When
These Are Our Lives was first published by The
University of North Carolina Press in 1939, the late Charles A.
Beard hailed it as "literature more powerful than anything I have
read in fiction, not excluding Zola's most vehement passages." A
very early experiment in the publication of oral history, it
consisted of thirty-five life histories of sharecroppers, farmers,
mill workers, townspeople, and the unemployed of the Southeast,
selected from over a thousand such histories collected by the
Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. It was the Press' intention
to publish several more volumes from the material that had been
amassed, but World War II forced the cancellation of those
plans.
The editors of
Such As Us have taken up the abandoned task
and have produced a volume every bit as rich as its predecessor.
From the perspective of forty years we can now read these stories
as vivid chapters in the social history of the South, reaching as
far back as slavery times and as far forward as the eve of World
War II.
To the modern reader the people speaking in this book may at first
seem quaint, like curious from a past time and a different world.
They worked on farms, in mills, oil fields, coal mines, and other
people's homes. Their life histories provide a view of the world
they saw, experienced, and helped to create. They tell about family
life, religion, sex roles, being poor, and getting old, and they
describe how major events -- the Civil War, Emancipation, World War
I, the Great Depression, and the New Deal -- affected them. These
accounts offer the reader the chance to experience vicariously the
world these people lived in -- to know, for example, the wife of
the tenant farmer who commented, "We seem to move around in circles
like the mule that pulls the syrup mill. We are never still, but we
never get anywhere."
Such as Us is a contribution to the history of anonymous
Americans. Like the former-slave narratives, which have become an
important primary source for the historian, these life histories
will enable the reader to reexamine traditional views and address
new questions about the South. By providing an introduction and
historical interchapters that place the histories in perspective,
the editors set these histories within the cultural context of the
1930s and illustrate the relationship between private lives and
public events. These life histories allow individuals to reach
across time and share their lives with us. Although the people who
speak in
Such As Us are representatives of social types and
classes, they are also unique individuals -- a paradoxical truth
their life histories affirm.