Toni Morrison, Margaret Garner, and Beloved

Tomorrow, we'll begin talking about Toni Morrison's seminal 1988 novel, Beloved. Beloved is a book rich with Cincinnati history. It fictionalizes the life of runaway slave Margaret Garner into a magisterial narrative about love, human rights, and our ability to truly "own" the lives we lead. Some of you might be familiar with the story of Garner. She was a slave on a plantation in Kentucky during the 1850s and escaped from her masters with her young children by night from Covington across the Ohio River into the Union enclave of Cincinnati. When slave-catchers reached the home where she and her children were hiding, Garner killed one of her children and attempted to kill the others rather than allow them to be returned to a life of slavery. An America already at odds over the issue of slavery was captivated by the story of Garner and her subsequent trial, which posed fundamental questions about liberty, personhood, and the law. When Junot Diaz was asked by Newsweek to name the 5 books of fiction that were most important to him, he placed Beloved at the top of the list, saying that "[y]ou can't understand the Americas without this novel about the haunting that is our past."

Thomas Saterwaite Noble, "The Modern Medea" (1867)--painting based on Margaret Garner


Toni Morrison based Beloved loosely on the Garner narrative. She also wrote the libretto for an opera on the subject of the runaway slave's life, entitled Margaret Garner. Beloved and Margaret Garner are just two examples of Morrison's interest in tracing the history of black life in America. She is one of the most important authors of the twentieth century and a major force in popularizing African American fiction, both as a writer and editor of other writers work during her time in the publishing industry. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize, but many other novels by Morrison were justly celebrated--from The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, two earlier works to Paradise and the soon to be released A Mercy. She is also famous for her many works of literary and social criticism, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature.