Author Toni Morrison based part of her story on a true case. Margaret Garner was a slave who lived on a farm called Maplewood in Boone County, Kentucky. Her owner was Archibald K. Gaines, who was most likely her half-brother, and the father of two of Margaret's children. In January, 1856, Margaret, her husband Robert Garner, and their four children escaped across the frozen Ohio River to the home of Margaret's uncle, Joe Kite, just outside Cincinnati. When slave catchers caught up with them, Margaret Garner attempted to kill her four children rather than have them returned to slavery. She succeeded in killing her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife before she was subdued. It took four weeks to bring the case to trial in Cincinnati, because the prosecution argued that Margaret should be tried under federal Fugitive Slave Laws, while the defense argued that Margaret should be tried for murder under state murder laws. (The defense hoped to obtain a pardon from the Ohio governor if Margaret was convicted.) By the time the judge ruled in favor of the federal Fugitive Slave Laws, Margaret's owner had taken her back across the river to Kentucky. To keep her out of the hands of Ohio abolitionists, Gaines sent Margaret to New Orleans, and then to a Mississippi plantation, where she died of typhoid fever in 1858.

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