145, 191, 200 situated identity  179–181 slave-as-cattle identity  73–83 slave-as-dog identity  84–88 transportable identity  179, 188, 196 undergoer identity  71, 79 victim identity  89 ideology  11, 96 imagined community  35–36, 60 implicature  121 indexicality  4–5 intergroup comparision  95 interview asymmetric discursive rights  150, 198, 206 interviewer role  153–155 iterative patterns  10–11, 198 J Johnson, Charles  19, 29 Johnson, George  104–111, 129–131 K King, Martin Luther King Jr.  56, 65, 117, 147 Ku Klux Klan  17, 21 L Lamarckianism  93–94 Ledbetter, Bob  46–48 legends  188 legislation Federal Civil Rights legislation  57, 65–66 legitimization of violence  49, 151 Library of Congress  25–29 lieux de mémoire  35, 151 Lomax, John A.  29, 118 M master narrative  2, 10–11, 71 master narrative of American inclusion  57, 65, 202 master narrative of chattel slavery  139 master narrative of obedience  113–116, 125–128, 146–148

master narrative of the oeuvre civilisatrice  94–96, 199–200 master narrative of white benevolence  172, 190, 206 master narrative of white supremacy  196–200 McCrea, Billy  158–161 McDonald, Joe  99–101 memory collective memory  35–38 fallibility of memory  152 historical amnesia  151, 158 remembering  149–150 missionaries  115 Mississippi Delta Project  106 monogenism  45–46 moral identity work  40 Moseley, Isom  96–98 music American Civil War-songs  118 analogy between religious songs and the slaves’ situation  118, 132 brass band music  106–111 jazz  107–111 quickmarch  108–109 ring shout  129–131 spirituals  117–118 the blues  106–111 myth  32 N narrative  5–7 as historical artefact  191 as interactional accomplishment  173 as performance  181, 189 genres  6 generic narrative  6, 84–85 habitual narrative  6, 124 normative aspects of narrative  43 permissible narratives  153, 155 prototypical narrative  5–6 retrospective construction of narrative  42–43 narratives of trauma  154 narratives of trickery  178, 191 nature/nurture  100–111 newsworthiness of stories  174

Northup, Solomon  18 O oral history  37, 39, 175 P polygenism  45–46 positioning analysis  8–10, power  138–147, 204 prayer  116–117, 126–127, 136–139 preachers  116–117 preference structure  126, 162 pronominal usage  5 proximity  52 Q Quarterman, Wallace  101–103 question and answer sequences  165 question design  188 R race  196–197 taxonomies  46 racialization of slavery  17 recipient design  177 re-contextualization  34 recordings  25–28, 31–32 recursive patterns  11 reflexivity  37–38, 177 religion  114–118 Christianization of slaves  115–116 rebellion through religion  114, 116, 132 revivalism  115 trance  130, 138, 139 religious proslavery propaganda  140 repetition  110, 189 reportability  6, 174 reported speech  168, 184, 189 rhetorical design  168, 172 S segregation  17–18, 56–57 semi-civilization  94 silence  122 silencing  146, 166 slave auction  74–75, 186 slave autobiographies  18–19 slave conversion  114–115 slave docility  116

slave education  96–104 slave ignorance  144–145, 200 slave illiteracy  117 slave naming  58, 187, 202 slave narratives in the antebellum period  18–19 slave narratives: scepticism vis-à-vis slave narratives  20–22, 173 slave owners as benefactors  78, 199 slave punishment  151 slave trade  30, 76–77, 178, 183–186 slavery Aristotelian view of slavery  16, 89, 199 chattel slavery  15–16, 70, 139 references to slavery in the Bible  16, 131, 145 Smalley, Laura  49–53, 73–82, 132–137, 167–171

Index  smile voice  110 Smith, Charlie  27–31, 42, 56–63, 65–67, 173–193 Smith, Harriet  53–56, 140–146 social constructionism  3 social group hierarchy  12, 66, 101–106, 197 Social Identity Theory  95 standardised relational pair  4 story big story / small story  6–7, 177 collective story  83, 176,181 hearsay stories  73, 164 untold stories  120–131 story ownership  174 storyability  179 Stowe, Harriet Beecher  115–116, 151 T tellability  6, 41–42, 155, 174

boundaries  6 temporal indexicality  199 topic stepwise topic transition  61, 160 topicalisation  165–166 transcription  33–34 transpersonalisation  55, 62–63 trauma  151, 164, 172 truth  41–44 symbolic truth  192–193 truthfulness  24–25, 175, 192–193 V veracity  159–161 Voices from the days of slavery  25–32 W Williams, Jessie and Annie  164–166

This book is intended for researchers in the ield of narrative from postgraduate level onwards. It analyzes the audio-recordings of the narratives of former slaves from the American South which are now publically available on the Library of Congress website: Voices from the days of slavery. More speciically, this book analyses the identity work of these former slaves and considers how these identities are related to master narratives. The novelty of this book is that through using such a temporally diverse and relatively large corpus, we show how master narratives change according to both the zeitgeist of the here-and-now of the interview world and the historical period that is related in the there-and-then of the story world. Moreover, focusing on the active achievement of master narratives as socially-situated co-constructed discursive accomplishments we analyze how diferent, inherently unstable and even contradictory versions of master narratives are enacted.

isbn 978 90 272 4935 7

John Benjamins Publishing Company