In 1861, shortly after Virginia secedes from the United States in order to “protect slavery” (xvi), three enslaved men flee to Fortress Monroe, a Union fort in eastern Virginia. This escape “[strikes] a crack in slavery’s centuries-old wall” (xvi) and, over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people will follow them over to Union lines. The Union Army will later begin recruiting some of these former slaves and their presence will be vital to the North’s eventual victory.

After the war, a Union officer named Samuel Armstrong sets up literacy programs in a refugee camp near Fortress Monroe. In 1875, a young African-American man and ex-slave, Lorenzo Ivy, studies there before training as a schoolteacher in his hometown of Danville, VA, which Jefferson Davis, then President of the Confederate States, had once called “the last capital of the Confederacy” (xv).

In 1937, Claude Anderson, “an African-American master’s student from Hampton University” (xv) arrives in Danville to conduct interviews as part of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Slave Narrative Collection project. The questions, supplied by the WPA, and the responses they are designed to encourage, reflect white Americans’ desire to “hear only a sanitized version of the past” (xvii).