My Daughter took a trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. While there she took a picture of the story of Margret Garner an African Black woman who killed her daughter after being encircled by slave catchers. Her hope was that she could kill all four of her children and then herself so that her family would not return into a captive unpaid violet servitude.
Margret Garner’s life is what gave Toni Morrison the vision to write the story Beloved very loosely based on the Mother that Margret Garner was.
I immediately said I must share this story once again. In this month of February also known affectionally as “Black History Month” what better story to share than a Love Story. A mother so loved her children she would rather have them dead than return them to slavery. “in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and… I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.” Phillis Wheatley
Margaret Garner was born into slavery on June 4, 1834 on a Maplewood plantation in Boone County, Kentucky. Working as a house slave for much of her life, Garner often traveled with her masters and even accompanied them on shopping trips to free territories in Cincinnati, Ohio.
In January 1856, when Garner, known as Peggy, was 22 and pregnant, she decided to flee the plantation where she was enslaved, in Boone County, Ky. She escaped with her husband and his parents, as well as their four children, and crossed over the frozen Ohio River to the safe house of Elijah Kite, Garner’s cousin, a free black man living in the free state of Ohio. Like hundreds of other enslaved black men, women and children, Garner and her family planned to use the Underground Railroad, which was then at its peak of operation, as the pathway to freedom.
Garner found herself in that fleeting, lightless instant of a mother’s incongruous love on a frigid night, when slave catchers surrounded her cousins’ home and when she made the decision, in one soul-chilling moment, to slit the throat of her 2-year-old daughter rather than return her to slavery.
Garner had already started on the mercy killings of her three other children she intended to kill them all, and then herself. However, the federal marshals bombarded the house to enforce the legal fact that she was not a mother or a wife, but the property of the man who owned her. She was immediately placed in prison. Was slavery a fate worse than death? Garner answers this question with her knife.
After a long trial that lasted several weeks, the U.S. Commissioner ruled that the runaway property must be returned to into slavery. Margaret was sold South. On the way, by ship, an accident occurred aboard and one of Margaret’s children drowned. Margaret survived the event and lived in slavery for another two years, when she died of a horrible Typhoid fever in 1858.
