An Acquaintance with Darkness

by Ann Rinaldi

  So that's what we did, all the way home. We thought of new last names for Annie. We had to walk. Robert couldn't get a hack. The press of people was terrible leaving the prison. Hacks were all over, people yelling for them, drivers yelling at each other. The mood was vicious and the heat didn't help any.

  Annie was selling the house at 541 H Street. She needed the money. We went inside. It was musty smelling and all the furniture was covered with sheets. It was eerie. I didn't look at the stairway for fear I'd see Johnny coming down, all gussied up for a night at the theater. I didn't look at the piano, either, for fear I'd see Mrs. Mary just sitting down to play.

  I was in the nest that had hatched the eggs. And it was already haunted.

  Annie was all packed. Except for Puss-in-Boots. I hunted her up for her. She knew me and purred. I kissed the top of her head and told her to be a good girl, she was going home to Maryland. Then I put her into the basket for Annie and we went out front, where Robert was trying to hail a carriage. He finally got one and paid the man himself. Then he put all Annie's portmanteaus in.

  H Street was quiet. The houses all shuttered. Yet I felt eyes peering out at us, at Annie. In front of her house I kissed her good-bye. We promised to keep in touch, but like it was the day Johnny walked out of my life, I knew I'd never see Annie Surratt again.

  The last thing I did when she got into the hack was give her the nightflowers. Tears came to her eyes. "You've been a good friend," she said.

  "I haven't been, and I know it," I told Robert as we watched her drive off. "I haven't been a good friend or a good niece or a good daughter or a good anything. Have I?"

  He shrugged. "You were a good sister to Johnny Collins," he said.

  "That you can joke at a time like this," I admonished.

  "It's called gallows humor," he said.

  "Robert!"

  He thrust his hands into his pockets and stood there on the deserted street smiling at me. "No disrespect intended. Soldiers have it. Doctors have it. It gets us through the terrible times. Or we'd go insane."

  He was perfectly solemn. "And you were good at the cemetery that night, too."

  "Good enough to do it again?"

  "No. Good enough to do something better."

  "What?"

  "What do you want to do?"

  "I've been giving it a lot of thought. Don't laugh. Promise."

  "It hasn't been a day for laughter," he said.

  "Maybe it's been living with Uncle Valentine. And reading his books. But I'd like to be a nurse. Like Clara Barton."

  He nodded. "What about a doctor? Like Mary Walker?"

  He was serious. I felt something swelling inside me in the place where I supposed my heart to be. On the deserted street, I smiled at him and the moment held for us, healing and full of hope. "You won't ever tell Uncle Valentine about that night, will you?" I asked.

  "Do you want to ride home or walk?"

  "Ride. It's too hot for walking. But you'll never get another hack. They're all busy taking people home from the hanging."

  "Trust me," he said.

  * * *

  Author's Note

  In 1639 an apprentice in Massachusetts was dissected after his death, and his master, Marmaduke Percy, was arrested for causing the young man's skull fracture. This was one of the first legal postmortems in America. Such dissections were conducted all through our early history in this country. Many led to the arrest of perpetrators of murder. Many were done so doctors could simply determine why a patient died. Today we call them autopsies.

  The acquisition of bodies for medical research became a problem in the eighteenth century in both England and America. At that time executed criminals were the only legal source for physicians. The first medical school in America was in the University of Pennsylvania's medical department, established in 1765. Dissection was allowed on the bodies of executed criminals, unclaimed bodies and, in Massachusetts after 1784, on victims of duels. Thus the practice of dissection became associated with criminality in America. It was said that the horror of dissection was additional revenge on criminals. And the blame was laid on surgeons and anatomists.

  Back in those days, however, medicine was still half folklore, half magic, and half art. Medical training was acquired by the apprenticeship method. A young man followed a doctor around for several years and learned by watching and assisting.

  It was different in England. Medical education required five years of study. Students had to take courses, attend lectures, do autopsies. So, many young men of means in America went abroad to study medicine, to London, Dublin, Edinburgh, or Glasgow.

  Anatomy courses were the main reason for the establishment of medical schools. But both in England and in America there was a shortage of cadavers for dissection.

  The acquiring of dead bodies for study goes back to the fifteenth century. Antonio Pollaiuolo (14311498) was the first painter to study the human body. Michelangelo (1475–1564) was able to do his paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in St. Peter's in Rome because he spent years studying the human body through dissection. Leonardo da Vinci (14521519) has been hailed as the best anatomist of his time and did many illustrations of the human body, besides being known as a painter and sculptor.

  During the American Revolution more men died in hospitals than on the battlefield. Hospitals were where you went to die. By the 1850s medical schools had sprouted up all over America, but the quality of education was poor. And vying for the attention of the sick were the herbalists, those who practiced slave medicine and folk medicine, and those who peddled bottled "cures," as well as just plain quacks. There were also midwives, who did more than deliver babies, and who sometimes knew as much if not more than the local doctors in far-flung regions.

  In my book The Blue Door, which takes place in 1841, I have Ben Videau giving his girls "blue pills" to ward off "hot fever." He rolls the pills himself from the decoctions supplied by a slave herbalist on the South Carolina island plantation. In The Second Bend in the River, which takes place in Ohio in the early years of the nineteenth century, I have a doctor visiting a young dying woman and bringing "Bateman's drops, Godfrey's cordial, Anderson's ague pills, and Hamilton's worm-destroying lozenges." Both incidents are accurate depictions, gleaned from research.

  In 1847 the American Medical Association was born and some control was exerted over medical practice. The profession in America upheld new techniques, put new focus on anatomical knowledge, and soon the torch was passed from Europe to America in medical education.

  From 1768 to 1876 about eight thousand dissections for medical science were done in medical schools in Pennsylvania alone. There was a constant search for bodies. Between 1820 and 1840 more than sixteen hundred medical students were in school in Vermont. Four hundred cadavers were needed for dissection. Only two bodies a year were made available legally.

  The American Civil War highlighted our physicians' abysmal ignorance and, at the same time, taught them so much. Surgeons just off the battlefields, where they'd dealt with carnage unbelievable to mankind, knew what they had to learn, and they weren't about to shilly-shally anymore about learning it.

  Washington, D.C., at the end of the Civil War had more problems than any other city in the North. Change was happening so fast nobody could keep up with it. The war was ending. Thousands upon thousands of "freedmen" (freed slaves) had gathered there since Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863. They were living in hovels, needing food, education, a new start. Photographs of the dead lying on the battlefield of Gettysburg were available to the public for the first time in the art galleries, the toll of dead was six hundred thousand in both the North and the South, African Americans were armed for the first time to fight for the North, women were entering new fields—nursing, writing, speechmaking. We even had an occasional woman doctor or two.

  Officials were making a graveyard of General Robert E. Lee's front lawn at Arlington, which would eventually become our National Cemetery; th
e telegraph, cameras, and newspapers were making news available quicker than ever before; and what I call "the hysteria of celebrityhood" was fast taking hold.

  State legislators had not yet made up laws to deal with supplying bodies for teaching. Resurrectionists, those who dug up and sold bodies, were rushing to Washington. Grave robbing became a lucrative activity. Handbooks were written on it. Wealthy people posted guards in cemeteries to protect the final resting places of their loved ones. There were four colleges in the District of Columbia. Three had medical departments. But there were a lot of cemeteries, as well as the Washington Asylum, and the Washington Almshouse (poorhouse). There were many derelicts who had nobody to claim their bodies. There was a potter's field and a good rail line, which made feasible the interstate shipment of bodies to Virginia and Michigan, where there were more good medical schools. (Back in 1859, when John Brown made his raid on Harper's Ferry to free the slaves, students from a medical school in Winchester, Virginia, rushed to the scene on hearing that the raid failed. They stuffed the body of Watson Brown, son of John, into a barrel, packed it in ice, and took it back to the college for dissection.)

  In 1865, Washington was a boiling pot of confusion and constant turmoil. It had a peculiar mixture of educated and uneducated African Americans, well-placed citizens and transients, captured Confederate soldiers, Confederate sympathizers, political power grabbers, visiting dignitaries, do-gooders establishing new social agencies, architects finishing the Capitol building and the Washington Monument in the midst of pigs wandering in the muddy streets, a newly organized Sanitary Commission (precursor of the Red Cross) rushing to organize hospitals, the first women nurses in America, barrooms, dance halls, Willard's Hotel, the Smithsonian Institution, as well as people in the vanguard of our culture establishing museums, theaters, and art galleries.

  It also had John Wilkes Booth.

  I felt that the assassination and the mayhem that accompanied it was the perfect backdrop for my book. And Annie Surratt, the perfect friend for Emily. Only Annie Surratt could show Emily, who thinks she knows horror in her suspicions of her uncle's body snatching, what horror really is.

  Emily Pigbush, Dr. Valentine, Maude, and Robert deGraaf are characters I created. Merry Andrews, the Spoon, and the Mole really lived and were involved in body snatching, though not in this time and place. Everything that happened to the Surratts is as I depict it.

  It is true that Mrs. Surratt didn't have lawyers and someone supplied Mr. Aiken and Mr. Clampitt. No one knows who. Three doctors did attend Lincoln at Ford's Theater the night he was shot. Two are known. I made Dr. Valentine Bransby the third, who was unknown.

  Lewis Thornton Powell also called himself Wood, and sometimes Payne. He did hide away in the Congressional Cemetery the Sunday night after the assassination, as I have him doing. And he did arrive at the Surratt house just as detectives were about to take Mrs. Surratt and Annie away for questioning.

  Johnny Surratt's "career" and background were exactly as I depict them. He did take two young ladies to Ford's Theater on the night of March 15, 1865, and they did sit in the president's box, and John Wilkes Booth did stop by. Everything about Elizabeth Keckley, dressmaker and personal confidante of Mrs. Lincoln, is true.

  There seems to be a controversy over Annie Surratt's age. Louis J. Weichman, author of A True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, has her age as twenty-six in the text and twenty-two in his chapter notes. Although his book is in my bibliography, I do not consider him a reliable source. He was a member of the cast in the Surratt house and the trial that followed. It would be like taking the word, a hundred and thirty years from now, about the "true story of the O. J. Simpson trial," by any one of the witnesses who gave dubious testimony. Other authors are more accurate about Annie's age. Gore Vidal has her eighteen in his Lincoln. Jim Bishop has her seventeen in his The Day Lincoln Was Shot, and in another book in my bibliography, The Assassination of Lincoln, Lloyd Lewis has her in convent school in 1863. That would hardly make her twenty-six years old in 1865. There also seems to be controversy about whether Annie was released immediately from prison after being taken for initial questioning. My sources tell me she was released within a day. We know she constantly visited her mother in Carroll Prison.

  Of course, the fate of Dr. Samuel Mudd is well-known to all. Only within the last decade or so has his name been cleared in the assassination of President Lincoln. Mudd was sent to Fort Jefferson Prison on Dry Tortugas, an island a hundred miles off the coast of Florida. There he remained until 1868, when yellow fever broke out in the prison. Dr. Mudd offered his services and got the epidemic in hand. Officers of the fort appealed to President Johnson, asking for a pardon for Mudd, and this was done on February 8, 1869. Mudd took up his old life and died in 1882. I made him a friend of Uncle Valentine.

  The Sultana riverboat disaster happened exactly as I depicted it, on April 27, 1865. And the accident with General George Armstrong Custer's horse in the Grand Review parade really happened, too.

  Yes, they did hang Annie Surratt's mother. Annie did wait outside the gate for her mother's body, and they did refuse to give it to her. Johnny Surratt did stay away. Since his friendship with Emily is of my making, so, too, is the letter he wrote to her when he was in hiding. He did, however, have "a man in Washington" who was supposed to keep him informed about his mother's trial. This information was taken from a lecture Johnny Surratt gave on December 6, 1870, at Rockville, Maryland, on the conspiracy and assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

  While his mother's trial was going on, Johnny was hidden by priests in Canada, then fled to Liverpool, England. From there he went to Rome, where he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves under an assumed name. In April 1866 he was recognized, and in November he was sent back to America. Some sources say Annie was living back in Washington and visited him in prison while he was on trial, and brought food. Their brother Isaac was at the trial, too. He was older than both Johnny and Annie, went south to join the Confederate army at the start of the war, did not return home, and was not in contact with his family until after his mother's hanging. I saw no need to bring him into the book.

  Johnny Surratt's trial went on for sixty-two days. In the trial, a diary of John Wilkes Booth was introduced. Nobody had ever known before of such a diary. It proved that neither Mary Surratt nor her son, Johnny, knew of the assassination attempt. They knew only of a plot to kidnap Lincoln and hold him for ransom until Confederate prisoners held up North could be released.

  The jury could not agree. Johnny Surratt was held for a new trial, but months later he was allowed out on bail and there never was a new trial. Johnny tried lecturing for a while, but it didn't work. He spent the rest of his life as an obscure clerk and died in 1916.

  Annie Surratt does not appear in any factual accounts after the trial of her brother Johnny. Nobody knows what happened to her.

  As for the nightflowers: My research tells me there are four hundred fifty members of the cactus family that bloom at night. The night-blooming cereus is one of them. The author of The Evening Garden, Peter Loewer, writes, "I have seen it bloom in September at Mohonk Manor, New York's famous resort hotel on the Hudson River." He furthermore writes, "These plants are native to every state in the United States with the exception of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont." Of the yucca, he says, "During the day, the white, six-petaled blossoms hang down like bells at rest. At dusk, they turn up to the evening sky, open wide, and release a sweet soapy smell to the night air."

  When I started writing this book, I didn't know if I would find even one flower that bloomed at night. Thanks to Peter Loewer, I found a book full of them.

  After all is said and done, I am writing fiction here. Writing, just like medicine in Lincoln's time, is half magic, half art, and half hard work. And my story is based on the hard, dry facts that I have taken pain to substantiate.

  So then, what happened to my fictional heroine, Emily Pigbush? I like to think she stayed with Uncle Valentine. Perhaps s
he became one of Mrs. McQuade's star pupils. Perhaps she sat in the courtroom at Johnny Surratt's trial. Did he see her there? Did their eyes meet? Did they speak?

  I like to think she finished her schooling and went on to become a woman doctor.

  Body snatching declined by the 1890s. The medical profession succeeded in getting decent anatomy laws enacted and scientific methods made it possible for cadavers to be preserved for a very long time. By the twentieth century body snatching had all but ceased.

  * * *

  Bibliography

  Adams, George Worthington. Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War. New York: H. Schuman, 1952.

  Bettmann, Otto L. A Pictorial History of Medicine: A Brief, Nontechnical Survey of the Healing Arts from Aesculapius to Ehrlich. Springfield, 111.: Charles C. Thomas, 1956.

  Bishop, Jim. The Day Lincoln Was Shot. New York: Harper & Row, 1955.

  Campbell, Helen Jones. Confederate Courier. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965.

  Green, Constance McLaughlin. Washington: A History of the Capital 1800–1950. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962–1963.

  Keckley, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. New York: Arno Press, 1968.

  Lewis, Lloyd. The Assassination of Lincoln: History and Myth. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Originally published as Myths After Lincoln, New York: Harcourt, 1929.

  Loewer, Peter. The Evening Garden. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

  Long, E. B., and Barbara Long. The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac 1861–1865. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1971.

  Russell, Pamela Redford. The Woman Who Loved John Wilkes Booth. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1978.