From Music in Cincinnati

"Margaret Garner" Challenges Cincinnati

Posted in: 2005

By Mary Ellyn Hutton
Jul 12, 2005 - 12:00:00 AM

   Baritone Rod Gilfry was booed in Detroit.
   Not surprising, since Gilfry portrays slave master Edward Gaines in "Margaret Garner," the Richard Danielpour/Toni Morrison opera which receives its Cincinnati Opera premiere with performances at 8 p.m. Thursday, Saturday and July 22 at Music Hall. (The world premiere was at the Detroit Opera House May 7.)
   Starring with Gilfry are mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, baritone Gregg Baker and soprano Angela Brown. Graves sings Margaret, whose 1856 escape from slavery in Boone County and killing of her child by her own hand when faced with re-capture have become the stuff of legend. Baker is Margaret's husband Robert, with Brown as Robert's mother Cilla.
   Directing is Kenny Leon, director of the 2004 Tony Award-winning revival of a "Raisin in the Sun" on Broadway. Conductor is Stefan Lano, who conducted Cincinnati Opera's "Dead Man Walking" in 2002.
   Cincinnati and Michigan Opera Theater have joined with Opera Company of Philadelphia in a $5.5 million, three-way co-commission that also marks the first main stage commission by Cincinnati opera in its 85-year history.
   Gilfry expects the response to be "much more intense" in Cincinnati than in Detroit. The historical context of "Margaret Garner" is more of an issue for Cincinnati Opera than Detroit, he said.
   Like Morrison's 1987 novel "Beloved," also inspired by the Garner tragedy, "Margaret Garner" is a fictionalized account.
   Known facts: Margaret Garner was a slave at Maplewood Farm, then owned by Archibald Gaines. (He becomes Edward in the opera because "Edward" is more singable.) A portion of the 1850s-era Gaines house still stands on the property, a designated historic site located on Richwood Road in Boone County near Richwood Presbyterian Church. (Visits are arranged through the Boone County Historical Society.)
   Margaret married Robert Garner, a slave on an adjoining farm owned by James Marshall. She, Robert, Robert's parents and Margaret's four children fled across the frozen Ohio River on Jan. 26, 1856 and took refuge in a cabin on Mill Creek near Cincinnati, owned by Margaret's free cousin, Joseph Kite.
   They were re-captured the next day by Gaines, a Marshall family member and federal officers. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter Mary during the melee. She was tried in Cincinnati pursuant to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which obligated Free states to return runaway slaves. It was a celebrated trial - actually just a hearing before a federal commissioner (court records are lost). And it pitted pro-slavery advocates against abolitionists, both strongly represented in Cincinnati by the pro-slavery Cincinnati Enquirer and the anti-slavery Cincinnati Gazette.
   The Garners were remanded to their owners, then "sold down the river," where Margaret died of typhoid fever on a Mississippi plantation in 1858. Gaines died of tetanus after stepping on a rusty nail in 1871.
   Morrison's libretto elaborates on this, in effect, giving a broader picture of slavery and its horrendous abuses. In the opera, Gaines rapes Margaret and Robert is lynched during re-capture. Margaret kills two of her children, not one, is put on trial in Kentucky, not Ohio, and condemned to death for theft of property (her children being Gaines' property).
   In true operatic fashion, she is granted clemency - on the gallows, noose around her neck - after intervention by Gaines at the prodding of his abolitionist daughter - but she trips the gallows and kills herself instead.
   This is hot button stuff - a kind of modern day "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - and as likely to arouse passions today as did the actual pre-Civil War events. There is plausible speculation that Gaines fathered the murdered child, which also adds tinder to the fire.
   Complicating the issue is Steven Weisenburger's 1998 book "Modern Medea," which explores the Garner case in elaborate detail, with particular attention to the trial. A large number of errors have been alleged, many factual, which has further incensed descendants of the Gaines family and their Northern Kentucky neighbors, who feel that the book is unfairly biased against them.
   Alabama resident John C. Gaines, a collateral descendant of Archibald Gaines and Gaines family historian, has stated that he will not attend the opera.

Weisenburger, former professor at the University of Kentucky now holder of the Mossiker Chair in Humanities at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, will address the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Toni Morrison Society, which meets in Cincinnati Thursday through Sunday .
   Tours of Maplewood by cast members, Cincinnati Opera board members and others have produced heated exchanges over the nature of slavery in Northern Kentucky, and set nerves on edge. Weisenburger has been notified that he is not welcome at Maplewood.
   To Gilfry, all of this could have been prevented by a simple expedient, changing the name of the slave owner. This was done, in fact, for a mock trial of Margaret Garner, presented by the Ohio Chapter of the American College of Trial Lawyers at the annual meeting of the Federal Bar Association in Cincinnati last October. Gaines' name was changed to Davis Jefferson for that event, which will be repeated at 7 p.m. July 19 at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. (Morrison does not use the name Gaines in "Beloved.")
   "I don't think the opera benefits from my character being called Gaines," Gilfry said. "I would like to go on record as saying that I'm fully aware that the character of Edward Gaines is largely fictionalized. What the opera has become - and should be - is an opera about the story of Margaret Garner and about slaves before the Civil War and the oppression they suffered. Gaines is the one figure in the entire opera where there's still family, and he is not portrayed accurately. I don't think they deserve to be punished for the actions of their forefathers.
   "The other side of the coin, though, is that the suffering of the slaves is a hundred times - a thousand times - more important than a few people's hurt feelings."
   Gilfry believes descendants of slave owners should be "hyper-sensitive" to what happened. Though unconnected with the history of slavery (Gilfry's maternal ancestors do include General Custer of the Battle of Little Bighorn, he said), Gilfry feels an obligation to "make good for this slavery thing. I do feel like I have to do penance in some way. I feel dirty, especially being as white as I am."
   For the record, Gilfry, 46, is blonde, 6-feet-3 inches tall, and one of the most physically imposing baritones on the opera scene today. He made opera history with his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in the world premiere of Andre Previn's "A Streetcar Named Desire" for San Francisco Opera in 1998. He has also starred as Czar Nicholas II in Deborah Drattell's "Nicholas and Alexandra" in San Francisco and Nathan in Nicholas Maw's "Sophie's Choice" in London.
   In 2008, he will premiere the title role in "The Fly" by Howard Shore (composer for "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy) for Los Angeles Opera. (Yes, that fly, chillingly portrayed by Jeff Goldblum in the 1986 film.)
   A California native, Gilfry trained at California State University at Fullerton and the University of Southern California before apprenticing at Los Angeles Opera, where he returns this fall for Offenbach's "Grand Duchess of Gerolstein" and Leoncavallo's "I Pagliacci." His cabaret act with pianist Christopher Denny is available on DVD at his web site www.rodgilfry.com.
   Gilfry brings a complex humanity to Edward Gaines in "Margaret Garner."
   "He's not a one-dimensional villain, an all-bad, black-and-white character. From the very beginning, you see he has a great love of the land, a great love for nature and a tremendous love for his daughter. He's had a tragic past. His wife has died and left him a widower, so you're inclined to be sympathetic until he starts behaving badly."
   What Morrison built into Gaines' character, he said, is "a desire to prove himself.
   "He was run out of town 20 years earlier because he had an undesirable episode with a girl in town. He comes back and feels like 'I'm going to show them. I've got money and I'm going to show them I'm a big man and undo the disgrace I left with.' "
   If he could speak for the Gaines family - and other Americans today - this is what Gilfry would say:
   "I understand that I need to be hyper-sensitive to what my forefathers did. It's not for me to say when the descendants of those who were enslaved should be finished talking about it. We should continue to have a dialogue and listen to them until they feel that they are done with it, not say, 'Come on now, we've said we're sorry. You have a Freedom Center now. Can you please just drop it?' "
   Adding her voice to the need for dialogue is Dr. Anne Butler, director of the Center of Excellence for the Study of Kentucky African Americans at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. Butler, who was involved in archaeological digs at Maplewood in 1998, calls "Margaret Garner" a "lightning rod around which the discomforts people have about slavery are unfolding. We haven't done enough talking about it. When I came here in 1996 and dug around in textbooks, the writers pictured a kinder and gentler slavery than in the Deep South."
   This attitude cannot be sustained, she said. "The institution of slavery denied the basic democratic ideals our country was founded on. 'Margaret Garner' serves as a symbol of how it devastated the lives of its victims, particularly in the context of family.
   "In reality, that's what the Gaines descendants are doing, she said. "Standing up for their family."
( Mary Ellyn Hutton is a direct descendant of Henry Clay, drafter of the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act.)
(first published in The Cincinnati Post July 12, 2005)