"The interest is not the fact of slavery, the interest is what happens internally, emotionally, psychologically, when you are in fact enslaved and what you do in order to transcend that circumstance, which is what Margaret Garner reveals." Margaret Garner at the age of 22 and while being pregnant decided to flee the plantation where she was enslaved for so many years. She escaped with her husband, four children, and her husband's parents to Ohio. They arrived at her husband's cousin's house but a few months later the house was surrounded by slave catchers. In that split second she decided to cut the throat of her 2 year old daughter and right when she was about to continue on with her other kids the federal marshals came in the house. She was immediately placed in prison and went to trial. The abolitionist lawyer John Jolliffe asked Garner to be tried for murder which would have set a civil right precedent but instead she was tried for damage of property. Her story had many questioning if slavery was a fate worse than death? Many scholars have written books about her story and her case was the basis for Toni Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Beloved." Garner had been the product of the rape of her black slave mother by a white slave owner. She use to work for Archibald K. Gains and was gifted to Gain's wife since she was a light-skin girl. Many historians believe that at least two of her children that were characterized as mulatto were fathered by Gaines. Gaines however, was a violent slave owner which ultimately encouraged Garner to flee with her four children. After her trial, her four children and herself where shipped to Louisiana where they were sold off to a brother of Gaines, she never hurt any of her remaining kids. Unfortunately, one of her kids passed away while they were being transported to the brothel after the ship crashed into another boat and threw the child overboard. Garner died in 1858 of typhoid fever. "The legal fact was that she was not a mother or wife, but a property of the man who owned her."

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