BCALA NEWS Volume 41, Issue 3
Summer 2014
47
Much to Say in a Few Words: An Interview with author Karsonya Whitehead
BY JASON ALSTON, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
Editor’s note: The following is an interview with Dr. Karsonya Whitehead regarding her work, ‘‘Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis.” Whitehead’s work is available at
http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Colored-Girl-Diaries-Frances/ dp/1611173523. For more information on Whitehead, visit
kayewisewhitehead.com. This interview was edited for length in some places with minimal effect on information outcomes.
J.A.: Thank you for talking to us about your new work, Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis. Who was Emilie Frances Davis and why might BCALA members want to read about her?
Karsonya Whitehead: Emilie Frances Davis was (free) born on February 18, 1838 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and raised in Roxbury, Philadelphia, near the shipyards, where she attended a local public school. Growing up, she lived with her parents, Charles and Helena, her younger sister Elizabeth, and her two brothers, Alfred and Thomas. In the 1850 U.S. Census, there are two other family members mentioned, Elwood (five) and William (eighteen), neither of whom are mentioned in the 1860 U.S. Census or in Emilie’s pocket diaries. By 1860 Emilie had moved in with her uncle, Elijah Joshua (E.J.) Davis, his wife, Sarah, and their son, Elwood, at 916 Rodman Street, between South and Lombard. She was a member of First African Presbyterian Church, a student at the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheney University), and a member of the Ladies’ Union Association.
J.A.: So what exactly is included in this work, Notes from a Colored Girl?
K.W.: In Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis, I examine the life and experiences of Emilie Frances Davis, a freeborn twenty- one-year-old mulatto woman, through a close reading of three pocket diaries she kept from 1863 to 1865. In it, I explore Davis’s worldviews and politics, her perceptions of both public and private events, her personal relationships, and her place in Philadelphia’s free black community in the nineteenth century. Although Davis’s daily entries are sparse, brief snapshots of her life, I interpret them in ways that situate Davis in historical and literary contexts that illuminate nineteenth-century Black American women’s experiences. I believe that my contribution of edited text and original narrative fills a void in scholarly documentation of women who dwelled in spaces between white elites, Black entrepreneurs, and urban dwellers of every race and class. This is the first published transcription of Davis’s pocket diaries that tackles both the complexities of a free Black woman’s lived experience during the Civil War while providing a word-for-word transcription of her handwritten pocket diaries. I believe that by including both of these ‘‘pieces,” it helps to resurrect an ordinary Black woman’s writing and voice that has been buried for over 150 years.
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