Driven toward Madness. Nikki M. Taylor
of the questions concerning her life, but it gets us a step closer. More than anything, though, this book should simply serve as a guide for how we might reclaim black women’s voices and agency in history when traditional historical sources are scarce, nonexistent, vague, coded, or erased.
A black feminist interpretation of Garner’s life—as an enslaved woman, wife, and mother—offers a more holistic picture of who she truly was and what drove her to kill. It rejects the distortions and fictionalized images of her that essentially reduce her to various symbols—all with their own audiences and purposes: to free African Americans and abolitionists, Margaret Garner was the first widely known black female hero—a potent symbol of slave resistance; contemporary women’s rights advocates tried to use Garner as a feminist symbol; and proslavery folks raised her as a black bogeyman. The real Margaret Garner is nothing close to any of those depictions. Although she had not intended to make a political statement about slavery or women’s rights when she attacked her children, her actions are loaded with political meaning, nonetheless. For one, they impugn her owner as particularly cruel and directly undermine the myth that her enslavement had been mild. Beyond simply emphasizing that she was a whole woman and not just a symbol created by others, interdisciplinary theories and approaches allow me to probe slavery’s legacy of violence—sexual and physical—and psychic trauma and their capacity to render Margaret Garner “mad.” I deal with her as a traumatized black female in historical, social, cultural, and political terms; she carried a history of the trauma of slavery—personal, collective, and compounded—with her on her journey to freedom the day she escaped. Margaret’s history of abuse, enslavement, and denied freedom and humanity burdened her with its full weight as she faced her deepest fear of returning to that life and watching her children grow up in it. Despite such burdens and traumas, Margaret Garner was not destroyed and nor was her spirit. Her family and her hope for freedom for her children were a salve.
Garner’s trauma is at the center of my historical question, so I find it useful to embrace the history of emotions’ assumption that emotions have their own histories. Understanding the historical, social, and cultural context in which these emotional events are produced does get us a step closer to understanding them. How Margaret processed her slave experience, grief, threat of recapture, imprisonment, trial, and subsequent loss on the Ohio River has meaning and significance to this story. Moreover, the history of emotions frees me to make claims about Margaret Garner’s emotions based on my familiarity with her world, life, family, words, and actions. As historian Andrew J. Huebner posits, “Evoking feeling does not have to distract us from our primary goal as historians—to convey the character of human life in the past—and in fact helps achieve it.”6
African American women’s history—especially this black woman’s history—brings together the history of emotions, the history of black corporality, trauma studies, the histories of science and psychology, legal, political, and social history, the history of slavery, and even the history of free blacks. In short, African American women are at the heart of American history and its many subfields.
1
“HOPE FLED”
Then, said the mournful mother,
If Ohio cannot save,
I will do a deed for freedom,
Shalt find each child a grave.
I will save my precious children
From their darkly threatened doom,
I will hew their path to freedom
Through the portals of the tomb.
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 18571
Late in the evening of 27 January 1856, the Garners—an extended family of eight people living on two farms in northern Kentucky and ranging in ages from nine months to fifty-five years—escaped from slavery. The fugitive family included twenty-two-year-old Peggy Garner, who was pregnant; her twenty-seven-year-old husband, Simon Jr., also known as “young Simon”; their four children, Tommy, Sammy, Mary, and Cilla—who were almost six, four, and two years, and nine months old, respectively; and young Simon’s parents, Simon and Mary, both in their midfifties. Peggy and the children were owned by Archibald K. Gaines of Richwood, and Simon Jr. and his parents lived roughly a mile away, on a farm owned by James Marshall. What made the Garners unusual is not that they escaped slavery, but that they did so as an intact family unit.
Thousands of enslaved people attempted to escape slavery every year in the antebellum era (roughly the years from 1830 to 1860), but only a small fraction succeeded. Coming up with a plan of escape, including the means and route of escape, was incredibly challenging for enslaved people. Even a solid escape plan often was not enough to guarantee success; would-be fugitives had to summon a high degree of courage to face the prospect of permanently leaving behind their farms, families, and communities in pursuit of an uncertain freedom in an unknown region. Only the most ingenious, resourceful, determined, courageous, and fortunate fugitives made it to freedom.
Despite how courageous, empowered, resourceful, and determined the Garners were, and how intensely they desired freedom, the sheer size of their party proved to be a hindrance. Larger groups, with few exceptions, rarely made it to freedom. The larger the group, the greater the risks of discovery and capture.2 Most potential runaways knew the risks and would not dare attempt to escape with their entire family in tow. The Garners were an exception.
Not only were entire family units unlikely to escape slavery, but even as individuals the Garners were the unlikeliest of runaways. Most runaways tended to be young men in their teens and twenties, traveling alone. None of the Garners fit that profile except Simon Jr. In their mid-fifties, young Simon’s parents were the antithesis of that youthful profile. Peggy was well into her fifth pregnancy and certainly could not have made the journey without the assistance of her family. As women and mothers, Peggy and Mary were far from typical runaways, as well, because enslaved women did not commonly try to escape slavery. It is not that these women did not want to escape, but because they were the primary caregivers for their children, the thought of leaving them behind was unimaginable; the thought of taking the children with them was equally overwhelming. In other words, children decreased the likelihood that their mothers would escape. Interestingly enough, although women did not escape bondage as often as men, most of those who did were driven out of a fear of losing their children through sale, and those took the children with them.3
Gender ideals and obligations to family and community kept enslaved women tied to their farms and plantations. Ideals about black womanhood pressured women not to leave their children behind if they did flee: the culture dictated that mothers should be selfless and sacrificing. Good mothers, then, did not abandon their children, just as good wives did not abandon their husbands, on a quest for personal freedom. Additionally, enslaved women had fewer realistic opportunities to escape because of their relatively limited mobility. Nineteenth-century gender conventions limited the movements of enslaved African American women and confined them where they lived and worked. They were subjected to what the historian Stephanie Camp termed a “geography of containment.” The only exceptions were those women who traveled with their owner’s family as personal servants or nurses. By comparison, enslaved men possessed far more mobility than enslaved women: they transported products to the market, did errands, carried messages for their owners, worked in cities, and sometimes worked jobs for pay. Moreover, they were more likely to be given passes to visit family members. Enslaved women’s geography of containment was certainly true for the Garner women. Peggy claimed she had been to Cincinnati only once—as a small girl—underscoring how little mobility she had had in her entire life. Mary Garner had been hired out once about five years before the escape; she then spent a year hired out to a man named Cas Warrington, of Covington, Kentucky—a small town just across the river from Cincinnati. During her service to Warrington, Mary enjoyed mobility for the first time in her life. He often sent her to Cincinnati on errands and allowed her to travel there by herself to attend church services. But it had been years since she had enjoyed that mobility. By contrast, young Simon had been hired out several times and had frequently traversed Boone County, northern