Publisher's Weekly Review
Taylor (America's First Black Socialist), professor of African-American history at Texas Southern University, rehabilitates the image of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery and, in 1856, murdered her infant daughter rather than see her taken back into bondage. A number of abolitionists saw Garner's actions as heroic, but popular opinion excoriated her as an unnatural woman and a monstrous mother-a "Modern Medea." Garner's story largely disappeared from the public eye until resuscitated through Toni Morrison's celebrated 1987 novel Beloved. Taylor focuses on the psychological damage that Garner and other enslaved people suffered, and on the extent to which her actions resulted from this unending bodily and spiritual abuse. Deploying perspectives from feminist analysis and trauma theory, Taylor vividly portrays the sufferings Garner and her family endured under slavery and in their attempt to escape from it, placing their experiences in the wider context of the antebellum Midwest. For those familiar with the experiences of enslaved women in relation to sexuality, motherhood, and violence, little here will come as a surprise, but readers of Morrison's novel will likely appreciate the ways that Taylor illuminates the gendered experience of enslavement and the dialectic by which the victims of violence may in turn become its perpetrators. Illus. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Choice Review
On the night of January 27, 1856, eight members of the Garner family fled Richwood, KY, for freedom across the Ohio River in Cincinnati. The odds were against them--the group was too large. Simon, the husband and father of the family, was a known figure in the area, and the fugitives never got out of the city. By the morning of the 28th, they had been apprehended by slave catchers, who would see them remanded to the owners. At that moment, Margaret Garner took a knife and killed her older daughter, Mary, and then wounded the other children. The act of killing one's own child caught the public's attention and to this day fascinates and confounds people attempting to explain Margaret Garner. In this brief book, Taylor sets the context, reviews the known actions, and applies a genuinely multidisciplinary set of tools to understand a mother maybe driven to madness. The author peels away layers of analysis of Garner as archfiend or feminist and abolitionist hero to discover what she calls an intensely personal act, even if one fraught with political consequences. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --R. Bruce Way, The University of Toledo
Library Journal Review
The events delicately detailed in Taylor's (African American history, Texas Southern Univ.; Frontiers of Freedom) work may be familiar to some as the subject of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. Taylor presents here a well-written and thoroughly researched account of Margaret Garner, an African American slave who attempted to escape from Kentucky to the free state of Ohio with her family in 1856. The story of Garner, who killed one of her children to prevent them from a life of slavery after being captured in Ohio by their owners, is quickly related by Taylor. Much of the book is a reexamination of Garner's trial and an examination of the conditions of her traumatic bondage. The author's background as a historian of the period brings a fresh look at this unfortunate event. VERDICT Taylor crafts a book that should be read by all who have an interest in understanding the roots of slavery and oppression of women during the pre-Civil War era. It should also be read by those seeking to understand the depth of pain and depravity faced by women living under the tyranny of American slavery.-Amy Lewontin, Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
