Voices of the Owned: What They Lived Through

Seltzer (How to Partner With AI) presents a moving, revealing, and extraordinary selection of first-person narratives by formerly enslaved Americans, gathered through the Depression-era WPA Slave Narrative program, in which participants were interviewed about their experiences roughly seventy years after the end of the Civil War. The project, now in the public domain, comprises 2,291 biographical accounts, and Seltzer’s approachable, highly curated collection features memorable stories and voices, presented in conversational counterpoint, that give readers a vivid portrait of the barbarism of what has been called the “peculiar institution”—but also of resilience, love, and the richness of everyday experience. Seltzer is open about the role AI has played in assembling this work and searching for “incidents, images, and turns of phrase that could stand on their own” from the larger corpus of WPA narratives. The selections, editing, interpretations, and final decisions remained his own, he notes. The stories chosen are not for the faint of heart: troubling accounts of vinegar and salt applied to open wounds from whippings; an overseer entertaining himself and friends with sexual assaults against enslaved women while their husbands were forced to watch; and mothers torn away from their children, only to reappear in different roles. The language of the speakers is presented in dialect, as WPA interviewers recorded it: “I married when I wuz 14 years old,” declares Minnie Fulkes of Petersburg, Virginia. “I didn't know what marriage meant. I had an idea when you loved de man, you an' he could be married an' his wife had to cook, clean up, wash, an' iron fer him was all.”

Readers are likely to wonder whether tasking AI with helping to make selections results in a selection as well rounded and historically informed as one made by dedicated human researchers familiar with all available records. What is undeniable: Voices of the Owned compels and illuminates on every page, bringing these stories and lives to new readers in an accessible, lively presentation with moral weight.

Takeaway: Powerful chorus of voices drawn from WPA slave narratives.

Great for fans of: Through the Eyes of a Slave: Written Accounts of American Slavery, Laura T. Murphy’s Survivors of Slavery.

- BookLife/Publishers Weekly

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