Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives
by Cynthia Goodman and Spencer Crew

An adaptation of the HBO documentary of the same name, Unchained Memories is a compilation of more than forty narratives and photographs drawn from interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930s by the government’s Works Progress Administration. From slave auctions to emancipation, the narratives trace the extraordinary experiences of life in perhaps the darkest period of our nation’s history. Readers will shudder at the at the vivid accounts - told in the dialect of the former slaves - of the painstaking labor and abuse to which the slaves were subjected, and they will be moved by the recollections of family life, slave weddings, and other special occasions.