by Mim E. Rivas
Jim Key’s precocious sense of hygiene notwithstanding, his rapid growth eventually had him unintentionally breaking through floorboards and collapsing doorjambs, which meant he had to be relegated back to the barn.
Jim put up such an unbearable ruckus when he discovered that he was expected to sleep alone in his stall at night that Dr. Key eventually had to bring a cot out to the barn and sleep at Jim’s side, thinking he would only do so for a night or two, just until the orphaned horse got used to sleeping out there on his own.
From that first night forward, this was how the two slept, virtually 365 nights a year, every year for the remainder of their lives. Only when Dr. Key was called away on an urgent professional matter or when Jim traveled separately from him, were they apart at bedtime, and in those instances one of Jim’s trusted attendants would take Bill Key’s place in a nearby cot at night.
Future generations of his in-laws speculated that the reason William Key produced no heirs over the course of four marriages had less to do with any sexual or physiological impairment on his part, and more to do with the constancy of his attention to the animals he tended. His previous wives may have lost children in childbirth, while his third and fourth wives spent periods of time away at educational institutions. Early in Jim’s life, Lucinda Davis Key, Bill’s third wife, was commuting to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she received her medical degree before returning home as one of the first licensed black female doctors to practice in Tennessee.
The Doc told Albert Rogers that when Lucinda came home to find out that her husband had taken up residence in the barn, she could only laugh at his devotion to Jim.
To be still closer, the Doc moved a large desk into a corner of the stable to serve as his office so that Jim could watch him as he did his daily bookkeeping work. Carefully writing in his clean, swirling script in a bound accounting ledger, he kept track of his Keystone and veterinary businesses, and other financial activities. Perhaps in the course of simply making conversation he may have explained to Jim what he was doing, what the numbers meant, and why it was important to be mindful of figures and money. To demonstrate, the Doc held up different coins, teaching Jim the difference between pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and silver dollars. A game evolved. Whenever Jim correctly identified the coin that Doc Key requested him to select, he was rewarded with a whole apple.
On a subsequent afternoon when Jim was out grazing, the Doc devised a plan to maintain a large supply of apples by hiding them in a deep desk drawer. As the drawer tended to become stuck in the damp, he tied a length of string to its handle, which would give him easier access. After leaving to take care of other concerns that day, Doc Key returned to find the drawer empty. Lucinda assured him she had not been in the stables, which prompted him to guess, “Must be one of the boys about the place.”
The next day he put some more apples in the drawer, and they too disappeared. After refilling the drawer that afternoon and announcing that he was leaving, he pretended to depart from the property, returning covertly to watch through a window. Some minutes later he observed Jim Key blithely amble back into the barn alone. As though checking to make sure he wasn’t being observed, Jim’s ears rotated separately, searching for clues of sound, while his nose quivered as he tried to pick up any telltale smells. Satisfied that he wasn’t being watched, Jim veered toward the desk, pulled the drawer open by tugging on the string, held tightly between his teeth, and then buried his head in the drawer, voraciously devouring every last apple, before nudging the drawer shut by leaning into it with the weight of his flank. Jim turned and strolled back out of the stable, not bothering to conceal the look of self-congratulation that would mark him in years to come.
The Doc was less concerned with Jim’s thievery than he was proud of his mimicry, and he praised Jim for learning to open and close a desk drawer through imitation, although he had to explain that he had no apples to offer as a reward. Instead he reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and plucked out a couple of sugar cubes, which, as usual, his discerning young horse took in his mouth and spat to the ground. Doc Key laughed exuberantly, reward enough it seemed for Jim.
That was when, William Key told Albert Rogers, he began to think that Jim might be a natural performer like his dam, and he started coming up with some novel ideas for entertaining bits that Jim could learn to perform in his medicine show.
Rogers wanted to know if that was the turning point when Dr. Key recognized Jim’s “extra” intelligence. Not exactly, said Dr. Key. By now he readily saw that Jim had a certain alert and quick mind, watching and imitating as he did. But it was actually Lucinda who first came to the conclusion that Jim was even smarter than they realized. She announced the news—with the startled, serious expression she often wore—as she came running out of the stable just as Doc Key was returning from town.
“Doctor, Doctor!” Lucinda Davis Key called to her husband, beckoning him. “The horse can say yes!”
William Key remembered the event sentimentally. He related to Albert Rogers that during the initial time period when he had begun training his fledgling equine performer, “My wife used to tell me to let the horse alone and come out of the stable. She knew that I’d go crazy over Jim. But it came around that Lucinda got very fond of Jim and was soon very much attached to him. That day she happened to go into the stable while eating an apple, and she said, ‘Jim, do you want a piece of apple?’ He bowed his head up and down. The next thing I heard was her calling for me that Jim could say yes.”
Doc Key went in and asked Jim the same question, but the young bay stallion just stared down his nose at the Doc. Lucinda tried again, and Jim didn’t respond either, blinking back at the two of them, as though they were both awfully strange humans to be asking him something so obvious.
“Well,” Key continued, “I did what I’d done before, went out and came around to watch from where Jim couldn’t see me and saw him ‘say yes’ for my wife. From that day she fell in love with him and would always reward him with apples whenever he would do what she asked of him.”
Eventually, Lucinda was able to convince Jim to say yes to Doc Key, who soon taught Jim to also say no by swaying his head from side to side. In this fashion, a new learning game was invented for teaching Jim to identify primary colors. If the Doc held up cloth that was yellow and asked Jim, “Is this the color red?” his earnest student could choose to bow yes or sway no. There was a right or wrong answer, Jim learned, and the right answer would earn him a reward. But he was given a choice to answer correctly or not. There were other kinds of questions, however, that Jim came to understand had answers that were not necessarily right or wrong. Did he want a bite of apple? Did he want some sugar? Would he like to go out and run in the pasture? Would he like to be ridden to town by saddle? Or be hitched to a buggy? It turned out that Jim, like many horses, had preferences and opinions, not just as to what he ate or what color blanket he liked best or how he passed the day, but also his own ideas about different individuals’ personalities, about human actions, even about events of the times and of the past.
Did Jim want to hear a Bible passage? Would Jim like to see the battlefields where Rebels and Yankees, human and equine, fought and died? Did Jim approve of Republican President Benjamin Harrison (who in 1888 had lost the popular vote but won the electoral majority, a concept then too sophisticated for Jim)? Was Jim a Republican? No? A Democrat? Yes?
But Abraham Lincoln was a Republican! (As was William Key.) Fine, Jim, if you want to be a Democrat, that’s your choice. (That Jim wasn’t eligible to vote and that Dr. Key had only limited voting rights and was concerned that his fellow citizens of color were being barred from those rights didn’t seem to keep the two from having political affiliations.)
Unlike many horses, Jim was being taught that he was entitled to have his own likes and dislikes and, even more uniquely, how to communicate those feelings. And so, rather than teaching him to respond affirmatively or negatively to rote questions, Will
iam Key bestowed upon Jim Key a gift that had been denied him in his own childhood and youth, a power and purpose of biblical proportions: free will.
What Albert Rogers construed from these stories was that the controversial art of horse whispering, made famous in the later 1800s by names like Busbey, Offutt, and Rarey, was as Dr. Key described it, both a dance and a dialogue.
In the twentieth century, the legendary Monty Roberts, the definitive horse whisperer, actually went on to codify the language that came from this choreography that equines used with one another, which was similar to Dr. Key’s methods. The positioning of his body in relation to the horse or mule was critical, as was the importance of turning his back to the equine, or at an angle, so as to invite, rather than force, the horse to follow him.
The “Dialogue Between Man and Horse” comprising these physical gestures was described by Denton Offutt to his horse-training students in a well-circulated pamphlet of the late nineteenth century:
Man: I wish to put my hands on your face, and come near you.
Horse: If so, you must let me see that you will not hurt me, nor will have anything about you that will, nor anything that smells badly. I am a stranger to you; all that will offend any of the five senses, I will guard against, and those five senses must have proof that you will not hurt me, before I will allow them to be on me.
Man: I wish to put my hands all over you.
Horse: This you may do by commencing at the face. Commence rubbing on the face and repeat it; then pass on down the neck, first as slight as possible, and as I become used to it, rub the harder. Remember always to rub the way the hair lies smooth. My tail is, when I play, to be held up high; and as my pride and beauty, you must be careful in handling it. But after you raise it, be sure to repeat it, and raise it and put it down several times, until it goes up quietly. It becomes habituated by use.
Man: Then the more I rub you, and repeat it, the quieter you get?
Horse: It is so in all beasts.
Doc Key took these principles a step further, whispering his wordless sounds of encouragement as his body language asked the questions. How do you want me to teach you? He knew to let the horse do most of the talking.
As he took these notes for his pamphlet, Albert Rogers was clearly ambivalent about portraying Dr. Key as a horse whisperer—generally considered at the time to be suspect. Rogers also believed that the Doc’s various incantations and occultist habits might not appeal to the officers at the New York–based ASPCA or to the planners of the American Institute Fair at Madison Square Garden—where he was hoping to book Jim next as part of his Northern debut. The question recurred: Just who was this “Dr.” William Key?
Albert Rogers was still hard-pressed to answer that question himself.
Doc Key said very little about his early life which began in Winchester, Tennessee, in 1833. He was born a slave, he stated plainly, and took the name of his master, John W. Key, of Shelbyville. When Rogers later asked about his unusual generosity toward John W. Key and his family, William Key only shrugged and said, “I was one of those fortunate men who had a kind master.”
Bill’s special status in the Key household might have suggested that John W. Key was William Key’s white father. Although they were blood related, the more probable connection was that master and slave were first cousins, evidenced by deeds, wills, and court documents, most of which were to be lost during four separate destructions of the Bedford County courthouse.
Amid the clues that remained, William Key had made his inauspicious entrance onto the pages of documented history at the age of five years old, as an entry of property belonging to Captain John Key of Winchester, Tennessee, an uncle of John W. Key of Shelbyville. In this document, Captain Key’s last will and testament, his list of slaves included nine adults and eight children. Among them was six-year-old Nancy, who was William’s sister; their mother, Caroline; and Caroline’s brother Jack. It was from Caroline, a cook and a medicine woman who was probably of a mixed Cherokee and African background, that Bill first learned how to find and distill roots and herbs into life-saving concoctions, and how to cook so masterfully that his talent would one day save him from the gallows. From his uncle Jack, a blacksmith and tanner, Bill learned early how to shoe and outfit horses as well as other survival skills that ensured he would not be sent out to the fields.
When Captain Key died, unmarried and without heirs, his will stipulated that Jack, Nancy, and her children be deeded to his nephew, John W. Key. The slaveholding Keys had strict family agreements that property—slaves included—stay in the family, except when necessity forced the selling of property, in which case the revenue had to be used to take care of the extended family members. In this group of Keys, originally from Albemarle, Virginia, there was a focal point for this policy: Strother Key.
Captain Key’s brother and John W. Key’s father, Strother was the family scourge. As a boy of five arriving in a strange household on a different farm, Bill soon figured out that his fate was tied to that of the tragic Strother. The polite version of how John W. Key’s father had become permanently helpless and deranged was that after proudly serving as a mounted gunman in the War of 1812, he had reenlisted and had been mysteriously injured.
The real story was that his incapacity was due to profligate living—drinking, gaming, and womanizing—so intolerable that his wife, Margaret, divorced him, complaining that when they married he was possessed of respectable property but had gambled everything away. Rather than shouldering his debt and letting it drain the fortune she brought to the marriage, she asked the court to grant her the divorce so that she could live “as a feme solo.” Margaret C. Graham Key was granted her petition, excluding her the right to remarry, but she and the rest of the family had to make sure Strother was clothed and fed, and not causing himself or others grave harm. Before young Bill’s arrival, problems with Strother had been getting worse, but the family noticed immediately that the boy had a calming, sobering influence on the old man, instantly endearing Bill to the Old Missus Margaret, to Marster John and his wife, Missus Martha.
Everyone was taken with the small, charismatic child, with his piercing gaze and an almost magical presence of being. Rogers wrote in his brief “Sketch of Dr. Wm. Key’s Life” that “in his early years he had a great fondness for the animals. Ever kind to them, and many a poor dog or a worried cat was he the defender of on the old plantation.”
“My entry into the barnyard,” Doc Key told Rogers, “was the signal for a general commotion. All the animals, big and small, recognized me as a friend.” He had a special connection to horses, his gentle and intimate manner producing such a calming effect on wild colts and balking, kicking mules that he was soon being sent into a pen or pasture by himself to tame and train them, working his magic. That’s what was suspected by others in the black community, Key recalled, who believed he was bewitching them.
Word began to seep out that up at the Key place there was an extraordinary child who could talk horse.
“They tell stories about me when I was six years old,” the Doc remembered. “I had a rooster and a yellow dog that could do wonderful things.”
One of those who grew up to tell stories of that time—and who became mayor of Nashville—was a boy named Richard Houston Dudley, around the same age as Bill. The well-to-do Dudley family lived four miles from John W. Key’s tanyard. At first, Marster Dudley was there to gawk in amazement at the tricks performed by the yellow dog and the rooster. But before long, Richard treated Bill less as a source of entertainment and more as a playmate, while Bill replaced deference with familiarity. The two became fast friends, with a bond that lasted until old age.
John W. Key was a kind, well-liked, well-intentioned man who had been saddled with responsibilities for which he was never suited. A series of lawsuits and debts testified to his dubious business judgment, while an emphasis on education in his household suggested that instead of owning livestock for tanning and making his living as a merchant, John woul
d have preferred the life of a scholar. But his father’s problems prevented him from following that path. Instead he educated himself and eagerly encouraged a love of book learning in Bill, tutoring him in every academic subject that time allowed. While John schooled Bill in reading, writing, mathematics, and science, Martha supplemented those lessons by teaching him such gentlemanly skills as presentation, elocution, and etiquette.
A daughter of a wealthy Nashville family, Martha Minter Key was among that growing number of Southern wives who convened in sewing circles and afternoon teas to voice candid opposition to slave owning. In covert rebellion, it was women leading the charge to teach slaves to read and write, despite laws in most slave states against doing so.
At the age of nine, Bill may not have known that in some places John and Martha would be at risk of breaking the law for endowing him with the power of literacy, places where the punishment ran from fines to imprisonment and worse. Some localities saw teaching slaves to read and write as a crime equivalent to distributing abolitionist material to incite rebellion, which was a hanging crime.
There were stories of benevolent rural masters who sent the children of their slaves to Free Negro schools in Nashville and were appalled when they returned with foolish ideas of liberty in their heads, refusing to work in any capacity and running off, sometimes forging their own passes. They were resented by their fellow slaves, so it was claimed, who described them as “dangerous niggers.”
Even so, with the exception of Memphis, where the education of Negroes was illegal, in most of the state the practice was so widespread that Englishman James Sterling, writing about the condition of slaves in America, observed that in Tennessee he heard none of the “nigger gibberish” noted elsewhere and that, for the most part, the African-Americans he met in the border state “seem to speak better, or at least more agreeably to an English ear, than the whites.”
