Silvia Dubois: A Biografy of the Slav Who Whipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom (The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)

In this extended interview, conducted in 1883 on Sourland Mountain, New Jersey, Sylvia Dubois--then nearly one hundred years old--tells her life story to Dr. Cornelius Wilson Larison. Dr. Larison wrote the original version in his singular phonetic alphabet. The Princeton Recollectorpublished a normalized spelling version in 1980. This volume presents an edited and annotated version of the original text. No one knows for sure whether Dr. Larison's account of Sylvia's life is mostly history or mostly folklore. In either case, it remains a fascinating view of slave life andthe life of the uneducated free black in the North during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.