Politics & Prose at Busboys and Poets 14th & V welcomes Nikki Taylor to present their new book "Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio."
Margaret Garner died in 1858 and was largely forgotten until Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved fictionalized the fugitive slave’s killing of her infant daughter to spare the child from a life of slavery. In her own time, Garner was variously demonized and praised for her desperate act of resistance, and Taylor, in her comprehensive profile of the escaped slave, frees Garner from the distorting images of both the monster and the saint. Using trauma studies and feminist criticism to fill in history’s blanks—Garner left no written records and any transcript of her courtroom testimony has been lost—Taylor, author of America’s First Black Socialist and the chair of the history department at Howard University, focuses on Garner’s actions as the response to slavery’s ongoing physical and emotional damage, with special attention to the gendered experience of slavery.
