Another Kind of American Tragedy

The Modern Medea by Thomas Satterwhite Nobles, 1867

It happened this way: One winter day in 1856, a group of slaves from Kentucky slipped away and made their way to the free state of Ohio. Some got safely away. A husband and wife, Robert and Margaret Garner, along with their four children, managed to get to the house of a formerly enslaved black man named Kite. But before they could get to Canada, the "Promised Land", slave catchers and police* surrounded, then stormed the house. The Garners and slavers fought room to room, and Robert shot one of them, a deputy marshal, in the process. When the slave catchers got to the room in which Margaret was cornered, a bloody sight met their eyes: Margaret had taken a knife and cut her toddler daughter's throat rather than, as she told it, allow her to be a slave again. She was preparing to kill all of her children, and then herself, when the posse burst in on her.


The white world was shocked and horrified, as were, I'm sure, some blacks, the difference being that the blacks could understand why she did what she did.

There was a trial, but not to determine whether Margaret was guilty of murder, but to determine whether she was a free woman because she had reached Ohio, or enslaved because she was considered property. Margaret was not tried for murder, but she and husband were sent back into slavery, allowed to take an infant daughter, but leave behind their two sons, four and six years old. The baby girl drowned when the steamboat that was carrying the Garners back to slavery began to sink and she was thrown overboard when another ship, come to help, rammed the boat. Margaret was said to have been happy the child was spared. She herself died of typhoid fever two years later.

You may well gasp at the idea of a mother killing her child. But immerse yourself, as I do on an almost daily basis, in the perverted, rotten, depraved sickness that was the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, read the gruesome accounts of what enslavers did to those they enslaved, and perhaps you can understand why hundreds of years of violence was met with violence just as extreme, and in Margaret’s case, as in many instances, spurred by utter desperation.

I ask myself what I might have done in such a situation.

"We could move," she suggested once to her mother-in-law.

"What'd be the point?" asked Baby Suggs. "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don't talk to me. You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don't you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody's house into evil." Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows. "My firstborn. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember."

From Beloved by Toni Morrison

In her novel Beloved Toni Morrison delved into Margaret’s psyche in the character of Sethe . Sethe was Margaret; a woman driven to killing her child, Beloved, when slave catchers cornered her. Sethe is haunted by her daughter, first in the form of an invisible ghost, and then in the incarnation of a young girl who shows up on her doorstep one day, and becomes Sethe’s all-consuming passion drivien by guilt and a belief that she can never explain how deep and wide her love was for her daughter. The novel is no easy read; what it is is all the heartbreak of the soul can endure in poetry. Oprah starred in a film of the same name based on the book: It is not a bad film in and of itself.

But read the book.

Now there is an opera, created by the composer Richard Danielpour, with a libretto by Toni Morrison. From what I understand the opera has less to do with removing and revealing the many layers of the soul, and more to do with the moral vs. legal concepts surrounding slavery. It premieres today at the New York City Opera and runs through September 29. I have not seen it (it has already played in Michigan, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia), and by all accounts, it sounds wonderful if you like opera. I do, but very likely will not be able to find the time to see it, so if anybody out there does, please tell me. Click here for more on the opera.

At any rate, it is a very necessary piece of art that belongs in America's musical portfolio, which is why I include it here. The greatest operas are often the most tragic, and nothing could be more of a tragedy than
400 years of slavery in North America. An inspired composer could dedicate his entire career to operas based solely on that subject.

*The Fugitive Slave law required that law enforcement in free states assist slave catchers in apprehending runaway slaves, who were considered, in a way, stolen property. Imagine, a human being stealing himself from another human being.