The Resurrectionist (26 page)

Jacob watches him as his eyes cut from the poster to the people gathered on the lawn. “And I decided not to write that letter,” he says. “I don't think I really need to. But it's your call, Jim. Say the word and I'll turn this board around.”

“You touch it and I'll tear it to pieces.”

“No harm,” Jacob says. “I've got another copy of that picture sitting in a fax machine across town. And right beside it is a list of the fax numbers for everybody here.” He pulls his cell phone out from his pants pocket just enough for Jim to get a good look at it. “Want me to make the call?”

“You're finished, you fucking runt.”

Jacob only smiles back harder and throws an arm around the dean's shoulder. “I'm just waking up, Jim. I've got a feeling you are too. Smile for the people.” With his arm around McMichaels, he steers them both back to the podium.

“I spoke a moment ago about official recognition,” Jacob says, “and Dean McMichaels is here to make good on that promise.” With his free hand, Jacob reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out the check he has carried since Thursday. He holds it up high, thinking that although it is beginning to show some wear, it should photograph well enough. “I have a check here from the dean's own discretionary fund in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. It is made out jointly to the Reverend Marcus Greer and Professor David Sanburn, pro tempore custodians of the Nemo Johnston Historical Fund, for the express purpose of underwriting the first annual symposium on slavery and antebellum medicine at the South Carolina Medical College.”

The applause from the Ebenezer congregation is deafening as Jacob holds the check aloft. One of the photographers says something to McMichaels, and the dean nods as absently as a sleepwalker, raises his own hand to the check, and clutches a corner of it weakly between his thumb and forefinger. Beneath the clapping, Jacob can hear the cameras still snapping, recording it all for posterity, and he smiles for them with an intensity he has not felt in years.

He turns to McMichaels and sees such a deep malevolence in the dean's eyes that he cannot help speaking again, shouting over the noise to be heard. “This is the first installment of the dean's pledge of two hundred thousand dollars to this project,” he says, making up the numbers as he goes and hoping they sound about right, “which we hope will culminate in a museum dedicated to Nemo Johnston and bearing his name.”

The applause turns into cheers, waves of sound coming up the steps and over the podium. Jacob sees McMichaels's arm beginning to falter. He lowers the check and presses it into the dean's hands, which are trembling now, then moves aside for the dean to take the podium. When McMichaels steps up to it, he seems to be leaning on it for support, his throat working as the applause slowly tapers.

Jacob is beginning to move down the stone steps of Johnston Hall when McMichaels clears his throat and starts in on his standard thumbnail history of the school—pure autopilot. This speech is not going to be one of his best. After just a few sentences, sure enough, McMichaels begins to falter.

Jacob pauses on the steps. “Foundations, Jim,” he says to help him. “All the way down.”

As the dean resumes the halting speech, Jacob turns and starts to walk across the grass, the voice behind him growing fainter with every step. He can see Kaye across the lawn, see that she has stood up now and is coming to meet him. There are tears in her eyes, but she is smiling as she moves through the bands of sunlight that drop through the old oaks.

When he reaches her he will hold her for a long time, he thinks. Then he will take her hand—small and fine and pulsing with life—in his, and as they walk away from the campus they will talk of new plans for other paths, elsewhere.

But for now there is time simply to walk on the soft grass and watch her come toward him through the green-dappled sunlight; time enough to feel it all, from the great blue dome of the sky to the whispering earth beneath his feet, knowing that all of it—everything—is alive.

Fernyear: 1875

T
HE SOUND OF VOICES CAME TO
him first, voices pitched keen with the energy of morning and the promise of the day ahead. Then, in the distance, the piercing cries of seabirds, and beneath them the sound of water lapping against the wood of docks and hulls. For a long time he lay on his back with his eyes closed and listened, trying to hear it all. He reached out a hand to the sleeping form of Amy beside him and let his palm rest on her belly, feeling its warmth in the sheets as it rose and fell with her peaceful breathing.

He opened his eyes. Morning light had crept through the muslin drapes and shot muted rays across the room. Once again dawn had come and he had slept through it, this luxury becoming habit with them now as each year the hard labor of Carolina receded further into the benighted past.

The baby too was sleeping in. Nemo rose, stretching to his full height, and stepped over to the bassinet. He grinned down at his firstborn, come late to him and welcomed twice as heartily for it. One child given to this fifty-odd-year-old ex-slave, and a son: Cudjo.

He walked to the tall windows and parted the drapes a few inches, breathing in the warm salt air as it drifted into the room. Below him, Kingston stretched out like a quilt patched together from a thousand rooftops, honeycombed with roads that widened as they neared the water. Down in the harbor hundreds of sails, bone-white in the morning sunlight, bobbed at the docks. A dozen more traversed the water farther out, their pale canvas dipping and rising on the ocean waves, coming and going as they pleased.

He loved these mornings, the quiet that was not quiet, the lull that was filled with early activity. Below him he could hear Maria as she unlocked the front door of the hospital and propped it open with the crate that would seat his late-arriving patients this afternoon, when the waiting room was full and the line stretched out the door. The last to come were the ones he was always most anxious to treat—the ones who, having reluctantly given up on the local healers, had decided to visit Doctor Johnston at last.

He breathed in the sea air again, deeply, then threw open the drapes to the brilliant Caribbean sunlight. He turned back to his family with his arms held out wide, his silhouette midnight black against the white light. Amy and Cudjo began to stir in their bedclothes, and his voice came loud and deep and clear: “Sleepers, awake!”

Historical Note

T
HE EVENTS OF
T
HE
R
ESURRECTIONIST
ARE
drawn from actual medical practice in the southern United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth.

For historical grounding I am indebted primarily to two late scholars, Abraham Flexner and Robert L. Blakely.

Abraham Flexner was a crusader for medical college reform in the early twentieth century; his report for the Carnegie Foundation, entitled
Medical Education in the United States and Canada
, was published in 1910. Flexner's exposé of the schools of his era—many of them rife with charlatanry, operated without regulation for pure profit—ushered in a new era of medical reform. For sheer revelatory content, his report rivals any novelistic invention.

In 1989, the archaeologist Robert Blakely was called to the Medical College of Georgia when human remains were discovered in the earthen cellar of the campus's oldest building during renovations. His work, aided by the cooperation of MCG authorities, culminated in the publication of
Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Training
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997). Though I have taken the liberty of changing names and locales from the scholarly account, the character of Nemo Johnston is drawn from the enigmatic biography that
Bones in the Basement
sketches of Grandison Harris, a slave purchased by the MCG faculty prior to the Civil War. Harris functioned as the school's janitor, butler, and body snatcher—or resurrectionist, in the parlance of the day. With the faculty's silent endorsement and support, Harris routinely pillaged Augusta's African American cemetery, Cedar Grove, until his retirement in 1905. Harris died in 1911, having never divulged his activities and without facing official censure for carrying out his nocturnal duties. To date, the location of Grandison Harris's remains in Cedar Grove is unknown.

These are the facts, the known historical record. With them I've attempted to tell another kind of truth.

—M.G.

July 4, 2012

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to Keith Stansell, MD; Robert Bailey, PA; Shelby Bailey, RN; and the late Michael Casey, PhD, all of whom provided invaluable guidance on matters of modern medical practice and anatomy.

To my many close readers and closer friends—Kristen (first, always), Amy Bowling, Nancy Sulser, Helen Braswell, Kay Largel, Floyd Sulser, Paul Rankin, Steve Yates, Scott Sutton, and Park Ellis—thank you for always asking to see the next page; it kept them coming.

For invaluable help along the way, I am grateful to my parents, Wendell and Jane Guinn, and to Kathleen Yount, Tammy McLean, Phoebe Spencer, Taylor Batey, John Evans, Maude Schuyler Clay, Langdon Clay, Thomas Ezell, Tina Brock, Jerry Ben-Dov, Sharon Ben-Dov, and the members of the Hard Times Literary and Drinking Society.

To Alane Salierno Mason, for her astute editing and for taking a chance on my work, thank you.

And to Andre Dubus III, what words suffice? Andre—thanks for everything.

Praise for

the
R
esurrectionist

“The best novel I've read in years, and absolutely the best first novel I've ever read. . . . Surprising, compelling, moving, shocking, and satisfying.”

—Chris Offutt, author of 
Kentucky Straight

“I just finished Matthew Guinn's fine new novel
The Resurrectionist
with a rare sense of excitement. It's relentlessly compelling, thoughtful, intelligent, and just plain wise. It's a shame Robert Penn Warren is no longer with us, because this is a book he would love.”

—Steve Yarbrough, author of
Safe from the Neighbors

“
The
Resurrectionist
is a spectacular novel that seamlessly connects fact and fiction, past and present. Matthew Guinn is a novelist who possesses that rarest and most underrated of literary gifts—how to tell a story in such a way that the reader surrenders completely to its power.”

—Ron Rash, author of
Serena

“Guinn's fascinating, occasionally macabre, and engrossing novel offers a story of redemption and renewal while revealing the uncomfortable details about the historical practice of procuring human cadavers for doctors in training.”

—
Historical Novel Society

“The enigmatic body thief Nemo elevates the pulse rate on this haunted history lesson.”

—Tray Butler,
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“An engrossing tale . . . weaves crime, social commentary and revenge into a moral parable of the South.”

—Susan O'Bryan,
Clarion-Ledger

“Creepy and macabre (in the best possible way). . . . [A] curious yet highly satisfying brew.”

—Alabama Booksmith blog

“Matthew Guinn makes books like they used to. . . . [B]y remaining mindful that literature is both entertaining and academic, he's created something fresh.”

—Sam Suttle,
Portico
magazine

“A noteworthy debut of an author from whom we will hopefully read more, and soon.”

—Joe Hartlaub, BookReporter.com

“Guinn provides a lot of twists and an effectively ominous mood, thanks partly to some not-for-the-squeamish medical scenes.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Strong pacing, interesting lead characters, well-framed moral questions, and clever resolutions to both prongs of the story are the hallmarks of this winning debut that shows that in matters of race and American history, navigating to ‘truth' and ‘right' is almost always a complex journey.”

—Neil Hollands,
Library Journal

THE RESURRECTIONIST

Matthew Guinn

READING GROUP GUIDE

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. After reading the novel, how have your views of medical schools or of medical history in the United States changed? Which part of this history shocked you the most?

2. The act of “resurrecting” cadavers was common to Western medical education until fairly recently. What do you think of this practice, especially given that it often served the greater good? How does is cadaver theft complicated by the context of American slavery?

3. The novel is told in an alternating narrative Guinn calls “fernyear.” What do you think of the technique of navigating between present and past? Does it shed any light on Faulkner's famous observation that the past “is never even past”?

4. What would you do if you found yourself in Nemo's place on Drake's Windsor Plantation? At the medical school? What ironies do you see in his unusual position?

5. Does it seem to you that Dr. Johnston—given his time and place—acts with Nemo's best interests in mind? Sara Thacker's?

6. Do you approve of Jacob Thacker's actions throughout his stressful week? Where would you have him act differently?

7. Jacob's colleagues at the medical school act on a range of motivations. What drives Dean Jim McMichaels? Adam Claybough? Kirsten Reithoffer?

8. Does Nemo's act of revenge against Fitzhugh seem appropriate to you? How does it echo what happened years earlier to Drake's foot?

9. Near the end of the book, Dr. Johnston says of Nemo, “I treated him as if he were my own.” Is this choice of words revealing? Toni Morrison has said that literature should explore “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it.” Do you see that at work here?

10. The novel concludes with Nemo having made what Hemingway called “a separate peace” with his family in Jamaica. How does this resolution strike you? Discuss what is implied by Nemo's son's name.

11. Do you see a double meaning in the novel's title? Is there a sense that Jacob is a kind of resurrectionist to the departed Nemo Johnston? Or is Nemo in some way a resurrectionist to the disillusioned Jacob Thacker?

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