User:Cjr100B/Mandy Long Roberson

Mandy Long Roberson, a former slave, was born in Yadkin County, North Carolina several years before the Civil War. She lived life as a slave, a cook, a property owner, and a resident in a county home. When she was about eighty and living in the county home, she was interviewed by Clalee Dunnagan as a part of the Federal Writers' Project. The Federal Writers' Project was an initiative put forward by Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to give struggling writers work during the Great Depression.

Biography
As a child, Roberson was a slave on a North Carolina plantation. When she was very young, Roberson and her remaining family were freed and began to look for work as a cook or housekeeper. After an unsuccessful marriage to Joe Goodman, a worker in a cotton warehouse, she moved to Atlanta, Georgia to cook for her uncle and his family. About four years later, she married Sam Morrison, a mineworker, and the two moved out of Atlanta so they could have their own house. Nearly fifteen years later, Roberson divorced Sam and moved back to Atlanta. Her uncle had died and left her his property – five lots and a farm. After a final and unsuccessful marriage, she moved to Arkansas for almost five years, moving back when she had spent most of her money she made from renting out the lots.

When she returned to North Carolina, she discovered that her son, Willie, had died, leaving his wife and daughter. She began to write her will, but instead of her property being given to her daughter-in-law after she passed, Roberson found that everything she owned had been passed to them immediately, leaving her completely penniless. She then decided to move to the county home, where she spent the remainder of her days. It was in this county home that Clalee Dunnagan gave her the interview that would become a part of the massive compilation of personal narratives that made up the Federal Writers Project.

Marriage after the Civil War
Before slavery was abolished, marriages between slaves had no legal standing. Slaves were prohibited from taking legal action to initiate, maintain, or terminate a marriage between each other. However, after the war, marriages between slaves were made legitimate in the eyes of the law. Roberson, a freed slave, was married a total of three times. Jane Daily, the author of “Jumpin’ Jim Crow,” speculates that marriage between freed slaves was made legal by authorities in the legal system so that African Americans would be compelled to take care of family, as opposed to working to extend their rights. Instead, some African Americans turned legal marriage to their advantage as a way to claim civil and political rights.

For many of the freed slaves, the right to be married meant being accepted into civil society (citation needed). However, a sizeable amount of marriages between lower-income African Americans weren’t legitimate; the freed people had more concern for their traditional customs of marriage than for the processes now required to give them any legal power. In her interview, Roberson gives mention to divorcing one of her husbands, but it is unclear if any action was taken in the court system or not.

African American land ownership in the South
A unique aspect of Roberson’s life is that she was the owner of a property in Georgia at one point in her life. After the Civil War, landownership was highly sought out by freed slaves. A South Carolinian observer at the time noted, “The freedmen have a passion for land”. For a former slave, land symbolized freedom, security, and having the power to live at his own will.

Directly after the end of the Civil War, certain communities tried to prevent that kind of freedom. White communities would sign agreements saying that they would not hire former slaves so that the freed people would be forced to work and live on their former master’s land, similar to serfdom. However, in some regions in the South, certain factors, such as less white opposition, demand for unskilled workers, and less white opposition, made land ownership easier for African Americans. For example, in Georgia, he number of African American landowners jumped from 286 to 17,739 from 1860 to 1870.

The land Roberson came to inherit was extremely beneficial to her, at least for a while. She was able to live a relatively comfortable life on her own in Arkansas before her funds began to run low.

Federal Writers' Project
During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the President of the United States, instituted the Federal Writers’ Project, an initiative aimed to give work to writers. Out of work writers were paid around twenty dollars a week to conduct interviews, compose state history guides, and other similar tasks. Between the years of 1936 and 1938, nearly two thousand ex-slaves were interviewed. Roberson was interviewed just a year later in 1939 by Clalee Dunnagan.

Throughout the interview, Dunnagan intentionally misspells countless words so that the dialect of Roberson can be understood: "Lawsy, chile, you don’t know nothin’ ‘bout misery lak in dem days when we ‘uz slaves. I was little den, but I recollects how de traders useter come an’ buy our folks an’ take ‘em away an’ leave us chilluns a-cryin’ an’ a-weepin’…"

This was common in many of the narratives of ex-slaves in the South. In an in-depth assessment of the narratives, Lynda Hill states that the writers of the narratives were “drawing upon conventions of popular, sentimental fiction to create what they considered interesting narratives”. Henry Alsberg, a director of the project, gave instructions to the writers that their primary concern when writing the narratives was to be truthful to the idiom, and the exact pronunciation was of secondary importance. However, when some of the transcripts were inspected, it is clear that Alsberg’s instuctions were sometimes ignored. Some of the writers, in order to make the transcript more interesting, “summarized the answer or entire interview in a more entertaining style than the question-and-answer format allows”.

The use of sentimental dialect and more stylized recording or interviews has raised the question of whether or not the Federal Writers’ Project transcripts are as accurate as they appear to be. Like Hill, some people are inclined to believe that there can be doubt in the accuracy of the papers, and others believe that the transcripts are an irreplaceable record of life after the Civil War. As Soapes claims, “What is important is that…the interviews allow the ex-slaves themselves, most of whom could not have left written accounts, to speak and present another viewpoint for historians to consider."