Kali Nicole Gross - Hannah Mary Tabbs and the disembodied torso: a tale of race, sex, and violence in America

Instead, her manner of self-presentation draws attention to the fact that both these narratives and her autobiographical persona are disorderly.

Rhonda Frederick, Creole Performance

When I stumbled across the story of a murder and dismemberment that occurred in Philadelphia in 1887, complete with a love triangle and press coverage across the country, I knew that it wasnt your average African American historical tale. However, I do want to highlight the reasons I find Tabbs so compelling.

Rather than simply bowing to the social mores of her time, ideals such as chastity and morality, Hannah Mary Tabbs lived by a different set of values. Her life and daily interactions evidenced someone who appeared to adhere to mainstream notions of respectability but instead employed deceit, cunning, and cold-blooded ruthlessness to control those around her, both in her home and in her neighborhood. Her ability to slip seamlessly between displaying deference to wealthy and middle-class whites whose houses she cleaned while violently coercing other African Americans in her own fraught effort to be self-determining amazed me. Tabbss maneuvers seemed to expose the inherent disorder within restrictive categories such as race, gender, and geography. In many ways, her role in the gruesome murder afforded a multidimensional historical rendering of a black woman and the complexities of her life that defied the customary narratives of suffering, resistance, and, ultimately, redemption.

These narratives, which dominate much of African American history, are rooted in structural and institutional biases. Historical research methodologies largely mute the experiences of African American womenparticularly those of poor and everyday black women. Enslavement and its legacy severely stunted their ability to access the written word, silencing many voices, save the most elite and learned with enough education and resources to create and save documents such as personal papers, letters, and memoirs. Barring this, most records about everyday black women exist only because they mark a moment when a black womans life intersected, or collided in some way, with white people. Typically in positions of authority, whitessuch as slave owners, employers, doctors, journalists, lawmakers, teachers, and prison administratorshave unwittingly left behind many of the sources that scholars rely on to reconstruct information about the black past. Historians have done some incredible work in finding ways to tell black womens stories; often they have done so by writing against one-sided historical records that would otherwise map these women only in the barest sense.

Still, through these materials we have come to know black women as laborersunfree or impoverished domestics and field hands. We know them as victimsof rape, sexual exploitation, and other forms of violence. We encounter these women as problemssubjects that shame the race or are used to pathologize it. We understand them as displacedthose denied civil rights, protection, access, and justice. We glorify them as freedom fightersresisting enslavers and corrupt authority figures. We do our best to animate themas clubwomen, as mothers and wives, as sexual beings, as queer, as entrepreneurs, as artists, as sanctified, as activists, and as teachers and legislators.

Indeed, historians of African American womens experiences have done much with very little. Yet even as I have laughed, cried, and cheered aloud while learning about black womens tribulations and triumphs, I have also found myself yearning for histories that permit black women to be fully visible, fully legible, fully human, and thus vulnerable, damaged, and flawed. Most of our storiesmy own research includedare often one-dimensional portraits. We piece together fragments of lives and eventsgood, bad, and traumaticbut rarely do we stumble across figures or sources that sustain richer accounts. Few records reflect the historical difficulties that bisected black womens lives at the same time they reveal in nuanced ways how black women managed to survive between heroism and heartache. We have precious few examples of black women who lived as people with depression and joy, with desire and love, as well as contempt and rage. We do not have many stories of individual women who lived for themselves and did not put the race or their children or families first. And we certainly do not have tales about African American women who were very good at being very bad. Enter Hannah Mary Tabbs.

Though Tabbs is appealing not just because she is a kind of antihero. Equally compelling is the fact that while the circumstances of white supremacy and antiblack violence encapsulated Tabbss life, the case and all of its macabre elements do not depict her or other African Americans as existing solely in opposition to or engaging with white people. Rather this crime opens a window onto violence within the black community and shows how that violence is deeply rooted in the pervasive racism of the criminal justice system.