Margaret Garner and the Second Tear

Margaret Garner, an opera. Music by Richard Danielpour; libretto by Toni Morrison. World première at Michigan Opera Theatre May 7, 2005. New production by the New York City Opera performed on various dates in September 2007.

I wanted that haunting not to be really a suggestion of being bedeviled by the past, but to have it be incarnate, to have it actually happen that a person enters your world who is in fact—you believe, at any rate—the dead returned, and you get a second chance, a chance to do it right. Of course, you do it wrong again.

—Toni Morrison

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!

The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

—Milan Kundera

Before the 1987 appearance of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, most Americans had never heard of Margaret Garner, the fugitive slave from Kentucky who, in 1856, killed one of her children as she and her family were about to be recaptured in Ohio. It would not be correct to say that Garner became a household name as a consequence of the critical and popular acclaim that greeted Beloved, but her story, if not her identity, certainly became better known than it had been before the novel—for it was Garner's murder of her two-year-old daughter Mary that gave Morrison the idea for Beloved. Morrison has always acknowledged this inspiration, but in interviews published when the novel first appeared she was careful to note that Beloved was engaged in a project rather different from the recovery of a specific lost event. Beloved's reach extends well beyond the bounds of conventional historical fiction, taking both the murder and the task of its narration as opportunities to pose fraught questions about U.S. racial history, memory, trauma, and guilt, and to acknowledge that making art out of this volatile material is a hazardous endeavor. As Morrison frequently pointed out, Beloved was an invention, and, as her blending of modernist literary techniques with plot devices drawn from gothic fiction makes clear, she had little interest in producing a fictionalized account of a historical figure or event in the manner of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood or Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French.¹ In fact, it would not be incorrect to say that it is precisely the disappearance of Margaret Garner's case from our national memory that matters most to Beloved, given its preoccupation with the difficulties of recollection and representation—of "passing on," as the novel's closing pages put it.

Nevertheless (and perhaps unsurprisingly), the years since the appearance of Beloved have seen several efforts to recover the lost history of this "Modern Medea" (as Garner was styled in Kentucky artist Thomas Satterwhite Noble's 1867 painting of the murder). On the face of it, there were good reasons to make the attempt. Though practically unknown to most in the United States, black and white, for much of the twentieth century, Margaret Garner was extremely famous in her lifetime, an abolitionist cause célèbre and the inspiration for scores of essays, poems, pamphlets, and engravings that cast her variously as a nineteenth-century Medea, Virginius, or Mithridates. But as the appeals to characters from antiquity hint, Garner's murder came to the public via prefabricated narrative forms. Almost certainly as a function of its deeply unsettling aspects (some of them acknowledged only indirectly to this day), Margaret Garner's slaying of her daughter was never granted the dignity of a singular human event, an irreproducible meeting of impersonal historical forces with individual circumstance. On the contrary, the story of the woman who murdered a child rather than see it returned to slavery—for so her act was immediately interpreted in the press—was viewed by mid-nineteenth-century journalists, poets, poetasters, and visual artists (proslavery and abolitionist alike) as bringing to life ancient and familiar...