She Did the Best She Could
Review by Chitown Kev
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio
by Nikki M. Taylor
Ohio University Press, 152 pp., $22.95 (paperback)
In 1974, Middleton A. Harris, a collector of African American memorabilia, worked in tandem with a team of collectors, editors, and designers (including Random House book editor Toni Morrison) to publish The Black Book, a “large scrapbook” of "photographs, newspaper clippings, illustrations, and various other African American memorabilia." Even a cursory glance at the portions of The Black Book available online shows The Black Book (or at least the 35th anniversary edition) to be a handsomely curated print documentary of African American life that remains more than worthy of study and meditation whether by scholars or even, say, over an afternoon tea where one might see The Black Book sitting on a coffee table.
Nowadays, The Black Book is best known for its entry on page 10; a February 22, 1856 newspaper headline in The American Baptist titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child.” It tells the story of the prison visit of a Reverend P.S. Bassett, a Baptist minister, to a fugitive slave named Margaret Garner, who was imprisoned for killing her daughter, Mary. That “scrapbook” entry, of course, was the primary source and inspiration for Toni Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved. Since the publication of Ms. Morrison’s novel, Garner’s story has inspired a film (an adaptation of Beloved starring Oprah Winfrey), a 2005 opera called Margaret Garner that played to packed houses in Cincinnati, Detroit, and Philadelphia, and a historical account of the Garner case written by Steven Weisenberg.
While there are certainly a number of aspects of the Margaret Garner case appealing to artist-types, Dr. Nikki M. Taylor, newly appointed chair of The History Department at Howard University and the author of Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio, posits that even in Mrs. Garner’s lifetime, the case was so chockful of “things deemed unspeakable, dishonorable, and ugly” that a central element of the Garner story remains underappreciated: the trauma or what Dr. Taylor (following historian Nell Irwin Painter) labels the “soul murder” that Margaret Garner (and most enslaved black women) must have suffered; a trauma that, in Margaret Garner’s case, manifested itself in the near-decapitation of her two year old daughter, Mary, by her own hands mere hours after the Garner family escaped from enslavement in Boone County, Kentucky across a frozen Ohio River to freedom in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The first three chapters of Driven Toward Madness consists largely of the narrative of Margaret Garner, the background of the Garner family and the backgrounds of the slaveholders, Archibald K. Gaines and James Marshall (the owner of Margaret’s husband, Simon Jr. as well as Simon Jr.’s parents). A number of specific and peculiar aspects of slavery in Boone County, Kentucky immediately catch one’s eye. For example, the Garners were enslaved on small farms as opposed to huge slave plantations, therefore the popularly known binary of “house slave” and “field slave” is probably not applicable for such cases as small farms frequently “could not afford to have separate structures for their enslaved workers” therefore, enslaved families on small farms often lived in “the main family structure” with their owners and would be “quickly missed” in the event of an escape. Another curious aspect of slavery as experienced by the Garners is the apparent mobility of enslaved people even on the “free soil” of Cincinnati, Ohio; Simon Jr.’s mother, Mary, for instance, occasionally attended the AME church in Cincinnati and Simon Jr., himself, frequently accompanied Thomas Marshall, the nineteen-year old son of his owner James Marshall, to Cincinnati and it was on one of these trips, in December 1855, that Simon Jr. was able to visit his wife’s relatives; a visit that proved to be critical in the Garner family’s eventual escape.
Dr. Taylor’s highly readable prose, largely unencumbered by much of the academic “jargon” that usually accompanies a book that crosses disciplinary boundaries, serves Driven Toward Madness especially well as she depicts Garner’s killing of her daughter, Mary:
“Grabbing a butcher knife from the counter, she rushed toward her children, grabbing two-year old Mary and declaring, Before my children are taken back to Kentucky I will kill every one of them!” While the men were trying to keep the posse from gaining entrance, Margaret snatched up two-year old Mary and quickly cut her throat, right to left. She practically decapitated her daughter with a cut that was estimated to be four or five inches long and three inches deep...” (p.20)
Dr. Taylor’s flat, naturalistic, relentlessness description of Margaret Garner killing her daughter (and attempting to kill her other children) simply sticks with you. That description also gives the later, more speculative chapters of Driven Toward Madness, rooted in disciplines like “black feminist theory, trauma studies, pain studies, genetics, history of emotions, and literary criticism,” more credence and results in the inevitable conclusion that Margaret Garner’s murder of her two-year old daughter is actually...quite logical.
While interdisciplinary in nature, one central unknown and unknowable question permeates the later chapters of Driven Toward Madness: the paternity of Garner’s children. The testimonies of noted abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone during and after the Garner trial (testimonies that Dr. Taylor feels somewhat “diminished the women’s movement” and, in a way, “turned Garner into a caricature”) laid before an open court and abolitionist and suffrage meetings what everyone knew and no one could acknowledge; the physical and sexual abuse of enslaved black women. The evidence that such abuse had probably occurred laid on Margaret Garner’s own scarred face and in the “faded faces” of three of Garner’s children (including Mary, the child she killed), who were described in various news reports of that time as “mulatto” (as was Margaret Garner, herself). To Dr. Taylor’s credit, she presents the available evidence within the appropriate historical and legal contexts while stipulating that neither Margaret Garner nor those that talked to Garner while she was imprisoned said anything definitive about the paternity of her children one way or another.
Driven Toward Madness is even more unsettling than my multiple readings of Morrison’s Beloved. The boundaries between slavery and freedom, sanity and madness, were then (and are now) every bit as thin as a sheet of ice on the Ohio River on a freezing February night. Furthermore, the awareness of those boundaries can and do get lost over time, lending stories like Margaret Garner’s to becoming a broad range of narratives from tall tales to novels to dramas. To be sure, Dr. Taylor’s Driven Toward Madness is, in a sense, yet another narrative, but it is a narrative with the distinction that finally removes Margaret Garner, in part, from the pantheons of superheros and monsters and tries (largely successfully) to restore and celebrate Garner for simply being a human being who, in Garner’s own words, simply did the best she could.
Amended 4:20pm 4.18.17 CK
Amended 1:34am 4.19.17 CK
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Stacey Patton, author of a new book about black America’s relationship with corporal punishment, says it’s time to understand it as abuse, not Slate: Against Spanking
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In her new book, Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America, Stacey Patton explores the deeply embedded practice of corporal punishment for black children, both within and outside of the home. Patton, an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Morgan State University, drew on decades’ worth of research and interviews with adult victims of what she considers childhood abuse and traced the history of spanking to European parenting styles that were eventually passed on to black American slaves. Ultimately, she advocates fiercely against hitting children in any way, as well as the embrace of such parenting tools within black culture.
Patton spoke with me by phone for almost an hour. In our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, she discussed her own abuse as a child, the pushback she’s received from those within the black community, and her struggles to find the right tone for the book.
You write that many adults who grew up having experienced corporal punishment in one form or another are in denial when they claim to have “turned out fine”; you see them as the survivors of “unrecognized trauma.” As someone who was beaten by your own adoptive parent, when did you first identify yourself as abused, and how did that recognition come to be?
It happened when I was 5 years old, the first time my adopted mother backhanded me in the mouth. I had never been hit before, and so when she did this, my whole world came crushing down. It was a person I was supposed to trust and depend on for nurturing and safety, and from that moment I felt unsafe around her. And it continued to escalate as I got older. She started using objects, and I knew it was wrong. I didn’t have the language as a child to explain it, but it never felt good, and no matter what I heard from her, from the community, from folks at church—it didn’t feel like protection. ... So, I never normalized it, and maybe that was because I was adopted, and I never felt any emotional connection to her.
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One of the leaders of the resistance The Root: Auntie Maxine on Trump: ‘We’ve Got To Stop His Ass’
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U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, “Auntie Maxine” to us, continues to speak truth to power.
On Saturday, the California Congresswoman kept it real and succinct as she spoke on President Donald Trump: “We’ve got to stop his ass,” Rep.Waters said to a cheering crowd.
As noted before, Mama Max takes no tea for the fever, and, as a 78-year-old black woman in America, she done ran out of f—ks to give about 30 years ago.
According to Mic, Rep. Waters hosted an event/fundraiser at socially conscious watering hole, Busboys and Poets, a day before D.C.’s tax march.
The event was actually called “Auntie Maxine’s Tax Day March Open Mic Reception.”
The mic was indeed open, and Waters let her thoughts pour on our current commander in chief.
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A reported 4,000 Somali nationals are in the pipeline for being deported to a homeland suffering a severe humanitarian crisis.
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Among the thousands of people Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detain, arrest and deport there are a reported 4,000 Somali nationals in the deportation pipeline.
The current surge in Somali deportations is likely the result of a backlog of detainees that grew during the Obama Administration. Throughout Obama's presidency, documents to travel to the country plagued by civil war, famine, the terrorist group Shabab and U.S. airstrikes were hard to come by. Now that the Somali government has an embassy in Washington, D.C., ICE is asking officials to issue these documents more frequently. But the Somalis being deported—including those who were denied asylum—are returning to a country that remains in conflict.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The Song which is America is harmonized by many diverse voices. Some of those voices sing America from an unbridled joy deep within them, while others sing America from the constant anguish brought by generation after generation suffering under the manacle and the lash. It is a sad refrain sung from that inner pain brought from the loss of ancestry and Home.
The melodies of both interweave and play a coda on the landscape and the Soul of America.
It is on that landscape that the first faint strains of the Song that is America became the forceful tacet on an American Exceptionalism, an entitlement borne from a eurocentric ethnic certainty, a certainty of purpose, and an almost religious devotion to save those not touched by our benevolence. It is the chorus singing a rose is a rose is a rose but a cotton blossom cuts and infects deeper. Trust fund babies from the gated white enclaves slumming among the rabble can escape the Commune when the sharing gets too rough, and that riot of color on that lysergic afternoon might have been the firebombing of that block of Philadelphia row houses, or maybe even Watts burning a hole in that plainsong carried from the interior landscape to the West, and an earthquake in Sylmar syncopated to that measured cadence called, the Song of America.
My ancestors weren’t hippies, cotton
precluded fascination with flowers.
I don’t remember communes, I remember
ghettos. The riots were real, not
products of hallucinogens. Free love had
been at Redbones since black unemployment
and credit saturation.
The white women my mother cleaned
for didn’t notice she had changed. I guess
it was a small event, a resurrected African
jumping out the gap in her front teeth. I
guess it looked like a cockroach; that’s
what she was supposed to have, not dignity.
My mother just couldn’t get excited
about the Beatles, those mops she swilled
in ammonia everyday on their heads. Besides,
she didn’t work like a dog but like a woman;
they aren’t the same. The hair was growing long
for the same reasons Pinocchio’s nose did.
I can think only of a lesbian draping
crepe paper chains over my head to make a
black Rapunzel possible; that’s how a white
woman tried to lift my burdens. At the time
I didn’t reject her for being lesbian or
white but for both burdens. That was when
I didn’t want Ivory soap to be what
cleaned me, made me presentable to society.
All the suds I’d seen were white, they still
are but who cares? I’m more interested in
how soap dwindles in my hand, under the faucet.
I’m old enough to remember blocks
of ice, old enough or poor enough.
I remember chipping away at it, broken
glass all over the floor. Later in the
riots, the broken glass of looting tattled
how desperate people were to keep cool.
There are roses now in my mother’s yard.
Sometimes she cuts them, sets them in Pepsi
bottles throughout her rooms. She is,
I admit, being sentimental. Looting her
heart. My father who planted them is gone.
That mop in the corner
is his cane growing roots.
-- Thylias Moss
"Botanical Fanaticism"
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