A fascinating documentary history of the fugitive slave case that captivated the nation-and inspired Toni Morrison's acclaimed novel Beloved.

In January 1856, Margaret Garner—an enslaved woman on a Kentucky plantation—ran with members of her family to the free state of Ohio. As slave catchers attempted to capture the fugitives in Cincinnati, Garner cut the throat of her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to prevent her return to slavery. Toni Morrison first imaginatively treated Margaret Garner’s infanticide in her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Beloved (1987). In 2004, it became the subject of her libretto Margaret Garner: Opera in Two Acts, a lyrical text designed to be paired with music and sung operatically. Grammy Award–winning composer Richard Danielpour had tapped Morrison to write the libretto for his opera Margaret Garner: A New American Opera, which world premiered in Detroit in 2005. La Vinia Delois Jennings’s edited volume records key events, debates, and critical assessments of Morrison's success with Garner’s story as a libretto. It also includes essays by individuals who played central roles in bringing the opera to the stage and recovering Garner's story. The collection opens with a foreword by mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, for whom Danielpour composed the title role. The other contributors range from literary and opera scholars to specialists in American slavery studies and scholars of Toni Morrison's oeuvre. Their essays position her libretto within the African American operatic and libretto tradition, a tradition not fully known to performance scholars and heretofore unexamined.

Inspired by the searing story of Margaret Garner, the escaped slave who in 1856 slit her daughter's throat rather than have her forced back into slavery, the essays in this collection focus on historical and contemporary examples of slavery and women's resistance to oppression from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Each chapter uses Garner's example--the real-life narrative behind Toni Morrison's Beloved andthe opera Margaret Garner--as a thematic foundation for an interdisciplinary conversation about gendered resistance in locations including Brazil, Yemen, India, and the United States. Contributors are Nailah Randall Bellinger, Olivia Cousins, Mary E. Frederickson, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Carolyn Mazloomi, Cathy McDaniels-Wilson, Catherine Roma, Huda Seif, S. Pearl Sharp, Raquel Luciana de Souza, Jolene Smith, Veta Tucker, Delores M. Walters, Diana Williams, and Kristine Yohe.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

The story of Margaret Garner-the runaway slave who, when confronted with capture, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery-has inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved, a film based on the novel starring Oprah Winfrey, and an opera

The widely acclaimed inquiry into the story that inspired Toni Morrison's "Beloved"--a nuanced portrait of the not-so-genteel Southern culture that perpetuated slavery and had such destructive effects on all who lived with it and in it. 25 illustrations.

Two Books in One: Historical Spiritual Non-Fiction and Memoir. Margaret Garner slit her daughter's throat to protect her from American slavery in 1856. The tale was fictionalized in Toni Morrison's Beloved, but a young white mother began researching the true story in 1994. Soon paranormal events with Margaret began, revealing the mother's past life connection to the murder and a chance to heal a tragedy more than a century old.