rned chiefly with folklore; a few negligible
fragments and unidentified manuscripts; a group of Tennessee interviews
showing evidence of plagiarism; and the supplementary material gathered
in connection with the narratives. In the course of the preparation of
these volumes, the Writers' Unit compiled data for an essay on the
narratives and partially completed an index and a glossary. Enough
additional material is being received from the state Writers' Projects,
as part of their surplus, to make a supplement, which, it is hoped, will
contain several states not here represented, such as Louisiana.

All editing had previously been done in the states or the Washington
office. Some of the pencilled comments have been identified as those of
John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, who also read the manuscripts. In a few
cases, two drafts or versions of the same interview have been included
for comparison of interesting variations or alterations.

II

Set beside the work of formal historians, social scientists, and
novelists, slave autobiographies, and contemporary records of
abolitionists and planters, these life histories, taken down as far as
possible in the narrators' words, constitute an invaluable body of
unconscious evidence or indirect source material, which scholars and
writers dealing with the South, especially social psychologists and
cultural anthropologists, cannot afford to reckon without. For the first
and the last time, a large number of surviving slaves (many of whom have
since died) have been permitted to tell their own story, in their own
way. In spite of obvious limitations--bias and fallibility of both
informants and interviewers, the use of leading questions, unskilled
techniques, and insufficient controls and checks--this saga must remain
the most authentic and colorful source of our knowledge of the lives and
thoughts of thousands of slaves, of their attitudes toward one another,
toward their masters, mistresses, and overseers, toward poor whites,
North and South, the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, religion,
education, and virtually every phase of Negro life in the South.

The narratives belong to folk history--history recovered from the
memories and lips of participants or eye-witnesses, who mingle group
with individual experience and both with observation, hearsay, and
tradition. Whether the narrators relate what they actually saw and
thought and felt, what they imagine, or what they have thought