48 BCALA NEWS Volume 41, Issue 3


Summer 2014


J.A.: Your press release states, ‘‘Whitehead interprets them (Davis’ writings) in ways that situate Davis in historical and literary contexts that illuminate nineteenth-century Black American women’s experiences.” Can you expound more on what is meant by ‘‘interprets”? What role are you filling as one reads Notes from a Colored Girl?


K.W.: In 2005, I received black and white copies of the 1863-1865 diaries of Emilie Frances Davis. They were very difficult to read as Emilie’s writing is hard to understand, the ink is smudged on some of the pages, and there are quite a few entries written in pencil that were too faint to read. After reading them and discovering (from her August 23, 1863, entry) that was she was a Black woman, I decided that I wanted to transcribe her work and reconstruct her story. I started with only a few pieces of information that I gathered from her diaries and organized them into a simple gazetteer’s chart.


This is where I started. I had eleven facts about her life and a desire to find her. As Alice Walker once yelled for Zora Neale Hurston, many nights I called on Emilie to assist me. She became real to me—I decided that in addition to reclaiming her life—I wanted to transcribe all of her words so that future scholars could build on the work that I had started. At that time, I did not have a name for what I was doing. I knew that I was calling on the methods of history and documents editing and that I was working across multiple disciplines to piecemeal her story together. Since I did not have either a guidepost or a starting place, Emilie’s story changed everyday as I discovered new information, reconstituting these three years in Emilie’s life. It was a slow process and it was extremely difficult because I did not have any information on Emilie except what I was finding because Emilie had not yet been resurrected from a sea of forgotten histories. Not until 2012, with the help of my mentor, was I able to name and define it. I was a forensic herstorical investigator conducting an ongoing forensic herstorical (history told from the perspective of women) investigatory process. That is, I actively used forensics, or tools, to uncover Emilie’s identity and activity, which had been buried or lost over time. These tools included dictionaries of common usage, census records, neighborhood directories and other holdings from state archives, churches, and private clubs, and more, which allowed me to do a historical documentary excavation of her life for the three-year period covered in her diaries. Finally, I reconstructed Emilie’s ‘‘story” from a black feminist perspective (a perspective informed by a person’s race, gender, and often, class) where I emphasized and centered her voices and her experiences, more commonly known as historiography. I believe that forensic investigation is the practice whereby social history, journalism, diary writing, women’s studies, and documents editing meet and coalesce. It is, at its root and center, transdisciplinary work, in that it is both holistic (in that it crosses many disciplines giving us a fuller picture of what we learn from the information that we have) and organic (in that as we investigate further the complexity of the story continues to develop).


J.A.: What do you think is truly unique or remarkable about Davis’ take on what was going on during the time that she penned these pocket diaries?


K.W.: The history of how the free and enslaved Black communities were able to both survive and prosper within a slave society is both engaging and fraught with confusion, half-truths, and in some cases, unsubstantiated claims. Sifting through the history is particularly difficult for anyone who is attempting to understand how the social and political climatic shift that occurred in the nation on January 1, 1863, affected both of these communities. We now know that for a variety of reasons ‘‘freedom” for some did not actually mean freedom for all; and in both cases, there was not a clear definition of what freedom meant, how it could be negotiated, and how it translated into tangible rewards. Though there have been a number of books and articles that have attempted to answer these questions, many remain, and more research still needs to be done. Slavery and freedom are complicated terms that involve an understanding of how race, class, and gender were socially constructed in this country and how this social construction still continues to inform how these issues are viewed today.


This book cannot possibly answer all these questions and instead seeks only to tell the narrow


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