She escaped with her husband and his parents, as well as their four children, and crossed over the frozen Ohio River to the safe house of Elijah Kite, Garner’s cousin, a free black man living The Garnies made it to the Kites home on a Monday morning. Within a few hours her master found them. “Motherhood, across race, language, country and culture, is understood to be complicated and powerful: a tsunami of gut and joy and fear and heartache. Garner found herself in that fleeting, lightless instant of a mother’s incongruous love on a frigid night, when slave catchers surrounded her cousins’ home and when she made the decision, in one soul-chilling moment, to slit the throat of her 2-year-old daughter rather than return her to slavery” (nytimes). By the time that the Marshes got there Margaret's 2 year-old daughter was dead from the butcher knife, and her other children lay wounded but not dead on the