Booknotes: Voices of the Formerly Enslaved in Louisiana

New Arrival:

• Voices of the Formerly Enslaved in Louisiana: The WPA Narratives edited, with an introduction, by Andrea Livesey (LSU Press, 2025).

The Depression-era's coordinated recovery of slave memory in the words of those who experienced it left an important documentary legacy, but Louisiana somehow got left out of the dissemination part of it. From the description: "In the 1930s, thousands of formerly enslaved Americans were interviewed across the United States as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project. While most of those interviews were subsequently published, Louisiana’s were not." Collected in Voices of the Formerly Enslaved in Louisiana: The WPA Narratives "for the first time in complete and contextualized form are the full interviews with the formerly enslaved in Louisiana, the transcripts of which had been separated, fragmented, and distributed throughout archives in the state."

More from the description: "Reassembled and analyzed by historian Andrea Livesey, the interviews are critical for understanding how Black Louisianans experienced enslavement but also resisted and built distinctive cultures, communities, and families in spite of it. Equally important is the testimony of how they negotiated emancipation and built relationships after freedom."

Undoubtedly, there are many commonalities with other southern states, however numerous other aspects emerge that were distinctive to the Louisiana experience. More: Livesey's work "discusses the impact of Lyle Saxon, a well-known writer who headed the Louisiana branch of the Writers’ Project, and Louisiana poet Marcus B. Christian, who led the segregated Black unit. Other unique aspects of the collection are interviews in Kouri Vini and Louisiana French and descriptions of Voodoo, Marie Laveau, and medicine practiced in Black communities of the era."

Of course, users of the WPA narratives have long been cautioned to approach the interview material with due care, and Livesey duly "invites readers to pay critical attention to how the interviewers may have influenced the narrative preserved in the archive through interpersonal dynamics or editing as they transcribed the interview. Alongside the extended introduction to the volume, this analysis sheds light on the administrative structures and racialized dynamics that initially shaped the interviews."

There is a lot of content in the volume, well over 500 pages. The book is organized into sections by interviewer. Some personal background information for each interviewer is provided along with brief additional notes on the interviewer's style, focus, and "positionality" factors involved. There are also a number of unattributed interviews included, with additional fragmentary interviews gathered in an appendix.