February 7, 2003

A Slave-Narrative Documentary Is Limited, but Compelling

By STEVEN MINTZ

The pain of slavery echoes through James Green's plainspoken words. "Friday," the former Texas slave said, is my "unlucky-star day." One Friday, decades earlier when he was about 12, his mother had turned to him and said, "Jim, you be a good boy." His master then led James away. "Dat was de last time I ever heard my mother speak, or ever see her," he recalled.

Green was among more than 2,300 former slaves -- 2 percent of all who were alive in the 1930s -- whose oral histories

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