This is a column about nightmares.
On Jan. 28, 1856, Margaret Garner slit the throat of her 2-year-old daughter, killing her. Slave catchers had closed in on the Cincinnati safe house to which Garner, an African American woman, had fled, seeking freedom. She tried to kill two of her other children, too, but succeeded only in wounding them before the white men stopped her.
She later explained that this was no act of sudden madness: “I was as cool then as I am now.” She said she simply wanted to end her children’s suffering then and there, rather than see them returned to slavery and “murdered by piecemeal.”
From the bloody skeins of Garner’s nightmare, Toni Morrison wove her own. In her 1987 novel, “Beloved,” she imagined the dead toddler as a ghost, haunting the mother who killed her. “Beloved,” a dense, harrowing and deeply affecting work, became one of the most acclaimed novels of the century, winning a Pulitzer Prize.
But it gave Laura Murphy’s son nightmares, and that was that. Never mind that Blake Murphy was a high school senior, reading it in an AP literature class. Never mind that “AP” means advanced placement: challenging, college-level course work. Since 2013, Murphy, a white woman from Fairfax County, Va., has been trying to ban Morrison’s book. Part of her complaint is that it is too sexually explicit.
