side, demanding that they surrender. Mary Kite, Elijah’s wife, refused the party entry; Elijah first agreed to let the authorities in but changed his mind.27 Outside, a crowd—composed of curious passersby, neighbors, proslavery and antislavery sympathizers, deputies, members of the press, and African Americans—gathered around the home and grew larger by the minute.
The deputies tried to force their way into the home. Cornered, the family scrambled, not sure what to do. Robert pulled out a pistol he had taken from his owner to protect his family’s freedom. The men had decided to “fight and die” rather than return to slavery. Surely, Robert had freedom and death on his mind as he fired at a deputy who tried to come through a window of the cabin. The bullet hit the deputy, shattering his teeth and leaving his finger hanging “by a mere thread.”28
The Garner men’s decision to resort to armed defense is remarkable for a few reasons. It was a powerful assertion of manhood neither ever had been able to assert in Kentucky: the power to protect their family from everything that had hurt them in the past, plus all that threatened to hurt them outside the doors of that Cincinnati home. Hence, they enacted a type of heroic power that was largely elusive for enslaved men. Moreover, it was a brazen act for African Americans to fire at white men—especially deputized federal authorities—who outnumbered them and had greater firepower. Their decision to use deadly force to avoid capture was not without precedent, though. Other fugitive slaves had used deadly force to avoid capture before the Garners, including in Christiana, Pennsylvania, in 1851. Then, when Maryland slave owner Edward Gorsuch tried to reclaim his slaves from the home of free black William Parker, the armed inhabitants inside shot and killed him and gravely injured his sons.
There were consequences for shooting at white men in the Ohio Valley. Had the shooting occurred across the river in Kentucky, laws there decreed that an enslaved person convicted of maliciously shooting a free white person with the intent to kill could be punished by death, whipping, or imprisonment; a conviction for murdering a white person carried the death penalty.29 In Ohio, a free state, there were no specific laws against fugitives shooting, injuring, or killing white men, but black on white violence certainly would lead to an extralegal death sentence. African Americans’ armed resistance against whites in Cincinnati always prompted swift mob violence against the entire community. None of the consequences deterred Robert from firing a gun against white deputies.
Initially, Margaret, Mary, and the children were in the front room of the Kite home with the Garner men. As Margaret watched the unfolding struggle at the door and 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
