In an extended interview in 1883 Silvia Dubois, then nearly 100 years old, told her life story to Dr Cornelius Wilson Larison. This volume is an edited and annotated edition of Larison's original text, written is his idiosyncratic phonetic spelling. How much of Silvia's life is history, and how much is folklore, we cannot be sure, but it remains a fascinating view of slave life and the life of the uneducated free black in the North during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.