Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 180, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 July 1912 — STORIES of CAMP and WAR [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

STORIES of CAMP and WAR

STRANGE CIVIL WAR INCIDENT Negro With Piece of Spent Ball is Head Is Restored to Consciousness by Surgical Operation. After the battle of Bull Run, when the whole country was holding up its hands in dismay and breathing hard In the realization that the war was not, after all, to be a picnic for the northern troops, I, together with many other doctors and surgeons, rushed into Washington from distant cities, writes Q. Gufflng Wilcox In the New Orleans Times-Democrat I was taken, one dark, rainy night, by an affable old negro woman to her cabin, in the outskirts of the city. She came to me in tears: “Doetah, I des wisht yoh come an’ see my Samson. He ’pears mops’ous curious, an’ he acts des like he ’str acted.” At her cabin I found her son, a tremendous fellow, as black as a coal and evidently an athlete, with no evidence of a wound upon his body, but with a tendency to bear off to one side as he walked, an apparent inability to talk, and possessed of a persistent effort to march and keep time to martial music, which he could not do. Aunt Hannah told me that her son had always been strong and healthy, and that when he left Washington With the army he was perfectly sound and “des like de res’ of de folks; but dey fotch him back to his po’ ole mammy des like yoh se him, doctah, an’ I des skoered plumb outer my senses, 'dat I is.” I examined Samson carefully and could find not the slightest thing the matter with him, and half believed that he was shamming. The room was whitewashed and I noticed a streak entirely around ft that was so evenly drawn that it attracted my attention, but in the stirring events of those days I really paid scant heed to so trifling a case as Samson’s, and so apparently trivial aa Indication as was that level streak on. the wall. I spent several years in Paris and' in Germany after the war, and It wan not until 1856 that I was back in Washington. We had an international convention there at the time, and were taken .to various public Institutions, among • ' • 'n '-•■'•WSi

which was a little asylum for poor and Insane negroes. In one room, as we- were passing the door, I happened to observe on the whitewashed wall a well-worn streak drawn so level and circling the room so perfectly that It called to my mind a vision which I had wholly forgotten. < Before noon the next day we had Samson’s small room looking like a* hospital operating room, and the great black frame lay on the table under the influence of ether. I cut open the right side of the thick skull, and sure enough, a splintered piece of bone from an old depressed fracture pressed into the brain. I lifted it, dressed it with aseptics, and replaced skull and scalp and. placed him in bed. Then we set about reviving him.Presently Samson opened his eyes and stared about him. Then he asked —and it was the first articulate word he had uttered for over twenty long years—“Whar did de army move to yisterday?" I was too excited to reply, and no one else seemed to grasp the full meaning of the question. Presently I said: “Forward —Richmond, Samson, but you were hurt a little and had to stay behind, and we have been doctoring you. You are all right how. How do you feel?” “First rate, thankee, sir; first rate. Which side licked yisterday? Ourn?" The war and his experience up to that time when he was struck on the head, most likely by a piece of spent shell, are as If they were yesterday in his memory, and his mind is as clear and as good as the average of his race . and condition, but where that mind was, and how it was occupied during those years, is a never-failing query to me. all the more, perhaps, because it does not trouble or puzzle Samson in the toast

With a Tendency to Bear Off to One Side.