"The Peals of Her Terrific Language": The Control of Representation in 'Silvia Dubois, a Biografy of the Slav Who Whipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom.'

In the bumptious, mythologizing obituary that prefaces the Schomburg Library edition of C. W. Larison's Silvia Dubois, A Biografy of the Slav Who Whipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom (originally published in 1883), the brilliantly Rabelaisian career of the work's titular heroine is limned: She is said to have been 122 years old "beyond doubt." She was for years the slave of a man named Dubois. Then she was sold to a man who kept a hotel, where she became famed for her feats of strength and for the prize fights in which she engaged. One day she got angry at her mistress and nearly killed her. She picked up her child and fled across the Susquehana and tramped all the way to Sour Land Mountain, where she lived the rest of her life. Her fondness for fighting, for liquor, and her profanity soon made her notorious. All her children died but the youngest; who remained with her mother, and is eighty years old. It is said that she inherits all her mother's pugilistic prowess, and has maimed many men.(1) In this folkloric resume of might and gigantism, Dubois spurns her culture's tyrannies of decorum, station, and femininity. Her transgender combat and independent maternity reject male prerogative and protection; her very public notoriety (her fighting, drinking, and vernacular outspokenness) overturns both the expected obeisance of the "good" slave and the genteel anonymity of the "true" woman. As carnal centenarian, Dubois seems to defy temporality itself. Dubois's narrative, however, actually unfolds as a colloquy between herself and C. W. Larison, a New Jersey doctor, educator, and publisher who transcribes and fashions the interview, and it is the nature and problematics of this colloquy that I wish to consider here. In part, Silvia Dubois might be annexed to a larger tradition of American captivity writing that plays out analogous embroiling dialogues between custodial editors and textualized captives: Cotton Mather and Hannah Dustan, for example, or William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. This particular text, however, is unique for its specific negotiation and staging of the great hegemonic divide between an unlettered black woman and a professional white man. While Dubois's equivocal yet startling self-empowerment occurs within the authoritative male frame she disrupts, Larison's more predictable attempts at maintaining superintendence underline not only some inveterate masculine will to power, but also the anxieties that are the bedrock of his various professionalisms. These anxieties also typify larger Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction anxieties of race and class. Larison, a zealous advocate of spelling reform, printed Silvia Dubois in his own phonetic alphabet of some fifty letters with diacritical markings for use in the classroom, and the encounter between Larison and Dubois is best experienced through the book's special orthography. Although Jared C. Lobdell, who edited the Schomburg Silvia Dubois, does append a facsimile of the original to the volume, his own version of the text translates rather than reproduces it. Lobdell chose to normalize Larison's spelling, to omit his preface, to abridge a few of his remarks, and to rearrange the order of the book's sections (3-4, 18-19). Although such editorial decisions enhance the text's accessibility, Lobdell does not account for this methodology, and his Silvia Dubois both flattens and fractures the colloquy and Larison's peculiar narrativization of it. Lobdell is not misguided in emphasizing "the material for social history" that Silvia Dubois provides or in reminding that Dubois's reminiscences are "good reading" (19, 20), but in Larison's original text a very literary social history and the machinations behind the folklore and the fun are much more clearly discernible. Contradiction coheres in Larison's very sympathies for Dubois. He admires and fears the "force" that she epitomizes (3, 4).(2) At least nascently, Larison is able to articulate a relatively progressive theory of history, relational and materialist, that values the specificity of a narrative such as Dubois's: "no history of our country can be complete, nor of much value as a record of the lives of a people that does not chronicle, at the same time, the doings of the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the proud and the humble, the exalted and the abject, the virtuous and the vicious" (101). …