BCALA NEWS Volume 41, Issue 3
Summer 2014
51
Tubman, Charlotte Forten, Ida Bell Wells Barnett, or Maria Stewart, to name just a few—is just beginning. It is organic and will continue to shift and grow and be corrected and disputed as new information is added and new conclusions are made. This is the work that comes with being a forensic herstorical investigator, the ongoing feelings of concern that your story has no end and only a comma can be placed where you desperately want a period to rest. Instead of waiting until everything about the life of Emilie Frances Davis has been written, we decided to invite teachers and students into the beginning of this conversation, fully aware that by having them participate in and add to this growing body of knowledge, they are starting the work of becoming active agents in their own knowledge process. We submit that Emilie Davis’s life can be viewed through a transdisciplinary lens and that teachers can work both across disciplines and beyond their own discipline to help students connect the life of a freeborn nineteenth-century black woman to their own.
J.A.: What are some lessons that you think readers today can learn from the writings of Davis and your accompanying notes?
K.W.: Since Emilie’s entries cross so many fields, I believe that readers can access her work and from multiple perspectives to gain a new insight into life at this time. More specifically, readers can examine nineteenth-century writing practices; dating practices within the free black community; Emilie’s work as a seamstress from making dresses by hand to learning how to use a sewing machine; her activist work with the Ladies Union Association; the roles and experiences of people, especially women, in the North and South during the Civil War. They can scrutinize literacy in the lives of African Americans during the time when the Emancipation Proclamation was released while exploring a multitude of ways that Emilie and the free black community pursued and claimed political, social, and economic. They can also explore what life was like for a young, single, free Black woman in an effort to complicate and disrupt the familiar stories about the Civil War that fail to include people of color. They can consider how Emilie’s diary entries were a precursor to the contemporary forms of diary writing found on social media (i.e. blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and by rethinking and repositioning Emilie Davis’s diary entries as Tweets and status updates, they can begin to explore both the importance of diary writing and appreciating and recording ones day-to-day activities as being a part of a larger, national history. Finally, readers can use her entries to explore how Emilie may have thought about the problem of race and class in America.
J.A.: I’m sure you’d love your book on every library shelf, but specifically, what types of libraries and what types of individual readers do you think should invest in this work?
K.W.: Given that Notes draws upon the scholarly traditions from history, with a 6-chapter historical reconstruction of her life that explores both the nineteenth century free Black community and the life of a freeborn literate young women who worked as a domestic and a seamstress; literature, by comparing her with other Black diarists from her time including Ida B. Wells, Charlotte Forten, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Amos Webber and by examining her diary as a socially, racially and gendered non-fiction text; from linguistic and rhetorical perspectives, she studies Davis’s discourse about her interpersonal relationships, her work, and external events in her life in an effort to understand how she used language to construct her social, racial and gendered identities; and in feminist studies, by using a Black feminist lens to explore her entries; and documents editing, by doing a word-by-word transcription of her diaries with annotations—I was able to investigate her diary as a complete literary artifact and in terms of her specific daily entries.
With that in mind, I think that Emilie would work in a number of different environments: a) in the public library, in both the Humanities section, African American Studies, and for teenagers; b) in college libraries, as a resource for anyone who is conducting research on the Civil War, the free black community, or nineteenth free Black woman; c) in school libraries, as a resource for middle and high school teachers and students; and, d) in the libraries of museums that highlight the
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