Question: Which slave's story inspired the novel that beings the "trilogy" that, according to Toni Morrison, Paradise completes?

Context articles: Paradise (novel)
Janis Mayes
Love (Morrison novel)
Tar Baby (novel)
Slave iron bit
God Help the Child
The Bluest Eye
African-American literature
Beloved (novel)
Beloved (film)

Paradise is a 1997 novel by Toni Morrison, and her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
 According to the author, it completes a "trilogy" that begins with "Beloved" and includes "Jazz".
Dr. Janis Alene Mayes is a leading American author, literary critic,literary translator and professor in Africana literature.
 She has made literary contributions in French- and English-language literature in the African Diaspora.
 Her specialties are in French translation literary practices.
 She has translated ground-breaking anthologies and books in francophone literatures.
 Her translation of "A Rain of Words" is the first comprehensive anthology of francophone poetry and includes work from 47 authors not well known outside of francophone literature.
 She is also the pioneer and director of the first American study abroad program that examines the historical connections between African Americans and "Black Paris", entitled "Paris Noir".
 The Syracuse University program has been influential in shaping Africana-focused cultural programs at leading museums in Paris such as the Louvre.
 This original specialized program has also gained notoriety by attracting students from universities across the USA including Spelman, Agnes Scott, and George Washington University and Hampton University.
 It has brought students to Paris to meet in scholarship with world-renowned artists whp are connected to the intellectual, artistic, and historical Black French experience, such as Nina Simone, Archie Shepp, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sonia Sanchez and Toni Morrison.
 She was a board member of the Toni Morrison Society.
 In 2004, she participated in public conversations with Toni Morrison in Paris at the Theatre de la Madeleine after the unveiling of a bench commemorating the end of slavery in France.
 She has also organized cultural literary conferences, including an event with "Discover Paris!"
 that celebrated the literary contribution of Toni Morrison to the African diaspora.
Love (2003) is the eighth novel written by Toni Morrison.
 Written in Morrison's non-linear style, the novel tells of the lives of several women and their relationships to the late Bill Cosey.
Tar Baby is a novel by the American author, Toni Morrison, first published in 1981.
 The "New York Times" reviewer wrote of it: "...Toni Morrison's greatest accomplishment is that she has raised her novel above the social realism that too many black novels and women's novels are trapped in.
 She has succeeded in writing about race and women symbolically."
The iron bit, also referred to as a gag, was used by slave masters and overseers as a form of punishment on slaves in the Southern United States.
 The bit, sometimes depicted as the scold's bridle, uses similar mechanics to that of the common horse bit.
 The scolds bridle however, is almost always associated with its use on women in the early 17th century and there are very few accounts of the device as a method of torture against black slaves under that particular name.
 As opposed to the whip, the iron bit lacks the historic, social, and literary symbolic fame that would make information on the use of the iron bit as accessible.
 Its use throughout history has warranted some attention though, mostly from literary texts.
 Most notable is Toni Morrison’s novel "Beloved", which gives insight as to the emotional and mental trauma of being subjected to the bit.
 Even earlier, slave narratives and publications of newspapers and magazines from the 18th century on give evidence of this device being used to torture and punish slaves.
God Help the Child is a novel by American writer Toni Morrison.
 The book is her 11th novel.
 News of the book, as well as the title and opening line were released in December 2014.
 The novel's original title, preferred by Morrison herself, is The Wrath of Children.
The Bluest Eye was written by Toni Morrison in 1970.
 Morrison, a single mother of two sons, wrote the novel while she taught at Howard University.
 She centered the story around a young African American girl named Pecola who grows up during the years following the Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio.
 Because of her dark skin color, Pecola gets taunted for her appearance as the members of her community associate beauty with "whiteness".
 She ultimately develops an inferiority complex, which fuels her desire for blue eyes.
 The point of view switches between the perspective of Claudia MacTeer, the daughter of Pecola's foster parents, and multiple third-person limited viewpoints.
 Due to the controversial issues the book raises such as racism, incest, and child molestation, there have been numerous attempts to ban it from schools and libraries.
African-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent.
 It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley.
 Before the high point of slave narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives.
 The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.
 The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands.
 African-American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize to Toni Morrison.
 Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality.
 African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison.
 Set after the American Civil War (1861–65), it is inspired by the story of an African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state.
 In the novel, the protagonist Sethe is also a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio.
 After 28 days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue slaves across state borders.
 Sethe kills her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured and taken back to Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation from which Sethe recently fled.
 A woman presumed to be her daughter, called Beloved, returns years later to haunt Sethe's home at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio.
 The story opens with an introduction to the ghost: "124 was spiteful.
 Full of a baby's venom."
Beloved is a 1998 American horror-drama film based on Toni Morrison's 1987 novel of the same name, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, and Thandie Newton.
 The plot centers on a former slave after the American Civil War, her haunting by a poltergeist, and the visitation of her reincarnated daughter whom she murdered out of desperation to save her from a slave owner.
 Despite being a box office bomb, "Beloved" received an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design for Colleen Atwood, and both Danny Glover and Kimberly Elise received praise for their performances.