Beautiful Jim Key

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by Mim E. Rivas


  In contrast, Albert Rogers—hurrying through the torrents of travelers onto the overcrowded platform, waving an apology and a greeting to Dr. Key—may have had a keener sense of the distance they were about to go. Only a man of such convictions could have persuaded Key to enter into a partnership in the first place.

  Bill Key no doubt had misgivings about throwing in his lot with a fellow he had just met. But there was something about A. R. Rogers he liked, something about the intensity of the man thirty years his junior that he found refreshing. The redheaded, bearded, stylishly coiffed and attired Rogers may have come from a world of privilege, but there was about his soulful, saucerlike eyes the look of a man who longed for more than the comfort and status of wealth. Key sensed that Rogers fancied himself as a showman in the mold of P. T. Barnum who, though he had died in 1891, still hovered as the most dominant force in American entertainment. But for some reason, maybe because Rogers was self-conscious in front of crowds, or because he lacked the requisite skills to be a performer himself, he had opted for the role of a behind-the-scenes impresario—destined to live out his dreams vicariously.

  There was something else. Rogers had prominent ears. They were not the small, pinned-back type that horses interpreted as a threat or posture of anger in their own species. That may or may not have had anything to do with why Jim had taken to Albert Rogers right away, but Doc Key saw that Jim’s instincts were to trust the stranger.

  For as much as Bill and Jim were able to intuit about Rogers, their new promoter was still mystified by them. And that was a problem he hoped his interview for this promotional pamphlet might address. He had to come up with a way to entice the leadership from New York’s prestigious ASPCA to attend his private press party, and a way to overcome the question he anticipated hearing—just who is this “Dr.” William Key?

  That was why, when he heard the tale of Bill Key’s pure Arabian, Lauretta “Queen of Horses,” he pounced on it and decided to make it the centerpiece of his publicity push. Was it true? Doc Key insisted it was. Then again, he quickly learned that Key was an artful storyteller, an occultist, a die-hard capitalist, a voracious reader (with interests that included the Bible, veterinary medicine, politics, the history and struggle of African-Americans, and strange news items dealing with outer space), and was, in Bill Key’s own estimation, the best poker player south of the Mason-Dixon.

  Rogers had to have known that promoting the story as fact, if it was fabricated, could undermine Jim’s credibility. On the other hand, Albert Rogers was a romantic—a man born to wealth who didn’t need to cavort with the masses but who sought on many levels to be one of them—and he chose to believe Doc Key’s account mainly because it moved him. What was clearly evident in the telling was that Key, the son of a slave woman and a white father he never identified, had in the spring of 1889 anticipated the birth of his Arabian’s foal as if he was awaiting a Second Coming.

  Doc Key by that year was already fifty-six years old and recently wed to Lucinda Davis, the third of what would be four wives, with no children of his own. He had presided over hundreds of foalings, several from mares and stallions he owned. But this colt or filly was going to be something more special than any of them, having, after all, the finest pedigree in the nation. All the omens that spring were favorable.

  William Key set stock in signs. Key explained to Rogers that black folk called it “mother wit,” a kind of earthy second sight, an inherited knowingness. His ability to observe and interpret signs had helped him survive terrible times and prosper, allowing him to heal animals and humans, figuring out their ailments and devising homemade remedies that cured about anything. Despite the fact that he was self-taught, by the early 1880s his renown as a medical practitioner and expert in animal sciences had well earned him the appellation of “doctor.”

  His success came also because he understood the laws of supply and demand, and many times throughout his life he had faced down death by letting it be known that he had the ability to fix whatever demanded fixing. Cavalry horses shot or maimed, wild colts in need of taming, mules gone lame, milk cows turned dry, hens refusing to lay, wagon wheels to repair, saddles and harnesses to be restored. He had remedies for other human wants and needs: his own country cooking, rooms to rent, a hand of cards, and races to wager on.

  Though Rogers obviously recognized that Key was an unusual man, he couldn’t yet have known the extent of his success—that the kindly Doctor had created something of a small kingdom for himself, at various points owning and operating a veterinary hospital, a hotel, a restaurant, a blacksmith and wagon wheel shop, and his own racetrack. But Key couldn’t restrain his pride in admitting that one of the different businesses that occupied him had boomed. “I had a liniment which I called ‘Keystone Liniment,’” he told Rogers, almost casually, “and everybody wanted it, so that started me in the medicine business. I used to travel around the country with a minstrel band to attract a crowd, and then sell my medicine.”

  Rogers saw the approach as further evidence of Key’s ingenuity. In this heyday of the patent medicine era, the highways and byways of much of the country were littered with all classes of medicine men selling their miraculous concoctions that promised everything from a cure for the common cold to life everlasting—boasting ingredients that came anywhere from the salt of the Dead Sea to the planet Mars. There were the usual scoundrels selling snake oil and the big-budget productions pushing famous labels like Kickapoo (products sold in elaborate Indian medicine shows starring Kickapoo tribal members, including a salve and a sagwa, or tonic, the precursor to the Joy Juice cola that had future comic book fame) and Carter’s Little Liver Pills. But every now and then a product with actual therapeutic properties came along. One of them was Keystone Liniment, used internally and externally, for such horse and mule afflictions as joint spasms, cuts, splints, swelling, cholera, saddle sore, lameness, bots, colic, and their various corresponding human maladies. Breaking into the exclusive ranks of top-selling patent medicines, however, required not only a credible medical expert, but also a brilliant pitchman, as well as a riveting form of entertainment to draw an audience.

  Cutting down on expenses, Doc Key did most of that himself, playing three roles: formulator, pitchman, and medical expert. Since he traveled with a group of black minstrels (typically banjo, bones, mouth organ, and sometimes fiddle), he had the advantage of employing friends and relatives, and he benefited because crowds were starting to prefer authentic Negro music to the minstrel tunes borrowed by whites in blackface.

  Whatever his secret was, with repeat business and word of mouth, Key hit a gold mine, which kept him busy filling mail orders when he wasn’t on the road. Keystone Liniment may not have been as big a name as Jack Daniel’s—which was distilled and bottled in Lynchburg, Tennessee, not far from Shelbyville—but the low cost of production and the high demand made it hugely profitable. Just how profitable, Rogers wouldn’t know until later, when he was shocked to learn that Bill Key was worth more than $100,000 (a multimillionaire by twenty-first-century standards). And that was before he went into the practice of teaching horses to spell.

  Rogers made the initial decision to make little mention of Key’s wealth in his publicity materials, choosing instead to promote Jim’s costar by focusing on the less threatening image of a kindly, older, colored country doctor—the Uncle Tom figure from page and stage who was more popular than ever as the turn of the century approached. Initially, Dr. William Key went along with the portrayal, just in time for the New York press to be charmed by “Uncle” Bill’s quaint colored country expressions.

  Despite its patronizing ring (more pronounced in later generations), calling a man or woman of color “Uncle” or “Aunt” was long assumed by Southern whites to be a term of affection and familiarity. Then again, Doc Key would have agreed with the delegates to the 1865 State Convention of the Colored People of Tennessee when they complained about the demeaning ways that both former slaves and freeborn were addressed. One of the
more famous complaints arose when a delegate had been asked by a white man who passed him on the street, “Well, Uncle, how are you getting along?” The delegate feigned surprise: “I was glad to know that I had a white nephew.”

  At the same time, as a poker player Doc Key knew it could be advantageous to presume upon the prejudices of others, in other words, not to show one’s hand. This had been his secret, he told Rogers, in finding and buying the Arabian mare.

  Around 1885, after getting a healthy start in the medicine business, Key and his group were out on the road when they met a man who knew of a circus that had become stranded near Tupelo, Mississippi. In order to raise money to get home, the circus owners were selling out, including their stock of horses.

  The Doc was mighty interested, he recalled, but not sure if the risk of heading down that way, either alone or with his minstrels, would be worth it.

  Risk? Rogers didn’t yet understand the kind of peril that such a trip might entail for a black person, although over the years that he and Key worked together, Rogers came to witness many indignities of the color bar that his partner faced—from the different train compartments they were sometimes forced to occupy, to the hotels that prohibited Key from entering, to the rules of theatres and concert halls that permitted the Doc to perform onstage but which only allowed Negroes as audience members on certain days or in certain sections. Rogers hurt for the injustices, and later devised ingenious ways to break down some of the barriers. But no matter how much he sympathized, he couldn’t change the color of his skin, and it would have been hard to relate to all the considerations Key must have had while traveling among the many worlds he inhabited.

  Rerouting to Tupelo to inspect what was left of a small circus was not only inconvenient but it was, after all, Mississippi. There, as in other areas of the South (including pockets in Tennessee), in the 1880s lynchings were on the rise. The tide of justice that had helped Lincoln to free the slaves and had moved toward full and equal rights had turned back. Not only was the federal government unable to stop vigilantes and lynch mobs and the spread of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but now there was also a trend moving south and north toward institutionalizing racism.

  Doc Key’s survival instincts warned him not to travel unfamiliar roads into Mississippi. Then again, he smelled a good deal—something he could rarely pass up—so he proceeded on down to Tupelo cautiously, keeping his troupe nearby but not with him, as he made sure he didn’t arrive looking too much like a duded-up somebody. He went ready to play poker, prepared to look and sound as raggedy and illiterate as he could pull off.

  When he came along the rutted road outside the stables where the sale was taking place, Key recalled to Rogers, he was struck by the sight of a gray mare standing in the field, like a sculpted though weathered marble statue, as if she’d been waiting for him for a long, long time. He read the signs: she was probably younger than she looked, underfed, badly abused. But despite the injuries that slowed her down, as she cantered curiously alongside his carriage with a fluidity that conjured images of desert sands, he could have begun to guess that the gray mare was a true Arabian and that she must have once been extraordinary.

  Bill Key didn’t elaborate to Rogers as to what kind of ruse he used with the owners of the circus, except to say that he first picked out a string of other horses to buy, before asking if the gray mare was for sale. Masking their amusement, the sellers brought her into the stables so he could have a closer look.

  Since the time of the Prophet Mohammed, the laws of Islam restricted the sale of prized horses, so most pure Arabians in Europe or America were considered either stolen, illegally sold, or the descendants of either. Females were called Daughters of the Wind, because of their exceptional speed. Arabians were the progenitors of the English Thoroughbreds, horses originally bred primarily for racing. But Arabian blood was valued for other traits of equal or greater importance than speed: intelligence and a familial connection to human beings, even what some called a humanlike morality.

  Arabians had another telltale trait that Doc Key easily spotted—jet-black skin showing through underneath a thinning iron gray coat, a genetic gift of equine sunscreen. The other signs were there—the wise eyes low and widely spaced, their color deep and dark, the small perky ears that pointed inward, and the distinctive shape of the head, tapered, with a prominent brow, chiseled cheekbones, flat nostrils—natural traits without embellishment said to make the Arabian an essential drinker of air, a breathing machine destined for speed.

  These were the features of the gray mare inspected by Doc Key. Because of what he judged to have been years of mistreatment, she appeared to be in her midtwenties, not long from death. Once Key got a look at her teeth, however, pretending to be an amateur, he saw she was probably ten or twelve years younger.

  Bill Key offered forty dollars for the old mare, a price high enough for the sellers not to bother hiding their laughter. But once Key and his troupe had finished hitching up the horses, Lauretta among them, and were back on the road to Tennessee, they were the ones having the bigger laugh. For forty dollars, Doc Key had just bought a horse that had once fetched $50,000.

  Lauretta’s history, compiled by Rogers and Key, centered on a shady figure by the name of Jack Randall, a light-haired, blue-eyed Englishman, known to have traveled to Persia in the late 1870s, who arrived in the many-tented domain of the powerful Sheik Ahemid, bearing a gift of holy Arabic tablets of unknown origin. The charming Randall was welcomed by the sheik and treated royally to a series of nightly feasts, earning the trust and generosity of his host through his flattering “tongue of oil.” The sheik—his guard down—soon began to boast about his four priceless horses, the Kingly Four. There were three stallions, Philis, Ectes, and Ranus, and a mare, Lauretta.

  Sheik Ahemid told the Englishman of their illustrious history, how they were the four remaining descendants of the horses who had lived in the time of the great pharaohs, that their names were inscribed on ivory tablets, and that none was more prized than she, Lauretta Queen of Horses.

  Key and Rogers knew well that Arabian mares were valued over the stallions—indeed, that Prophet Mohammed had decreed, “Give the preference to mares; their belly is a treasure and their back a seat of honor.” As the Islamic saying had it, “The greatest blessing is an intelligent woman, or a prolific mare.” The superior ride and comfort of the female Arabian was so seductive, some even said the ease of her gait could render her rider effeminate.

  Jack Randall, according to the Key/Rogers account, told Ahemid that he worked for a great sheik in far-off England, whose name was P. T. Barnum, that he had enormous power and wealth, and would pay an unprecedented price to purchase Lauretta—her weight in gold and one thousand horses.

  “Sell Lauretta, my Queen? Sell the Mother of all Horses, to whom a million Allahs are said?” the sheik allegedly thundered. He would first pluck out his own eyes. So enraged was Ahemid that he ended the feast and sent the Englishman back to his tent, still not suspecting what the stranger might do.

  In a frothy, almost cinematic piece of prose, Rogers and Key described Randall’s daring predawn theft of the mare, detailing how he stole from his tent, gliding into the semidarkness under a starlit sky, creeping past the sleeping guards into the tent of the Kingly Four. “’Twas a moment that made his hair turn gray, but there at the very place stood Lauretta, her trappings on a post near her. No hesitation now; ’twas a lifetime in the minute it took to sling a bridle on her noble head and lead her out. Cautiously, with silent tread, in the sand he led her, and then bounding on her back glided as if she had wings, out in the desert.”

  Once the theft was discovered, Ahemid and hundreds of horsemen gave chase into the desert, but the shifting sands, blown by the wind, had hidden Lauretta’s tracks.

  While the sheik was reportedly overwhelmed by anger and grief, the whole of Arabia was outraged, and suspicion soon turned against him. The sheik’s boasting was at fault, said some. Others believed he had secre
tly sold her to Jack Randall for some portion of the $50,000 that P. T. Barnum was said to have paid for her.

  A short time later, when a gray Arabian began to appear as a main attraction in Barnum’s European shows, the semifictionalized controversy turned into a real-life scandal. In the British Parliament, a lord lamented to the London press over the exploitation of the horse that was “drawing such crowds at the circus because she was known as the Queen of Arabian Horses, causing no end of annoyance by the fanatics of Arabia…all because of one gray mare.” He called it tragic that Lauretta, the once proud queen of the desert, was now the “slave of a circus owner, though the greatest in the land, to be exhibited to the tens of thousands of the curious.”

  Key figured that the worst of her mistreatment began once the controversy died down and the crowds stopped caring about the stolen, royal horse. No longer a spectacle of intrigue, Lauretta was sold to a lesser circus, brought to America, and taught the typical circus tricks, through the typical means that were all too familiar to Doc Key. Some methods were violent, others more insidious like the common practice (considered less extreme) of using pins and sharp tacks, pricking the horse’s head to teach her to nod yes, pricking her shoulder to teach her to nod no, pricking her leg so many times to get her to kick the dirt to tell her age, later using the whip to remind her of the pinpricks, then eventually using signals to remind her of the lashes.

  Doc Key calculated she had been with at least three circuses before he found her in Tupelo, and he believed that besides the cruelty of her training she had also been broken down by neglect. Even though Key was well known in Tennessee and in other Southern states for his skill in rehabilitating sick horses, almost no one had any hope for anything more than a minor, superficial improvement for Lauretta.

  Using his own cures, Dr. Key tended to her continuously, spending hours every day rubbing her down with his homemade liniments, feeding her his remedies, talking gently and kindly to her. After almost a year, she revived. She was as beautiful as he could have imagined she once was, though she would never again be as strong as was her heritage to be. But her spirit was back.

 

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