"Surviving Justice" (2005)

Oral histories and "in their own words" narratives have a long history, but they came into their own with the postwar development of portable audio, and especially this century with better recording and transcription technologies.  It still remains an extraordinary amount of editing work; as Craig Taylor noted in a Rumpus interview of his 2012 collection Londoners, "I spoke to something like 200 people, and sometimes the person you’ll see in the book is the result of five or six interviews with other people who are similar but couldn’t quite say the things that needed to be said or just weren’t as eloquent. It takes a long time, but you just make those calls and talk to people and listen."

The starting point for many remains the immense body of recorded and published work by Studs Terkel, particularly his 1974 collection on jobs, Working. An immense archive of 5,400 radio shows by Terkel is now being created by his Chicago station WMFT.

As Eggers notes in this 2009 interview with Mother Jones magazine, Terkel was a towering part of the cultural landscape where he grew up:

In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often. We had some of his books in our house and that was sort of my first introduction to the form, which I thought was fascinating. He was just an intriguing figure when you would see him on TV—he had a talk show and a radio show, so he was kind of all over the place. You couldn't really avoid him. He was one of the biggest personalities out of Chicago. This was before Oprah. And he just looked like some guy out of a Cagney movie or something. The red-checked shirt and the red socks and his way of talking and that nose of his and everything. He had something very uniquely Chicago about him—real no-nonsense, no bullshit. 

It's amazing he lived as long as he did, and he was working pretty close to the end. I hope his legacy is done justice. It's important to hear primary sources, to hear people's voices as opposed to having it all filtered through some authoritative, professorial textbook voice. I've brought Surviving Justice into high schools and I've left them there, and they are the ones that everybody grabs.

Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, coedited by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen, was first in a series of volumes in the Voice of Witness series, which recently marked its 10th anniversary with an anthology.  One particularly notable entry is Audrey Petty's High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Housing (2013), which revisits Chicago and looks at public housing. Harper's has a Q&A with Petty that, along with noting some of her interview questions, also delves into the complexity of the responses that oral histories elicit -- that, along with their sorrows, these projects were nonetheless home and a community:

Ben Austen’s story “The Last Tower,” in the May 2012 issue of Harper’s, emphasizes the strong sense of community experienced by public-housing residents and their mixed feelings about Cabrini-Green’s demolition, even as the event was trumpeted as progress. In High Rise Stories residents express similar sentiments. In what ways were their experiences positive?

When I started interviewing people, the way in for me initially was to start with questions like, “Talk about your apartment: What do you remember about it? What was the layout? Did you know your neighbors?” I hoped the answers would lead to more questions, but I wasn’t prepared for the deep complexity of what people shared, or the powerful mix of conflicting emotions they felt when they talked about their homes and their communities. One woman said, without sarcasm or bitterness, “I saw shootings, I saw people killed — but other than that it was lovely.” All of these emotions were possible simultaneously, and one didn’t cancel out the other.