Faded Heart

VII. Calm in the Chaos

After he left, I realized that I didn't need to do this for JJ or for John B. I wanted to figure out what was going on for myself. Whoever the man was, in the picture that JJ and I found, he was important to the entire story surrounding the Royal Merchant. I was beginning to believe that this entire time there was more to the story than I ever knew. Maybe, the Royal Merchant could be real after all.

    My realization led me to my family's personal library on the other side of town. It took me a while, but the walk was worth it since this part of the island actually had power right now. It was important that the books weren't left in the heat for that long or they could be ruined. Some of the books in this library were hundreds of years old. Even dating back to the founding days of the Outer Banks.

    Like all the members of the Slaney family, I had keys to the library. My parents never minded when Elise and I came here to do homework and study during the school year. I don't think they'd get suspicious if they caught me here. I could just make up that I was studying for the SATs or something. But, the truth was, that was the last thing on my mind right now.

    The books in here were so old that the pages felt different than anything I'd felt in a book before. I never felt what old paper felt like until now. It had a much different texture than the paper of books today. Also, another difference between the books today and these books was that all of these were written in ink. Some words faded from time. Every time we touched a book here, dated before the twentieth century, we had to wear latex gloves to ensure that we didn't smudge the ink.

    The first book I picked up was a history on the founding of the island. There were many times that my father tried to tell me about our families history and the history of the island. Most of the time I zoned out. I never was interested in history until now.

    I set the picture from the folder right beside the large, brown book I had picked out to read. I was looking for any pictures that looked similar to this one or any information about the Royal Merchant. If I found little tidbits of information, I could potentially piece it together to find out how this all fits together and find out who this man was.

    One thing that interested me about this was that the picture depicted an African American. At the time, it was rare for them to be painted in portraits displaying nobility. During the founding days of the island, it would have been rare for an African American to be anything other than a slave in the United States. This man had to have made a large impact on an island in the South. There had to be something about him in the history books somewhere.

    After scattering through a few pages, I couldn't find anything other than descriptions of the planters and different types of plants in the late eighteenth century. This was awfully boring and I didn't know why anyone would want to sit here and read about how to plant cotton on an island.

    After countless attempts to figure out who the man in this picture was, I finally came across something. My last name in bold letters and below it was a passage written in partially smudged ink. I took extra precaution not to smudge the words even more. It seemed important, almost like it was the history of my family. So, I read the passage over and over again until I had it practically memorized, I couldn't wrap my head around what it revealed. There was one text in the book which led me to the identity of the man in the picture.

    The author of the passage describes events that happened on May 3, 1844, which was the day that Denmark Tanney was hanged after a revolt spread across the island. The date was so long ago that it felt to me that it almost wasn't real. My family was directly involved with the revolt and death of the former-slave. Along with being founders, they ran large plantations across the island. That explains how my family has so much old money. But, this took place before the Civil War, my family along with other plantation owners around the island were mad that a former slave was buying all the slaves around the island and freeing them. So, as a result, they hanged him.