LITMIR.BIZ

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became convinced of the inevitability of the family’s capture, she grew increasingly agitated, if not panic-stricken, after Robert shot the deputy. She decided to use deadly violence, as well. Grabbing a butcher knife from a counter, she rushed toward her children, grabbing two-year-old Mary and declaring, “Before my children shall be taken back to Kentucky I will kill every one of them!” While the men were trying to keep the posse from gaining entrance, Margaret snatched up two-year-old Mary and quickly cut her throat, right to left. She practically decapitated her daughter with a cut that was estimated to be four or five inches long and three inches deep. She threw the bleeding, dying child to the floor in the corner of the room. Margaret roared to her mother-in-law, “Mother, help me to kill them!” The older woman—the only adult witness to the impending horror—returned, “I cannot help you kill them!” Mary Garner did nothing to stop Margaret from harming her grandchildren; instead, she turned, ran from the room, and hid under a bed in an adjoining room. Not content with taking just one child’s life, Margaret then grabbed her sons one at a time and tried cutting their throats. They both fought back, though: one begged for his life, crying, “Oh Mother, do not kill me!” Hearing the commotion and screaming from the boys, Mary and Elijah Kite ran into the front room and witnessed Margaret trying to kill them. Mary Kite rushed over to Margaret and struggled with her for the knife. Tommy and Sammy took that opportunity to run into the next room and hide from their mother under the bed with their grandmother. Once Mary Kite wrested the knife from Margaret, she sternly told her not to kill her children—apparently still unaware that a child already lay bleeding with its neck cut open just a few feet away. Margaret went after the knife a few more times until Mary Kite gave it to her son to put in the privy behind the house.³⁰

      Figure 1.1. Pencil drawing of the Thomas Satterwhite Noble painting The Modern Medea (1867). Granger, NYC

      When the Garner men—who had been occupied preventing the deputies from entering the home—turned and saw what Margaret had done to little Mary, Robert started “screaming, as if bereft of reason,” and pacing the room. His anguish was palpable—a testament to how much he loved the little girl. Old Simon groaned, while pacing too, and his wife wept inconsolably. Sheer pandemonium reigned inside the cabin. The men paced and wailed; the boys trembled under a bed—terrified of their own mother; the Garner matriarch cried; and deputies battered in the door, successfully gaining entrance. Meanwhile, as everyone else was focused on the specter of the dying toddler, Margaret, with laser-focused attention, decided to finish her mission. As the marshals battered their way into the now unmanned front door of the home, Gaines instructed the deputies not to do anything illegal. His last directive was that “no harm whatever should be done to the little children.” As they burst into the cabin, Robert fired his pistol a few more times at the entering party, but hit no one. Gaines, following behind a marshal, rushed in, grabbed Robert by the wrists, and wrested the pistol away before he could fire another round. Before Margaret could be apprehended, though, she picked up a heavy coal shovel, aiming it at her youngest child, Cilla, who was on the floor in the front room. She managed to bash her daughter in her face with the shovel one time before deputies grabbed it from her. The younger couple reportedly fought the deputies with “the ferocity of tigers” to avoid being taken.³¹

      It is important to state here that trauma is not fully digested or comprehended until later. There is a period of latency, and then the trauma of that violence may rush back at once in ways that shock or debilitate the trauma victim. The act of leaving the site of trauma—what Sigmund Freud calls “a form of freedom”—is what accelerates the recognition of the trauma and, ultimately, fosters its eruption. In other words, Margaret’s facing recapture and the possibility of returning to her Kentucky enslavement may have led to a rush of traumatic memories and an eruption that resulted in murder.³² Hence, her trauma—consisting of interior and exterior injuries—is central to understanding what had driven Garner to escape bondage and, when that failed, to commit an infanticidal act.

      The family had generational responses to the threat of recapture. The older couple had a quieter, less confrontational response: elder Simon did not use a weapon, and his wife hid under a bed. The younger couple, by contrast, used armed violence to resist returning to the lives they had left. Margaret and Robert each brandished weapons—he a pistol, and she a knife and shovel; neither hesitated even the slightest to use them. The couple gravely injured people in the process of resisting: Robert shot a deputy, while Margaret slit one child from ear to ear, bashed another in the head with a coal shovel, and tried to cut the throats of her other children. The difference in the violence committed by husband and wife is that he turned his weapon outward toward strangers who threatened his family, while Margaret turned hers inward to her own children.

      Aggression, public violence, and armed self-defense were understood to be prerogatives of white men in the nineteenth century. Through their violent resistance, the younger Garners exercised a form of power that was a right reserved to white men. The irony is, of course, that as a legally powerless, enslaved woman in a racist and patriarchal society, Margaret had been an object and target of violence her whole life; as a free woman striving to assert her freedom, she became an instrument of deadly violence against someone who was even more powerless than she—an enslaved, female child.³³

      With Margaret and the men restrained, the deputies rushed from room to room trying to reclaim the other fugitives. They found the elder Mary Garner hiding under a bed with Tommy and Sammy. When deputies pulled them out, they noticed that Tommy bled from two cuts on his throat—one four inches long—and Sammy from gashes on his head—injuries inflicted by their mother. Cilla’s head was swollen and bruised. She bled from her nose as the officials removed her from the Kite home. Someone in the home tenderly wrapped little Mary in a quilt and put her on the bed in the next room. Though cut from ear to ear reportedly, the toddler did not die swiftly. According to witnesses, she gasped and struggled for air as a male neighbor carried her from the bed into the outside yard. She was dying as her parents, grandparents, and siblings were being apprehended, led outside, and loaded into an omnibus, a horse-drawn bus designed to transport groups of passengers in the mid-nineteenth century. As the omnibus carrying her entire family left the scene, little Mary Garner was in the arms of a stranger as she took her last breath.³⁴ So ended the Garners’ quest for freedom. Sadly, their brief freedom in Cincinnati had been marked with violence, much like their bondage.

      Still in front of the Kites’ home after the omnibus departed, Archibald K. Gaines took Mary’s body from the arms of the neighbor, intending to take it back to Covington for a proper burial in a slave cemetery. The crowd vociferously objected to his removing her body before a proper coroner’s inquest could be made into her death. Gaines complied and awaited the arrival of Hamilton County Coroner John Menzies, who had been summoned to the home. Coroner Menzies was himself from the same Richwood neighborhood as Gaines and knew the family quite well.³⁵ He immediately examined the scene and the girl’s body, while Gaines patiently waited for him to finish—apparently more concerned about securing Mary’s body than securing his other slaves. When Menzies completed his examinations, he gave the toddler’s little body back to Gaines, who loaded it, and then proceeded to the Hammond Street jail. A neighbor claimed he held a funeral, but it is not clear where Gaines laid the toddler to rest.³⁶

       2

       BEFORE THE BLOOD

      I have but four, the treasures of my soul,

      They lay like doves around my heart;

      I tremble lest some cruel hand

      Should tear my household wreaths apart.

      My baby girl, with childish glance,

      Looks curious in my anxious eye,

      She little knows that for her sake

      Deep shadows round my spirit lie.

      My playful boys could I forget,

      My home night seems a joyous spot,

      But

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