by Mim E. Rivas
Dr. Key paused and puzzled over the question. “Well, Jim,” he asked at last, “how much should I sell you for?”
Jim Key snorted in surprise. His expression was almost mocking: Sell me? You’d never sell ME.
“Now, Jim”—Doc Key played along, putting on his countrified airs—“you is a fine, healthy horse, and can fetch a fair price.” He turned to the crowd and began to entertain offers, encouraging his handsome bay stallion to parade back and forth to show potential buyers his elegant gait.
As if resigned to his misfortune, Jim inched tentatively forward and began a resentful but obedient stroll. Ascending dollar amounts were called out from the crowd, starting at ten and rapidly reaching five hundred.
“Sold!” The Doc beckoned the gentleman with the highest bid toward the staging area to pay up. Suddenly, with all the melodrama of a dying opera diva, Jim Key crumpled to the ground. Desperately the bay tried to hunker up and then wobbled from side to side before collapsing pathetically again.
Dr. William Key masked his smile. Jim was pretending to go lame, the same trick he often performed but now in a new context.
The crowd, not sure if this was part of the act or not, held its collective breath. With a wink, the Doc turned his back to Jim and in a pronounced stage whisper declared the sale off, at which point a gleeful Jim Key bounded to his feet and pranced back and forth in emphatic relief.
Laughter rang through the streets of Chattanooga. This was to become a feature of Jim’s performances from then on.
In telling this anecdote to Rogers, Doc Key remarked that Jim’s stint in the medicine show circuit gave him a steadily increasing value. “At three years old, I couldn’t have gotten fifty dollars for the horse, but at five years old he was worth five hundred.” Not long before Jim turned eight, the Doc received his first of many offers of $10,000 for his unusually gifted stallion.
The occasion was at the Chattanooga train depot, where Dr. Key was approached on the platform by a stranger he ascertained to be a “circus man.”
“I hear you got a horse who can do anything,” the man ventured.
“That’s right, sire,” Doc Key answered deferentially, as was his professional habit. “Jim can do almost anything.”
“I’ll give you ten thousand dollars for him if he can take a silver dollar out of the bottom of a bucket of water without drinking any of the water.”
William had never thought of that trick and had never heard of any horse performing it, especially because it required a trainer to convey to a horse the need to submerge his head underwater and hold his breath while opening his mouth. Pretty much impossible. But instead of saying so, he confidently insisted he could teach Jim to do it. The man agreed to return in a few weeks and see if he had bought himself a new horse or not, and then boarded the outbound train, never to be heard from again.
Dr. Key admitted to Albert Rogers that he had no intention of selling Jim, but in the weeks that followed he couldn’t get the challenge out of his mind. “I laid awake nights thinking how I was going to teach Jim how to take out that dollar without drinking the water. Finally, I got an idea.” Much in the way he obsessed over teaching Jim the alphabet, he devised a method for training that began with sugar, plus a silver dollar and a new pail. “The dollar I covered with sugar and dropped into the empty pail. Jim licked all the sugar off the dollar and brought it to me in his teeth to put more sugar on it. It only took a few days to teach him that he’d get sugar when he brought me the dollar. Then I began to cover the dollar with water, and he picked out the dollar just the same.”
When the depth of the water started to intimidate Jim, Doc Key changed the game by putting an apple in the pail. Day by day, he increased the depth of the water and decreased the size of the apple, then substituted small items. Eventually he had Jim submerging his head in the pail of water and drawing out the silver dollar with his teeth—without drinking a drop of water. The circus man never materialized again, but ironically the stunt he had scripted for Bill and Jim Key—which with the use of a glass barrel would be a mainstay of their repertoire—was to become the single most heralded feat that Jim ever performed, over and above his often inexplicable mastery of human intellectual skills.
Jim’s psychic abilities were also cultivated in the course of his travels. Dr. Key had by now accumulated more than five thousand rabbit’s feet, most of them, he confirmed to Rogers, he had personally collected from Civil War battlefields, the majority of them from Chickamauga, the last battle he witnessed. In a battlefield where almost 35,000 soldiers lay wounded and dead, the Doc presumably took the feet from the thousands of rabbit casualties—before they could be appropriated by starving soldiers for stew. There were other, supposedly luckier methods of capturing rabbits that required killing them at midnight under a full moon, which apparently William Key disdained. When asked about his practice of stringing them up for demonstrations, he insisted that they helped to clear and comfort his mind, as well as Jim’s. To prove it, he told the story about one journey to Virginia when Jim’s clairvoyance was put to the test with impressive results.
The crowd had thinned after Dr. Key finished his liniment sales, and as he began to pack away his bottles, while Jim held court with straggling admirers, an “old ex-slave lady” introduced herself. Ancient but with a sparkle in her eye, she whispered to Doc Key that a relative died before telling her where he or she had left buried treasure—money and jewelry hidden in a pot. She knew generally where the land was but had no idea where exactly to dig. Could the horse help her find the treasure?
Doc Key vowed that Jim’s dam, Lauretta Queen of Horses, had helped someone else find buried money and that his smart stallion could do it too. Through a series of questions he asked the old woman, he had Jim lead the two of them to the very spot where the pot was indeed buried. Key told Rogers, “The ex-slave gave me half the treasure, and the pot too.”
This was not a story that Rogers necessarily wanted promoted to the skeptical New York press. Personally, he wasn’t wild about the rabbit’s feet either. Doc Key couldn’t understand such concerns. For the generations who had any direct or inherited memories of the Civil War, spiritualism and belief in the possibility of communicating with the dead were survival skills. Besides, as far as Dr. Key was concerned, the public mind could always use healthy doses of mystery and magic. He knew this for a fact from the many daily newspapers he read that advertised three times as many faith healers and occultists as they did licensed medical doctors.
Rogers’s real concern with the rabbit’s feet, however, was that they would upset the Ida Sheehans of the world. The Doc recognized this as a potential problem but noted that it was better to be lucky than too careful.
At what point, then, did Jim Key leave behind the world of liniment sales and step into his career as an educated horse?
That had begun to happen, said Dr. Key, around 1896, when he decided to retire from the patent medicine business, except for the occasional mail order. At the age of sixty-three, he was a very wealthy man and could afford to slow down a bit, perhaps even to move to Chattanooga, where he had bought a large piece of property, to be closer to his wife’s work there. But his instincts had told him that he had important work before him. What exactly, he wasn’t sure.
Dr. Lucinda Key saw a path that her husband hadn’t yet considered. From the moment when she and Jim had connected after her discovery that he could say yes to her offer of an apple, she came to feel that the horse’s unusual gifts could be put to use for a higher calling. Her idea was vague, perhaps that Jim Key could serve as an ambassador in the cause of the advancement of people of color, or to encourage education, or simply to demonstrate to all the power of patience and kindness.
As a matter of fact, that was the role that Jim had already begun to carve out for himself in his appearances alongside the Doc at numerous county fairs cropping up across the South. At these fairs, Dr. Key’s services were in high demand in advisory and ministerial roles, whether as
livestock and agricultural director, or as a judge in competitions, or sometimes as grand marshal of parades and races. In and around Shelbyville, Jim Key was already a hometown star.
Doc Key had seen the local Bedford County fair develop from its first annual event in 1857 to forty years later, where locals considered it the biggest event of the year, and he served in a directorial position of honor. A precursor to the annual Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration, which would come into being in 1939, the Bedford County fair of the 1890s boasted a quarter-mile racetrack, a promenade, and an exhibit hall with bounty on display and for sale—crafts and handiwork, produce, canned goods, and the latest in home and farm machinery. The superlative Bedford County taffy was a perennial best seller, and refreshment vendors typically ran out of food before the fair was over. Awards were given in multiple agricultural categories and age groups, with prizes that included everything from a pair of registered Berkshire pigs (awarded to the owner of the best animal on four feet) to a set of fine lace curtains (for the best lady rider).
Traditionally the last day of the fair was reserved for the presentation of awards and for elected officials and politicians to take to the judge’s platform in the center of the racetrack. In this context, Dr. Key found a ripe opportunity to demonstrate Jim’s latest academic achievements and, in the process, for them to serve as self-appointed ambassadors of civility. This was where Jim Key first began to give demonstrations of his ability to read and spell short, common words. Along with the letters and numbers on cards that Doc Key put on display, he also had a handful of last names on longer cards that included notable Bedford countians, the President of the United States (then Democrat Grover Cleveland), the Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and his Republican rival, William McKinley.
Much to the entertainment and surprise of the crowd, Jim correctly selected the corresponding card for every name of every local official announced that day. As a final bit, Dr. Key and Jim reenacted their original debate over politics, in which William Key identified himself as a Republican and Jim Key adamantly proclaimed himself a Democrat, whinnying in support of Bryan.
This was a bold move on Doc Key’s part, since the majority of the hundreds of fairgoers in the crowd that day were fervent Democrats. A smattering of Republican handkerchiefs waved in support of the Doc’s admission, but others did not reveal their alliance to the party then associated with the North, with big business, and with “what they were pleased to call” equality for Negroes. Jim Key, Southern horse that he was, became the crowd favorite.
Variations of this bit took place at many fairs across Tennessee, where Dr. Key and Jim held demonstrations in the spring and summer of 1896. Most county officials assumed that Jim would be a featured act at the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition that was scheduled to open in Nashville in the fall of 1896. Whether or not Nashville—or any Southern city, for that matter—could pull off a major world’s fair was still in question. Three years earlier Chicago had hosted the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, the most ambitious grand-scale world’s fair ever mounted, against which every subsequent international exhibition struggled to compete, including Atlanta’s 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition. Now Nashville was daring to host a world’s fair to celebrate one hundred years of Tennessee’s statehood and to promote itself as the capital of the new South. Most of Bedford County took it for granted that the planners would want to feature a horse as marvelous as Jim Key. But when the Doc wrote to inquire about being booked, he received no response whatsoever.
Bill and Lucinda were aware that although Jim had numerous admirers across the state, there were two significant challenges that needed to be overcome. The first, of course, was that it may have sounded absurd to the planners that a horse could spell, read, figure, and handle money. The more insidious problem was the issue of William Key’s color.
It wasn’t that the planners were against having African-Americans participate as exhibitors. To the contrary, the organizers and underwriters of the Tennessee Centennial were determined not to incur the kind of trouble that the Chicago World’s Fair had seen, when Negroes were left out of the planning process, or the criticism that the Atlanta Exposition received after its planners promised to be more inclusive but fell short. But the lack of response suggested that the officials didn’t regard Dr. Key as being representative of the Negro community. He was not a man of the cloth, not a trained doctor, not affiliated with any Negro educational institutions, and spoke for no established groups. Though his stirring success story was impressive, he was possibly not seen as the portrait the planners wanted to present of the “advancing Afro-American” of Tennessee. Perhaps he was too light-skinned, too wealthy, too independent.
Not to be discouraged, he decided to take Jim up to Nashville and meet with the officials in person and then see what they had to say. After a short demonstration, the planners agreed that he was extraordinary but felt the act bordered on being a sideshow. Where would Jim fit in?
By summer 1896, Doc Key realized the Centennial planners were distracted by bigger problems. With the mammoth undertaking of a world’s fair in Nashville only a month away from opening, construction of the exhibition halls had fallen drastically behind schedule, and several buildings had barely broken ground. Worse, funding sources, local and federal, had been exhausted. The embarrassment wasn’t what the region needed.
The Doc understood that the Tennessee Centennial Exposition was either going to be postponed or scrapped, depending on whether or not other funding could be found. Chicago’s Columbian Exposition—originally scheduled for 1892 to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage—had been postponed to the following year and was no less legitimate for the delay, as proven when twenty-seven million Americans, or almost half the nation’s population, attended the fair. Then again, other world’s fair celebrations had been canceled or scaled back when their undertakings proved too mighty.
On August 20, 1896, Dr. Key also had larger concerns on his mind when he returned from being away and was met by the shock of his lifetime. Lucinda was sick in bed at her father’s house, close to death. William tended to her every way he knew how, boiling his roots and herbs, chanting and praying, drawing from every ancient and modern medical secret he had read about or been given. But when at last Lucinda’s breath became labored, Bill knew that they needed to have a final conversation. He asked what she would have him do to help her go peacefully to the next world.
She spoke of others. Take care of my parents, she asked, make them comfortable in old age. Lucinda asked that her siblings be helped to receive the education she had been so fortunate to receive. That included her younger sister Maggie, a widow and schoolteacher. On her deathbed, Lucinda planted the seeds for Dr. Key to consider marrying Maggie. Lucinda didn’t want to be worrying about him in the by-and-by and knew he needed a woman to be there when he came back from traveling. Against his protests, she laid out her vision, assuring him that a new life was beginning that would take him and Jim to distant places and greater heights than he could even imagine. And finally, she exacted a final promise that her husband not give up on entering Jim in the Tennessee Centennial.
As Lucinda started to slip into her final sleep, Bill called her back, asking out loud what she wished him to do, not for others, but for herself. She answered serenely in words William Key chose to have inscribed on her gravestone: “Whatever happens to me, my dear, it is well with my soul.”
Six days later the Shelbyville Gazette noted in a brief announcement that her passing had taken place on August 21, 1896: “Mrs. Lucinda Key, wife of Dr. William Key, died at the home of her father, George Davis (colored) last week and buried Saturday.”
In the Northern and Southern celestial hemispheres all the planets aligned for the success of the postponed Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition when it was rescheduled to run May 1 through October 31, 1897. From this, Jim Key was about to get his proverbial big break, th
anks ultimately to the ambitions of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. In fact, but for aims of the L&N that had little to do with underwriting a world’s fair, the exposition in Nashville wouldn’t have taken place.
On March 13, 1897, Dr. William Key stood on the stage of the exposition’s only completed full-scale auditorium, in an assembly of Centennial dignitaries, marveling at the determination of Director-General Eugene Castner Lewis to bring to fruition what others swore was a doomed affair. Lewis had brokered a politically risky deal with the New York–owned L&N and their Southern subsidiary, the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railroad (the NC&St.L), whose president, John W. Thomas, was also the president of the Centennial. In return for the L&N gaining the right to monopolize the tracks in and out of Nashville at the lavish new train station that they were already planning to fund, the railway company was given the privilege of paying for the costs of the unfinished Exposition.
To the chagrin of many who knew that locally owned rail companies would be ousted by the locomotive giant, L&N saw their advantage and accepted the deal. With Northern money and a mandate to improve the railroad’s public relations image across the South, more pressure was put on the planners to show the world that the Tennessee Centennial was worth attending. It had to deliver crowd-pleasing elements that fairgoers had come to expect from the Chicago and Atlanta expositions, but it had to have a pull of its own—a distinction that was of its place and that embodied the optimistic, expansive spirit of the times.
At a committee planning meeting, E. C. Lewis had a brainstorm for what could provide the fair with its unifying theme and major landmark, which was much needed, given the array of architectural schemes. “About the center,” Lewis proposed, speaking of the midpoint of the two hundred acres of land—previously known as West Side Park, a harness racing track—“on an elevation…I want to put a reproduction of the Parthenon in actual size, line for line, and call it the Fine Arts Building.”
