McGehee vs. Tourgee: Reconstruction Foes--25 page draft

 It's been a year in hell--with a Stanford expert mentioning the possibility of taking out my good eye and a local doctor speculating on amputation for part or all of the leg with DVT. That's not to mention 3 weeks with a catheter and 5 months watching the Valley Fever lesion in the good eye change shape until it disappeared and not to mention genuine hallucinatory Vertigo and some bad falls. The good news was that when Amazon, the reliable friend of all shut-ins, got my comfortable soft eye patch delayed by 4 days I did not need it when it got here: massive doses of the right anti-fungal drug had begun to conquer what they had called lymphoma. Then came the slow shrinkage of the lesion over 5 months. I watched it on the walls every night--tumbling tumbleweed, long watermelon, finally down to a little hunter green finger ring that disintegrated "before my eyes." So now, I know what I want to do with all the thousands of documents I have gathered on my family after discovering that Okies who were in Indian Territory, 7,000 in one file, had astonishing stories, if you only found them. In the year of Black Lives Matter I decided the first book had to be racial and eventually narrowed it down to RACIAL ENCOUNTERS of my kinfolks beginning in the 1600s and going on up. 

Last night I finished a draft of the chapter on my cousin Montford McGehee the defender of amnesty for KKK members and a really distant cousin, Albion Tourgee, a Radical Republican Carpet-bagger Judge. Oddly, I knew A Fool's Errand and Bricks without Straw from 1962, when I read a hundred or so books the last literary histories before the New Criticism said were significant but neglected. This is an ugly chapter but truthful. McGehee was a lot like Lamar Alexander, a great gentleman who would always vote the wrong way when the issue was moral, a courtly man who would eagerly punish evil when it was not committed by someone of his own social class. This turned out to be an absolutely timely chapter as I suffered through it with real time parallels. So I have a draft to put in the RACIAL ENCOUNTERS folder. 

Now I need to write a chapter a little more cheerful. Maybe I can do the one next about the Baptist preacher who was called the vilest man in the United States merely because he joined in holy matrimony two Chinese brothers to two white North Carolina sisters. (The brothers were mistakenly identified as Siamese Twins.) Having no trace of pruriency in my imagination, I cannot imagine what aroused such denunciation of my good cousin. Maybe I will find out.

I think I have turned a corner, as they say, and will be able to walk a little more every few days without DVT sending us back to the emergency room, and be able to focus on evidence. You don't worry about mastering prose after you have been unable to write for a long time. You have to learn again. Good year coming! But what was possibly wrong about officiating at a double wedding?