Bearing Witness: Memories of Arkansas Slavery: Narratives from the 1930s WPA Collections.

Bearing Witness: Memories of Arkansas Slavery: Narratives from the 1930s WPA Collections. Edited by George E. Lankford. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Pp. xxvii, 428. $34.95, ISBN 1-55728-747-3.) A curious distinction of George P. Rawick's monumental collection of WPA slave narratives, The American Slave, is the disproportionate appearance of testimony from Arkansas, an antebellum state with a relatively low slave population. For Bearing Witness, George E. Lankford has done the hard work of sifting through the narratives to find testimony of those who were actually slaves in Arkansas, rather than former southern slaves living in Arkansas in the 1930s. In addition to publishing 175 recollections of slavery in Arkansas, Lankford has written an introduction with a helpful analysis of the delights and dangers of reading WPA narratives. He notes the problems of transcription, editorial process, interview technique, and rendering of dialect, as well as the conflict inherent in white WPA workers interviewing African Americans in the Jim Crow era, but he urges readers to make their own judgments about the validity and usefulness of these rich testimonies. He identifies the race of the interviewers where possible and includes an appendix in which the interviewers and their informants are listed. Interestingly, the primary African American interviewer in Arkansas, Samuel S. Taylor, rendered all of his transcriptions in standard English, whereas white interviewers' accounts are generally written in black dialect. The book is filled with vivid descriptions of antebellum slavery, Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, and cotton fanning, as well as colorful stories and chilling details about life as an African American in Arkansas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bearing Witness provides scholars and general readers with a concise, one-volume entry into these fascinating and complex documents and will be a useful tool for further studies of slavery, memory, folklore, and oral history. [BENJAMIN E. WISE, Rice University]