Cultural Detectives: "The Merchant"
Inspired by Henry Gates Jr.‘s book The Slave’s Narrative and in conjunction with conversations with Drs. Cornel West, Lawrence Bobo and Marcyliena Morgan (Director of Harvard’s Hiphop Archive and Research Institute), Cultural Detectives is a historical art experiment that harnesses the power of music. It brings the unheard words of slaves to life by combining their poems and stories with modern music productions. The project was created by Wheeler del Torro (aka DJ Fortune) and is being produced by DJ Tony Humphries. Their mission is to revive slave narratives through our era’s most poignant audio tradition: music. For del Torro and Humphries, the pairing of narratives and music seemed only natural. Not only does music have the power to both sustain our attention and provide us pleasure, it can be a powerful teaching tool. “By placing these narratives to modern beats, I hope to bring the words to life in an accessible, enjoyable way,” says del Torro.
The first song to drop from this innovative project is titled “The Merchant”. It’s a poem from a powerful collection published in 1840 by Juan Francisco Manzano. Born into slavery in Cuba, Francisco Manzano is regarded as a founder of Cuban literature. He is the only former slave in Spanish American history to achieve success as a writer. His collection of poems and narratives tells his story from a carefree childhood to a troubled, enslaved youth, and eventually, to his eventual escape to freedom.
What are slave narratives?
It’s estimated that there were over 6,000 slave narratives recorded between the early 1700s and the 1940s. These stories were documented in a variety of mediums, including books, journals, newsletters, judicial records, and oral histories.
Approximately 100 of those narratives were recorded before the Civil War. The stories made the case for abolishing slavery by providing Northern Americans a raw glimpse into the life of Southern plantation slaves. This glimpse was a stark contrast to the idyllic stories told by Southern plantation owners. These stories of extreme physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual deprivation reached the height of their influence in the decades before the war. It was during this time that slave narratives became their own genre of American literature, with popular works including autobiographies by Fredrick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. Many of the narratives reached a global scale with translations into French, Dutch, German, and Russian.
While interest in the narratives waned after the abolition of slavery, the storytelling persisted. Nearly 100 more narratives were recorded, providing haunting, firsthand accounts of the true experience of slavery so as to remind the newly reunited country of the horrors of an institution that nearly drove the nation apart.
Many slave narratives were recorded as oral histories and transcribed into a seventeen volume anthology. This effort was sponsored by the federal government in the 1930s as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to revive a struggling economy. Housed under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Writers Project employed writers in seventeen states to interview their African American citizens. From those interviews, nearly 2,500 narratives and 500 photographs of former slaves were curated. Their stories were written down, organized, and published in 1941 into an anthology entitled Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington, D.C., 1941).
This anthology, now housed in the United States Library of Congress in Washington D.C., provides a powerful testimony to the life, love, and trials of America’s slaves. They provide a window into the cruelty of slavery from the separation of families, inhuman work conditions, and sexual abuse at the hands of white slave owners. They contain tales of kidnapping, terrorizing, and physical and emotional abuse. They also tell stories of warmth and hope, from the love slaves cultivated with one another to tales of escape and heroism.
For over two centuries, former slaves told the difficult truth of their experiences, not to shame or blame, but to open a dialogue between black and white Americans. To breathe humanity into inhumane spaces. To create the possibility of a new, healthy relationship with one another. In today’s climate, there is a pressing need for conversations such as these. And so, the Cultural Detectives Project was created.
Check out this interesting and important project:
