Mary E. Frederickson - Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner

Elizabeth Clark Gaines's Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Mary E. Frederickson

In 1991, after the publication of Beloved, Toni Morrison addressed an audience of a thousand historians at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. After a stirring introduction by Darlene Clark Hine, the crowded conference ballroom grew quiet as Morrison spoke of the importance of remembering those who brought you over, those who made it possible to get to the other side. She had taken the process of making sense of the past to an entirely new level in Beloved, a novel that pivots on the tension between keeping the past at bay and the act of remembering. Leveraging history with the power of fiction, Morrison transformed Margaret Garner, the enslaved Kentucky woman who escaped with her husband and children across the Ohio River from Covington, Kentucky, to Cincinnati, Ohio, on a freezing January night in 1856, into Sethe, who kneads memory like bread dough, turning it over and pushing it back, over and back, again and again.

Elizabeth Clark Gaines, the protagonist of the story told in this chapter, traversed the same River Jordan forty years before Margaret Garner's treacherous passage. Crossing the Ohio River from Covington to Cincinnati in 1817, Gaines was a manumitted slave whose history has been hidden in archives, wills, census records, city directories, court documents, newspaper accounts, and notes from an interview conducted with her grandson Peter H. Clark in June 18, 1919.

Elizabeth Clark Gaines's story speaks directly to three questions of major concern to historians, anthropologists, and feminist scholars. First, what do the experiences of enslaved women in the United States tell us about sexual servitude? Second, how useful and reliable is oral history in reconstructing a history of gendered resistance? And finally, what do stories about enslaved mothers and their children tell us about resistance and the meaning of freedom? Margaret Garner's life offers one historical template; the life of Elizabeth Clark Gaines provides another. In sharp contrast to Margaret Garner's brilliant flash of resistance that was ultimately unsuccessful, Elizabeth Gaines's calculated, manipulative, and persistent route to freedom unfolded with no public notice. No one has written about her life. Court documents recording her name, including her manumission papers, remained buried in the archives for almost two hundred years, leaving her thoroughly disremembered. The interview with her grandson held the key to this reconstruction of Elizabeth Clark Gaines's story. At age ninety, he spoke about his family history in eloquent detail. His account of names, places, relationships, and dates, stretching from eighteenth-century Virginia to nineteenth-century Kentucky and Ohio, began with his once-enslaved, mixed-race grandmother and his white slaveholding grandfather. Her life history, the forms of resistance she employed, and the trajectories of her children's lives bring to life a multifaceted way of negotiating enslavement and emancipation that stretched across a lifetime.

The hero of this story went by three different names: born a slave named Betty in 1783, she took the name Elizabeth Clark at the time of her manumission at age thirty-one in 1814; five years later, in 1819, she changed her name to Elizabeth Clark Gaines when she married a free man of color named Isom Gaines. Betty lived as an enslaved woman who, according to her grandson Peter, bore five children fathered by a white slave owner named Clarke. Four of these children lived to adulthoodPeter Clark's father Michael; his sisters, Elisa and Evalina; and his brother, Elliott. One of Betty's five children apparently died in infancy. Elizabeth Clark survived as a free woman of color who built an independent life for herself; after age thirty-six, as a legally married woman, Elizabeth Clark Gaines gave birth to three more sons, fathered by Isom Gaines. Her seven children, four of whom were born in slavery, became influential leaders, active church members, significant abolitionists, and accomplished businessmen. Their children became teachers and homemakers whose children attended public schools, went to college, and trained as physicians and musicians. They inherited a world that first took shape in their great-grandmother's imagination.

At each stage of her life, Elizabeth Clark Gaines, ne Betty, plumbed the resources available to herfamily, church, literacy, white allies, and the lawto navigate her way to freedom. In the process, legal battles ensued, first with the man who enslaved her for twenty-four years, and then with his eldest son. Elizabeth

Betty

Betty was born in 1783, in eastern Virginia's Hanover County. Evidence of her birth appears in a ledger meticulously kept by a young white man named John Clarke. Her mother, Lucy, was said to be a mulatto; her father, a Black. Her parents had worked as slaves for William Clarke, a wealthy man who ran a thriving import business and inn. When William Clarke died intestate, shortly before Betty's birth, his son John Clarke was appointed executor of his father's complicated legal affairs, a process that eventually took twelve years. Betty's brother Edmond was born in 1789; her sister Sarah, in late 1793. Each time, expenses paid To negro Rachel for laying Lucy were carefully recorded in the Clarke book of expenditures.