Sylvia Dubois

Dubois was born in Sourland Mountain, New Jersey, although the exact year is contested. Dubois herself said she was born March 5, 1768. Her father, Baird, had a different owner than Dubois and her mother. As a child, Dubois lived in Flagtown, and at 14 years old, she moved to a town called Great Bend on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to work on the tavern of her owner, Dominicus "Minna" Dubois. Moreover, he describes Dubois as industrious, "capable of great endurance," and strong. According to Larison, Dubois enjoyed making children afraid of her by telling them that she would kidnap children and swallow them alive. Dubois also drank heavily, danced, and fought with both men and women. While Dubois described her owner Minna as agreeable toward her, her mistress was abusive and domineering. Dubois described her as "the very devil himself." In one instance, her mistress whipped her so severely that she gave Dubois scars that she would have for the rest of her life. In another, Dubois claims that the mistress cracked her skull with a shovel. ==Freedom==

In 1808, when Minna was out on grand-jury duty in Wilkes-Barre, the mistress had Dubois scrub the bar-room because guests were over. Dubois did not do the scrubbing to her liking, and the mistress hit her. In retaliation, Dubois struck the mistress, and she fell and landed against the door. ==Silvia Dubois: A Biografy of the Slav who Whipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom==

C.W. Larison, the writer of Sylvia Dubois' biography Silvia Dubois (Now 116 Yers Old) A Biografy of the Slav who Whipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom, was a physician and former educator interested in documenting local history. Historian Jared C. Lobdell edited, translated the phonetic spelling, and wrote an introduction for a new publication of Dubois' biography by Larison. ==References==

• Berthold, Michael C. "Dubois, Silvia." Oxford African American Studies Center. Accessed April 11, 2016. http://www.oxfordaasc.com/article/opr/t0001/e2557?hi=0. • Berthold, Michael C. "'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." MELUS 20, no. 2 (1995): 3–14. Accessed April 11, 2016. doi:10.2307/467619. • "Dubois, Silvia." Oxford African American Studies Center. Accessed April 11, 2016. • Fulton, DoVeanna S. "Tale-Bearing and Dressing Out: Black Women's Speech Acts That Expose Torture and Abuse by Slave Mistresses in Our Nig, Sylvia Dubois, and The Story of Mattie J. Jackson." In Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery, 41–59. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. . • Fulton Minor, DoVeanna S., Reginald H. Pitts, Louisa Picquet, Mattie J. Jackson, and Cornelius Wilson Larison. "Sylvia Dubois: A Biography." In Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts: Three African American Women's Oral Slave Narratives, 131–93. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. • Larison, Cornelius Wilson, and Jared Lobdell. Silvia Dubois: A Biografy of the Slav Who Whipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. • Loewenberg, Bert James, and Ruth Bogin. "To Knit Together the Broken Ties of Kinship: Silvia Dubois." In Black Women in Nineteenth-century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings, 37–47. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.