In an extended interview in 1883 Silvia Dubois, then nearly 100 years old, told her life story to Dr. Larison. This edition preserves Larison's idiosyncratic phonetic spelling, with annotations.

This book may be mostly history or it may be mostly folklore, but it is in any case well worth reading. It is a colloquy an extended interview- with a long foreword by the interviewer and two appendices, one of them mine, and it is the product of a meeting between two 'originals' of the sort that seem to have been commoner in the last century than in this.

This book may be mostly history or it may be mostly folklore, but it is in any case well worth reading. It is a colloque - an extended interview - with a long foreword by the interviewer and two appendices...the colloquy took place on January 27, 1883 on Sourland Mountain, near the border between Hunterton and Somerset counties in New Jersey....What we have here throughout is the material for social history, particularly for that part of social hisory deasling with slave life and the life of the uneducated free black in the middle-states part of the north, from the end of the eighteenth century to as late as 1883.