A Mother's Arithmetic

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. This history is a story of emancipation, not of a dramatic escape on the Underground Railroad nor of whips, chains, or barking dogs on the chase. In contrast to Garner, there were no trials, no speeches, no editorials, no publicity of any kind. Elizabeth Clark Gaines calculated her way out of slavery, following a route that took decades and led to Gaines's freedom and the manumission of her children. Their emancipation was her proudest legacy. Records of the manumission of slave mothers and their mixed-race children are not rare in American archives, suggesting that Gaines's story, as remarkable as it is, is more common than we think.

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 adulthood—Peter 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, née Betty, plumbed the resources available to her—family, church, literacy, white allies, and the law—to 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 Clark Gaines used the law to free herself and her four children. Her success met with hard resistance, both in Kentucky, where signed papers concerning enslavement meant nothing if a slave master refused to honor them, and in Cincinnati, where, as Elizabeth Clark Gaines's grandson Peter later put it, "Nowhere has the prejudice...