Type the words “Born in Slavery” into a search engine and you’ll find a link (thttp://memory.loc.gov/ammen/snhtml/) to more than 2,000 first-person accounts of life under slavery.

The accounts were collected by interviewers hired by the Federal Writers’ Project during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Norm Yetman, a Kansas University professor and chairman of KU’s Department of American Studies, has published more than a hundred of the stories in his books “Voices from Slavery” and “When I Was a Slave.”

This weekend we celebrated Independence Day. Many former slaves talked about the day they were set free, so a little later I’ll share a couple of those stories.

Slavery’s gruesome face was revealed in many of the accounts. Just listen to Mary Reynolds:

“When a nigger died they let his folks come out the fields to see him.

“They buried him the same day, take a big plank and bust it with a ax in the middle enough to bend it back, and put the dead nigger in betwixt it.

“They’d cart them down to the graveyard … and not bury them deep enough that buzzards wouldn’t come circlin’ ’round.”

Listen to Frank Bell, age 86:

“When I’m about 17, I marries a gal while Marster on a drunk spell.

Marster he run her off, and I slips off at night to see her, but he finds it out. He takes a big, long knife and cuts her head plumb off, and ties a great, heavy weight to her and makes me throw her in the river.”

Others memories are less jolting, but they still leave bad echoes in your head.

Martin Jackson, 90, said, “My earliest recollection is the day my old boss presented me to his son, Joe, as his property. I was about five years old and my new master was only two.”

Yetman said he was struck by the resilience and tenacity of the slaves and surprised by the consistency in the accounts of emancipation day.

A bell would ring. Field hands came up to the house. The master and his wife sat on the porch in their rockers. The master said, “Boys and girls, I got bad news. You’re as free as I am. You can stay or leave.”

And he’d be crying, Yetman said.

William Moore, 83, remembers freedom this way:

“My sister, Mandy, come runnin’. She say, ‘Us niggers am free.’ I looks over to the house and seen the niggers pilin’ they little bunch of clothes and thing outside they cabins.

“We get up to the house and all the niggers standin’ there with they little bundles on they head and they all say, ‘Where we goin’?’

“We all cries and sings and prays and was so excited we didn’t eat no supper.”

Tom Robinson, 88, described his feelings:

“Was I happy? Lord. You can take anything. No matter how good you treat it — it wants to be free. You can treat it good and feed it and give it everything it seems to want — but if you open the cage — it’s happy.”

The cage opened, but blacks weren’t free. Economic, educational and social discrimination continued for more than a century after slavery’s demise, Yetman says.

This Fourth of July weekend, rather than thinking about America’s throwing off the oppressive British yoke, imagine how a slave might have felt on July Fourth in the years before emancipation.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it this way:

“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery.”

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “Look, it’s over and done with. What’s past is past. Let it rest.”

Is it over? Recent data shows the median net worth of American families, including their homes, to be $45,000. The figure for black families is less than a 10th of that.

Is it really over? Aren’t collective memories sometimes a form of gravity that limits the range of a person’s dreams?

Type the words “Born in Slavery” into a search engine. Read a dozen tales told by former slaves. Check out the gravity for yourself.