Name: ________________

Do Now
Close your eyes and open Beloved to a random page. Pick a quote out
to introduce and cite correctly in the space below:

What do you see in this picture? Tell the story you see happening?

The Story of Margaret Garner, who Morrison based her novel

off of. The Margaret Garner Incident (1856)
Best known as the inspiration for Toni Morrisons award winning
novel, Beloved, The Margaret Garner Incident of 1856 contains one of
the most ground breaking fugitive slave trials of the pre-Civil War era.
Margaret Garner was born into slavery on June 4, 1834 on Maplewood
plantation in Boone County, Kentucky. Working as a house slave for
much of her life, Garner often traveled with her masters and even
accompanied them on shopping trips to free territories in
Cincinnati, Ohio.
After marrying Robert Garner in 1849, Margaret bore four children by
1856. The 1850s were also a period in which the Underground Railroad
was at its height in and around Cincinnati, transporting numerous
slaves to freedom in Canada. The Garners decided to take advantage
of such an opportunity to escape enslavement. On Sunday January 27,
1856, they set out for their first stop on their route to freedom, Joseph
Kites house in Cincinnati.
The Garners made it safely to Kites home on Monday morning, where
they awaited their next guide. Within hours, the Garners master, A.K.
Gaines, and federal marshals stormed Kites home with warrants for
the Garners. Determined not to return to slavery, Margaret decided to
take the lives of herself and her children. When the marshals found
Margaret in a back room, she had slit her two-year-old daughters
throat with a butcher knife, killing her. The other children lay on the
floor wounded but still alive.
The Garners were taken into custody and tried in what became one of
the longest fugitive slave trials in history. During the two-week trial,
abolitionist and lawyer, John Jolliffe, argued that Margarets trips to free
territory in Cincinnati entitled her and her children to freedom.
Although Jolliffe provided compelling arguments, the judge denied the
Garners plea for freedom and returned them to Gaines.
In a bid to gain freedom for Margaret and her children, Jolliffe
convinced officials to arrest Margaret on the charge of murdering her
daughter. Joliffe surmised that with a murder trail, Margaret would
have another chance for freedom. Gaines caught on to Jolliffes plan
and relocated the Garners to several different plantations before finally
selling them to his brother in Arkansas. As a result, federal marshals
were not able to serve Margaret with an arrest warrant and she never
received a second trial.

Margaret Garner died in 1858 from a typhoid epidemic. Her story lives
on today through countless theatrical productions, as well as Toni
Morrisons book and film Beloved.

Debate
Was Margaret Garner justified in her actions? Why or why not?
In groups of 3, choose a side and come up with your 5 key points for
your argument. You can either argue Yes, Margaret Garner was
justified in her actions or No, Margaret Garner was not justified in her
actions.
Recorder:
_______________

Your Side:

1st Speaker:

________________
2nd Speaker: _________________
Key Points
1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Key Points about Beloved

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

A letter to his son, Samori.

There was also wisdom in those streets. I think now of the old
rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone elses chancy
hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their
beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all
living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists
raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies number, strength,
nor weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you
fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in
our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own
bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we
did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could
and mustfashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper
meaning of your namethat the struggle in and of itself has meaning.
That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special
meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were
carried off and divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to
respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that
same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh.
It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as
your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers
the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys
fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her
mother in her complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a
favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress-making and
knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.
Slavery is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its
love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in
which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother
a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman
peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can
hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But
when she dies, the worldwhich is really the only world she can ever
knowends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is
damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is
most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country
longer than we have been free. Never forge that for 250 years black
people were born into chainswhole generations followed by more
generations who knew nothing but chains. You must struggle to truly
remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must
resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law,
toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved
were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your
redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American
machine. ()

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world and I love it
more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you
must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot
know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other
black bodies, which, somehow will always be assigned to you. And you
must be responsible for the bodies of the powerfulthe policeman who
cracks you with nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive
movements. And this not reducible to just youthe women around you
must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you will never will
know. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.
You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they
transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold (70).
()
Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our
American generations took me. Now I personally understood my father
and the old mantraEither I can beat him or the police will. I
understood it allthe cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual
switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You
are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like
to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that
American made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people
who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear
not just the criminals among them but the police who lord with all the
moral authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that I
understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mothers hand.
She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be
shattered and all her legacy spilled upon the curb like a bum wine
(83).
1. Describe the overall message Coates is telling his son:

2. He states in the last paragraph, I held you and a great fear,

wide as all our American generations took me Black people
love their children with a kind of obsession. What do you think
he means by this? Can you relate to this description?

3. Coates states, you cannot forget how much they took from us.
Who is they and what did they take? Do you agree with the
message he is telling his son, never to forget? Why or why not?