Creating a Living Historiography: Tracing the Outlines of Philadelphia's Antebellum African American Women and Mapping Memory onto the Body

Abstract

In 1865 Sarah Gudger left her master's farm in North Carolina to begin life as a free black woman. "Aunt Sarah," as she was called locally, had seen fifty years of slavery and watched from her porch in Asheville as America transformed into an emancipated nation. In 1937, at what she claimed was the age of 121, Gudger recounted her slave experience for the Federal Writer's Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Her riveting narrative, in whichthe WPA transcriber attempts to capture her southern dialect in detailed phonetic spellings, is replete with descriptions of nightmarish conditions, cruel masters, violent lashings, and watching her mother be taken away. Gudger assures the interviewer, "Law, chile, nobuddy knows how mean da'kies wah treated."