Margaret Garner Quotes

Morrison read a news clipping about Margaret Garner while doing research for another book, and she decided to try to imagine what caused a woman to commit infanticide. What does it mean to be a mother to children who literally belong to another person?...What she created was a novel in the tradition of ghost stories, but in which the ghost represents more than just a person returning from the afterlife. The spirit also stands for the estimated sixty million people who died in the so-called land of the free during the time of enslavement.

A newspaper clipping in The Black Book summarized the story of Margaret Garner, a young mother who, having escaped slavery, was arrested for killing one of her children (and trying to kill the others) rather than let them be returned to the owner’s plantation. She became a cause célèbre in the fight against the Fugitive Slave laws, which mandated the return of escapees to their owners. Her sanity and lack of repentance caught the attention of Abolitionists as well as newspapers. She was certainly single-minded and, judging by her comments, she had the intellect, the ferocity, and the willingness to risk everything for what was to her the necessity of freedom. The historical Margaret Garner is fascinating, but, to a novelist, confining.

His favorites were the handful of adventure books, the ones that let him pretend he was a knight fighting a dragon to rescue a kidnapped princess, or an explorer sailing on the high seas, holding tight to a mast while a hurricane raged about him. He liked to forget he was Luke Garner, third child hidden in the attic.

The Books Lucia’s birthday gifts for September 1st: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and Peter Pan and Wendy by J. M. Barrie 2nd: Burglar Bill by Janet and Allan Ahlberg 3rd: Dogger by Shirley Hughes 4th: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll 5th: Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter 6th: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame 7th: The Borrowers by Mary Norton 8th: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett 9th: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell 10th: Matilda by Roald Dahl 11th: Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott 12th: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 13th: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 14th: Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman 15th: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters 16th: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen 17th: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson 18th: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 19th: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 20th: Passing by Nella Larsen 21st: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 22nd: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood 23rd: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell 24th: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie 25th: The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes 26th: Atonement by Ian McEwan 27th: Small Island by Andrea Levy 28th: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 29th: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson 30th: Harvest by Jim Crace 31st: A Secret Garden by Katie Fforde 32nd: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel From Lucia’s life Bird at My Window by Rosa Guy Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle The Owl Service by Alan Garner The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault Story of O by Pauline Réage Illustrated Peter Pan by Arthur Rackham Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie Marina’s recommendation Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder The book club at September’s house The Color Purple by Alice Walker Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Silas Marner by George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss also mentioned) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The book club’s birthday books for September’s 34th birthday Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters We Are Displaced by Malala Yousafzai To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson