50 BCALA NEWS Volume 41, Issue 3


Summer 2014


attempting to use these words (sometimes incorrectly) in her entries. In those cases, I translated the word to the best of my ability and then provided the meaning. Because Emilie wrote for herself and did not revise her entries, there are a number of grammatical and spelling errors, as well as mistakes in capitalization and punctuation. I completed three drafts of the transcriptions constantly checking them against the original diaries; my research assistant then completed an additional transcription once the initial corrections had been made. I signed with the University of South Carolina Press in 2012 and the book was published on May 30, 2014.


J.A.: Were there other scholars or researchers involved in this particular project? What roles did they play in bringing this to reality?


K.W.: There were a number of different scholars that helped me at various stages throughout the project: Dr. Martin was the scholar who originally provided me with black and white copies of the pocket diaries. We had originally planned to work together on the pocket diaries but we were never able to coordinate our schedules. My dissertation committee (Kriste Lindenmeyer, Christine Mallinson, Christel Temple, Michelle Scott, and Debra Newman Ham) assisted me as I was writing my dissertation and transcribing the 1863 pocket diaries. They helped me to think through the project and organize it in such a way that scholars, researchers, and others would enjoy reading it. I had a number of research assistants (particularly Megan Fisher) that double- checked my transcriptions. There were researchers and scholars that attended my various research presentations and read through countless drafts of my articles about Emilie and of the manuscript. In the end, (of course), all mistakes are mine as I was the final voice that shaped the way that Emilie was presented to the world.


J.A.: I see you were also involved with another piece about Davis called, Rethinking Emilie Frances Davis: Lesson Plans for Teaching Her 1863-1865 Civil War Pocket Diaries. What exactly is the aim of this other work?


K.W.: Rethinking Emilie Frances Davis (coedited by Karsonya Wise Whitehead and Conra Gist) is a critical knowledge project that is situated as a companion reader to Notes from a Colored Girl. With ten different lesson plans drawn from the fields of English, math, history, social studies, and library science, Rethinking provides teachers with multiple opportunities to engage with the pocket diaries throughout the school year by providing them with a vision and tools for introducing and investigating the text in the classroom. The goal is to eventually have a copy of Notes in the hands of every student so that a noble readership could grow. Since we aimed to develop a companion reader that focused on various ways to use Notes across a range of content areas and grade levels, the book was the conceptual starting point for all the curriculum designers who contributed lesson plans. Due to the variety of content area foci, and big ideas grounding the lesson plans, each set takes students on different learning paths but collectively the lessons represent multidimensional instructional opportunities for teaching Notes. The tie that binds them together is that they each use the life of Emilie Frances Davis, as discussed in Notes and in other sources, as a starting point to construct learning experiences for students. As a whole the lessons demonstrate that rigorous and scholarly knowledge produced about and by black women matters. The ‘‘absence” of Black women from mainstream high school U.S. history texts is not only disturbing, but also problematic in the twenty-first century classroom. The erasure and omission of diverse views and perspectives in academic texts is a distortion that communicates an unspoken message to students that only certain groups of people matter in history. Organizing the development of lesson plan ideas for teaching Notes challenges this deceptive practice and supplements the critical knowledge project launched by Whitehead, and we hope, empowers teachers to identify diverse and fruitful entry points to learning.


We recognize that the research into the life of Emilie Frances Davis—unlike the multiple streams of research that currently exists about the lives of such black women as Harriet


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