Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves
""In contrast to Gone with the Wind-style histories                 which suggest slavery wasn't all that bad, we have here the slaves' own view of life                 under the peculiar institution. Seventy-five years after the end of the Civil War,                 the emotion which comes through these narratives most strongly, and which seems to                 have characterized daily life under slavery, is terror..[The book] is a major                 contribution to Afro-American history and anthropology." -- Southern                 Exposure"[This] is one of the most valuable books on slavery to appear in                 recent years, and it is one of the most fascinating. The recovery and publication of                 all the surviving Federal Writers' Project interviews with former Virginia slaves is                 an event of major scholarly importance in the ongoing effort to understand what it                 meant to be black and enslaved in the antebellum South." -- Virginia Quarterly                 Review"Here is oral history at its best." -- Richmond                 Times-Dispatch