by Mim E. Rivas
Negro literacy thrived not only in the John W. Key household but also in much of Shelbyville, which had a strong contingency of those who supported black education and emancipation.
Known for its three distinct geographic regions—the mountains of East Tennessee, the low hills of Middle Tennessee, and the flats of West Tennessee—the Volunteer State had fostered what were generally three corresponding sets of beliefs and practices regarding slavery, shaped by the distinct terrain of each given region and its respective agricultural and economic activities. Because farmland in East Tennessee was less suitable for tilling on a large scale, a lower demand for slave labor was one factor that led to a social environment in which antislavery and later pro-Union sentiment flourished. The opposite held true in West Tennessee, where there was a predominance of the so-called slave crops (or, in the more genteel phrase, “money crops”)—cotton and tobacco—as there was the defense of slavery as a necessary evil. Middle Tennessee was the proverbial and literal middle ground, where proponents and opponents of slavery lived in proximity. Since many farmers of the hillier areas had smaller farms that combined livestock herding and less labor intensive crops such as corn, many didn’t own slaves—and those who did, like John W. Key, had fewer than ten slaves—and both groups tended not to be apologists for slavery. Yet it was also in Middle Tennessee’s fertile valleys that some of the state’s most expansive improved acreage could be found, where slave ownership and its staunchest defenders were likewise concentrated.
These diverging attitudes based on regional and economic differences were difficult for Dr. Key to explain to Albert Rogers, a Northerner born after the Civil War, who actually promoted at expositions a popular attraction known as the Old Plantation, which reinforced the myth of the earlier, simpler days of antebellum grandeur.
The Doc didn’t try to explain how those stereotypes were wrong or how slavery in Tennessee was manifest in every extreme, from its most abhorrent to most lenient, the institution having been contentious even before Tennessee became a state in 1796. Over time, the net impact of these disparate beliefs about persons of color—slave or free—gave blacks something of a dual status. Before the 1830s, there were more antislavery groups in Tennessee than in any of the other slave states combined. Within a decade, the pendulum had swung the other way, and by 1837 there was not one abolitionist society in the whole state. Contradictory laws permitted both the legal emancipation of a slave by a master but also the capture and sale back into slavery of free Negroes. While a person of color accused of a crime had the right to a trial, a right of personhood, by civil law, all slaves, William Key included, were chattel: not entitled to legally own property, deprived of the right of suffrage and even civil marriage, subject to the control of a master—to be worked without cease, to be confined in movement and travel, to be humiliated, beaten, starved, raped, to be sold to the highest bidder, and ultimately to be killed.
This was the reality nine-year-old Bill understood, making him painfully aware that even with a kind master and mistress, and even with his favored status, his future and the futures of his loved ones remained tenuous at best. If Strother died and Bill wasn’t needed to look after him, he feared the Old Missus would force John to lease or sell him. Or if John’s financial straits worsened, then it could lead to the same result.
There was another concern. At the tanyard, he increasingly heard the inquiries and comments about himself—spoken in front of him as if he were foreign or deaf—not just from masters and their overseers but also from other Negroes. He could do tricks and should be taken and put on show, said some. He was spoilt by his master, a few said. True, he had a way with horses and livestock, but he belonged in the stables as a groom or out in the pasture and should not be allowed to come and go as he pleased. Although John W. Key made it known that Bill was not for sale at any price, he was offered escalating amounts to purchase the mulatto slave child who could do magic (some slaves called it voodoo, or its variation, hoodoo). With his talents, however derived, to tame wild beasts and cure sicknesses, and with his educated speech and manners, he could be a fine houseboy up in Nashville.
There were one or two attempts to try to buy Bill in order to teach him his place, including that of a certain slave driver who worked as a local overseer of a large plantation, and who was reputed to administer cruel and unusual torment to slaves. “That man was my worst enemy,” he told Rogers, never naming him.
The overseer had complained to John before about Bill’s insolence and demanded that the boy be whipped. When John refused, the overseer began taunting Bill at every occasion, threatening to wrest him away from the Keys.
Finally one evening, as Bill sat next to John in the wagon while driving home with the sun going down into the green grassy cleavage of the Tennessee hills, he extracted a promise from John never to sell him to that slave driver’s boss.
John made that promise, reassuring Bill that day would never come. Still, he wondered if Bill might not prefer living in a grand plantation with a rich master instead of with a struggling tanner and hill farmer. That would be fine living, John W. Key proposed. Another reality for any slave was that your status could be determined not only by your position within your master’s domain, but just as much by the status of your master. At the tanyard, Bill had heard the way ornately uniformed Negro manservants belonging to the more prosperous owners liked to ridicule lower-class slaves in their burlap breeches and makeshift shoes. “Don’t mind them darkeys,” they’d say when Bill went to help with their similarly mistreated mules, “they belong to po’ white trash.”
After Bill assured John that he cared nothing about being the slave of the richest man in Tennessee, his cousin acknowledged that Bill was a member of his family. John promised again: no one will take you away from us without your consent.
As Bill predicted, that certain slave driver soon showed up at the tanyard, bringing his boss with him. The two came ready to pay enough cash to clear John’s considerable debts in return for the purchase of William. After a stammer or too, John gave the plantation owner a firm no.
Relieved beyond words, young Bill had no time to thank John before he saw the furious slave driver make a beeline toward him. Seething, the slave driver swore at Bill in a hoarse whisper, saying, “Boy, one day I’m gonna get you and lick the blood out of you!”
Those were the exact words that Dr. Key recalled to Albert Rogers, hinting that later such an occurrence nearly transpired.
From then on, Bill Key believed he owed a debt of gratitude to John Key for keeping his promise and standing up to the overseer and his boss. But other circumstances arose that John couldn’t so easily unravel. John and Martha’s family was growing with the arrival of two sons, Merit and Alexander, and more children on the way. With money becoming more and more scarce, the Old Missus insisted that the slaves be sold or leased out. Up until now, the care Bill gave old Strother had deterred Margaret Key from demanding that John do it. That was why, in 1842, when Strother suddenly died, Bill knew his days there were numbered. Worse, John had become ensnared in legal problems, somehow involving Martha’s brother, Jeptha Minter, ostensibly for loans he had failed to repay.
A settlement was reached that turned the ownership of Bill, his sister Nancy, his mother, Caroline, and his uncle Jack over to Jeptha, allowing him to lease their services out as he so deemed. Being an unusual individual, young Bill Key responded unusually to the next ten years of being sent to work at a range of different plantations and businesses. Turning adversity into opportunity, he managed to use this passage of his enslavement as a way to elevate his reputation across the state as a doctor for both horses and humans.
Something fundamental changed in his sense of self, a shift that Rogers grasped as a clue to understanding just who Dr. William Key was. From then on, contrary to outward conditions, Bill vowed to have no masters other than God and himself, and whether his legal status was made free or not, he would become free in his mind and come to be responsible for
whatever good or evil befell him.
On August 27, 1852, in Shelbyville’s town square on the steps of the Bedford County courthouse, nineteen-year-old William Key held an emotional reunion with John and Martha Key, after some legal and financial wrangling that morning in the Chancery Court with Jeptha Minter.
Much had changed. Now known in some circles as Young Doc Key, Bill not only had grown into a man but also had seen enough of the state beyond Bedford County to become a much different person. Those were the years in which his horse-training talents had sent him to places like Belle Meade Plantation, and where, at such locations, he met famous black horsemen and jockeys, fellow slaves who also lived in dual worlds. He learned from them and their lore, adding to his knowledge of magic making and omen reading as well. Whether he believed in luck or not, he hedged his bets and came away with a lifelong fondness for the use of the rabbit’s foot.
He wasn’t alone. One of humankind’s oldest symbols of fertility and prosperity, the rabbit’s foot had visited a myriad of cultures, dating back to as early as 600 B.C. It had now made its way into nineteenth-century America—mainly in the South, in African-American culture of the day, and definitely into the belief systems of those whose fortunes could rise or fall at horse races.
Young Doc Key had also met individuals in the Negro community who shared with him the navigational secrets of what became known later as the Underground Railroad, including knowledge about routes and safe houses he later used. Some of the men and women he met between 1843 and 1852 were associated with Reverend Jermaine Loguen, originally from Tennessee, and with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. He also related to Rogers that as a slave belonging to Jeptha Minter but entrusted to travel extensively either on his own or under a “loose rein,” he was permitted to provide free doctoring for slaves—pulling teeth, setting bones, delivering babies. Stories about his kind generosity and miraculous healing abilities spread across the state.
William saw the extremes of living conditions for those he tended—from palatial Thoroughbred stables to the unprotected, foul-smelling draft horse pens, from lush grazing fields to the chicken-scratch dirt of poor barnyards, from the fine homes of rich slaveholders to the comfortable if cramped quarters for the more fortunate and better fed Negro house servants, to the unsanitary, overcrowded, unventilated, leaky-roofed slave huts where field hands were confined. He had to have been struck by the similarities between the treatment of horses and other animal property and that of fellow slaves. He had to have nurtured some slow, seething anger when he saw the worst of the worst—a labor force fed only enough so as not to die, but not enough to live, with rages of smallpox, measles, whooping cough, cholera, pleurisy, and other diseases proliferating. Surely he had to swallow hard and look away when owners complained of the economic loss that would result from the death of a slave, as if they were talking about a good working mule or a milk cow. But instead of saying a word, he went to work, patiently expressing his gratitude for being able to be of help, quietly making suggestions that were almost always effective.
The fact that his veterinary and medical expertise was self-taught didn’t lessen his value. At the time, there were plenty of self-taught physicians, white and black. And as it happened, Negro practitioners, male and female, were suspected by many of being superior doctors—with their body of handed-down medical knowledge that included such advanced treatments as a smallpox cure and a derivative of the African midwives’ practice of performing caesarean section. When it came to a choice between the typical white practitioners—like the barber who bled patients or the old wives and druggists who prescribed potions that regularly ended more lives than they saved—or a doctor of color, the latter was often preferred.
William’s travels had brought him back to Shelbyville, and he had seen John Key and his family in passing and had seen the town changing. At last, he was glad to be legally back with the Keys, and happy to be back in Shelbyville. Southern Railway had come through, laying tracks through the center of town and building a depot that appeared to be bursting at its seams. The square too was alive with commerce: wagons and buggies unhitched and amassed everywhere, as horses were led in weary groups into a central livery stable while humans sought the shade of building overhangs and the poplars and elms that surrounded the courthouse.
To William’s surprise, Old Missus Margaret had apparently felt remorse about separating William from the family, so she helped arrange for his return. Now that Martha’s brother owned a piece of property next to the Keys, William didn’t have to go far to see his mother, sister, and uncle. And, as if no time had passed, he was embraced by the John W. Key household, human and nonhuman, and encouraged to pick up his studies where he had left off.
Dr. Key told Albert Rogers that his “Young Marsters,” eleven-year-old Merit and nine-year-old Alexander, helped tutor him so he could make up for lost time.
Legally, William belonged to John W. Key, but at this time period he was able to start keeping portions of the revenue he helped generate. John realized that William’s fastidiousness about his time and money actually helped his own bottom line. Everyone prospered.
“I was sent for,” the Doc told Rogers, “by neighbors from miles around. If a wild colt was to be broken, I took the frightened colt and kept him with me at my marster’s farm. In a week’s time, I returned the same colt ready to ride or drive.”
His technique? Always the same: “Kindness and patience.” It was that simple to him. Young Doc Key continued to take special pride in his expertise with kicking and balking mules, and he was also called upon to reform vicious dogs. For him there was no end to the wondrous results of a gentle touch.
That he earned and saved money during the last decade of slavery was borne out by friendships he was making in the white community—with businessmen, bankers, and lawyers who may have used his services and paid him, or lost a hand of cards to him—and with one lawyer in particular, who served as a personal banker for the Young Doc. The lawyer’s name was William H. Wisener, an outspoken Whig who advocated for immediate and full emancipation. And Wisener wasn’t afraid to say so either, blasting his abolitionist opinions in the headlines of the leading Shelbyville newspaper that he bought in the 1850s, much to the consternation of local Democrats, who didn’t so much want to preserve slavery as they were angered by anyone with the gall to take the side of interfering Northerners.
But many area residents found slave-holding increasingly distasteful and agreed with Wisener. By 1860 Bedford County’s total number of slave holders was on the decrease. In a county population of over 13,000 whites, only 980 were slaveholders; of the 275,000 slaves in Tennessee, 6,744 were enslaved in Bedford County, putting the county at fifteenth in the state in number of slaves. Thirty percent of the slave holders owned either one or two slaves, while most of the remaining owners still held fewer than ten slaves, and there were no longer any slave holders in Bedford County with one hundred or more slaves.
One factor in Shelbyville’s trend away from slave-holding was that its economy was becoming based more on commerce and industry, and less immediately on agriculture. Bedford County’s hardworking populace, especially in Shelbyville, was also highly literate. If there was a community ripe for electing to banish slavery, it would have been Shelbyville.
But even as Dr. Key described to Rogers how tolerant most folks in his hometown were, he couldn’t deny that by 1860 the tensions and divisions across Tennessee were beginning to mirror those that were fracturing the rest of the nation. The river town of Shelbyville, like the rest of the border state of Tennessee, was about to become trapped in the crossfire between the North—with its edge in developing industrial superiority—and the South, where its economic power stemmed from an agrarian system that harnessed the toil of four million slaves, valued then at three billion dollars (more than three trillion dollars in the twenty-first century).
A witness to every side of the conflict, Young Doc Key was there when the fissures gave way in Shelbyvill
e—where the vote on Tennessee’s secession was virtually decided, shaping the fate of the rest of the Volunteer State and, ultimately, the nation.
Before Albert Rogers heard those stories, he interrupted the interview to catch up on his notes and begin designing the look of his pamphlet.
Starting with the cover, he placed an earlier photograph of Jim Key in the middle of the page. Then, along the top border, Rogers wrote out a question: How was he taught?
Along the bottom border, he answered it: He Was Taught by Kindness.
4
War Stories
By late Spring of 1861 only the formalities were needed to place Tennessee in a state of war. The difficult…part had already been accomplished by the politicians. Like expert harpists they had strummed the emotions of the people…who stood in town squares and heard the politicians extol the virtues of the South…. Political rallies took on the appearance of religious revivals…after which “men of courage and patriotism” were invited to come forth…to protect southern property and the honor of southern womanhood.
—BOB WOMACK, Call Forth the Mighty Men
August 10, 1897.
The Rogers home, 75 Maiden Lane. New York City.
THE REMAINDER OF THE INTERVIEW for the pamphlet took place in Albert’s stables behind his stylish townhome, where, the night before, his wife, Clara, and their three young sons had excitedly welcomed the Tennesseans to New York.
The following day Rogers resumed his questions on the subject of Jim’s education, returning to the point at which Doc Key had first come to believe that he was an unusually smart horse. As his exchange with the Doc proceeded, there was something unnerving to Rogers about the presence of the tall bay, who seemed to be following the interview closely, even nodding yes to agree with points, at other moments nickering for dramatic emphasis.