Anarcha Archive News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Enslaved woman who's the focus of a book called "Say Anarcha" is buried in the woods of King George on land that once was a plantation.

Say Anarcha takes its title from an enslaved woman out of Alabama who, starting in her teens, not long before the Civil War, had her uterus torn apart repeatedly, in most cases without anesthesia, in experimental surgery by J. Marion Sims, a white doctor hungry for reputation. The man went on to international acclaim, while the woman returned to servitude worse off than before, leaking rank fluids and never out of pain. This is the crime at the core of J.C. Hallman’s new masterpiece of revisionist history.

Hallman has also embedded Anarcha’s story in gloriously rich detail from the nineteenth century, ranging from comet showers to train derailments to international espionage in the court of Louis Napoleon. That panorama alone makes the book a riveting read. But despite the scope and the glitter, Hallman never allows us to lose sight of Anarcha: her exploitation, her humanity, the embodied Black womanhood that left her so exposed to others’ whims and schemes. Hallman’s novelistic writing and brisk pacing had me eagerly turning pages, alternately aghast at and elevated by this story...