# CHAPTER 9  
## TESTIMONIES OF SLAVERY \& FREEDOM  
The North American Slave Narratives<br>Mary Niall Mitchell  
'Marse Bill wus mi'ty tough on his slaves. I wus jes' a boy, but I will niver fergit how he whup'ed his slaves.' So reads the transcribed testimony of Ebenezer Brown, a formerly enslaved person, given in Amite County, Mississippi, United States of America, in the late 1930s (Rawick, 1972, pp. 239-254; Berlin et al., 1998, p. 92). Brown was speaking to an interviewer from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Writers' Project (FWP), a group charged in the New Deal era with gathering the narratives of the last remaining survivors of chattel slavery in the antebellum South (Rawick, 1972, pp. 239-254; Berlin et al., 1998, p. 92). The thousands of interviews conducted by the FWP, in common with the rest of the canon of North American 'slave narratives', the first-hand accounts of the formerly enslaved, are simultaneously a collective indictment of American racial slavery and a testament to the tenacity of the enslaved. By their specificity, and with collective wisdom, they refute the myth of the benevolent slaveholder and, at the same time, give a voice, a name, a personal history and sometimes even a photographed face to the individuals that survived.  
While the slave societies of the Caribbean and Brazil might have held the majority of the enslaved the previous century, the best known published narratives come from the American South and relate the stories of those who escaped slavery before the Civil War; and while there were some 4 million people enslaved in the southern states at the start of the war, the number of book-