"I was owned by Johnson Bell and born in New Orleans, in
Louisiana." Those words were spoken by a man named Frank Bell.
He said that according "to the bill of sale, I'm 86 years old."
His words, and those of thousands of other American citizens,
were transcribed in the 1930s, at the depth of the Great
Depression. As part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's efforts
to restart the economy, the Works Progress Administration was
founded, and one arm of the WPA was something called the Federal
Writers' Project. Men and women were hired by the government to
work on various assignments documenting American history and
American life. One of those assignments, vast in scope, came to
be known as the Slave Narratives. "If a woman was a good breeder
she brought a good price on the auction block," said Hattie
Rogers, a North Carolina resident, when she was interviewed in
1937. "The slave buyers would come around and jab them in the
stomach and look them over and if they thought they would have
children fast they brought