Jubal Leatherbury

Jubal Leatherbury tells the story of an abused child, describes the impact of witnessed abuse, and eventually extends to the damage caused by cruelty to incarcerated human beings. It is a dark and powerful subject, but the tale is clothed in a many faceted story of love—love between father and son, between husband and wife, of interracial tenderness surprising for the time, and a David and Jonathan kind of love between friends.

This book is the second volume in the story of Jubal Leatherbury. Book I began in the year 1894, in Mobile, Alabama. Four year old Jubal was found hanging in a woodshed and rescued near death, the victim of ongoing cruelty at the hands of his mother. When his loving but inattentive young father learned what had happened, what had been happening, he panicked and ran with the child to New Orleans, where he left him with his own mother and his aunt. What was meant to be a temporary arrangement while he attempted to deal with the situation in his home, turned out to be for the duration of Jubal’s childhood. Growing up with the two elderly and somewhat reclusive women, the child’s life was peaceful and he soon appeared to have forgotten what he had endured. In spite of the relatively easy distance between Mobile and New Orleans, he didn’t see his mother again. She didn’t accompany his father on the frequent trips he made to New Orleans, and Jubal never asked for her. Attempts to explain the situation to a child who seemed to be without curiosity, were ineffectual at best. Quietly, he concluded that his mother would not take him back—did not even care to see him. After the death of his grandmother in 1912, his father and his remaining guardian encouraged him to move to Mobile, at least temporarily, in the hope that some relationship might develop between the aging mother and a sweet natured but emotionally fragile young man. When it came, the encounter with his mother and with his older brother was mystifyingly filled with hostility and animus, which subsequent encounters only seemed to deepen. Handicapped by loss of memory and a child’s conclusion that he was removed from his home because of his unworthiness, Jubal struggled with little success to understand his place in the family. Within a month of his arrival in Mobile, Jubal began having episodes of a debilitating dizziness which those closest to him feared could herald some sort of crises, perhaps a surfacing of buried memories and the possible affect that might have on his mind—defenseless against what he didn’t know was there.

The death of his beloved aunt at the end of Book I, removed one of the strongest anchors to home, enabling him to take a business opportunity in the expanding timber industry in the heavily forested hill country of North Alabama. As Book II opens, Jubal leaves his father, his intimate friends and the parish priest who had become his spiritual mentor. Success in business and finding a place for himself in the community brought a measure of contentment but among the new experiences there, the one destined to have the greatest impact on his life was his encounter with the practice of using convict labor in private industry.

In the year 1914, only tax revenue provided a greater source of income for the state of Alabama, than the income provided by the lease of convicts to railroads and to the coal and timber industries. Leased convicts became the property of the leasing company. There were fewer safeguards in place for these prisoners than there had been for former slaves (which in fact some of them had been). They were routinely beaten, starved, and often worked until they died from exhaustion and disease. Their deaths may or may not have been reported along with the request for another prisoner.

In the tender, wounded heart of Jubal Leatherbury, a passion to relieve the suffering of these men was ignited, a passion that would consume and govern him, no matter where it led or what it might cost him.