Driven toward Madness by Nikki M. Taylor

Author:Nikki M. Taylor [Taylor, Nikki M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, Social Science, Slavery, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Law, Legal History, Modern, 19th Century, Women's Studies, African American & Black, State & Local, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI)
ISBN: 9780821445860
Google: 57D5DQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2016-12-15T03:42:52+00:00

4

“FADED FACES” TELL SECRETS—OR DO THEY?

I am black, you see,—

And the babe who lay on my bosom so,

Was far too white . . . too white for me;

As white as the ladies who scorned to pray

Beside me at church but yesterday;

Though my tears had washed a place for my knee.

My own, own child! I could not bear

To look in his face, it was so white.

I covered him up with a kerchief there;

I covered his face in close and tight:

And he moaned and struggled, as well might be,

For the white child wanted his liberty—

Ha, ha! he wanted his master right.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 18481

Beyond the Garners’ untold physical and psychological abuse, an additional layer of abuse was submerged: sexual. Presumed sexual abuse has been a prominent undercurrent in the histories about Margaret Garner. Allegations about Gaines’s sexual exploitation of Margaret were first raised by Lucy Stone during the fugitive slave hearing. In open court, she had given a speech that laid bare the most controversial core of the entire tragedy—rape and race mixing—when she declared, “The faded faces of the negro children tell too plainly to what degradation female slaves submit. Rather than give her little daughter to that life, she killed it.”2 Stone bluntly stated—as none but a women’s rights advocate would dare—that the Garner children’s light complexions, or “faded faces,” testified to Margaret’s “degradation”—which in the nineteenth century, was a euphemism for sexual abuse. In one declaration, Stone not only had accused Gaines of sexual abuse and insinuated his paternity of Margaret’s children, but also explained that the hell Margaret tried to save her daughters from was sexual abuse. Writing later, Stone’s daughter and biographer, Alice Stone Blackwell, recounted what her mother had shared with her in support of this claim: “Margaret had tried to kill all her children, but she had made sure of the little girl.” She did not want her to “suffer as she had.”3 In short, Stone insisted that Mary’s murder had been a gendered mercy killing, of sorts.

Had Margaret Garner really told Stone that she had been raped by Gaines and that he fathered her daughters, as Stone implied?4 Perhaps; perhaps not. Garner may have felt comfortable enough with Stone to confess these salacious secrets. After all, Stone had an empathetic ear: not only was she a women’s rights advocate and abolitionist, but she fully empathized with Garner’s decision to kill her daughter. But Stone’s accusations complicate this history and lead to at least two plausible theories of what happened to Garner.

The question of whether Margaret Garner had a sexual relationship with Archibald K. Gaines, and if it constituted rape, cannot be known with absolute certainty. The answer cannot be disentangled from nineteenth-century gender and racial assumptions; nor can it be disentangled from how social and economic power—and powerlessness—functioned in nineteenth-century society. At one end of the power spectrum were powerful white men, who wielded unchecked racial, gender, and economic power in southern society—power that was protected and magnified by the legal system. The intersection

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