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Sixty Million and More: Toni Morrison's Beloved

by Michael Laliberty & Andy Sperling

Oprah Winfrey as Sethe

(Beloved, 1998)

Gordon

(1963)

How does one "heal"?

  • In court-ordered whippings, slaves received an average of 179 lashes.
  • Gordon's photo circulated the press in 1863, creating more antipathy towards slavery.

Slave collars often had long, metal spikes to increase the likelihood of sleeplessness and getting entangled in the woods.

Sources Used

"Margaret Garner Incident (1856)." Blackpast.org.

"Margaret Garner." Ohio History Central.

"Slaves with Iron Muzzles." PBS.

''Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.'' Black Women Writers 1950-1980. NY: Anchor Books 339-345.

Twelve Years a Slave. Dir. Steve McQueen. Perf. Chiwetel Ejiofor. Fox Searchlight, 2013. Film.

This gruesome device gains popularity in American slavery, now known as the Iron Muzzle or Iron Bit.

2015

The iron bit holds down the tongue firmly, so as to accumulate saliva and prevent swallowing for long periods of time.

"The need to spit is so deep you cry for it" - Beloved (84)

~1700s

Abolitionist lawyer John Jolliffe tries to persuade the court to charge Margaret for murder with the hopes that she would not be re-enslaved via the Fugitive Slave Law.

The court returned the Garners to their masters. Margaret died in 1858 in a typhoid epidemic.

The Fugitive Slave Act

Required by law enslaved persons, even in free territory, be returned to their masters. Threatened the safety of all black people, even freedmen in the North.

1850

A pregnant Margaret Garner escapes with her children and her husband Robert, fleeing with several others to a safe house in Cincinnati, Ohio. Many called it the coldest winter ever.

1856

1867

The tradition of Negro spirituals is immortalized and recorded in "Slave Songs of the United States"

"For a long time, the art form that was healing for Black people was music. That music is no longer exclusively ours ... so another form has to take that place, and it seems to me that the novel is needed by African-Americans now in a way that it was not needed before." - Toni Morrison, "Rootedness" (1984)

The "Middle Passage" marks the final and most deadly leg of the Atlantic slave trade, lasting for several centuries.

Hours later, their master and several federal marshals arrive with an arrest warrant. Robert Garner fires several shots in defense, wounding one man before being overpowered.

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~1500s

Before and After Margaret

~1500s

European women are increasingly subjected to the "scold's bridle" to encourage silence in the presence of males, especially in church.

Margaret slits her two-year-old daughter's throat with a butcher knife, wounds her other children, and intends to take her own life as well as theirs. She is stopped and the entire Garner family is taken into custody.

1834

1441

Margaret Garner, the inspiration for Sethe's character, is born into slavery in Kentucky.

The slave trading in Africa by Europeans begins.

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