Slave Interviews

It is really difficult for people in these days to know the truth about the conditions and circumstances in which the slaves lived in. Even though there are many interviews that have been made to try and find out more about what it was like being a slave in those days, it is hard to know wither the person is telling the truth or not. When most of the interviews were being made, there were still lots of racial feelings towards the African Americans. When an African American was being interviewed by a white person they sometimes would feel intimidated and nervous so most of the time they were extremely careful about what they said and how they portrayed their slave owner. One can see the difference if they read an interview from a black person to black person or a white person to a black person.
In the three interviews that I read, two of them were written by white people and one of them by a black person. As I read, I could tell that in the one where the black person was asking the other black person questions the former slave was calmer and they gave more of the truth it seemed like. In the ones where a white person was asking, you could see racial discrimination still because of the way the interviewer would call the former slave woman, “Auntie”.
In the first interview, a white woman named Maude Barragan, interviewed a former slave named, Carrie Nancy Fryer. In this interview Nancy says that she is now about 72 years of age. If we do the math we can see that if she is 72 now, this means that she was only about one or two years old when she was a slave. Most likely the things that Nancy says in the interview are either things she made up, or things her parents or sister told her when she got older. It is easy to see that she was nervous during the interview because the interviewer notes that her hands were moving nervously in her skirts. She talks about remembering Miss Douschka Pickens and she says she remembers when they lined up all the slaves when