"I never talk to nobody 'bout this" was the response of one aged African American when asked by a Works Project Administration field worker to share memories of his life in slavery and after emancipation. He and other ex-slaves were uncomfortable with the memories of a time when black and white lives were interwoven through human bondage. Yet the WPA field workers overcame the old people's reticence, and American West scholars T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker have collected all the known WPA Oklahoma "slave narratives" in this volume for the first time - including fourteen never published before. Their careful editorial notes detail what is known about the interviewers and the process of preparing the narratives.

Autobiographical accounts of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration.

This unique and original compilation of Work Progress Administration slave narratives contains 145 slave narratives from the states of Oklahoma and Texas. Slave narratives from Oklahoma are difficult to obtain in print format and this title contains all of the narratives from the state. There are a vast amount of photographs included of the actual former slaves who were interviewed.

Oklahoma Slave Narratives contains a folk history of slavery in the United States from Interviews with former Oklahoma slaves.

They came in land runs and on the Trail of Tears, sometimes with families, sometimes alone. But the women who first came to Oklahoma all had trials to face—and stories to tell. In this stirring collection, the women who settled what would become Oklahoma tell their own stories in their own words. From thousands of interviews conducted by the Work Projects Administration in 1936–37 and preserved in the Indian Pioneer Papers of Oklahoma, editors Terri M. Baker and Connie Oliver Henshaw have selected the words of women from a wide range of socioeconomic groups, ethnic backgrounds, and geographical locations to relate the pioneer experience as it was really lived. Elegantly written, skillfully edited, Women Who Pioneered Oklahoma reflects the everyday will and courage to survive of Oklahoma’s founding mothers. It conveys the violence of a frontier culture set in a landscape of stark beauty where death was always just a heartbeat away. A vital part of the state centennial, theirs is the story of real Oklahoma, writ large—and in a distinctly female hand.