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As Seen in ESSENCE...
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THE SEARCH FOR MY BELOVED MARGARET GARNER
On the 150th anniversary of Margaret Garner’s flight from slavery to freedom, Essence editor STEPHANIE STOKES OLIVER embarks on a deeply personal journey to unravel the mystery of her relationship to the woman whose desperate act of defiance became the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Beloved.
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Credit: Chris Cone
On the rolling hills of the Maplewood farm, where Margaret Garner was enslaved in Boone County, Kentucky, Oliver walks in front of the cookhouse. From its windows, Garner could see the neighboring farm where her husband toiled.
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Kinship. That’s what I felt for the woman whose real-life story inspired Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Morrison had based her work of fiction, published in 1987, on the historical account of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who attempted to murder her four children rather than allow them to be captured and returned to slavery. Garner and her family had escaped from Kentucky by walking on the frozen Ohio River into Cincinnati, where U.S. marshals caught up with them. Upon apprehension, she succeeded in slitting the throat of her 2-year-old daughter, Mary.
When I first learned that Beloved was based on an actual event, one detail stood out: the determined woman’s name, Margaret Garner. My own paternal grandmother’s name had been Myrtle Garner. What a coincidence, I thought. Two women born in the 1800’s named M. Garner. And it remained just that—a coincidence that was of no consequence to me for 18 years. And then I met Toni Morrison.
May 2004: The First Clue
While working at Essence, I enthusiastically accepted an invitation to attend a luncheon in celebration of the publication of Morrison’s new children’s book, Remember: The Journey to School Integration. In a quick conversation with Morrison as she graciously table-hopped, I mentioned that I was writing a political memoir about growing up in Seattle with my late father, Judge Charles M. Stokes, who had carried out a family legacy of loyalty to the Republican Party, “the party of Lincoln.” Morrison commented that most Blacks had done the same until the Roosevelt years. I added that in researching my father’s childhood, I’d discovered that his parents may have met in Kentucky and that his mother’s name was Myrtle Garner. Morrison set her gaze upon me with great interest, then said, “Go read a book called Modern Medea.” She explained that the author was a professor named Steven Weisenburger who, after reading Beloved, had conducted research on the real-life story of Margaret Garner. Morrison herself had become fascinated with Garner’s story in the early 1970’s. While doing research for a book she edited titled The Black Book, a scrapbook of 300 years of African-American life, she came across a Cincinnati Gazette clipping dated January 29, 1856. The headline read: “Arrest of Fugitive Slaves: A Slave Mother Murders Her Child Rather Than See It Returned to Slavery.” After reading the article, Morrison declined to do further research. She had decided to explore Margaret Garner’s unwritten interior life through fiction, and she didn’t want to be unduly influenced by the actual federal case that followed her desperate act.
After speaking with Morrison, I was inspired to do some research of my own. At my local bookstore I found Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder From the Old South. Skimming through the index, my finger lingered on a reference to Toni Morrison. Above her name was another that took my breath away: Charles Morehead. That was my own father’s first and middle name!
I had learned quite a bit about my father while researching my own book, Song for My Father: Memoir of an All-American Family. My mother had given me an audiotape of my father telling his life story to Mary Henry, a family friend who was working on a project for Seattle’s Black Heritage Society. Moving from Kansas in 1943 at the age of 40, my father had become Seattle’s only African-American attorney in private practice, and the first elected to public office; he served in the legislature in the 1950’s. He narrowly lost a primary bid for lieutenant governor in 1960, but became the city’s first Black district court judge eight years later. I had been born when he was almost 50. A good father, to whom I was close, he lived to be 93.
As he told his story on tape, my father stated, “My full name is Charles Moorehead Stokes, retired Judge Charles M. Stokes. I was named for my grandfather, who was Charles Garner. His middle name was Moorehead…. My mother was Myrtle Garner, before she married. But my mother died when I was about 3. I don’t remember one thing about her.”
The first time I saw “Morehead, Charles S.” in the index of Modern Medea, I didn’t notice the variation in spelling. I looked up the page in the book and found that the name referred to the governor of Kentucky at the time of Margaret Garner’s trial. That was enough to pique my interest. But I couldn’t read the book right then. I had my own to promote. That summer I went on a book tour.
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May 2005: A Child With the Angels
For seven years, I had fantasized, planned, plotted and saved up to treat myself to a week of pampering at a spa in southern California. When I finally made the trip, I took Modern Medea with me. I started it on the five-hour flight from New Jersey, and I kept reading it all that week. From the turn of the first page I was riveted.
According to Weisenburger, a professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Margaret Garner was born on June 4, 1833. On the cold, snowy Monday morning of January 28, 1856, a pregnant Margaret, her husband, Robert Garner, their four children, and Robert’s parents, Simon and Mary, made a daring 18-mile escape by horse-drawn sleigh from two neighboring Boone County farms in northern Kentucky. After leaving the horses outside at a stable in the town of Covington, the family walked across the frozen Ohio River. The eight Garners found temporary shelter in the cabin of a free relative named Joseph Kite.
While awaiting an Underground Railroad conductor to take them further, the Garners were apprehended by pursuing slave masters and federal marshals. In the struggle, Robert fired shots from the six-shooter he had brought, severely wounding one deputy. After subduing Robert, the marshals discovered what Margaret had done in resistance: With a coal shovel she had attempted to kill her elder children, and with a butcher knife she had succeeded in almost decapitating 2-year-old Mary. Her own suicide, speculates the book, would have been next.
As I read the horrific account, my mind played a song I had heard so many times during the Civil Rights Movement:
Oh, Freedom/Oh, Freedom/Oh, Freedom Over me/And before I’d be a slave/I’d be buried in my grave/And go home to my Lord and be free.
The trial, which took place in pre–Civil War America and made national news, became the longest-running fugitive-slave case in the history of the country, pitting the proslavery forces of Kentucky against Cincinnati’s abolitionists. A pivotal point centered on whether the case was about the “destruction of property” or murder. At one point, the abolitionist and feminist Lucy Stone addressed the packed courtroom and said that she had spoken with Margaret. “I took her hand and expressed my sympathy,” she said. “I told her that a thousand hearts were aching for her, and they were glad that one child of hers was safe with the angels.”
I had heard of Lucy Stone in my women’s studies classes, but I never knew she came to Margaret’s defense. Weisenburger further reports her statement to the court: “The faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation the female slaves submit. Rather than give her little daughter to that life, she killed it.”
The spectators gasped. Stone had dared to speak the unspeakable. She had voiced what Margaret would not be allowed to say, the true motive for her escape and murder—fear of sexual bondage. Margaret Garner was eventually remanded back to slavery. She and her family were sold to a plantation in the Deep South. Margaret died just two years later from typhoid. But her life would remain a compelling testament to the human determination to be free.
There was so much about Margaret Garner’s story that seemed to resonate within my own family. I began to grasp why my father had stayed loyal to the Republican Party, because it was the one that had freed the slaves. My grandparents had been born in the 1870’s, the decade after Emancipation. When my father considered changing political parties in the 1930’s, as did so many other African-Americans who liked Roosevelt’s New Deal, my grandfather had stopped him: “Lincoln done freed your butt,” he said, “and now you’re going to go against him? Oh, son, don’t do that.”
June 2005: Making Connections
After finishing the real-life account of Margaret Garner, I noticed in Black Issues Book Review a small announcement of an upcoming conference of the Toni Morrison Society (TMS) in Cincinnati. I told my husband, Reginald, “If I don’t go anywhere else in this lifetime, I will be at the Toni Morrison Society conference in two weeks.”
I wanted to see if I could uncover more clues to my ancestry and find out once and for all whether Margaret Garner was my kin. I did the math. My father was born in 1903. If his mother, Myrtle Garner Stokes, had been born around the same time as her husband, she would have come into the world around 1877. If her father, Charles Moorehead Garner, had been 21 at her birth, he would have been born in 1856, the year of Margaret Garner’s escape. Margaret had been pregnant during her flight to freedom, her capture, and her trial. But no one knew for sure if she had given birth to a son or daughter, what the child’s name was, or even if it lived. Details of her life between 1856 and her death from typhoid fever in 1858 were obscure.
I registered for the conference and discovered that the president of the TMS, Maryemma Graham, was a distinguished professor of English at the University of Kansas, my father’s alma mater. The coincidences and links to the ancestors kept coming. I had never attempted to search my roots before, but now my roots seemed to be searching for me.
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July 2005: The Path to Freedom
I knew I needed to brush off my original first edition of Beloved to refresh my memory of it before the conference. I read it on the plane to the conference, and in my hotel room. I couldn’t put it down.
The first night of the conference opened with the premiere of Toni Morrison’s opera, Margaret Garner, at the opulent Cincinnati Opera house. On the second day of the conference, 250 attendees from 35 countries (mostly academics who teach Morrison’s work) were taken on a bus ride to Margaret Garner’s “sites of memory”—places of significance in her history. It was hard to believe that I was actually standing on the farm where Margaret Garner had been enslaved. There at Maplewood, I saw the two-room cabin that had served as the detached kitchen, where Margaret had labored for the Gaines family.
As a descendant of the Gaines family spoke to the crowd, I wandered around the building trying to take it all in. It was hard to admit how beautiful and lush the hills were. I kept thinking that in this bucolic setting, unthinkable horror had occurred. I remembered how Sethe, the Margaret character, had described her plantation in Beloved: “...there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling, out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.”
We left the farm and visited the nearby Richwood Presbyterian Church. Margaret had become a member in 1855. The current minister, the Reverend Jean Frable, told our group that they had the old record book in which Margaret’s baptism had been inscribed. “Black and White sat side by side in this church,” she said. I noted that on the night of the escape, it became the rendezvous point.
Our tour continued down the actual path the Garners took from Richwood to Covington, then a dirt road, now a paved main one. “Here is where Robert Garner left the horses and sleigh,” our guide said, pointing to what looked like a firehouse but was once a stable. At the end of the street was the river. I noticed the luxury apartment buildings now overlooking the spot where Margaret and Robert Garner, who worked on neighboring farms, took their chances in the hope of living together as a family. A colorful mural that depicts the crossing marks the place in homage.
The Ohio River was narrower than I imagined. Freedom had been so close, yet so far. When I had arrived in town the day before and had told my White cab driver Margaret’s story, he had remarked in disbelief, “That river never gets cold enough to freeze over. I’ve been living here all my life and I’ve never seen it.”
“Well, it froze over that day in 1856,” I said, staring at the river as we drove across it on a bridge. “Maybe it froze just that once, so they could make their escape.”
August 2005: Naming the Ancestors
As a journalist, getting to the truth is important to me. Credibility is the basis of my work, and I felt compelled to do all I could to supply it in my search for kinship with Margaret Garner. Back at work the week after the conference, I was in the kitchen area making tea one morning when I came across a pamphlet tacked to the bulletin board: “PathWays Genealogical Research. You say you don’t have the time; let us find your great-great grandparents!”
I called the number and asked Anthony Matthews, the CEO, if he would help me solve my mystery. After hearing the story, he said, “When you get a strong feeling like that, there’s usually something there. It’s also likely that you are related, because of our African-American naming tradition. Most people have at most two names in common. You have three: Charles, Moorehead and Garner.”
I asked if it was possible to be named after a governor who was proslavery yet had reluctantly granted the Ohio governor’s requisition to return the Garners to Cinncinnati, albeit too late for Margaret, who by then had died. “It was common to be named after prominent people who were slave holders, such as Washington, Jefferson and others,” Matthews replied.
And what about the discrepancy in the spelling of the name Moorehead? “There were lots of name differences in the census records that stuck,” he told me. Someone could have misspelled the governor’s name in print at any time since his death in 1868. I myself could never remember if my father’s middle name had one o or two. Weeks later, I searched the Internet for more information on the Kentucky governor. On Ancestry.com I found his biographical information under Moorehead, Charles—the same spelling as my father’s name.
September 2005: The Nature of Kinship
Anthony Matthews agreed to take my case, and a few weeks later he presented me with a packet of census records and his findings. “Margaret Garner is probably not a direct ancestor,” he concluded, “but you may be descended from the northern Kentucky Garners.”
I was disappointed, initially, to hear this news. But I was also happy that Matthews had traced my family’s roots farther back than my father, who’d known nothing about his own mother, had been able to. Matthews told me that my great-grandfather, Charles Moorehead Garner, was born in 1857, the year after Margaret made her escape. Matthews added that according to the 1880 census, in Charles Garner’s home lived a grandmother, Esther Clark, who was 94 years old. “She was a slave for a long time,” he said, “but at least she was able to live in freedom too.”
The lack of a definitive answer has kept the possibilities alive for me. Whether or not Margaret Garner is my great-great-grandmother, one thing is clear—and that is my strong sense of connection to her story. Perhaps as Nikki Giovanni, the poet from Cincinnati, once told me: “In our African-American extended family tradition, if you say you’re family, you are.”
Stephanie Stokes Oliver is a deputy editor at Essence. This article was published in the February 2006 issue.
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