"One day, I went to the slave market and watched em barter off po'
niggers lak tey was hogs," said George Lycurgas, as recalled by his son,
Edward. "Whole families sold together, and some was split--mother gone
to one marster and father and children gone to others. They'd bring a
slave out on the platform and open his mouth, pound his chest, make him
harden his muscles so the buyer could see what he was gittin'." The
ex-slaves in No Man's Yoke on My Shoulders speak of a Florida that no
longer exists and can barely be imagined today. Now the fourth most
populous state in the country, Florida has more than 100 times the
people it did in 1860, just before the Civil War. And it was only 40
years removed from Spanish rule. In the 1930s, the Federal Writers'
Project dispatched interviewers to record the recollections of former
slaves, many in their 80s or 90s. Only one percent of the 2,000-plus
transcripts collected in the Library of Congress told the stories of
people who had experienced bondage in Florida. That makes the narratives
of former Florida slaves in this volume doubly precious. Readers will
get a glimpse into the lives of these rare survivors as they told their
stories at the height of the Great Depression, a time many found little
better than the slave days.
Horace Randall Williams describes himself as "among the last of
Alabamians--black or white--who have memories of picking cotton by hand
not for a few minutes to see how it felt but because I needed the few
dollars I would get for a day's hard labor under a hot sun." He was the
founder and for many years the director of the Southern Poverty Law
Center's Klanwatch Project. He also edited
Weren't No Good Times: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Alabama
.
