The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Death
Baby Smothering
 slave infanticide




From: mtepper@panix.com (Michele Tepper)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Baby Smothering Revisited
Date: 9 Jun 1996 11:43:25 -0400

(How's *that* for a thread name, eh?)

Anyway, you may recall we had a debate a few weeks ago about the "woman smothers baby so Commies/Nazis/General All-Around Bad Guys don't hear its cries and discover entire family's hiding-place." Well, there are as I think at least one thread participant noted, similar legends around African-American slave women killing their children to save them from slavery. One documented instance of this was the case of Margaret Garner, who murdered her daughter to keep her from being recaptured and re-enslaved. An editor at Random House named Toni Morrison who was doing research for a history called _The Black Book_ (Middleton Harris, ed., 1973) came across a newspaper account of this story, and fifteen years later, used it as the basis for one of the most important American novels of the 1980s, _Beloved_.

A recent article on _Beloved_ as a political intervention in ongoing debates about American race relations, James Berger's "Ghosts of Liberalism: Morrison's _Beloved_ and the Moynihan Report" (PMLA 111:3 [May 1996], 408-420), has a long footnote on slave infanticide which, for your general eludication, I reproduce in its full here:

"Among representations of American slavery, _Beloved_ is unusual in emphasizing a former slave woman's killing of her child. Historians agree that slave infanticide was extremely rare (see White 87-89; Genovese 496-97; Miller and Smith), and Deborah Gray White's evidence suggests that a significant number of alleged infanticides were cases of sudden infant death syndrome (89). Randall Miller and John David Smith note that it was even rare for a mother to kill her child to save the child from slavery. More common were instances in which a mother committed infanticide to conceal the fact of the child's birth or because the father was a slave owner. The latter motive is the theme of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1848 poem 'The Runaway Slave of Pilgrim's Point.' Accounts of slave infanticides were also rare in abolitionist writings. The _Liberator_ covered the Margaret Garner case extensively but never mentioned other such incidents. Nor are there references to slave infanticides in Theodore Dwight Weld's _American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Voices_. In _The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_, Harriet Beecher Stowe refers to 'a case of this kind' in which a slave mother kills a child who is about to be sold (86), and the story of Cassy in _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ provides the closest parallel in literature to Sethe's story in _Beloved_. In an analysis of the rhetoric of suffering and cruelty in abolitionist writing, Elizabeth Clark shows that graphic accounts of slave owners' cruelty were 'riveting... and proved to be among the most effective and dramatic weapons in the reform arsenal' (467). Clark's analysis and the limited presence of slave infanticide in the documentary and literary record give significance to Morrison's focus on infanticide. It allows Morrison to represent the damage African-American families suffered both from racist institutions directly and sometimes from themselves, as their members acted under pressures from these institutions" (417-8).

That last sentence, I think, holds the key to the story's UL status; it allows us to acknowledge how wars and other evils deform not only their perpetrators, but their victims.

Berger's references, in order of their appearance in the text:

White, Deborah Gray, _Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South_. New York: Norton, 1985.
Genovese, Eugene D., _Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made_. New York: Vintage-Random, 1976.
Miller, Randall M. and John David Smith, eds. "Infanticide." _Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery_. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Weld, Theodore Dwight. _American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Voices_. New York: Arno; New York Times, 1968. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. _The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_. New York: Arno; New York Times, 1969.
Clark, Elizabeth B. "'The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual RIghts in Antebellum America." _Journal of American Hisory_ 82 (1995); 463-93

-- 

Michele Tepper          "The Life Delivery Service is down here at the 
mtepper@panix.com        front desk and has a package for you to sign for."
                            -- Harry MF Teasley, Combustible Clue Exporter



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