Summary Of The View From The Bottom Rail

"I've told you too much. How come they want all this stuff from the colored people anyways? Do they take any stories from the white people...?" a Georgia woman. The View from the Bottom Rail is the name of the chapter, what this meant wasn't easily known from the title, trains, maybe from the first few sentences it could have been. The Bottom Rail in this chapter deals with a social classification specifically African Americans slaves. When men, women, and children were treated as an object to own, trade, abuse and degrade as if no human emotion existed within them. Oppression of another human being for monetary gain, sexual gratification and or pure laziness since it was much easier to sit back and have the work done for you. Africans

These were not jobs that a paycheck was earned from or that one could call in sick to, this was forced labor in which some were beat into submission. The provisions for the slaves were different depending on who owned you, where you worked and what tasks were performed. Some slave had just the bare necessities, living in cramped quarters, with barely enough food to sustain life and work, with little hope for change. How do we know these things today seeing we have never been slave owners and there is no written instructional manual to teach an individual? We have the written and recorded accounts from former slaves, independent stories, exaggerated, some maybe slightly, but there is plenty of proof to these facts also. Scars that show the beatings a slave would receive for whatever his master deemed fit, babies born of mixed races when white masters rape their black servants, further proof of the inhumane treatment. These slaves were purposely left uneducated and it shows in their dialect "I go shum" was a phrase said that had to be interpreted from a missionary man to mean I'll go see about it. One can determine that freed slaves would be able to recall their own past experiences but with time and age stories get

Did you earn money? Did you see slaves being bought and sold? What did you do and say when the Yankee came and freed you? This brought about a lot of information ex slaves being able to tell their own stories, in their own way. However, there are factors that change accounts considerably, like what state they were from as some states slaves were treated harsher than others, these accounts were recorded when many of these people were quite old and may have confused some facts. One case Susan Hamlin was interviewed, by someone she thought was from the Welfare Office, so the accounts of her life were made to appear milder than what they were for fear of trouble even though she claimed to be 104 years old. After interviewing so many people Lomax realized these were just words on paper flat no emotion, so, Lomax and son started recording interviews with a three-hundred-pound portable recorder. The problem with Oral History is oral history is only as good as the evidence provided. It can be passed down from generation to generation and distorted along the way due to memory loss, plain confusion or difference in perception. Either way without being able to prove