Savage Conversations
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“Savage Conversations takes place somewhere in between its sources, between sanity and madness, between then and now, between the living and the dead. It pushes past the limitations of textual sources for telling indigenous history and accounts of insanity.” —Barrelhouse Reviews
May 1875: Mary Todd Lincoln is addicted to opiates and tried in a Chicago court on charges of insanity. Entered into evidence is Ms. Lincoln’s claim that every night a Savage Indian enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp. She is swiftly committed to Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Her hauntings may be a reminder that in 1862, President Lincoln ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas in the largest mass execution in United States history. No one has ever linked the two events—until now.
Savage Conversations is a daring account of a former first lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Written in the form of a poetically infused play, Howe's illuminating and challenging work draws its dramatic energy from the hanging of 38 members of the Dakota tribe in Mankato, Minn., on Dec. 26, 1862 the largest mass execution in American history under the order of Abraham Lincoln. The narrative is set primarily in the Bellevue Place Sanitarium in Batavia, Ill., in 1875 and features three characters: Mary Todd Lincoln, whom her son Robert had institutionalized there earlier that year; Savage Indian, a personification of the executed Dakotas and their tribe; and The Rope, an image of the U.S.'s tools of execution. Basing their interactions on Mary's reported delusions of an Indian spirit who mauls her nightly, Howe (Choctalking on Other Realities) choreographs an intimate pas de deux between Mary, who excoriates her husband and family for their neglect, and the Savage Indian, a symbol of national guilt and injustice. Although revisionist in scope, Howe's drama taps emotional undercurrents that course imperceptibly through conventional historical narratives. "We are a pair, you and I,/Relics to be studied," says Mary to her Native American counterpart. Readers will be intrigued by the light this work shines on incidents behind the scenes of history.
