We Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Virginia

In the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project undertook a massive effort at gathering the oral testimony of former slaves. Those ex-slaves were in their declining years by the time of the Great Depression, but Elizabeth Sparks, Elige Davison, and others like them nonetheless provided a priceless record of life under the yoke: where slaves lived, how they were treated, what they ate, how they worked, how they adjusted to freedom.

Here, Belinda Hurmence presents the interviews of 21 former Virginia slaves. This is a companion volume to Hurmence’s popular collections of North Carolina and South Carolina slave narratives, <i>My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery</i> and <i>Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember</i>.