Tragic accounts of Margaret Garner

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is in its essence a fugitive slave’s narrative, a fiction of factual representation based on perhaps the last, and certainly the most shocking, of all the fugitive slave cases that tore the United States apart in the 1850s.

The case of Margaret Garner, a fugitive from Kentucky who killed her daughter in Cincinnati on 28 January 1856 to prevent her from being taken back to slavery, also, italicized the horror of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 in the blood of a murdered slave girl whose name was never recorded.

In Samuel May’s antislavery tract, The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims (1861). The details of Margaret Garner’s tragedy were preserve by a white man active in the abolitionist movement. Also the underground railroad. But Garner never had the opportunity to tell her own story. She had to wait for Toni Morrison to voice it for her.

As anyone who reads Beloved knows. The novel is not solely concerned with recreating the life of a fugitive slave woman who killed her daughter.

Beloved also narrates the interconnected destinies of a community of former slaves who settle in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the early 1870s.