Dear historian,
Whether you read this first journal entry of the strange omens that changed the course of our history one-hundred years in the future or one thousand, if you are sensitive to aggression committed out of passion rather than self-defense, you may decide to continue no further after you learn more about my most ruthless inclinations. In any case, I am bound by duty to divulge my most shameful temperaments. You will not fully understand the actions I took on Dunbar if I do not explain to you the horrible state that often detained me.
I suppose there’s violence in human nature. As a black doctor in a prejudice and dangerous land, I’ve been forced to defend myself with such primitiveness on some occasions. On a couple or more, I’ve lost control, allowing the instinct to have its days.
There’s one such case that I isolated to the furthest depths of my consciousness. When I was a man of hard antifogmatics, I attempted to drink the memory away, even when the scent of woodfire would bring it to the forefront.
During hours of silence in this wagon, when suffocating tensions replaced the thin mountain air, I sat at gunpoint to the lowest scoundrel ever called a deputy, all the while thrusted right into Calamity Dyer’s trap. Chip, himself, said she colluded with savages, and she had us— nowhere to turn— in territory of the fiercest, the Comanches.
As we passed by a camp rustling and smoking out on the frontier, I went to the aforementioned locked away place in my mind. I faced the evil which occurred back when I was bound to run from Washington DC.
***
A senator’s daughter and my lover, Aminda, sent word for me to see her one last time. This event occurred after we had a big fight over her discovering I meant to leave her behind to head West with Mormon converts.
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The contained fire in the hearth gave us little heat. Contained and small fire—the way Aminda somehow kept the controversy of her forbidden love for a black man; howbeit, one who recently completed education to become a doctor.
Small and contained like the flatness of her personality, which she hid beneath the roundedness from tresses in her hair and flowers in her bustle.
Neither of us could cover the fact that her houseslave, Bet, showed now, and that I was the father. I knew that she knew about me and Bet, though it remained unsaid. Aminda lifted her chin as proud as ever. “This is goodbye, Doctor. I shain’t ever beg a man to stay by my side.”
“Goodbye, Aminda. I am more regretful than you would like to imagine.”
“Do not underestimate the sheer liking I may get from a good reverie. Which brings me to the reason I sent for you.”
I felt nerves rise up my throat. My Mormon colleagues had warned me that she could be contemplating pinning her father’s murder on me to get me jailed.
She covered her smile with her silk gloved hand. “I’ll come out and say it. Bet’s slave cabin burned down. She and the slave child, who she would have given birth to, went up in flames.”
Her monotone without a note of compassion had hit worse than if she gloated. I gasped for air. Everything became a blur when I took off running.
***
My feet had taken me to my knees by the ruined slave cabin. Aminda yelled from behind. “You sorry cheat and coward, that’s what you get.”
I screamed, tears running down my face. It’d only been weeks ago when I last gazed in Bet’s big bug eyes. In front of the hearth, Bet stood in her plaid blue dress and bonnet. She smiled, showing her gums for me. No doubt she’d later be digesting broken pieces of her heart. She nonetheless whispered, “You gotta cut and run. Go be somebody, Wiley.”
***
I got up and turned in Aminda’s direction, hurt in my eyes. My voice choking, lips quivering, I said, “Tell me it’s a lie.” Next thing I knew Aminda lay on her back with my hands around her throat. “Tell me it’s a lie!” If the grip of slave men hadn’t restrained me, I’d have strangled her to death, and I often wished that I had.
