I could not dismiss my suspicions about Mr. Jones. Maybe it was best to let my awareness, concerns, and questions linger in my heart and mind as this journey continued. It has been noted that "You can't unring a bell." Maybe truth will come forth.
Like someone who really didn't want to see a friend who was suspected of some offense, I was ambivalent about seeing Mr. Jones, not sure of what would develop. I rationalized that he would find me if he wanted to. The mysteries of his life that appeared suspect and possibly less than noble led me to halfway hope he would not show. Maybe I needed to let this go and leave George Washington Jones in the dusty books of history. Maybe no one would or should care about an obscure mid-nineteenth-century politician.
Able historians had not thought him worthy of much ink. The only biographical information that existed on him were in footnote citations of serious histories and brief articles on him in the U.S. Congressional Biographical Directory, the Tennessee General Assembly Directory, and the Biographical Directory of the Confederate Congress. In a time of giants, his measure was no more than that of a normal, moral man. The extensive and outstanding Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture did not even include an article on him.
It seemed presumptuous of me to attempt to dig around and give his life the significance that true scholars had not. Mine would be the first biographical treatment if only a novel about George Washington Jones. Updike's writing about King and Buchanan provides but a glimpse of homosexual love, seemingly created for and the gratuitous titillation usual in his works. As my phantom had said, no one had 'called' on him for over a hundred years.
I could have found some other writing project that would have been perhaps more worthy, less conflictive and provocative, and easier to accomplish…I could have, but would not. I didn't want to walk away from years of wondering, from the obsession that had broken forth while I was deadly ill, and from the months of studying him and accumulating what was surely the most information on him ever considered or collected. The possibility of exposing and solving a mystery was too tempting.
I was mysteriously deeply attached to this 'writing' project. Many write tomes on the Jacksons, Lincolns, Lees, Grants, and Roosevelts. Maybe a flawed everyman needs his story told, too.
After wandering around in the records and wrestling with my motives and some unseemly things I suspected about Mr. Jones, I turned to hard facts. Mr. Jones was a friend of Andrew Johnson for forty years, his ally and confidant. That offered some possibilities of interesting discovery. I decided to focus on the political alliance of Jones and Johnson in an effort to avoid my sexual suspicions.