Bound Through Slavery’s Words

CCH Pounder can’t explain what happened to her and several other actors when they performed their on-camera readings for the HBO Black History Month documentary, “Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives.” The 75-minute documentary, premiering Monday, is based on the words of former slaves that were documented in the 1930s by the Works Projects Administration’s Federal Writers Project.

“There were moments of divine intervention,” says Pounder, who reads the recollections of three slaves. “People’s voices changed, even body postures changed.”

Pounder, a regular on FX’s “The Shield,” recalls that while she was reading the reminiscences of a feisty ex-slave named Fanny, who fought off the advances of her owner, the actress felt compelled to raise up her finger. “Afterward they showed me the picture of her, and her finger was raised” the same way, says Pounder. “So I said there was some kind of collective memory going on around.”

“I think all of the performers made a connection with the material,” says executive producer Jacqueline Glover. “I think it comes through in the performances.”

“Unchained Memories,” produced in association with the Library of Congress, home of the Slave Narrative Collection and other Works Projects Administration collections, is narrated by Whoopi Goldberg and features archival photographs, music, film and period images interwoven among readings by Pounder, Angela Bassett, Michael Boatman, Roscoe Lee Browne, Don Cheadle, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Robert Guillaume, Jasmine Guy, Samuel L. Jackson, LaTanya Richardson, Courtney B. Vance, Vanessa L. Williams, Oprah Winfrey and Alfre Woodard.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, there were 4 million ex-slaves. By the 1930s, 100,000 were still alive. From 1936 through 1938, young writers conducted more than 2,000 interviews with these former slaves in 17 states, and the transcripts were written in the vernacular of the time. The ex-slaves vividly chronicle the horrific living conditions and treatment they received from their white owners -- their daily, back-breaking routines of working in the fields, their shabby living quarters and poor nutrition; the rape of the women at the hands of their white owners, the brutal punishment for attempting to escape and the harrowing agony of parents and children being separated when sold to different owners.

Glover says that it was difficult narrowing down the narratives for the documentary. “I read probably more than 500,” she says. “There are 500 at the Library of Congress that have photographs. We wanted to start with people you could see. We were looking for really strong characters that were able to impart material that you would understand about their lives and what slavery was like. We ended up with the strongest characters -- the ones who, when you are reading, leap off the page.”

Take, for example, former slave Jenny Proctor: “None of us was ‘lowed to see a book or try to learn. They say we git smarter than they was if we learn anything, but we slips around and gits hold of that Webster’s old blue-back speller, and we hides it ‘til way in the night, and then we lights a little pine torch and studies that spellin’ book.”

Or Arnold Gragston, who joined the Underground Railroad and helped smuggle slaves in a rowboat into the free state of Ohio: “It took me a long time to get over my scared feeling, but I finally did, and I soon found myself going back across the river with two or three people, and sometimes a whole boatload.”

“I think these are stories anyone can relate to,” says Glover. “When you hear someone wanting to learn or read or being desperate to find their parents or having just lost their parents, I think anyone hearing that story is going to feel something about that person. It’s an American story. It’s American history. It’s our history. It’s everybody who lives in this country’s history. It’s how this country came to be what it is.”

“Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives,” can be seen Monday at 8 p.m. on HBO.

Cover photograph courtesy of Library of Congress.