Carol McCabe Booker: "The Farmer’s Wife"

Carol McCabe Booker will discuss a 19th century muder trial in Southern Maryland as part of the Pratt Maryland Department’s Let’s Talk About Maryland author series.

In the southern Maryland hamlet of Friendship, a young wife and mother is found brutally murdered, her head bashed in with a crude implement. The Farmer's Wife-by Carol Booker, author of the best-selling The Waterman's Widow-suspensefully describes both crime and punishment, recovering the narrative from contemporary newspaper accounts and other archival sources.

From the nerve-testing tension of suspicion, trial, conviction, redemption and retribution, readers get welcome breaks in interludes describing the tenor of the times. Slavery has forged allegiances in a nation still healing from Civil War. Even religious alliances have been affected. Nature shapes the spring of 1877 even more intimately, after perhaps the harshest winter in memory. Southern Maryland is still a practical frontier of frost-pitted roads, subsistence farming, indentured servitude, insecure jails, primitive forensics and not-infrequent lynching.

But lawyers are clever, and the wit-twisting back and forth of prosecution and defense leaves the outcome as uncertain for readers as it must have been for the avid trial-followers of a century and a half ago.

About the Author:

Carol Booker is a graduate of the City University of New York and Georgetown University Law Center. As a journalist, Booker's beat ran from civil rights to the Nigerian civil war. She worked as a writer/editor/reporter for the Voice of America, and freelanced in Africa for Westinghouse (Group W) Broadcasting, covering the Nigerian Civil War and other stories in ten African nations. Her articles and/or photography have also been published in The Washington Post, and Ebony and Jet magazines. After graduation from GeorgetownUniversity law school, she became legal counsel to public and international broadcasting entities, the environmental giant Greenpeace, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She is a (retired) Member of the Bar of the District of Columbia, the State of Maryland, and the Supreme Court of the United States.

About the Program:

• Doors will open to registered attendees at 6 pm.
• A local bookseller will be on-site and have books available for purchase.
• Free parking vouchers are available to program attendees who park at the Franklin Street Garage (15 W. Franklin Street) after 4pm. Ask Pratt event staff for your parking voucher prior to or after the program.
• There is no registration required for virtual attendance, simply visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Facebook or Youtube page.

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