The value of the narratives as the testimony of those that had endured slavery, however, is undeniable. James Cape of Texas, for instance, who was over 100 years old at the time of his interview, attested to being the son of Africans, which makes his testimony, gathered from a person so close to African culture, invaluable to historians studying the development of African American cultural and linguistic forms. Although the FWP interviews, unlike the nineteenthcentury narratives, relied on the memories of elderly people, learning about the abuses generated by the system of chattel slavery directly from the mouths of the survivors enables us to connect with that not-so-distant past, the power of which can be felt in the testimony of Mingo White, a formerly enslaved person born in South Carolina, who recalled the day that he had been sold to a trader heading for Alabama: 'I was jes' a li'l thang; tooked away from my mammy an' pappy, jes' needed "em mos" (Rawick, 1972, pp. 413-22; Berlin et al., 1998, p. 161). While some interviews served to preserve folk tales and descriptions of secret parties held by enslaved people in the woods, others recalled the violence visited upon family members, the violation of enslaved women and the indignity of having too little clothing and too little food. The combined memories of formerly enslaved persons recorded by the FWP, which have now been digitized and made available online by the Library of Congress, are arguably the closest link that we have to the experiences of those that endured the slavery and survived to tell their stories (Library of Congress, 1941, vol. 16, p. 193). ${ }^{4}$