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I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection.
-Sherlock Holmes in Doyle, The Sign of Four
There was a man who was well known in his community as a Negro, but who was so white that even an expert would have hard work to classify him as a black man. This man was riding in the part of the train set aside for the coloured passengers. When the train conductor reached him, he showed at once that he was perplexed. If the man was a Negro, the conductor did not want to send him into the white people's coach; at the same time, if he was a white man, the conductor did not want to insult him by asking him if he was a Negro. The official looked him over carefully, examining his hair, eyes, nose, and hands, but still seemed puzzled. Finally, to solve the difficulty, he stooped over and peeped at the man's feet. When I saw the conductor examining the feet of the man in question, I said to myself, "That will settle it"; and so it did, for the trainman promptly decided that the passenger was a Negro, and let him remain where he was. I congratulated myself that my race was fortunate in not losing one of its members.
-Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery
The Encounter
Towards the end of his 1881-1882 voyage to West Africa, twenty-two-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle met Henry Highland Garnet aboard the African Steam Navigation Company's Mayumba. Doyle's three-day encounter with Garnet occurred during the former's appointment as ship's surgeon on a four-month expedition. Garnet, a former slave who had become one of the most famous black abolitionists in the 1840s, was the American Consul at Monrovia. Doyle's biographer, Owen Dudley Edwards, calls this meeting "perhaps the most momentous encounter [Doyle] had yet sustained in the course of his life" (255). Edwards goes on to claim that Garnet "had done an extraordinary thing for Conan Doyle. He had given him his first authentic voice outside his own range of experience, and the voice was black" (269; emphasis added). How could a short, three-day meeting result in such a tremendous impact? What transpired in the encounter that resulted in Doyle achieving his "first...