Title: Modern
Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South
(Click title or book to buy on-line)
Author: Steven Weisenburger
Steven Weisenburger, professor of English and codirector of the Program in American
Culture at the University of Kentucky, is the author of Fables of Subversion: Satire
and the American Novel and A Gravity's Rainbow Companion.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
Incorporated
Date Published: September 1999
Format: Trade Paper
25 Black-and-White Illustrations Notes/Bibliography/Index
Synopsis
The widely acclaimed inquiry into the story that inspired Toni
Morrison's Beloved. One frigid Sunday night in January 1856, a
twenty-two-year-old Kentucky slave named Margaret Garner gathered up her family and raced
north, toward freedom. Soon, however, the Garners were discovered in their sanctuary, and
Margaret turned on her children with a knife rather than see them sent back to a life of
slavery. Steven Weisenburger is the first scholar to delve into the astonishing story of
Margaret Garner's child-murder in more than a century.
His dramatic narrative paints 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.
Annotation
25 Black-and-White Illustrations Notes/Bibliography/Index
Description
form the Reader's Catalog
A historical account of the events that inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved. In 1856,
Margaret Garner sought to escape with her children from slavery; when her master caught up
with her, she killed her two-year-old daughter saying she would rather see her children
dead than captive. Her subsequent trial for child-murder became a cause celbre for both
abolitionists and slaveholders
