Lay My Burden Down 

Here is a living memory. In this book the untutored and the inarticulate find a voice and speak haltingly, bitterly, proudly, fervently, about their own lives, about their struggles for freedom and self-development. 

Here the last of the ex-slaves become their own historians and record the story of a people walking the arduous road to liberty. They speak of freedom, of slavery, of race relations, and of ' the society they knew, in words sometimes poetic, some-times humorous, sometimes crude, but always moving and alive. 

These narratives are from the huge collection of life-history and interview material gathered by the Federal Writers' Project, of which Ben Botkin was folklore editor. In them, the emotional release of holiday parties and camp meetings, the routine of life in the slave quarters and the big house, labor in the fields, the workings of the Under-ground Railroad, the life of the Negro as a soldier, the Ku Klux Klan, the agony of inhuman beatings, the privations and changes of the years of the 

Civil War, the joy. and bewilderment at the coming of freedom, the philosophizing of old people looking back at lives lived partly in slavery, partly in freedom—all these experiences and many more are woven together to make a new kind of narrative which is both folk history and folk literature. 

B. A. BOTKIN, former chief of the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, has made America's rich diversity of folklore a permanent part of our history in nearly a score of collections.