Mary of Ill Fame

A fictional story inspired by a newspaper clipping from the 1830s about a trans woman named Mary Jones who was arrested for stealing a man’s wallet. The film is set in Seneca Village, an autonomous settlement of free Blacks and Irish immigrants located on what is known today as Central Park where Jones, a gifted conjurer who can see visions of future events and alter reality with her well crafted spells, fends off the white city officials who want to take control of the land she and her community call home. Here, Tourmaline answers the call of “critical fabulation” theorized by the influential historian Saidiya Hartman, inventing the narrative that doesn’t exist in the historical archive for Jones.