Driven toward Madness. Nikki M. Taylor

minds and spirits.

      Driven toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio uses the real history of Garner to demonstrate how slavery can and did cause interior and exterior injuries. This book reminds the reader in painstaking detail what life must have been like for Margaret Garner as a powerless, unprotected, and enslaved black woman who bore children in slavery. Such women not only endured various forms of physical and sexual abuse but were susceptible to the emotional traumas of living under the constant threat of violence, rape, familial separation, persistent racist insults, and other forms of degradation. Slavery guaranteed that these women perpetually lived in a state of vulnerability, fear, and physical and emotional pain. Enslaved women mostly endured that damage quietly and internally, but at times, their response erupted violently, outwardly and even publicly, in ways that defy comprehension or prevent our sympathy. This book is concerned with those eruptions of deadly violence and their implications about enslaved women’s damaged interiors. It is also concerned with a socially unacceptable type of slave resistance and what it may suggest about enslaved women’s power or powerlessness.

      Slavery caused trauma. The human responses to that trauma are the concerns of this project. Margaret Garner’s case underscores the fact that those responses are not always rational or bloodless. Some of these responses to trauma are, in fact, gruesome and incomprehensible, as hers were. It is easy to conclude that she was mentally ill, but by doing so, we redirect the conversation away from the conditions and experiences that may have triggered such acts, as well as away from the political import of said actions. Margaret Garner resisted in dozens of ways throughout the course of this case and managed, ever so faintly, to tell her very powerful story.

      Unfortunately, psychological and spiritual injuries rarely attract the attention of historians. Because the spirit and soul are considered the realm of the metaphysical or spiritual, intellectuals often discount or dismiss injuries to them. Yet there is a direct relationship between racist and sexist insults, sexual and physical assaults—injustice in any form—and psychological pain. The multiplicative and compounded effects of those injuries can “murder” the soul. Historian Nell Irvin Painter, borrowing from the discipline of psychology, uses an interpretive concept of “soul murder,” which is a useful framework to explain the experiences of enslaved woman in general and Margaret Garner specifically. According to Nell Painter, sexual abuse, emotional deprivation, physical and mental torture can be “compounded . . . as a series of hurts the weight of which shatters, or wounds, the soul.” Soul murder, then, is manifest in depression, anxiety, self-mutilation, or suicide attempts, or the equivalent of what psychologists call posttraumatic stress disorder.¹

      Historian Wilma King asserts that soul murder can make survivors self-destructive or can lead to expressions of extreme hatred toward or a desire to hurt the abuser or violence against others.² In other words, soul-murdered people can be driven to actions that are often desperate, violent, irrational, or deadly, like murder. This psychoanalytical framework better explains Margaret Garner’s actions than any other. The concept of soul murder is, by no means, an attempt to excuse or justify those actions, but to better understand them. For example, through this framework, one can better understand why she attempted to kill her children instead of Archibald K. Gaines—the man who owned her. Nor is soul murder an attempt to posthumously psychoanalyze Margaret Garner. Instead, the soul murder conceptual framework simply positions physical, sexual, and mental trauma, abuse, and torture as central to this story of slavery, escape, and resistance. Slavery caused real human beings to suffer in various ways, some of which were measurable and others of which were not evident until an eruption of violence occurred. Trauma theory, then, can produce a historical, political, and cultural understanding of the physical and emotional injuries that enslaved women such as Garner suffered.

      This book also grapples with the history of black corporality as it intersects with slavery. The late historian Stephanie M. H. Camp in Closer to Freedom crafted a brilliant interpretive framework that is quite useful in explaining Margaret Garner’s enslavement. Camp contended that enslaved people figuratively possessed three “bodies,” or three ways that they experienced slavery corporally. The “first body” was a site of domination and mastery. It is in this body that they were sexually and physically abused and commodified. This book explores ways in which enslaved people were owned and rented, worked and driven, beaten and abused, injured and broken. In addition to those experiences, Garner’s dominated body—especially her work productivity and reproductivity—enlarged her owner’s wealth, status, and power. Camp’s “second body” insists that the body functioned as “a vehicle of terror, humiliation and pain.” Garner was soul murdered in her “second body.” Camp’s “third” body, as a source of pleasure and enjoyment in the face of bondage, is not relevant to this project.³ If we expand the concept of three bodies, we might consider a fourth body: one that engages in resistance and violent eruptions in response to trauma. Driven toward Madness privileges Margaret Garner’s corporal slave experience in her first and second body and her response to it in her fourth. In particular, it underscores the abuse, trauma, fear, terror, grief, brokenness, and hopelessness that led to her soul murder while enslaved in Richwood, Kentucky, while also emphasizing the hope of escape and freedom and the subsequent disappointment and desperation when faced with recapture.

      This book also uses Margaret Garner’s story to underscore how slavery damaged African American women in their roles as women, wives, and mothers. As Patricia Hill Collins has argued, “African-American women’s experiences as mothers have been shaped by the dominant group’s effort to harness black women’s sexuality and fertility to a system of capitalist exploitation.” Moreover, slavery despoiled how Margaret Garner practiced motherhood; it despoiled her image of herself as a mother, damaged her bonds with her children, denied her the right to protect them, and even undermined her authority over them. In sum, slavery corrupted everything about motherhood and prevented a full expression of the ideals of womanhood. It also damaged black marriages and families and troubled the bonds between family members. Slavery tried to make a mockery of the Garners’ marriage: it refused their rights to live under the same roof or fully enjoy the intimate bonds of marriage when and how they desired. Slavery destroyed the confidence that a child born to a wife was her husband’s child. In short, slavery debased Margaret Garner’s family inside and out.⁴

      My overarching goal is to bring the historical Margaret Garner and her family into sharper focus by underscoring their trauma, as a unit and as individuals. As an enslaved woman, she left only faint traditional historical footprints herself: she could not read or write and left no diary, letters, or personal papers. None of this was her choice, but was a consequence of enslavement. So it is exceedingly difficult to know exactly what she thought or believed. Perhaps this is why Steven Weisenburger concluded in Modern Medea that her life was “nonnarratable” until she escaped Kentucky and committed murder.⁵

      We would be remiss to accept that the story of this enslaved and traumatized woman is “nonnarratable” until she did something unthinkable. This book provides one example for how we might fill the gaps and silences in historical sources—not with fiction, but with traditional and nontraditional historical sources, other disciplines, methods, and interpretive frameworks. Although Margaret Garner is one of the few runaway slaves ever to testify at his or her own fugitive slave hearing, there are no extant official transcripts of that hearing. Hence, this book relies on the transcriptions of the proceedings of the fugitive slave hearing recorded in the local newspapers, other newspaper accounts, indictment and requisition orders, as well as the manuscript collection of John Pollard Gaines, Margaret’s original owner. I utilize interdisciplinary approaches to bring the real Margaret into sharper focus. Anchored in history, this book also makes use of black feminist theory, trauma studies, pain studies, genetics, history of emotions, and literary criticism. Each of these approaches sews a layer of flesh onto a figure who has been rendered an apparition by the sources and raises the decibels of a voice that had been silenced before and after the murder. At the end of this book, a real-life woman in her proper historical and cultural context should emerge. In these critical ways and others, this book differs from Weisenburger’s imaginative and entertaining narrative in Modern Medea, which mixes history, drama, and historical fiction. Driven toward Madness has defied naysayers and journeyed to some difficult