Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Traditions of the African American Slave Narrative

Toni Morrison's novel Beloved is in its essence a fugitive slave's narrative, a fiction of factual representation based on perhaps the last, and certainly the most shocking, of all the fugitive slave cases that tore the United States apart in the 1850s. The case of Margaret Garner, a fugitive from Kentucky who killed her daughter in Cincinnati on 28 January 1856 to prevent her from being taken back to slavery, italicized the horror of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 in the blood of a murdered ..