For, Beloved
In 1857 or so, after fleeing slavery up the frozen Ohio River towards Cincinnati, Margaret Garner was tried for the killing of her daughter. Garner had been pursued and ultimately apprehended by US Marshals under the Federal Slave Act of 1850. Mary, her daughter, was two. Garner had intended to kill her two sons, four- and six-years-old, and her infant daughter as well. Rather than see her children dragged back into bondage - back into slavery - Garner chose a kind of freedom for them; something the state would not.
In 2025, following the overturning of Roe v. Wade three years prior, Adriana Smith would suffer a medical emergency that left her braindead. Because she'd been pregnant at the time, for four months following her legal death in February, Smith's body was kept on life support against the consent of her family so as to not violate Georgia abortion law. In June a son she'd never know was, at the will of the state, extracted from her body. Four days later Smith was taken off life support.
A clear, heavy, sick through-line tethers these events over nearly two hundred years; one saturated with questions of the state, of ownership, of freedom, of being a Black woman in America. Garner made the radical, uncomfortable, desperate choice of affording her daughter some semblance of freedom through death while Smith was explicitly denied the freedom even to die. Instead, her black son was harvested from her body in a country where countless black sons are harvested by the state, in life and in labor, in death and in bondage.
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