ix
way. In spite of obvious 1irnitations-~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, rriistresses, and overseers, toward poor whites, North and South, the Civil V~ar, i~~iancipation, Reconstruction, religion, education, and virtually every phase of Negro life in the South.

	The narratives belong to fok history—-history recovered from the r~e~iories and lips of participants or eye—witnesses, who r‘iingle group with individual experience and both with observation, hearsa:T, and tradition. ~Ihether th~ narrators relate what they actually saw and thou~ht and felt, what they ima~,ine, or what they have thought and felt about slavery since, now we ~mow why the7 thought and felt as they did. To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves‘ own folklore and folk-say of slavery. The patterns they reveal are folk and re~ional patterns—-the pat— t3rns of field hand, house and body servant, and artisan; the patterns of kind and cruel master or mistress; the patterns of Southeast and Southwest, lowl~3.nd ~nd upland, tidewater and inland, s~~aller ~nd l~r~er )iant~tions, and racial ~ixture (including Gre— oie ~nd Indian).

	The narratives belong also to folk literature. 2ieh riot only in folk songs, folk tales, arid folk speech but also in folk hu— rior ~)nd poetry, crude or skilful in diulect, uneven in tone and