Margaret Garner
Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAR : Margaret Garner
Margaret Garner was a slave from Kentucky. In 1856, she and her husband escaped slavery and fled to Ohio. When they were captured in Cincinnati, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife rather than see the child returned to slavery. Garner's life story is the foundation of the Toni Morrison novel Beloved, and the subject of an opera, called Margaret Garner, written by Morrison and composed by the Grammy-winning Richard Danielpour.
The opera was commissioned by Detroit Opera Theatre, Cincinnati Opera and the Opera Company of Philadelphia and premiered in 2005. It set records for opera attendance in Cincinnati. In Detroit, it played to unusually large audiences with an atypically high number of African-Americans. The cast included mezzo Denyce Graves as Margaret and baritone Rod Gilfry as the evil plantation owner, Edward Gaines.
Kentucky painter, Thomas Satterwhite Noble's 1867 painting, The Modern Medea, was inspired by the Margaret Garner tragedy. (Medea is a woman in Greek mythology who killed her own children.) The painting, owned by Cincinnati manufacturer, Proctor and Gamble Corporation was presented as a gift to the Underground Railroad Freedom Center, where it remains on permanent display.
External link
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.