so who was First Sergeant Mingo Sanders?

The fictional character Mingo Sanders appears in two stories in Stones from the Creek: "Wade in the Water" and "Scars."  He is mentioned in passing by the protagonists of "The Giant Believed Her" and "One Voice, One Heart."  After decades of service in the US Army, he has been dishonorably discharged without trial along with 166 other members of the 25th Infantry because of accusations by the white people of Brownsville, Texas… accusations that they were not allowed to answer and that have since been shown to be baseless.  The fictional Sgt. Sanders shares those years of service and that discharge with the historical Mingo Sanders.

But the fictional Sanders then heads back to his boyhood home in South Carolina without a friend, filled with rage and resentment and hurt.  He encounters an outdoor revival, is baptized and saved.  He is falsely accused of theft, imprisoned, and leased to a phosphate mine as a laborer.  The real Mingo Sanders was married.  He and his wife Luella went to Washington, DC to address Congressional investigations of the discharge, as well as speaking to mostly African American audiences about the Brownsville affair in other cities.  President William Howard Taft overrode the terms of Sanders's discharge to hire him as a confidential messenger at the Washington Navy Yard.

Mary Church Terrell wrote a sketch of his life and character while she agitated against the discharge of the 167 Black soldiers.  If you are unfamiliar with that name, Mrs. Terrell was a high school teacher and principal in Washington, DC around the turn of the twentieth century.  She was a prominent activist and journalist who was a founding member of the NAACP and of Delta Sigma Theta.  When Mrs. Terrell phoned Sgt. Sanders to arrange a meeting, she was afraid she would encounter a bitter and disillusioned man.  In fact she imagined him to be much like the character bearing his name in Stones from the Creek!

To her surprise, she found him, in her words, to be "as serene and mild as a May morning, at evident peace with himself and all the world."  She goes on to write:

He feels he has done his very best to discharge all the obligations resting upon a soldier from the day he elicited till he became the victim of circumstances over which he had no control and is manly enough to accept what a cruel fate has sen him without a whine.

How much of this is true?  How much is Mrs. Terrell writing what she needs to for her audience, who want a dignified "manly" man to lionize?  Certainly she is the one who met him and she describes her trepidation and that suggests that she is writing what she saw, not just what she hoped for.  Sgt Sanders was described by General AS Burt as the best non-commissioned officer he encountered in forty years of service.

So why did the author of Stones in the Creek write him so differently?  Part, I suppose, was the need for a dramatic transformation.  But more, to be honest, was probably projection:  How would I have felt?  As I wrote in another post on this topic: How did I feel?

This may be a good place to discuss a fiction that has arisen out of the dramatic needs of people encountering this story over the entire last 107 years.  As in "Wade in the Water," people remember Sgt. Sanders as a member of the Black company that accompanied Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders up San Juan Hill.  As in the story, people remember Roosevelt asking Sanders to share his men's rations with the Rough Riders, who had left theirs behind, and Sanders complying.  And then people remember Roosevelt unceremoniously discharging Sanders from the army only eight years later, without a trial, which of course is just what he did.

It was the 10th Cavalry that fought alongside the Rough Riders on San Juan Hill.  Sanders's 25th Infantry was just yards below, being held in reserve.  It was in camp, not on the field of battle, that Roosevelt asked Sgt. Sanders if his men would share their rations.  But just as the writer of fiction can mash together some events because it simplifies and dramatizes the real meaning of the story, so does the popular memory.  Our goal in writing history should be both truth and fact.  Our goal in telling story may be different.