A Note on Methodology

Before I begin the text of this exhibit, I wish to give a word on methodology. The following text follows the spirit of “critical fabulation,” which according to Saidiya Hartman, is the reconstruction of a narrative in the gaps of the archive when those gaps themselves commit injustice against the memory of those that they omit. In other words, the “fictions of history” are not enough for those whose memory silently lives in the gaps of historical record (Hartman 9). Although I risk to “trespass the boundaries of the archive,” the following narrative of the murder of Eugene Daniel is reconstructed by what exists in newspapers, birth certificates, death certificates, draft cards, census reports and land deeds in Chatham County, North Carolina in conjunction with other narratives of lynchings in the U.S. by reporters like Ida B. Wells-Barnett (Hartman 8). While the following narrative is not completely factual in an archival sense, it is indeed completely true.