Web Site Features Slave Stories

As editor of the first completed online collection of slave narratives recently finished by UNC staff members, Andrews said it's hard to hear the direct voices of people who endured such human cruelty.

He hears the voice of Leonard Black, who tells of forgiving the master who denied him clothing and who branded him with tongs when he desperately sought warmth in the master's house.

He hears the voice of William Henry Singleton, who was snatched away from his enslaved family in New Bern at the age of 4 and ran away from an Atlanta plantation, making his way back to New Bern alone when he was just 8 years old.

And he hears the voice of Henry Bibb, who could not protect his slave wife's back from the cruel lashes of a master's whip or protect his sweet toddler's face from the backhand of a heartless mistress.

"You can't read but so much because the stories are often so tragic," Andrews said. "You're reminded of what people will and won't endure in order to protect themselves and their families."

The project, "North American Slave Narratives," aims to document the tragedies of and triumphs over slavery from the often-unheard perspective of the enslaved. The process of digitalizing 230 slave narratives to protect these sensitive materials began at UNC in 1993.

"As a bibliographer, I see what is circulated a lot and what needs to be replaced," said Pat Dominguez, project director and principal investigator. "I was amazed at the circulation of slave narratives."

"They're fragile books with a lot of them being 150 years old -- they were just getting read to death."

By 1996, Dominguez and other library staff members had scanned, digitalized and encoded half a dozen narratives and posted them on the Web site found at http://docsouth.unc.edu.

That same year, the Department of English hired Andrews, who then volunteered to serve as series editor for the project. "I was always interested in African-American literature and the origins of it," Andrews said. "When I started working on it 20 or 21 years ago, most people were interested in contemporary literature, but I wanted to know the origins of it."

Andrews dove into the project headfirst by applying for and receiving a $110,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant paid for staff and the cost of collecting the narratives from libraries and repositories around the nation.

Dominguez said these slave narratives, with about 180 of them autobiographical, constitute a national treasure.

"Slave narratives are the only way we know about slavery from the perspective of the slave," she said. "We really hoped the narratives would be available free to the entire world, not just to rich institutions who have the availability to buy them."

And the project coordinators hope that availability extends to all levels of academia, from the Chapel Hill sixth-grader doing a book report to the University of Michigan student working on his doctorate to the average reader with an interest in American history.

Dominguez said, "It's hard to read a slave narrative and not look at the world a different way."

The University Editor can be reached at udesk@unc.edu.