by Tom King
The slave and her son lived a hard life, as would be expected. The money didn’t last, but still she raised her boy best she could. His name was George, of course. He had a destiny, she’d say, there was greatness in his blood, the only child of the Father of Our Country. Father of the whole country and this boy. Someday he’ll become a soldier and lead us all, just like his father. He has to, she’d say; he’s got a destiny, she’d say.
Apparently, she was a terrible whore, but work was work back then. It had to be tough going from sharing the bed of the Virginia-gentleman first president to fighting off the advances of whiskey-dipped strangers groping and punching their way to climax. She never made much of a living from it, and she died young. It was her son actually who found the body pretty soon after it was done, though no one found the two of them until days later, mother and child mixed together on the urine-yellowed floor of what was going to be their place; she’d finally gotten just enough money to pay just enough rent so that somebody considered her worth robbing and killing.
That’s a thorny way to get your start in the world, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that George didn’t come to be the best of men. A lot of time was spent suckling off the streets, panhandling from city to city, scoring food and drink any way he could. A couple of times he tried signing up for the army to go off and fight in Mexico, but despite his light skin they always recognized him for what he was: a half-drunk, half-blood son of a slave. Sure, he’d scream at them about his lineage, his fate to do something mighty one day soon, but no one paid it all that much mind. This likely frustrated him to no end.
By all accounts he was quite a violent man, tearing and spitting at a world that didn’t have much use for him even as it deified his father. He killed one of his wives, that’s pretty much confirmed. Beat her to death for taunting him, for mocking his story. Afterward, a bottle at his lips, he knew it wasn’t his fault anyhow. He was a sword to be wielded in a great battle; that he didn’t have a field of war on which to stand, that he only had this blood-wet dirt floor, wasn’t all that important in the long run. This was merely a speck of his destiny poking out, the smallest hint of the man he was meant to be.
There was a theatricality about George, which makes some sense. You unite the public leadership of his father’s life with the tragic suffering of his mother’s, and you’re bound to produce some sort of performer, the type who revels in a sham identity, if only to hide from the one he’s got. So it really wasn’t a surprise when George finally discovered his only path to success in life was to be clamored after while shouting lines from a shoddy stage under shoddy direction.
It started small, just some misbegotten bragging and wailing, but it grew: it was a kind of circus act, “The Negro Washington,” where he would go from town to town spreading the ludicrous story of his conception, which happened to be true, but which paid more when recited for laughs. He spent the last thirty years of his life ensconced in this performance, finally finding some level of peace in pretending to be a man pretending to be him. The show became so popular that, when he raped Soldier’s mother, he was actually on his second visit to the White House.
Not much is known about her; she wasn’t the type that felt obliged to leave a trail of her comings and goings. Probably figured someone of her stature didn’t really warrant a great deal of investigating. Mary was Irish, Soldier knows that much, and there were times on lonely fields when he could swear he remembered some Gaelic poem or another that she’d lullabied to him as a babe, but that was probably just false hope.
There are rumors her family originated from the lines of the great paladins of that contentious island; however, every family likes to cling to such tales when the evidence almost always suggests their mother was but another of the millions who floated in a precarious boat to a new land, coming with the tide, away from starvation toward something unknown, but perhaps better.
Almost as soon as she arrived from the old country in the early 1850s, Mary’s family married her off to a clerk in Washington, DC, sporting the name Virgil Wilcox. She apparently had some beauty, and he apparently had some prospects, and that was enough in those days.
Now back then there wasn’t really a public name for what this clerk should’ve been, but needless to say he wasn’t much interested in a fifteen-year-old mick waif beyond her offering him a cover to claim he was a nice married man with the legitimacy to scale the system. The relationship was not a happy one, and soon the clerk was looking for a way to get his foreign wife out of the house and have her serve him some other, more convenient way.
And so the clerk procured Mary a job as a maid at the Buchanan White House. Buchanan, the only bachelor ever to occupy the position, had tasked his friends to find people to care for the household, and the ambitious clerk was only too eager to please his commander in chief. If his beloved wife had to endure unending shifts scrubbing spittooned-spilled floors, then that was a sacrifice he was willing to make.
So it was that after the elderly George Jr. finished gathering up applause for another superb performance of “The Negro Washington” in a park just south of the White House, he spied a slim Irish woman charged with gathering up the stray cigars abandoned in the surrounding field. It’s not historically clear how the two consummated their short time together, but it was likely there, in the dirt and the grass, behind a stage set out in the shadow of the half-formed Washington Monument.
There is no evidence the two were ever in each other’s presence again. George Jr. continued to perform and continued to drink, as ever espousing his own one-day, someday greatness even as the grave beckoned nearer. Though people thought it would be the drink, it was a knife that killed him in the end. Apparently, he had returned to a brothel, the playground of his childhood, and was in the midst of bellowing out his speech on his noble lineage and destiny—this time for free—when another patriotic patron could take no more of these slurred ramblings and insults to country and stabbed George in the stomach. That’s how the son of Our General found himself buried in the same grave as the prostitutes and johns that always die in the course of their business and always need a nice, quiet space to finally come to rest.
Sadly, wee Mary did not fare much better. The clerk was not amused by her expanding belly, fully aware that he had not provided the material for such an unexpected miracle. Nonetheless, ever in need of acting the gentleman, he agreed—after some deep thought and some hard blows—to accept the part of daddy to his unnamed child. Unfortunately, in the foolish hope of gaining sympathy, Mary confessed that it had been the Negro Washington who had done this to her, casting some doubt on the clerk’s ability to play the bastard’s father. Faced with quite the dilemma, the clerk resolved to manipulate the situation for politics: once the child was born, he would dispose of it, fake a stillbirth, thus gaining the sympathy of his eminent colleagues and arresting any speculation as to his ability to impregnate his wife.
Not being a man of subtle subterfuge and assuming his immigrant wife to be as weak as he, the clerk nonchalantly explained the plan to her, emphasizing that after she went through with this slight ruse, he would reward her handsomely, allow her to quit her work, ensure that she was cared for the way a husband was honor-bound to care for a wife. If she decided to betray his brilliant plan, well, he would hurt her and the child, and no one would ever believe a Negro-fucking, leprechaun whore over a man of respectability. The offer was not received as well as he might have expected, and Mary borrowed a gun from a young, redheaded kitchen woman of Asiatic descent, snuck down the hall into his room, and killed him that very night.
Before they hanged her, they allowed Mary to bear the child, and he was born on March 21, 1860. The men who took him from his mother incuriously bestowed upon him the name of his supposed father, but the women who were charged with caring for him—Mary’s fellow maids, the only people who really gave a damn for her, who knew the truth of what had been done to her—discarded this identity and simply called the boy Soldier, due to the quick lau
ghter he’d break into when the boys in blue saluted through the nation’s capital on their way south.
The first years of the child’s life were passed in the corridors of a world at war. The help staff at the White House shared in raising the boy, lugging him around the mansion as they cleaned up after President Lincoln and his staff. But a lad of such energy who lacked any sense of precaution could not easily be hidden; and Soldier was soon discovered by Lincoln’s young sons, who took a liking to the child and treated him as a playmate, another member of the family.
They were quite a group in those halcyon days: the three boys raising as much hell as they could as the men of the household tried to do the same. At times, it seemed as if the only person in the mansion who could handle the lads was that same redheaded kitchen woman of Asiatic descent whom no one remembered hiring and who seemed to resemble other redheaded servants who had lingered among the corridors of power at times of strife.
Mostly she kept them subdued by singing stories: old tales of titans and heroes, men and myths, Achilles and Heracles, Jason on his ship sailing above the gods. Throughout the night, she’d whisper to them about these men, their battles and their powers, their successes in wrestling between good and evil, their glances toward a heaven serenely perched above as their fists sank into the demons below. The stories never ended, she said, there was always another battle won, well done, well done—but the boys still enjoyed them immensely. When the sun came, one could usually find them acting out roles they’d heard recited to them the night before.
Eventually, Lincoln himself developed a fondness for the young orphan, especially after the loss of his own child. The help of the house had told Soldier of his origin as the son of George Jr. and Mary, and the boy took no small pleasure in repeating these facts, with some natural exaggerations, to anyone who’d listen. And the president, that particularly acute man, enjoyed being regaled with the young boy’s knotted yarns of legacy and fate, destiny and guns.
In need of comfort in his final days, Lincoln would often invite the little Soldier to accompany him in his study as he wrote this or that order directing the conflict to move forward or backward. By the end of the war, even Lincoln’s wife was not surprised when he elected to bring the boy to Ford’s theater for a relaxing, distracting performance. By that time, Soldier was one of the few things that brought the ancient man any solace from the torched world around him.
While overlooking a stage, Soldier was shot for the first time. The bullet was meant solely for the president, but after it pierced Lincoln’s skull, it managed to slice down through the left cheek of the young child on his lap. Soldier can still remember the well-dressed assassin leaping from their balcony, twisting his ankle, and limping off to safety. Or maybe that was just something someone told him and it’s since become a memory, a part of his own shifting story.
After the shooting, the president and the boy were both brought across the street and placed in adjacent beds in preparation for their release from this world. Lying there, Soldier kept trying to reach out and feel this kind man’s skin, but strangers would slap his hand down every time he made the attempt.
By any reckoning, this should be the end of this tragic tale: Soldier should have died there, and his odd origins would soon have been forgotten. But this story has a way of continuing on when it might have ended at a more natural point, for it was in that room that the greatest doctors in the country proposed to the greatest statesmen in the country a great plan for a great man. A nascent technology existed that might be used to save the president: he could be frozen in ice and revived at a time when his wounds could be healed.
Amazing! Astounding! Incredible!
But such a thing had never before been attempted, and no one knew if it would work or if it might instead kill the mortally wounded Lincoln even faster than the bullet’s festering trail. They needed to test the process, and they needed to test it quickly. How fortunate for them that next to the famous man lay a lost orphan suffering from such similar wounds. If things went wrong with the boy, why, no one would remember, would they? And even if his wounds could be healed, wasn’t it the boy’s patriotic duty to test the process for the health of his dear leader?
Interestingly, these men, who were certainly powerful and intelligent, were not easily cruel, and though convinced it was the right thing to do, they found themselves hesitating from actually hurting the lad. They were after all scientists, not killers. However, they had grossly underestimated young Soldier. It wouldn’t be the last time. Interrupting their trade on the pros and cons of such an experiment, the boy—his face still bleeding from Booth’s bullet—jolted up and volunteered.
Yes, he would do it, he said. Yes, for his country. Yes.
And so Soldier was hurriedly taken to the edge of the Potomac and immobilized in pure ice. Much to the joy of the men present, the project was an ecstatic success—the boy appeared to have survived—and they rushed back to the small cabin across from the theater only to find that they had run just too late and their leader had passed from life to history.
In a crisis radical decisions become commonplace, but after that crisis fades those same decisions can seem to have been made in haste, to have perhaps been made in error. The men who trapped Soldier in ice could not help but regret their actions, thinking that if these maneuvers were to be discovered, the population would condemn them, not only for polluting the last moments of a martyr’s struggle with fairy-tale science, but for possibly killing a young boy.
The various influential people in that room acted, and they acted swiftly. Talk of the young Soldier, his role in Lincoln’s life and death, would be obfuscated and denied to the writers and journalists who would color in that day for the rest of the world. The boy would be kept in a clandestine basement far beneath the White House. The evidence of his imprisonment would be concealed, but he would not be killed, because again these were not cruel men, they still harbored some hope they had not needlessly slaughtered the child.
This manageable plan was easily enough executed, and Soldier was expunged from the record—not a hard thing to do considering the boy’s somewhat tainted lineage and the paucity of persons who cared that he was gone—and he was subsequently stored in a deep hole, not unlike furniture.
Once placed, so Soldier remained for forty years, until President Theodore Roosevelt made an executive decision of sorts. Roosevelt sought to fashion an American Empire and assessed that such an undertaking would require an American Soldier, a symbol of the destiny he found so remarkably manifested in the country’s makeup. Inspired by the science-fiction literature that permeated the media of that time, he charged his scientists to produce such a figure: a Superior-Man capable of defending America’s borders—borders that, he noted, were soon to expand.
As usual with such happenings, a committee was formed, scientists were assembled from a number of exotic locals both domestic and foreign, rustled men with bristly mustaches who sucked on a wide variety of pipes. Soon these preeminent experts were commenting to their commander that they were in need of a man upon whom they could perform certain delicate testings. They desired someone who could possibly strengthen some of the more fragile intricacies of their new technology before they put it to actual productive use. This individual, they were careful to emphasize, might not have a good time of it. Having been briefed on the ice-man in the basement, the perceptive Roosevelt recognized a useful parallel when it was laid before him and offered this elite grouping the boy-Soldier for whatever purposes they might deem necessary to achieve success.
No one knew if he would survive the thawing, and after he did, certainly no one was prepared for him to survive the injections, electroshocks, transfusions, and whatnot that followed. After these onlookers witnessed the pain the boy had to endure under these thoroughly classified bombardments, they honestly expected him to give up and keel over; no one could tolerate such distress, no one could do it without withdrawing, without even a hint of surrender.
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p; But then they were unaware of the blood in his veins: the grandfather, the slave, the father, the mother; they were ignorant of the upbringing in his bones: the kitchen woman, the president, the shooting. Before the indoctrination began, Soldier’s love for his country was deeper than Neptune’s grave, and it was certainly deeper than any wound they could scrape into his flesh. It’s how he survived long enough for the training to begin, how he became hard enough to undergo twenty-three-hour days of running, shooting, and fighting for thirteen years, until 1914, when it was finally decreed he was ready.
He became the first man to emerge successful from this illustrious program. Sadly, he was also the last. Others tried, strong men of strong conviction; unfortunately, all of them died, and they died screaming.
It was Woodrow Wilson actually who bestowed upon him his name. “Son,” he said, before sending the eighteen-year-old abroad to fight with French and British forces, “you can’t just be a Soldier anymore. You can’t fight for fighting’s sake, for empire. America doesn’t stand for expansion, my boy, we stand for freedom now. So we shall make you The Soldier of Freedom. Go forth and fight for self-determination, for honesty, for America.” Then Wilson added with a pat on the back, “And don’t let the Negro parts of you get in the way; you’re better than that.” A laugh, a shake of hands, and The Soldier of Freedom was off to his first war.
Five years later he returned to the same president, Soldier’s name now recited in awe throughout the country. As he was paraded through the streets, the crowds shouted out the slogan some forgotten Wilson electioneer had begun promoting, a phrase taken from Soldier himself: “Another battle won! Well done! Well done!”
A grand new hero for a grand new age. But that wasn’t enough. The new peace was tentative at best, and the country could sense it crumbling even as its structures were hastily pasted together. He was in his best shape now; he was a master of war and tactics, his aim was perfection, his fists were stronger, faster, tougher, than any man ever known. This battle was won, yes. Well done, well done, yes; however, the country would need him again, but they would need him as he was now. Not aged. Not spoiled. What a waste that would be.