M.S.B.,

I found myself thinking of you, and now I scratch out a message in the hopes that you will read it. Best that I open with this: you were right about this scheme, and I am sorry. No one has died directly by my own hands, but the indirect suffering I’ve caused weighs so heavy on me that I’m not sure killing would be worse. Mother’s new apprentice would agree, but we have a long history of not agreeing with each other.

We’re on the final approach. We’re waiting until the next storm to set off down the Suez Canal. I have my doubts, but my father and the old doctor already pulled a similar trick on their path to the land of the Northern giants. So long as my mother stands at the bow, the path will open to us, and we will see the Garden. At that point, our victory is secured or God Himself will ensure our failure. There’s an air of finality among our party. The hired crew is on indefinite shore leave, instructed to find passage on other ships if we do not return - only us, the fully initiated, remain. Dr. Birch, who I judge more highly now than the last time we spoke, is writing a report on everything he learned on his expedition so someone might replicate this endeavor if we fail; my parents are either advising him or bothering him. It is his last tribute to his old lover, and will be sent to his alma mater. Geraldine and Matilda - I cannot explain how I have become confidante, familiar and intimate to two mutually besotted white women in a way that wouldn’t cause you to laugh in my face - are drafting letters to estranged parents, or ex-lovers or deadly rivals or flawed mentor figures or whoever else they abandoned to run away with me. I’m not sure if they plan to send any of them. We are, I suppose, saying goodbye. As everyone else I feel estranged from is close at hand and, in their idiosyncratic ways, attempting to mend fences with what time is left, I thought to write to you. You probably qualify under one of those categories.

I miss you. I miss color. I miss the lights. I miss the rice. I’ve spent so long around nothing but white folk that I forgot how it’s like to spend time around people like you. I would like nothing more than to drag you back to Café Du Monde and tell you about the chaos I went through for the sake of my parents. The fire, the circus freaks, the weeks in the snow, narrowly escaping death again and again. Still lacking compared to your deeds, but you never challenged the force of great consuming beast of the West, these thirty-seven states, and managed a draw. But I fear I will have to miss you and your home for some time. I am free because the government chose to cast me as an uncatchable monster. I do not know what will happen if I am recognized in the States now, but I’m sure it will bring trouble to you if they find me with you. I would not put you in such a position. You would be exposed forever, and people would die and you would never forgive yourself.

The best I can do is leave you my record of what happened, along with some notes the others added. They’ll be in the box accompanying this letter, secured with the knuckle lock we came up with. I’m sure seeing how right you were will give you a laugh, but what I hope is that you’ll see something of what you found admirable about me when we first met. For what it’s worth, you were dear to me for those two years and I will carry you with me to the beginning of time. For what it’s worth, I would have treated you as family if we remained.

No one in academia has been able to prove the identity of M.S.B., in large part because scholarship on Victor Freestone’s early life is virtually nonexistent. It’s currently believed that he only picked his last name shortly before leaving for Henshaw, likely as a glancing reference to Mary Shelley, and he went by at least two first names (Victor and Victoria) and possibly had other pseudonyms, making it difficult to identify him in any documents from that period. The most reliable records are either from his work with Francois’s organizations (under the name ‘Victor L’). After that, there are anecdotal accounts from people who might have met one of his parents in the 1860s (emphasis on ‘might have’), remarking on a quiet, oft-disgruntled child accompanying them. The reliability of accounts drops significantly outside of familial professional records, the best account is that of a Black cardshark who recalled seeing someone of Victor’s general description frequent a Baton Rouge bar a few times in 1872 - usually losing at cards. Without this letter, we would have no proof that he had ever left Baton Rouge before 1875.

With no clear way to determine how Victor and M.S.B. would have known each other, conclusions are mostly drawn from where the letter was found: in the pages of a Vizetelly translation of War and Peace, in an steamer trunk that had been welded shut, found submerged in the swamps outside New Orleans. There was no sign of the copied notes; the lock on the trunk was broken but it appears to have been standard for a trunk of that make. What was found instead when it was discovered in the mid-1930s were handmade masculine travelling clothes, other translations of European literature, a shaving kit, a makeup kit, three balls of yarn with needles, and a vial of ash wrapped in flannel - an eclectic collection. Arthur Dunn of SUBR, who specialized in local Black traditions, was the first to confidently connect the letter found in the trunk to the exploits of The Mad Cutter, and proposed in the 40s that the ash in flannel may have been a gris-gris, suggesting a connection to Victor’s occasional off-hand references to Voodoo. However, no one known by those initials was determined to be active among the voodoo practitioners of 1870s New Orleans. Riley Evans, a predecessor to the gender abolition movement and a professor at University of Miami in 1994, noted the mix of mascuine and feminine objects and suggested that M.S.B. may fall under modern conceptions of genderfluidity, and that the steamer trunk may have had a pair with feminine travelling clothes and, hopefully, the missing notes. No second trunk has yet been found. Other notable scholarship from the likes of Skinner, Vernon and Maram tries to glean some insight from the particular translations found in the trunk; Vizetelly’s translation was only published in London, as were a few others, suggesting that M.S.B. either traveled there or had some connections there. Gilroy, better known for her biography on Breckenridge, is usually left out of such discussions due to her continued support of Howard Dixon as a secondary source, but her tests of the contents of the trunk did find traces of blood across the whole trunk, particularly in the clothes, and her hypothesis that some or all of the contents may have been violently robbed from their original owners by the owner of the trunk (rendering earlier analysis moot) should not be dismissed.

I only have this to add to the scholarship of my seniors. Given that most of the records of Victor were during such an atypical, stressful portion of his life, we will likely never know the true extent of who he was. It’s an odd thought in a world where you can find baby pictures for many of the country’s twenty-four senators. And in this letter we can see that his private nature was, in part, intentional. Wheenver there is any chance of his drawing negative attention, he hides what associations he can and protects those who are not already involved. There is a split between the young Victor Freestone and the Mad Cutter in the same way that there are dams in rivers. This letter tells us so little about M.S.B. because it is, instead, Victor’s closing argument on the person he was before Henshaw.