The Key by N. Barry Carver (best e reader for epub TXT) 📕

Victory

It is the year of Our Lord, seventeen-hundred ninety and three.

I was born into this world a slave. My parents both died without knowing the short freedoms I have gratefully achieved. As far as I know their parents were village dwellers, who were originally captured and brought, as cargo, from somewhere in Middle Africa to England and then here to Virginia.

I am to die today. This last privilege, and it is a rare one, is that I am allowed to write down my final thoughts before they come for me. You, who have read my notes before, will please forgive this foreign hand. A young Jesuit has offered to write this down, as all my fingers are now broken or missing. For this, and whatever use these words may be put to, I thank him and the mercy of his god to him, in whom, excuse me, I have no faith.

I am to be drawn and quartered. I will not here describe the procedure as I am trying to keep from thinking of it at all. I will instead tell you that I am happy today. I know how unlikely that sounds but I assure you it is true. While, again, brother, pardon me, I cannot believe in a distant and silent Lord to which I must answer, I do believe in human beings.

That my tenure in this world has been hard, I will not complain. That my parched throat will taste less than twenty-eight summers, I will not lament. My scars, most of them newly made, will never know a Doctor’s care; my mind will never achieve it’s potential; my skin will never again spark from a woman’s touch... none of these things occupy me in the few hours thoughts I have left. I have loved, I have learned and I have dreamt of the future. It is not enough but it will keep me happy for these last few hours.

The message I want to leave, now that I have grown to understand it, is that I have died. Again, I know, this may be hard to see, but please try to understand it.

Since I had no choice or chance to avoid my current predicament, I am now aware of the good it may do.

When my last moment comes – a crowd of people will gather to see how I make my end. That, my reader, is my last hope, for if a single person in that crowd is upset by what they see, I will have won the day. Empathy is a foothold for eventual justice.

If, as is more likely, the crowd will bellow in appreciation for whom they see as a criminal being destroyed... I will also win the day. For inhumanity breeds its own demise.

Either decency will spring from seeing an evil being done, or it will spring from the disgust of common persons who see those doing the evil with delight.

Injustice will end and that the gruesome event before me may, in some small part, work toward that, I am indeed happy.

I hear the jailer coming so this is all.


On the first day of spring 1793, Joseph Night,
a human being with dark skin, died as prescribed
by court in Springfield County, Virginia.

I have written here down the last words he said.

May God have mercy upon us all.

Brother Elias Stamp
Warton Township, Georgia


One century later

Civility

As a young man, I had it in my mind that the men of medicine were both well respected and paid. Only now, at the end of my career, do I believe I have finally reached those benchmarks. Be that as it may, the aforementioned was my thought and, with the time and expense of proper schooling out of the question, I set off in the last year of the War Between the States to put into motion the wheels that would bring me to my present destination – at the head of this table ready to accept a gold watch.

I left my home in Mississippi at the age of 19 to join in the fight for states’ rights. I am not saying that I joined the Confederate Army and went to war.

Indeed, I did not and it was not my patriotism that drove my actions. My goals I have written but my plan required the anonymity that the western edge of Kentucky provided. Once there, I sold the few goods I owned to acquire a ragged CSA uniform and hire the most remote tailor I could find. From the scraps I brought, the man concocted for me something a bit better than the common foot soldier’s issue – stitching into the lapel the symbol for the medical corps. With this uniform in my bedroll, I cast about to find a proper horse and spent my last solid dollar on outfitting it in such a way that it might be mistaken for a military mount. Once I thought I was far enough from town, I assumed the guise and bearing of that medical man I wished to be and looked for the smallest conflict that might afford me the opportunity for a battlefield commission.

I read of two such engagements along the way. Leaflets posted in the villages I passed through were desperate calls to arms - but the battles, I judged from the rhetoric, would be too involved for me to pass into unnoticed. I was seeking instead some skirmish where a few scrapes might be bandaged and a grateful commander might bestow a rank and title on me that I could not otherwise claim. As I rode, for nearly three weeks, I gathered a pair of companions, both of which were named Tom.

Tom Jons was a likable enough fellow, if a bit on the unwashed side. He had a quick temper but it was not often evidenced, so he was normally good company. The other was Thomas Night. As these are different times than those were, I will simply mention for the record that Mr. Night was a colored man. I will further state that the fact that he was colored, in no way affected the fact that he was a man. He was a loyal friend, a clever companion and I begged the lord for his soul, on the day they buried him. Further, though my salvation is still a matter of question, I am positive beyond a certainty that, when the rapture comes, Mr. Night will find Saint Peter a willing doorman. That being said, and these times being far more enlightened than those, I will now return to my story and never more mention the various shades of my friends.

I had only one joke at the expense of the men who traveled with me. Mr. Jons had a horse, if you could call it that, and Mr. Night would trade off riding behind one or the other of us. As we were nigh onto the frontier of the country in those days there was always some talk of fearsome Indian encounters. This is where the witticism I have mentioned came into play. When one or the other would ask if I worried about a possible savage attack... I would respond that I was well protected by having my Tom-Toms ever by my side – and that on their resilient skulls I could easily beat out a pattern that would afford me a quick escape. I realize that it is not much of a jest, but we were hard pressed for humor in those days and I will stand by my quip as one of the funniest we heard in all our travels.

I am unsure what day it fell on, but it was very near the war’s end. I am likewise unsure if the battle happened in Ohio, or if we were still in Kentucky. The Toms were actually keen on getting into the war and, by virtue only of the fact that I wore something that looked like a uniform, they expected that I was leading them back to the front lines.

This brings up the question of the association we two white men had with Mr. Night. I know I said I would no further mention it but, being of his color, it does leave one to wonder just why he would be heading for the war on the side of the Gray. Honestly, and even though this was surely what the war was mostly about, neither I nor the other Tom put that two and two together until much later... and I am not sure that he ever did.

Whatever day it was and whatever the reasons, we could now hear the occasional blast and echo of an altercation we were approaching. Before any of us had thought ourselves in the slightest danger - we were in the middle of a small clearing between exhausted units from both sides. The Toms were talking and, just as I motioned to them for quiet, a hot round of lead tore through my uniform and threw me from my horse. In an instant the Toms slipped behind their horse and reined him to his knees.

None of us were sure where the shot had come from and the boys had the unfortunate luck to place their animal in such a way that both sets of troops had a clear shot at them. Where they had thought to use the horse as a shield, they had done the exact opposite. In less than a minute we were all writhing on the ground and one of the horses was bleeding to death.

When first I knew that I had been hit, I made up my mind that I would tough it out, put on a brave face and go on as if I were invincible. This may be the thought that goes through the minds of many men in the instant after a wound is gotten in war. It lasted for less that a minute. The bullet that took me came dastardly from behind and tore it’s way through the structure, I have since learned, is known as the Rotator Cuff. I assure you that there are few more painful structures that a body can have punctured and twisted by a passing shard of metal that has so little chance of killing you. While I was screaming, my arm hung limp at my side, flopping as I rolled over like a dying fish. Not exactly the perfect start of what turns out to be a long career as a surgeon.

Both the Toms had been hit from behind as well. The Sons of the South were so incensed by the cowardice of the attack against us that they quit their barricades and charged the Union troops – killing three and leaving one wounded behind as they retreated into the bush. As the Southerners returned to the field to claim their own wounded, a detail hovered over the Toms and me. My career began as one of the young soldiers cried, “Glory be... Colonel! One of these