Margaret Garner

Sunday, November 16, 2008 

I first heard about Margaret Garner in high school probably bc I grew up in Northern Kentucky not far from where she lived. Long before Toni Morrison fleshed out this woman in Beloved, Margaret Garner lived for me. I don't know what it is about her story that draws me in, but I think often about what would be required to drive a woman that far. I have been to Maplewood where she was enslaved, have retraced her steps to the banks of the river that has frozen only once in my life. Trapping me eternally on the slave side of it. Freedom tantalizingly within my sight. Have climbed the ancient steps to Rankin house high on the hill in Ripley (not part of Margaret's story). Felt the breeze of freedom ruffle my hair up there. This white woman who has never felt the shackles of racial slavery but knows too well those of gender - those invisible cruel shackles present for so many of us. She has come to my thoughts again in the last few weeks – Margaret Garner. This woman who killed her own child rather than see her return to a life of slavery. And it occurs to me that maybe my mother did something very similar just as her mother had done to her. Tried to kill some part of me rather than see it suffer in a world designed to enslave it. Tried to shield me from the pain that she had suffered in a society created by men, ruled by men and at the hands of men. Maybe that is why she did not want girls, only boys. How could she sit and watch history repeat itself in another generation of women? How could she watch the slow drawn out destruction? Wouldn't a quick death be better? Her efforts though failed utterly. My experiences as a result were even more brutal than hers. As if she ran the knife across my throat, but did not succeed in killing that part of me at all, merely wounding it and making it crouch in fear of all the world.  So maybe I pilgrimage these local places to let go the fear just as countless slaves believed that crossing the river would free them from their chains. But when I went to the hill in Ripley expecting to taste freedom, I found the chains did not hold me, it was I who clung to them.  These days I cross the river easily and daily without a thought to what it meant to Margaret. But today I will cross the river consciously and let my chains begin to fall into the murky brownness of it. Day by day and link by link I will let them go. And then I will finally be free.