In his introduction to Prayin' to Be Set Free, Andrew Waters likens
the personal accounts of former Mississippi slaves to the music of that
state's legendary blues artists. The pain, the modest eloquence, and
even the underlying vitality are much the same. What is now Mississippi
wasn't acquired by the United States until 1798, at which time it had
fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, excluding Native Americans. By the Civil
War, it had over 430,000 slaves and 350,000 whites. More than half the
whites were members of slave-owning families. The majority of slaves
worked in the cotton fields. Mississippi was known as a slave-buying
frontier state, in contrast to the eastern states, which sold slaves
westward. Indeed, many of the former slaves in this book speak of coming
to Mississippi as children. At the height of the Depression, the
out-of-work wordsmiths who comprised the Federal Writers' Project began
interviewing elderly African-Americans about their experiences under
slavery. The former slaves were more than 70 years removed from bondage,
but the memories of many of them were strikingly clear. The accounts
from former Mississippi slaves are considered among the strongest in the
entire collection. The 28 narratives presented here are the best of
those.
Andrew Waters is a writer and former editor. A native North Carolinian,
he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with
Honors in Creative Writing and received a graduate degree from the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the executive director
of the Spartanburg Area Conservancy in Spartanburg, SC.
