An extract from the introduction by Russell Banks
Morrison selected author Russell Banks to introduce this edition. He writes earnestly of how Beloved has the power to transform the reader because it ‘lets one know how it feels to be an American and, yes, black and female, and ultimately how, at the deepest and most inclusive level, it feels to be human’. Joe Morse’s award-winning illustrations, approved by the author, capture the novel’s extraordinary power.
‘“I wanted to translate the historical into the personal,” Morrison has said. Her original source for the story is the historical account of a woman, Margaret Garner, who in January 1856 escaped with her baby daughter from the Kentucky plantation of Archibald Gaines, where she was a slave, into Ohio, a non-slave state. Thanks to the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, she was nonetheless still legally the property of Gaines, and when he and a posse appeared at the Cincinnati home where Garner, her husband and her three other children had found refuge, Garner, according to a contemporary account, “seized a butcher knife that lay on the table, and with one stroke cut the throat of her little daughter, whom she probably loved the best. She then attempted to take the life of the other children and to kill herself, but she was overpowered and hampered before she could complete her desperate work.” The story of Margaret Garner was widely circulated afterwards in the pre-Civil War antislavery press as an example of the unnatural consequences of slavery, but eventually it was more or less lost to public memory. Morrison herself first came across the story in the early 1970s, when she was editing African-American documentary material for a groundbreaking anthology called The Black Book.
‘But Beloved is not about the historical Margaret Garner. Morrison has insisted, “I didn’t do any more research at all about that story. I did a lot of research about everything else in the book – Cincinnati, and abolitionists, and the underground railroad – but I refused to find out anything else about Margaret Garner. I really wanted to invent her life.”’