Free Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell Page A

Cooking from her, descendant of racist, slave-owning, convicted assassination accomplice. It’s a cookbook that contains recipes submitted by various Mudd granddaughters and cousins for dishes such as cherry nut bars and three-fruit marmalade.
    As Klam drives to the church in Bryantown where Mudd is buried, I page through the cookbook. It says, “Life in the good old days here was centered around the family, hard work, good food and fun games on the plantations and farms.” Good old days for everyone but the family slaves.
    In His Name Is Still Mudd, one of Edward Steers’s most powerful, resonant arguments is one that amounts to a tangent. In a curmudgeonly chapter titled “The Good Doctor,” Steers turns his attention to Mudd’s Hippocratic oath alibi. After enumerating the number of slaves owned by Mudd (eleven), Steers cites the testimony of one of Mudd’s former slaves at his conspiracy trial. The slave testified that once, when he was pokey about following Mudd’s orders, Mudd shot him, hoping to teach him a lesson about picking up his pace. Then Steers points out that some of the other slaves testified that they were often whipped by Mudd. “By any standard,” hisses Steers, “owning slaves and whipping and shooting them seems at variance with the ideals of the Hippocratic oath.”
    The Dr. Samuel A. Mudd Family Home Cooking cookbook says, “In the correspondence with Dr. Mudd while he was imprisoned [at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas] was mention of the stuffed ham at Easter, the ‘gobbler’ at Christmas and several references to the Christmas egg nog.”
    So I booked a ticket for Key West and went to the place where Mudd ate rancid meat if he ate at all, all the while thinking of Christmas turkey, dreaming of Easter ham.

    I cannot decide whom I resent more, Dr. Mudd or Jimmy Buffett, as I vomit into a paper bag on a boat in the Florida Straits. But as “Margaritaville” thumps on the boat’s loudspeaker I am momentarily more famous than the Lincoln assassination conspirator and that laid-back singer-songwriter combined. On today’s voyage of the Yankee Clipper II I am a celebrity of seasickness, famous on board as the first person to throw up, and then as the person who has thrown up the most. I am famous as the tourist the crew shooed out to the aft railing for “fresh air” and who, after the wind almost blew me overboard, grudgingly chose wanting to die over actually dying, thus ripping open the cabin door in tears screaming, “I don’t like it out there!” I am famous for wedging myself, knuckles white and eyes closed, between the snack bar and the door for an hour and a half, trying to drown out the sound of Jimmy Buffett’s voice by softly singing the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B,” so that passengers squeezing past me to get to the overhyped fresh air could hear the faint, repeated melody of that song: This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.
    There are only two ways to get from Key West to Fort Jefferson at Dry Tortugas National Park, where Dr. Samuel Mudd and three others convicted for aiding John Wilkes Booth were imprisoned in the 1860s — by boat or seaplane. Except for today: the seaplane pilot, the wise, sane seaplane pilot, canceled my morning flight to the park because of the hazardous wind. Thus am I bobbing up and down here on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle opening up my third paper barf bag to catch what’s left of the key lime yogurt I had for breakfast.
    It is late autumn here in the Florida Keys, islands where, Hemingway wrote after the 1935 hurricane, “there is no autumn but only a more dangerous summer.” (Yesterday, I made the mistake of visiting Hemingway’s house in Key West. It was crawling with cats and I’m allergic. So, unable to dodge the sixty-something descendants of Hemingway’s six-toed pet, I eyeballed the room where he wrote Green Hills of Africa and For Whom the Bell Tolls for approximately eight seconds before sneezing back to my