Fall 2002
Volume 29, Number 1
Who Speaks for Margaret Garner?
Slavery, Silence, and the Politics of Ventriloquism
Mark Reinhardt
Can the Fugitive Speak?
To
seek the words of antebellum American slaves is to confront a paradox, for
those words are at once everywhere and nowhere in the archive of the era. On
the one hand, as Toni Morrison remarks, "no slave society in the history
of the world ever wrote more—or more thoughtfully— about its own
enslavement."1 The evidence can be found in letters, speeches,
interviews, and formal autobiographies; where else but in the United States of
this period can one encounter so much "slave testimony?" Though it is
constrained in various ways by the discursive conventions of a white
supremacist society, this testimony offers invaluable insights into slaves'
lives and beliefs, hopes and fears. When, about four decades ago, historians
finally began to take enslaved people's own thinking seriously, they radically
transformed the historiography of slavery.2 On the other hand, the volume of slave
writing shrinks considerably if terms are strictly defined; it is not the slave
but the ex-slave, looking backward, who testifies in most documents. By both
law and custom, the slaveholding South advanced the principle that "`the
slave could only be known through his master,'" denying slaves the right
and the means of speaking for themselves.3 Much of the structure of
American slavery was predicated on that denial; slave personhood was to a
significant degree constituted by this kind of silence. As D. L. Smith argues,
"The slave, discursively, is always by definition the object of some
subject," an object "whose own voice is necessarily absent from
public discourse."4 In the constitutive silence of American
slaves, Gayatri Spivak's claim that "the subaltern cannot speak"
receives an all too perfect demonstration.5
As
liminal figures, fugitive slaves occupied an especially complicated position
within this paradoxical framework of speech and silence. Fugitives who had
eluded capture in the North were ex-slaves, experientially, but still slaves by
law; they could speak out against the system they had left behind, but doing so
increased the risks of discovery and forced return. […] Yet a captured
fugitive might gain access to lawyers who contested those principles and even
to reporters, sermonizers, pamphleteers, and political activists capable of
disseminating information about the case. In these moments of legal conflict
and national publicity, white abolitionists saw a need and an opportunity to
give slaves a voice.
This
essay is about the speech acts that were performed in that conjuncture and
their peculiar echoes in contemporary criticism. My subject is Margaret Garner,
a woman who, in 1856, found herself at the center of one of the most
symbolically charged and widely discussed of all fugitive slave cases.
[…] In recent years, however, the story has regained a certain
familiarity; when Morrison's alchemical imagination transmuted a brief
newspaper clipping about the case into Beloved, she initiated an academic excavation
of the long-forgotten events.8 […] Repeatedly, […] those
who discuss the case end up speaking for Margaret Garner, putting words in her
mouth and claiming access to her inner life. Concentrating on antebellum
abolitionist representations but turning, eventually, to contemporary
commentary, I explore that propensity to ventriloquize, with its triple source
in the general problem of subaltern discourse, the more particular politics of
American slavery, and the unspeakable horror of what Margaret Garner did. […] Examining the persistence of ventriloquism into the present
raises questions about how best to engage that culture today. I will begin by
telling a Garner story of my own.
The Story
Late
on 27 January 1856, at Richwood Station, in rural Boone County, Kentucky, a
group of eight slaves slipped into the cold night and made a bid for freedom.
One member of the group, twenty-one-year-old Robert Garner, had stolen two
horses and a sleigh. Joined by his parents, Mary and Simon Garner, he drove to
a neighboring farm, where they collected Robert's twenty-two-year-old wife,
Margaret, and her four young children, Tom, Sam, Mary, and Cilla. Then they
were off, headed for the Ohio River, sixteen miles away. Well before dawn,
having eluded the night patrols that swept the highways, they reached the town
of Covington, on the Ohio's bank. Turning the horses loose and abandoning the
sleigh, they crossed the frozen river on foot. At Western Row, they entered
Cincinnati, in the free state of Ohio.12
The
family headed two miles into town to the house of their relatives, the Kites,
freed blacks who had formerly lived in Kentucky. They entered the house by
daybreak. For the first time in over twelve hours, the fugitives were hidden
from view. Margaret's cousin, Elijah Kite, set off to get help from Levi
Coffin, a prominent white "conductor" in the underground railroad. At
about this time, however, the Garners' owners, Archibald K. Gaines and Thomas
Marshall, arrived in Cincinnati and obtained a warrant from federal Commissioner
John Pendery and the assistance of federal marshals. The group of whites had
staked out the Kite house by the time Elijah returned. Shortly afterward, they
approached the house and tried to force their way in. The Garners resisted.
Robert Garner shot one deputy marshal with a pistol, forcing him to retreat.
But soon enough the fugitives, outnumbered and overwhelmed, yielded.
It
was as the whites were about to enter that Margaret Garner began her attempt to
kill her children. Before the men found her, she had succeeded in killing
two-and-a-half-year-old Mary by slitting her throat. One local paper described
the aftermath from the marshals' point of view:
In one corner of the room was a
negro child bleeding to death. His [sic] throat was cut from ear to ear, and the blood was spouting out
profusely, showing that the deed was but recently committed. Scarcely was this
fact noticed, when a scream issuing from an adjoining room drew their attention
thither. A glance into the apartment revealed a negro woman holding in her hand
a knife literally dripping with gore over the heads of two little negro
children, who were crouched to the floor....They were discovered to be cut
across the head and shoulders, but not seriously injured, although the blood
trickled down their backs....The negress avowed herself the mother of the
children, and said that she had killed one, and would like to kill the three
others rather than see them again reduced to slavery.13
News
of the murder and capture ran swiftly through the city and subsequently became
the focal point of the national attention that would persist in the press for
more than two months and in speeches and pamphlets through the outbreak of the
Civil War.14 As the
white men began to take the fugitives to the marshal's office, they had to
contend with a large and threatening multiracial crowd. Once the party arrived,
the marshals' custody was fiercely challenged by city sheriffs, and the two
forces fought over the issue through the following day. And even as Archibald
Gaines and Thomas Marshall, the Kentucky owners, asserted their claims of
ownership through the procedures established by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,
Cincinnati's organized antislavery forces came to the Garners' aid. Prominent
abolitionist lawyers took up their case, beginning by questioning the federal
government's right to detain the fugitives.
[…]
On
26 February [the judge] read [the] decision to a courtroom packed with white
and black spectators. Summarily dismissing all antislavery Constitutional
claims, but accepting as plausible the evidence that at least some of the
Garners had previously been in Ohio with Gaines's and Marshall's consent, he
announced that the case boiled down to one question: "`does the fact of
the temporary visit [to Ohio]...affect the rights of the claimant?'" His answer was an elaborately argued,
No.
[…]
The
problem is not that the discourse around this case obeyed conventions, as all
communication does; had Margaret been given more freedom to speak for herself,
she could not have found some form of pure immediacy, a mode of expression
innocent of the scripts around her. What could be more stylized than the slave
narrative? It is well known how
that monumental politico-literary achievement of nineteenth-century black culture
enmeshed fugitives in the linguistic, moral, and economic constraints of white
patrons and readers, not least of which was that cultural constellation we call
sentimentalism. Yet, in that very entanglement, the slave narrative exemplifies
the opportunities lost along with the stifling of Margaret's voice. The most
artful of slave narrators, such as Douglass and Jacobs, found ways to contest
and transform those moral frameworks while maintaining moral sympathy and to
solicit political solidarity even while underscoring the effects of social
distance. The type of racial condescension that suffused much sympathetic white
commentary on the Garner case received some of its most sophisticated
challenges in this subtly convention-stretching autobiographical literature.60
What
constitutes a responsible telling?
Morrison can help, here, for the question lies at the core of Beloved.
Nowhere is the
issue's centrality more obvious than in the stagy repetition that marks the
final two pages: "It was not a story to pass on....It was not a story to
pass on....This is not a story to pass on" (B, pp. 274–75). The shift in the
third iteration, from "It" to "This," implicates Morrison's
own narrative choices in her novel's anxious engagement with the politics of
storytelling. "Pass on," of course, means many things: to transmit;
to decline; to die; to walk by (perhaps, even, in the way that someone walks
through a crowd while "passing"). The text plays on all of these
senses, resisting both the illusion that we can simply walk away from the
nation's racial history and the compulsion to repeat that history yet again:
Morrison suggests that she has neither forgotten nor perpetuated, unaltered,
received versions of slavery's story. This suggestion poses a question about the
book it concludes: how does this novel tell differently? Writing in order to "rip [the]
veil" off of the slave narrative, Morrison explores interior life, probing
psychic wounds and depths that were passed over by antebellum discourse.75 But her writing is as much about
withholding as unveiling. She confronts readers with their will to possess or
master her characters through the acquisition of intimate knowledge. Beloved
repeatedly
underscores slavery's silences by replaying them, calling attention to what has
not been said and what, in the world of this novel, cannot be said—to "unspeakable
thoughts, unspoken" (B, p. 199).76
[…]
For
all their shortcomings, antebellum and Civil War tactics of speaking for slaves
were employed with a sense of political urgency, fueled by the clear need to
make the case against slavery persuasive to the broadest possible audience. The
current conjuncture is hardly comparable. The political justifications that can
be offered for those earlier acts of ventriloquism have no application to
today's very different struggles over how to remember America's racial
holocausts and whether to acknowledge the formative role of slave labor in the
nation's political and cultural economy. What purpose can speaking for Margaret
Garner serve now? Ventriloquism
still has its pleasures and rewards, of course. Inventing words for her lends
intensity to any narrative about this woman who has inspired so much curiosity
and commentary. Uncle Tom has had many children, indeed, and I suspect that contemporary
readers and writers of slave stories still desire those "thrills"
described by Lydia Maria Child. Clearly, though, those who have worked to
reconstruct this case (also) want something more than that. We would like our
critical labors to rescue Margaret from antebellum arrogance and carelessness,
to reclaim what was lost by those indifferent to how she articulated her own
experience. Resisting the record established by the powerful, we listen for
lingering echoes of Margaret Garner's subaltern speech. We want to bear witness
and, by doing so, to make it possible, finally, for her to testify herself.
Unfortunately, that testimony is irretrievable. The echoes have died. Those who
claim to hear them are encountering no more than thrown voices, whether their
own or those of earlier witnesses. Amidst all the stories told about her,
Margaret Garner remains an enigma, obdurately resisting all efforts to know her
well. Faced with this resistance, contemporary critics can do no more than, as
Giorgio Agamben puts it, "bear witness in the name of the impossibility of
bearing witness."78
1.
Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory," in Inventing the Truth: The
Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston, 1987), p. 109.
2.
John Blassingame argues for the centrality of slaves' perspectives and notes
the tradition of neglecting them in the introduction to his edited volume; see
John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches,
Interviews, and Autobiographies (New Haven, Conn., 1977), pp. xvii–lxv. Of
course, there were important exceptions to this tradition from Du Bois onward,
but I think Blassingame is right about the main currents of academic history.
Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972) was an early
landmark of historiographical shift that followed; another was George P.
Rawick's publication of the interviews with former slaves that had been
conducted under the auspices of the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s; see The
American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, ed. George P. Rawick, 16 vols. (Westport,
Ct., 1972–73).
3.
William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United
States Congress (New York, 1996), p. 256. The remark was made by Congressman Francis
Wilkinson Pickens, objecting to a motion that the House receive a petition
allegedly written by twenty-two slaves.
4.
D. L. Smith, "Re Telling Slavery" (unpublished draft, 1990, on file
with this author), p. 910. Used with permission. My account of the paradoxes of
fugitive speech is indebted to Smith's insights.
5.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana,
Ill., 1988), p. 308. The quoted remark is of course one strand in a complex
argument; it is with good reason that Spivak's title ends with a question mark.
8.
Among the academic commentaries, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 63–71; Avery
Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, 1997), pp.
137–90; Stephen Middleton, "The Fugitive Slave Crisis in Cincinnati,
1850–1860: Resistance, Enforcement, and Black Refugees," Journal
of Negro History 72 (Winter–Spring 1987): 20–32; Angelita Reyes,
"Rereading a Nineteenth-Century Fugitive Slave Incident: From Toni
Morrison's Beloved to Margaret Garner's Dearly Beloved," Annals of
Scholarship 7 (1990): 465–86; and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, "`Margaret
Garner': A Cincinnati Story," Massachusetts Review 32 (Fall 1991):
417–40, hereafter abbreviated "MG." The most thorough academic
history of the case written before Beloved was Julius Yanuck,
"The Garner Fugitive Slave Case," Mississippi Valley Historical
Review 40
(1953): 47–66. Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of
Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (New York, 1998) is the first comprehensive
history. I analyze the case in my forthcoming book The Strange Case of
Margaret Garner: A Brief History with Documents (Minneapolis, 2003).
12.
The local coverage began on the evening of the Garners' capture and continued
throughout the duration of the case. As I will discuss below, the coverage was
extensive, prominent (usually on the front page), and, on many key details,
contradictory. My narrative in this section of the article relies primarily on
the reports on the case that ran daily in the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, the Cincinnati Daily
Gazette,
the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, and the Cincinnati Daily Times and, secondarily, on the
reporting in the Louisville Daily Courier and the Covington (Ky.) Journal. Because my (highly
compressed) narrative of events is only a prelude to my analysis of how
Margaret Garner has been ventriloquized, I will cite specific stories only when
directly quoting them or when explicitly marking the contradictions among them.
I offer a more thorough discussion and a substantial sampling of these intial
reports on the case in my forthcoming book, The Strange Case of Margaret
Garner.
13.
"Horrible Affair!" Louisville Daily Courier, 30 Jan. 1856. This
reprints a story initially run under the same heading in the (now unavailable)
29 January Cincinnati Daily Columbian.
60.
See Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, and Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). For the best
and most thorough analysis of how slave narrators challenged the discursive
constraints with which they worked, see Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The
First Century of Afro-American Autobiography (Urbana, Ill., 1986).
75.
Morrison, "The Site of Memory," p. 110.
76.
Ironically, Weisenburger invokes this line even as he ventriloquizes Margaret
on her deathbed; see Weisenburger, Modern Medea, pp. 279–80. For
illuminating accounts of how the novel thematizes its own narrative choices,
see Doris Sommer, Proceed with Caution, When Engaging Minority Writing in
the Americas (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 160–84; George Shulman, "American
Political Culture, Prophetic Narration, and Toni Morrison's Beloved,"
Political Theory 24 (May 1996): 295–314; and Gordon, Ghostly Matters, pp. 137–90.
78.
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York, 1999), p. 34.
It is possible that, somewhere, awaiting discovery or simply unknown to me,
there is new documentary evidence that more directly records Garner's words and
thoughts. Without such material, however, acts of witnessing that ignore
Agamben's caution can only present words that (to quote Connor's definition, again)
"appear to issue from elsewhere than their source."
Mark Reinhardt is professor of political
science and American studies at Williams College. He is the author of The
Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (1997), The Strange
Case of Margaret Garner: A Brief History with Documents (2003), and coeditor of Kara
Walker: Narratives of a Negress (2002). "Who Speaks for Margaret
Garner?" is part of a book in progress on the interrelated problems of
speaking, truth, and power in American political culture.