Margaret Garner's story has resonated for the past 164 years. It's one she never got to tell

Ice that capped the Ohio River was thick underneath Margaret Garner’s feet. Gusts of biting wind blew through her garments, an infant wrapped to her chest and a baby in her belly. 

The inky night enveloped her family. Robert, her husband, their three other children and his parents. It was their escape from enslavement.

They blazed through the winter stillness in a stolen sleigh from Maplewood Farm in Richwood, Kentucky, that, at the time, was owned by the politically prominent Gaines family. The glacial, half-mile stretch to the banks of the Ohio was the last leg to freedom. 

The Garners reached the free state on Jan. 28, 1856, safe inside the Cincinnati home of her cousin Elijah Kite.

Day broke and the Garners' safety shattered. U.S. marshals surrounded the home, headed by Archibald Gaines, the man who said he owned her. From a window perch, Robert drew a pistol. And drove a bullet into a marshal’s finger. Marshals toppled the Garners, and the men rushed in.

And there Margaret stood. Her hands bloodied. She’d made a decision only a mother could. She’d slit the throat of the 2 1/2-year-old toddler she’d ushered through the night. Her other children bore slices across their heads and shoulders.

“It was my own,” she’d tell The Rev. Henry Bushnell later. “I knew it was better for them to go home to God than back to slavery.”

These were her words. She’d done “the best she could,” she would repeat to Bushnell three times in an interview.

But it was her own story that Margaret Garner never got to tell. One puzzled together by everyone else. 

Abolitionists would call her heroic. Historians and archaeologists would spend decades studying her tale. Garner’s story became the inspiration of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Beloved." It moved civil rights leaders. It transcended the common slave narrative. It’s a story relevant today for a nation having to reckon with its own racism.

Garner's harrowing story is one people from Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky know well. There's a mural commemorating the Garner family on the flood wall near the Roebling Bridge. A marker for her in Covington. Her history memorialized at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Her life gave way for African American women. The likes of Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hammer and Diane Nash.

Hers is a story that resonates loudly today. When George Floyd called out for his mother while he was dying, it was Black mothers who understood most keenly the pain. Many white mothers heard, of course, but there is an invisible but real thread between Garner and Mrs. Floyd. Save my child. Any way you can. 

"Black women have been holding families together and maintaining courage and they've also been fighting for liberation their whole lives," John C.K. Fisher, Kentucky Commission on Human Rights field supervisor, said.

"Margaret Garner is one of those women."

...

From the very first day, Floyd's mother had no control of what happened next. How her story and the story of her child would be told and woven into the fabric of this country. 

Neither did Garner.

Her name is ink on paper on Jan 29, 1856. It was a Tuesday, the day after the family's arrest under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced the return of slaves to their owners regardless if they'd escaped to a free state.

Inconsistencies flashed in a month of case-related coverage. The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, a paper associated then with Democratic political views, reported Margaret Garner had brandished a shovel, one she used to slit her child’s throat. Others reported a kitchen knife in her hand. They incorrectly gendered the 2 1/2-year-old child as a boy, not the real toddler named Mary. 

Headlines such as "Stampede of Slaves: A TALE OF HORROR: An Arrest by the U.S. Marshal" tantalized readers anxious for the retelling. Words like "excitement" were used to describe white onlookers during what would transpire as one of the longest and most pivotal of slave trials. 

The language was jarring but not uncommon, even unremarkable for the time, Mark Reinhardt, Williams College political science department chair, noted.

"Part of it is the confidence that white narrators and empowered actors had in making claims about circumstances involving Black people," he said. "There was massive asymmetry in who is empowered to describe whom."

He knows this, because it's the crux of his 2010 book, Who Speaks for Margaret Garner?

And in the Enquirer's position at the time, Hiram Robinson, a pro-Southern editor at the paper and the federal marshal who headed the Garner's eventual return to Kentucky, had power over Garner's narrative.

On Jan. 31, 1856, the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer wrote:

"Abolitionists regard the parents of the murdered child as a hero and heroine, teeming with lofty and holy emotions, who would rather imbue their hands in the blood of their offspring than allow them to wear the shackles of slavery, while others look upon them as brutal and unnatural murderers."

But it was never about the death of the Black child, Mary Garner. The Gaineses, and all those who still were Southern-leaning, wanted the Garners back in Kentucky.

That way, she would be sure to be punished.

If Margaret Garner was prosecuted for the murder of her child in Hamilton County Court, it was believed she could've had a chance at freedom. Abolitionists wanted her tried in Ohio for that reason. The Gaineses objected. It was the Garners' chief counsel John Jolliffe who navigated these murky waters.

Along with abolitionists, Jolliffe was the Garners' voice. Slavery, he'd assert in his argument only a few years before the Civil War began, was unconstitutional.

"Sir, your decision in this case is of the utmost importance – on it rests the peace of this nation," Jolliffe said to Commissioner John Pendery. "I hear the groans of the dying and the clash of steel against steel. If you decide against these defendants this Union cannot stand, the people would rise en masse and rend the Union asunder."

It would take almost two weeks until the voice of the woman whose life was at stake resonated through the courtroom. 

"Peggy," everyone called her when she testified.  

She didn't speak of her dead child. 

She spoke, as she may have been directed, of her past trips to Ohio. She had been there before under the Gaineses permission. Did her trips to the free state, under the Gaineses willing eye, mean she was free at the time?

Later, the abolitionists spoke for her. It's true that abolitionists sought out Margaret Garner, though their accounts weren't finite, Reinhardt warned. Those who met Garner and wrote about her, didn't respect her enough to report accurately. Many were patronizing.

Still, the abolitionists were courageous. They devoted their lives to the "right side of the struggle." But they felt superior to both Black people and Black issues, he explained. Everything was on the abolitionists' terms.

Ironically, the same group of people who lauded Margaret Garner's fortitude, ultimately silenced her.

Jolliffe lost his fight. Margaret Garner was indicted on charges of destruction of property. Gaines' property. Her daughter.

The Garners returned under the Gaines' torment.

Back to the haunts of Maplewood Farm.

...

What was once Maplewood Farm is still tucked along a winding road in Richwood, Kentucky. Tidy rows of soybean crops line the pastoral stretch. Decades ago it was platted with tobacco crops. More than a century and a half ago the crops were tended by slaves.

Now, the farm sits in near silence, scorching in July heat. A breeze rustles maple trees that scatter the property – the root of the farm’s namesake.

Garner's story isn’t too far away to see, to feel. Its remnants aren’t hidden. They’ve been preserved on the farm that sits in stillness just 30 minutes from Downtown Cincinnati. 

A sun-bleached wooden structure is what remains of the farm. The alabaster two-story home it was once connected to burned down when it switched hands from John P. Gaines to his brother, Archibald.

Inside is barren and dilapidated with only a rusted stove in the front room, but the building’s story is not exhausted

This is the kitchen where Margaret was believed to have worked.

She may have kept living quarters there. Her family may have stayed in a slave cabin across the way, where an archaeologist identified remnants years back. A white-steepled church a quarter of a mile down the road may have been where she worshipped.

But Garner’s life on the farm is historically vague. 

Some say she'd worked for the family's matriarch, "Old Mrs. Gaines." The court didn't talk much about her responsibilities, but rather, the permission it granted her to travel with the Gaineses to Cincinnati.

Others write about her rape, most likely forced by slaveowner Archibald Gaines. 

The skin of the 2 1/2-year-old and the infant Margaret clutched to her chest in winter's bone-chill was "nearly white," reporters wrote. A bright and rosy flush on the baby's milky cheeks.

Her children's complexions revealed what Margaret was never permitted to voice. An unspoken dynamic of slavery, Carl Westmoreland, a senior historian at the Freedom Center, said.

It was another reason why the Southerners found it difficult to face Margaret Garner's reality. She killed her child, not in the hands of animosity, but with a mother's protectiveness, Reinhardt said. And that child was more than likely a product of rape. 

"Even the North, they named it all the time, but there were ways that the depth of that was hard for the white press to talk about," Reinhardt said. "How do you talk about it as it implies rape or sex with a master?"

They didn't. They never wrote of Garner's agony.

The rape by white men. The death of her toddler. The grip slavery had on her life.

After the1856 trial, Margaret Garner returned to Kentucky and was later sold to a Gaines family member to work on a Mississippi plantation. In 1858, she died of typhoid fever. She was only 24.

...

Over a century later, in 1970, best-selling author Toni Morrison was perusing newspaper clippings from the 1800s.

It was Margaret Garner's story buried in those pages that stirred her.

Something about that stayed with Morrison.

Another decade passed, Morrison left her job as a fiction editor at Random House, and she began to piece together the bones of "Beloved."

Her fictional character Sethe draws likeness to Garner. The two both cut the throat of their third child. They're resilient. Courageous. And they reflect a mother's love.

"It was absolutely the right thing to do," Morrison would tell reporters. "But she had no right to do it."

Garner had been described by journalists in 1856 as "calm" even "serene."

 "She was not frothing at the mouth, she was not a madwoman," Morrison recalled to The New York Times in 1987. She'd read it in the clippings.

It was Garner's only decision that was her own during her two decades spent a slave.

But Sethe's voice is different. It's potent. And unlike Garner, Sethe goes on to live in Cincinnati, haunted by the ghost of her daughter.

"I didn't do any more research at all about that story," Morrison told the New York Times. "I did a lot of research about everything else in the book Cincinnati, and abolitionists, and the underground railroad – but I refused to find out anything else about Margaret Garner. I really wanted to invent her life."

So Morrison doesn't usurp Garner's story.  

For her, Garner's story was only a premise. She never uses her name, only her circumstance as a launching point. She told her own narrative from there. 

And for those who study Morrison's literature, it wasn't curious that she didn't delve into the intricacies of Garner's story.

Furaha Norton first read "Beloved" in a contemporary fiction class at the University of Chicago. The intricacies of Morrison’s work can be difficult to grasp, she said. And Norton's the first to say that "there's no way around it, (Morrison) always takes rereading." She would later go on to write her dissertation on Morrison.

Now an assistant professor in the University of Cincinnati English department, Norton teaches Morrison's literature to her students.

She's quick to parse: Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" and Margaret Garner as a historical figure are two separate stories.

It's purposeful. And moreover, impactful. Morrison was rewriting the slave narrative.

Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass used the archetypal slave narrative to emphasize the horrors of slavery, to work for its abolishment, she explained. Morrison shifted the paradigm. To use her imagination and infuse interiority and idiosyncrasy into Sethe.

"That is her way of expanding our understanding of the American literary tradition," Norton explained.

For Dana Williams, chair of the African American literature department at Howard University, "Beloved" is a novel of self-reflection. People often miss that. But not Black women, she said. They recognize it immediately.

Everything in the world tells Black women they're valueless, Williams explained, but Morrison character Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother, offers affirmations that transcend time.

"Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that eaither [sic]. You got to love it, you."

"This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up."

In a sense, Garner's story gave way to Morrison. And Morrison rewrote the narrative Garner may have wished she could've told. Or could've lived.

Out of Morrison's hands, lining bookshelves – it's cover gilded with a Pulitzer Prize-winning adage – it's been a literary classic since its publication in 1987.

"It remains startling and revelatory," Norton said.

It's been banned, debated, morphed into an opera and a film. But it hasn't left bookshelves.

Its admonition still carries throughout the nation.

...

But the story is not just a parable about slavery. And it is not just true for Margaret. 

"You can't talk about Margaret without talking about Robert Garner," both Fisher and Westmoreland say.

It's his story. His courage. His role as a father that isn't talked about. And it's one that for Fisher and Westmoreland say is an example of strong Black fatherhood. 

Robert Garner engineered his family's escape.

He had access to Downtown Cincinnati, where he learned the street and sought out safety. And when that glacial January day in 1856 fell into darkness, Robert Garner stole two horses from the Gaineses and a sleigh that pulled them through the night. 

When the Garners were ordered back to Kentucky, under the Gaineses thumb, and later sold to a plantation in Mississippi, he lost another child who drowned in the river. Then his wife.

But he remained steadfast. 

He fought in the Civil War. He broke free of slavery in 1862. And then, he returned to Cincinnati. His family alongside him.

"The man who owned Margaret knew Robert was back in Cincinnati, but he didn't come near him," Westmoreland recalled.

And much like Margaret's fervent motherhood, Robert was staunch in his fatherhood.

"Black women suffer when they lose their children but Black men suffer as well," Fisher said. "Because we also lose our sons and daughters."

...

The Garner family, painted in icy blue and swathed with navy, a baby swaddled in burgundy, is depicted on the flood wall near the Roebling Bridge.

It's a glimpse of salvation.

Her story defines the complication and contradictions of Cincinnati's relationship to racism, slavery and abolitionism, Norton said. But whatever salvation Garner thought Cincinnati would give her until her family could get to Canada wasn't enough. 

The mural's one of hundreds interspersed throughout the city. Two months ago, a fresh mural was revealed: Black Lives Matter fashioned across the block adjacent to City Hall.

It's a reminder, not far from where Garner killed her child. A reminder that Black lives have always been in danger. 

A reminder that Black lives are seldom defined by those who live them.

The Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863. The North won the Civil War two years later. The Fifteenth Amendment, giving African American men the right to vote, passed in 1869. Women got the vote in 1920.

Almost 100 years later, in 1954, schools were desegregated.

They're freedoms Margaret Garner could've never imagined.

A mother. A wife. A woman who didn't falter when it came to courage. A woman who used the only agency she had to deliver her child to God rather than send her back to hell.

In what Reinhardt would write was Margaret Garner’s “most extended” interview with The Rev. Henry Bushnell of Cleveland, she spoke of the killing of her child. Weeks of her thoughts and emotions were memorialized in only five sentences.

“Why did you not trust in God – why not wait and hope?” The Rev. Bushnell asked.

“I did wait,” Margaret Garner responded.

“And then we dared to do, and fled in fear, but in hope; hope fled – God did not appear to save – I did the best I could!"