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Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers' Project interviewed more than 2,300 formerly enslaved people across the South. Most had been children when freedom came. Their words were typed by white interviewers in the Jim Crow South, bound into seventeen volumes, and placed in the Library of Congress. Then they sat largely unread for decades.

In this episode, Jeliba and Nia open those volumes and ask how to read them honestly. What was said? What was shaped by the man holding the pencil? And what did the elders keep for themselves?

They listen to three voices from Newberry County, all recorded in 1937 by the same interviewer:

• C.B. Burton, born on the Henry Burton place, who remembered fiddles, cane whistles, and the first churches built of brush after freedom.
• Morgan Scurry, who remembered a wedding in a grove attended by more than two hundred people, and who said plainly, "I think slavery was bad."
• Emoline Wilson, who gave two interviews three months apart and told the story differently the second time.

Each carries a surname from the keeper's maternal family: Burton, Scurry, and Boozer. None is proven kin. Kevin Bearden explains what that means, and the one record that could change it.

Chapters 0:00 Cold open: Newberry, May 1937 1:32 Intro 2:07 What the Federal Writers' Project was 4:03 How to read them: the three baskets 5:51 Three voices from Newberry County 10:14 The keeper's segment 11:41 Closing: the names

Sources and further reading

• Library of Congress, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936–1938: loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938
• Narratives of Morgan Scurry (May 19, 1937), Emoline Wilson (May 21 and Aug. 10, 1937), and C.B. Burton (Sept. 10, 1937), interviewed by G. Leland Summer, Newberry, South Carolina
• The Bearden Family (Rose Creek Press), Part II, for the maternal-line research behind this episode