Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember: Twenty-Seven Oral Histories of Former South Carolina Slaves

Rating:
Summary: Want to know what slavery was like? Ask a former slave.
Review: A fantastic book that reveals the details of slave life through personal interviews of former slaves. Throw away the history books, forget what you learned in social studies, this is real. The book is printed using the dialects of the interviewees, so you almost feel as if you can hear the person speaking. A great read. Difficult to put it down once you pick it up.

Rating:
Summary: Could have been better
Review: I've read the original South Carolina Volumes of the WPA Slave Narratives that this book was edited from. This book could have been a whole lot better. While the current editor did a good job of making the SC African-American dialect more accessible to lay readers (even she admits to having trouble with printed versions of this dialect), many of the better stories were either highly edited or left out, such as Elijah Green's Reconstruction Narrative that was heavily edited and Isreal Nesbitt's recollections of the Vesey Rebellion, which aren't included.

However, to the layman and non-historian, this is a good start in understanding slavery from the sources. Some interesting stories do remain, such as the Union County narrative about the Ku Klux Klan. So it's good for starters. The Tennessee and Georgia anthologies in this series are better, though.

Rating:
Summary: Before Freedom by Belinda Hurmence
Review: This book was given to me by my social studies teacher as an extra credit reading assignment, so I read it just for the credit thinking that I would hate it. Little did I know how many metaphors and parallels to my life I would find. When I finished the book, I could not believe what some slaves had gone through. There were many theories that came out of this book, including that for many slaves, freedom was a two-edged sword. Yet to figure out what I mean by that, you will have to read the book yourself! I would strongly recommend this book to any 8th grade social studies teachers teaching the Civil War who want to make an impact on their students and wake them up to realize that history repeats itself and that the "killing of an old person is like the burning of a book in a library" - Mrs. Mahoney (my awesome 8th grade social studies teacher)!