During the 1930s while Americans experienced the turmoil of the Great Depression, men and women throughout the South took part in documenting the most important and controversial chapter in United States history. Franklin D. Roosevelt, through his numerous programs included in the New Deal, created jobs for those men and women left unemployed and in need of financial assistance. The Works Projects Administration, one of the New Deal programs, encompassed multiple public works jobs, but also included one project in particular known as the Slave Narratives. Men and women of all social backgrounds participated in traveling to various places in the South, interviewing former slaves and re-telling their story of slave life. Many of the interviewers formed a connection to each interviewee, socially or economically, in light of the race relations present at that time. The importance of each Slave Narrative moves beyond the re-telling of slave life, and lies in the connections and friendships made between each person.
Mrs. Sarah Howell Hall was one of the women who participated in the WPA’s Slave Narratives. Born December 19, 1888 in White Plains, Georgia, Sarah led an accomplished life for a woman of that era and of her social status. Her parents, Albert S. Howell and Cora Moore Howell, were farmers in the small town of White Plains. It appears that Sarah spent most of her childhood and adolescence in her home town until her marriage to Fred Hubert Hall of Atlanta on May 24, 1914. Following their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Hall moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Fred pursued a career in business.1
Fred prospered in his business venture, but his prosperity was cut short when he suddenly fell ill and died in the spring of 1918. Struck with grief, Sarah, pregnant with her third child, returned to White Plains to live with her parents and to bury her husband at White Plains First Baptist Church. Although her life had drastically changed, Sarah was determined to continue her life and support her three young children with the best possible means.2
According to the 1920 census, Sarah continued living at home with her parents, her children, Fred Jr., Ross and Albert, and her two siblings Samuel and Alonson. It is assumed that Sarah continued to support herself and her children due to the fact that the census indicates that she worked as a mail carrier for the White Plains post office. Sarah most likely received this job through her brother Samuel who was a clerk at the post office. Her job as a mail carrier is quite unusual because one traditionally views a mail carrier as a male dominated profession. One can assume that Sarah not only supported her children financially, but also felt that crossing gender roles was not an issue. Sarah understood that although women traditionally held domestic roles, she was unable to conform because she was a widow, and instead led an independent life.3
When the Depression hit America in the 1930s, all Americans were affected, as was Sarah and her family. By 1930, Sarah no longer held a job at the post office, which can indicate that, due to the Depression, she was fired or let go. Although she was out of a job, it appears that her parents were faring well because they still owned the farm they lived on, as well as owned a radio. But due to the fact that it had only been roughly a year into the Depression, the effects might not have hit the Howells yet. Regardless of her own personal financial situation, Sarah probably tried to remain hopeful in that relief would soon come.4
Relief came to many Americans in the form of FDR’s New Deal, and the programs it created, such as the Works Projects Administration. The Federal Writer’s Project, the project Sarah would become involved in, was included as part of the WPA. The Federal Writer’s Project was a program created to aid unemployed historians and writers. Some of the historians and writers were assigned the task of interviewing ex-slaves in order to document their testimonies about slave life. These interviews would be collected and put into what is called the Slave Narratives. Roughly 2% of the slaves still alive in the 1930s were interviewed. The slaves who were interviewed were chosen somewhat at random based on which slaves lived closest to one of the interviewers. Every interviewer did not have the same number of ex-slaves to interview, but even so, the Slave Narrative collection holds an abundance of interviews from all over the Southeast.5
Sarah was employed with the WPA as an interviewer for the Slave Narratives sometime between 1937 and 1938. It is unclear how Sarah obtained this job, but one speculation is her own genuine interest in history and slave life leading her to apply for the job with the program. This historical interest could have been brought on because her grandfather, Judge William Watson Moore, owned a plantation with slaves in Greene County. In fact, Sarah actually interviewed one of the ex-slaves, Emmaline Kilpatrick, for one of the narratives. According to the interview, it appears that Sarah had not planned on interviewing Emmaline for the narratives and had simply run into her at the cemetery.6
The relationship between Sarah and Emmaline can be seen immediately upon reading the narrative. The two women obviously had a previous connection and it seems as though both women viewed that connection as familial. Emmaline continually states how much Sarah’s Aunt Willie means to her and how her role as a slave was to look out for her. According to Emmaline, after the Civil War was over, most of the slaves returned to work for Judge Moore. This can indicate that perhaps Emmaline viewed Sarah’s grandfather as family and, as a result, Sarah and Emmaline view each other as family. Sarah furthers this point when she concludes the interview stating that Emmaline came home with her to work on her garden, as she use to do with Sarah’s grandmother.7
Another interview that Sarah conducted was with an ex-slave named Anna Parkes. Anna lived in Athens, as did Sarah while she worked with the WPA. The connection that developed between Anna and Sarah was more of an economic and social connection, rather than a familial connection, because during the Depression, when the interview took place, all races were equalized economically. According to the Athens City Directory, Anna lived in the same house at 150 W. Strong Street for a majority of her life in Athens. During the interview, Anna actually states that she lives in the same neighborhood that her and her mother lived in after the Civil War. One can presume that Anna remained in this location because she lacked the funds to move anywhere else. Furthermore, the Athens City Directories reveal that Anna held the same job over the years as a laundress; a job that was taught to her by her mother.8
The connection between Sarah and Anna is on a deeper level instead of on the surface. On the surface, Anna held one job throughout her lifetime, while Sarah held multiple jobs. More over, on the surface, it is assumed that Anna lacked the funds to move anywhere, but Sarah moved from White Plains to Athens while she was employed with the WPA, indicating that she had some money to move. But when one looks deeper, one can find similarities between the two women. Both women, because of their own situations, were forced to find means of supporting themselves, as well as their family. Anna, being an ex-slave, was forced to make the best out of her situation as an ex-slave in the Jim Crow era in the South. Sarah also made the best of her situation as a widow trying to support herself and her children in a male dominated society in which women held traditional roles.9
The similarities can ultimately be seen, again, at the end of Sarah’s interview. Anna, for a reason unknown, repeatedly apologizes to Sarah for never experiencing hard times. For example, Anna continually tells Sarah that her master never treated her badly nor did she encounter any hardships after she was free because she always worked and supported herself. One can guess that Sarah did not need an apology nor did she expect one. Sarah most likely understood Anna’s claim completely. Even though Sarah was widowed and supported herself, it does not appear she suffered any hardships. Sarah did what Anna had to do, which was work and make the best of the situation given to her. Both women held a connection with each other socially, through their situations in society, as well as an economic connection and understanding.10
One can speculate that Sarah thoroughly enjoyed her job as an interviewer because of all the connections she made with each person as well as the fact that she contributed to history. Her work with the WPA continued when Sarah also became an editor for the Slave Narratives, specifically for Sadie Hornsby, a fellow Athens WPA interviewer. She also helped out other interviewers with their introductions in their own narratives. It is unclear how Sarah obtained the editor position, but her enthusiasm and interest in working for the WPA as a writer surely contributed to her promotion, as well as her knowledge of history and writing.11
After Sarah worked for the WPA, the Athens City Directory states that she worked for the University of Georgia as a librarian in 1940. It appears that Sarah wanted to stay in Athens and see if she could find a job there instead of in her home town since she already held residence in Athens. Unfortunately, there were not any records that could be found to confirm that Sarah was employed with the University, therefore it is unclear on whether the city directory made a mistake or perhaps she did not hold the job long enough to be recorded into the University yearbook or faculty handbook. If one assumes that Sarah did in fact hold the job, one can infer that Sarah most likely enjoyed jobs that dealt with contributing to history through research or contributing through her own personal experiences, as with the Slave Narratives.12
It appears that after 1940, Sarah most likely returned to White Plains, perhaps because she could not find a job in Athens. The next record of Sarah’s job and whereabouts appears in the Greensboro paper,The Herald-Journal. According to two articles found in the newspaper, Sarah aided the Greene County historian, T.B. Rice, in researching his articles about the history of Greene County. In the March 10, 1944 issue of The Herald-Journal, Rice states that Sarah aided him in finding historical materials from libraries. Again it appears that Sarah took interest in history and research, and perhaps continued to aid Rice in his articles. One can speculate that Sarah may have found her passion in life, which might have been realized or further nourished by her job with the WPA.13
Between 1944 and 1976, little record could be found about Sarah and how she spent the remaining years of her life. The only record that could be found was her obituary found in The Herald-Journal, May 9, 1976. Sarah died in Plantation, Florida in a nursing home. According to the obituary, Sarah had moved down to Florida in 1971 with one of her sons. Sadly, the obituary says nothing of her contribution to the WPA during the Depression or her historical research she had done for the community. But the obituary does state that she was involved with her community, as well as her church, White Plains First Baptist Church, where she is buried along with her husband and one of her sons.14
The life that Sarah led and the things that she accomplished go beyond her personal experiences and her personal relationships she formed with certain people along the way. Her life was a statement for all women of all races during the 1930s era. During a time of segregation, Jim Crow, and women’s movements, it appears that Sarah broke all the barriers of race relations, as well as gender roles. Specifically with race relations, it did not appear that Sarah held any type of prejudice, as seen with her familial relationship with Emmaline, and perhaps never even thought of race relations as an issue for her. Although it appears that Sarah was never involved in promoting interracial cooperation publicly, she promoted it by first, not making race an issue personally, and second, by over coming racial boundaries and actually forming connections with African American women, such as Emmaline and Anna.
One reason race relations were not an issue for Sarah was because she shared a common bond with all working class women of all races, which was a common occurrence during that time. Women of the working class, whether they worked in the home or in an industry, realized their class status and understood that they would always be a part of the working class. For this reason, woman, like Sarah and Anna, lived most of their lives working only to support themselves and their family with no other expectations, such as becoming part of the middle class. One can speculate that because women of the working class supported themselves and their families, some pride must have gone into their work. Apparently, black and white women took pride in their jobs regardless of their personal experience or whether they were skilled or unskilled women. The fact that women of their time where supporting themselves was enough for those women and allowed them to have pride and dignity in a male dominated society.15
Along with the pride and dignity associated with supporting oneself, the idea of independent women, of all races, also dominated the minds of women. Women reflected their new found independence most often in the work environment. For example, to better their work experience and skills, women frequently changed jobs for salary reasons, gaining work experience for future jobs, but also to avoid being controlled by their employer. If one is controlled by their employer, his or her independence no longer exists. Sarah demonstrates this theme of guarding her independence from employers in some ways. As stated earlier, one of the first jobs she held after her husband died was a mail carrier. Not only was the topic of crossing gender roles addressed, but her job as a mail carrier is quite different than the jobs she held later in life. Perhaps Sarah wanted to gain as much working experience as possible in order to achieve her higher goals of becoming a writer and researcher. From her point of view, she might have thought that small work experience here and there would benefit her and, in fact, it did because she gained knowledge of her community while she was a mail carrier. This knowledge might have been used when writing her Slave Narratives, as well as when researching for T.B. Rice. Again, this demonstrates what many women of her time were trying to accomplish and maintain.16
Anna also serves as an example of an independent woman. Although she maintained the same job as a laundress after she was free, she maintained control of her job because she was her own boss. The only people Anna had to deal with were her customers, but Anna had to serve as her own motivation to get her work done. Therefore, although Anna differs from Sarah in that Anna held one job, she is similar to Sarah in that both women strove to maintain their role as independent women.
The fact that Sarah was an independent woman may have led to her employment with the WPA, although if it was not for Eleanor Roosevelt, women would not have had the chance to seek work relief at all from the WPA. The WPA, more specifically the Federal Writer’s Project, offered Sarah an opportunity to pursue her goals to contribute to history and have a job that she might truly enjoy. It appears that Sarah might have been in the minority as far as her being a woman and working as an interviewer. The WPA actually wanted to employ women to do traditional women jobs, such as a seamstress or a secretary. Sarah’s employment as an interviewer for the Slave Narratives definitely crossed the gender lines. According to the research done, it is unclear on the number of women who held jobs similar to Sarah, but overall, women held roughly 17.5% of the jobs in the WPA. This statistic shows that numerous women were similar to Sarah in that they, too, were independent women seeking to support themselves or pursue a certain passion through the WPA and its specific programs that fit to individual needs.17
Women of all races not only shared similar working experiences, but also shared the common bond of being a woman in the 1930s. The gender roles of women reached beyond race because regardless of race, women shared similar interests, such as family and involvement in the community. It is because of women’s tendencies to be involved in the community that led to women, black and white, being the greatest supporters of racial cooperation and supporters of organizations focusing on African American issues. In their own ways, many of the WPA interviewers contributed to interracial cooperation whether they knew it or not. Sarah, for example, promoted racial cooperation through her friendship with Emmaline, as well as her ability to interview many slaves and develop a variety of connections with each.18
When Sarah took the job with the WPA, one can assume that she was not fully aware of the impact she would have on history. Even though it is not her life that is being told in the Slave Narratives, she was one of the women behind the volumes of ex-slave interviews that line libraries across the United States. For a woman who was widowed with three children to support in the 1930s, that is truly an amazing accomplishment. And what is more intriguing, is the fact that through her work, she crossed lines and broke down the walls that separated her from men and, more importantly, from African Americans.
When I traveled to Sarah’s home town of White Plains, I sadly found a poor, run down town that had their City Hall in a small brick building, their post office in a motor home, and a town that consisted of one intersection with stop signs. The only beautiful object in her town, by this time, was the White Plains First Baptist Church where Sarah and her family are buried. The site of her town was, unexpectedly, very saddening and it continued to be depressing when I discovered that her old home had been torn down. The realization came to me that nobody, besides her immediate family and friends, knew anything about this woman who had made such an enormous contribution and seemed to love every minute of the work that went into the WPA project. But Sarah did so much more than interview former slaves. She was a strong-willed, independent woman who made a statement to society that when one can look beyond racial boundaries and gender roles, one can truly experience life. So when I visited Sarah’s gravesite, I was proud of the fact that I knew who this woman was and knew of the impacts she had on history; but more importantly, I was proud of her.
Links
1. U.S. Social Security Death Index, available from http://www.familysearch.org; Internet.; Manuscript U.S. Census, 1930, Georgia, Greene County, available from http://www.ancestry.com; Internet; “Fred H. Hall Obituary,” The Herald-Journal, 21 June 1918, sec.1, p.7.; Fred H. Hall and Sarah Howell, Greene County, Georgia Marriage License, Greene County Probate Court, vol. N, p.188.
2. “Fred H. Hall Obituary.”
3. Manuscript U.S. Census, 1920, Georgia, Greene County, available from http://www.ancestry.com; Internet
4. 1930 U.S. Census
5. Norman Yetman, “Ex-Slave Interviews and the Historiography of Slavery,” American Quarterly vol. 36, no. 2 (Summer, 1984): 181-210.
6. Sarah H. Hall, “Emmaline Kilpatrick,” WPA Slave Narrative Project, Georgia Narratives, vol.4, part 3: 8-13, 8 May 1937 [book on-line]; available from http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mesn&fileName=043/mesn043.db&recNum=10&itemLink=D?mesnbib:3:./temp/~ammem_mg1t ; Internet; Athens Georgia City Directory 1938, vol. 1, A.B.C.D. no. 46, Charleston: Baldwin Directory Company, Inc and Athens Chamber of Commerce.
7. Sarah H. Hall, “Emmaline Kilpatrick.”
8. Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000, (New York: Viking Publishing, 2001), 146-167; Sarah H. Hall, “Ex-Slave Interview. Anna Parkes,” WPA Slave Narrative Project, Georgia Narratives, vol. 4, part 3: 153-164, 8 May 1937 [book on-line]; available from http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mesn&fileName=043/mesn043.db&recNum=155&itemLink=D?mesnbib:1:./temp/~ammem_IKa3 ; Internet; Miller’s Athens, Georgia City Directory 1928-1929, vol. 9, Asheville: Piedmont Directory Co. Publisher, Inc.
9. Athens City Directory 1938; Athens Georgia City Directory 1940, vol. 2, ABCD no. 76, Charleston: Baldwin Directory Company, Inc and Athens Chamber of Commerce.
10. Sarah H. Hall, “Ex-Slave Interview. Anna Parkes.”
11. Athens City Directory 1938; Sadie Hornsby, “Plantation Life,” WPA Slave Narrative Project, Georgia Narratives, vol. 4, part 1: 37-57, 4 August 1938 [book on-line]; available from http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mesn&fileName=041/mesn041.db&recNum=40&itemLink=D?mesnbib:1:./temp/~ammem_mb86; Internet.
12. Athens City Directory 1940.
13. T.B. Rice, “History of Greene County,” The Herald-Journal, unknown date, unknown section, unknown page; T.B. Rice, “History of Greene County,” The Herald-Journal, 10 March 1944, unknown section, unknown page.
14. “Last Rites for Sara Hall,” The Herald-Journal, 9 May 1976, unknown section, unknown page; “Mrs. Sarah Hall Passes Away,” The Herald-Journal, 9 May 1976, unknown section, unknown page; E.H. Armor, The Cemeteries of Greene County Georgia, (Georgia: Agee Publishers, 1987), 309.
15. Georgina Hickney, Hope and Danger in the New South city: working-class women and urban development in Atlanta, 1890-1940, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 4-5, 43-44, 90, 204, 212-214, 218.
16. Georgina Hickney
17. Georgina Hickney
18. Adam Fairclough