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, ...