Who Speaks for Margaret Garner?

Abstract

Reviewed by: Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? LaVie T. Leasure (bio) Reinhardt, Mark. Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. As Class of 1956 Professor of American civilization in the Department of Political Science at Williams College, Mark Reinhardt has quite comprehensively detailed the events of the life of one of America’s most elusive citizens—Margaret Garner. Reinhardt’s attempt at presenting the drama of Garner and her family is commendable and effective. Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? is an apropos question as current-day readers have very little knowledge of the woman who so “brutally” killed her three year-old daughter, Mary, in a determined effort to prevent the return of her daughter to white slave masters. The question is somewhat rhetorical because of the slants of history and media surrounding the trial during the mid-nineteenth century. Rhetorical in that Reinhardt’s compilation of narrative, newspaper articles, interviews, public documents, sermons, and the like, as comprehensive as it is, can not reveal the entire truth of the implications of slavery, the life of Margaret Garner after the trial, nor knowledge of the other Garner children and their whereabouts and outcomes. Can anyone truly speak for Margaret Garner today? Can a spokesperson for Garner emerge with an accurate and unambiguous depiction of Margaret Garner and the act which jeopardized her very life? Reinhardt’s collection is signature in that it houses the very best of resources available regarding Margaret Garner and the court case that ensued as a result of her traumatic decision/impulse to kill her daughter. The collection attempts to historically report/speak for the Garner family and its plight. Reinhardt accurately purports, “The sources in this volume tell us much about contending understanding of slavery and freedom, race and gender, party and region, law and politics at a critical moment in American history” (xi). While Reinhardt does not appear to interpret the story of Garner, he does include in the collection various perspectives and emotional appeals from the media and personal interviews which speak to the brutality of slavery and the ongoing scars left on the bodies of not just individuals, but also on the body of a race of people who endured the dehumanizing injustices of slavery and racism: the human race. He has given readers access to the circumstances, voices, perceptions, prejudices, and compassion of Margaret Garner’s contemporaries. Quite frankly, this volume can effectively serve as a primer on the politics of the antebellum South, racism in America, the “flight-or-fight” syndrome, the female body as literature, the logistics of the “slave” family unit, and on and on and on. There is no question why Toni Morrison found the story compelling enough to base the entire premise of the novel Beloved on the powerful life of [End Page 541] Margaret Garner. As a fiction writer with the innate ability to make her fictional plots feel, sound, and move with such authentic realness, Morrison brought the life of Garner to a contemporary audience. This introduction to Garner, via the character of Sethe, allows readers to almost immerse themselves into the mind of Garner as she willingly risked imprisonment and possible death. It is here where Reinhardt and Morrison merge, for both of these capable and talented writers have attempted to speak for Margaret Garner and to expose, if not criticize, the horrors of slavery and its impact on the human spirit. Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? escorts readers through the chronological events of the apprehension of the Garner family, the court trial, the return of the Garners to slavery, the press battles, and other related events and literature that appeared as a result of the heinous (This word is italicized for the purpose of focusing on the impact of the connotation of words and their influence on the belief systems of readers. Some peers and contemporaries of Margaret Garner question whether the act was as heinous as it was desperate.) act committed by Margaret Garner. The impetus for her escape to Ohio was the monstrous institution of slavery. The concept of slavery must clearly be understood in order to fathom the need for Margaret Garner to have a...