New from Oxford University Press: University of Texas at Austin). A description from the Press:
Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside
Philadelphia in 1887, investigators honed in on two black suspects: Mary
Tabbs, a married, working class, black woman, and George Wilson, a
former co-worker who Tabbs implicated after her arrest. Eventually
police identified the victim as Wakefield Gaines, a biracial man who was
Tabbs's paramour. The crime and ensuing trial--which spanned several
months--featured in the national press. It brought otherwise taboo
subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the
black community to public attention. At the same time, the mixed race of
the victim and one of his assailants exacerbated anxieties over race in
the post-Reconstruction era.
Drawing on detectives' notes,
trial and prison records, local newspapers, and archival documents
historian Kali Nicole Gross reconstructs this ghastly case and analyzes
it against broader evidence of police treatment of black suspects and
domestic violence within the black community. Gross highlights how one
woman was implicated in and beat the criminal justice system in this
adulterous love-triangle gone wrong.
A few blurbs:
"Kali Gross has written a riveting narrative of the crimes of an
ordinary but notorious woman in late nineteenth-century urban America.
She does not flinch from the harsh truths her subject forces her to
face. She sketches a portrait with the complexity and sensitivity it
deserves. The book bristles with lessons for understanding vulnerable
communities and their engagement with the criminal justice system
today." --Tera Hunter
"This is a
disturbing book, not only because the story swirls around a most
gruesome murder, or because Hannah Mary Tabbs executed her crime with
cold-blooded resolve and cinematic flair, or because its spellbinding
narrative will leave you breathless at times. Rather, this is a
disturbing book because Kali N. Gross disturbs all of our inherited
categories, proving once again that woman, man, black, white, agency,
evidence, truth, even justice, are too small for the historical subjects
whose lives we wish to know. This is why Kali N. Gross is one of the
most original and imaginative historians of her generation." --Robin D.
G. Kelley
More information is available
here.
