You're doing so many different things here. You're marking sites and marking the not-official-marking of sites. It's astounding, in fact, that so much of an historical trail exists to illuminate Garner's story through the landscape. Virginia's new bill re Green Book sites is promising -- especially with/despite Youngkin as governor. I love the notion of reading text through the landscape, a necessary three-dimensionalization of history.
Thanks for your comment, Tim! I've also been impressed with how much detailed information is preserved--and accessible to people like Hillary who know where the all records exist.
In the case of Garner, her controversial trial guaranteed the preservation of a certain amount of information. What we also see is that, beyond her trial and her relentless enslaver's efforts to hide her from the courts until he could send her to Arkansas, it looks like the record on Margaret runs dry. The story is that she was moved to Mississippi and died in the epidemic, but that information wasn't recorded in official records I've heard of and only came down from her husband Robert when he was interviewed years later.
Robert, by the way, was apparently referred to as Simon by his enslavers, and that kind of de-centering of a person's identity during slavery literally makes it hard to pursue their true stories. There were so many fascinating details I didn't include in the summary.
Hillary is a walking library. She should win a medal. I know there have been at least a couple of nonfiction books about Garner. I've read Beloved four or five times. The figure called Beloved is not the ghost of the novel though. Garner is! This is fascinating work.
Yeah, there is plenty out there about Garner and the trial--I was trying not to re-do that work in a short post and get to the topic of the local presentation over time.
You're doing so many different things here. You're marking sites and marking the not-official-marking of sites. It's astounding, in fact, that so much of an historical trail exists to illuminate Garner's story through the landscape. Virginia's new bill re Green Book sites is promising -- especially with/despite Youngkin as governor. I love the notion of reading text through the landscape, a necessary three-dimensionalization of history.
Thanks for your comment, Tim! I've also been impressed with how much detailed information is preserved--and accessible to people like Hillary who know where the all records exist.
In the case of Garner, her controversial trial guaranteed the preservation of a certain amount of information. What we also see is that, beyond her trial and her relentless enslaver's efforts to hide her from the courts until he could send her to Arkansas, it looks like the record on Margaret runs dry. The story is that she was moved to Mississippi and died in the epidemic, but that information wasn't recorded in official records I've heard of and only came down from her husband Robert when he was interviewed years later.
Robert, by the way, was apparently referred to as Simon by his enslavers, and that kind of de-centering of a person's identity during slavery literally makes it hard to pursue their true stories. There were so many fascinating details I didn't include in the summary.
Hillary is a walking library. She should win a medal. I know there have been at least a couple of nonfiction books about Garner. I've read Beloved four or five times. The figure called Beloved is not the ghost of the novel though. Garner is! This is fascinating work.
Also, I am hoping Hillary will write a guest post about any of the other fascinating and important lives she told me about.
Hillary's Lives.
Yeah, there is plenty out there about Garner and the trial--I was trying not to re-do that work in a short post and get to the topic of the local presentation over time.
Of course.