In the middle of 1870, Scipio Africanus Kenner feared losing the girl he loved. For some time, he had been courting Isabel Park with her family’s encouragement. Then, suddenly, Park’s mother cooled on the match and asked Kenner never to visit the home again. Park, however, did not stop seeing Kenner. According to Kenner, Agnes Park then began berating and beating her daughter, desperate to impede a probable marriage.
Why the turnabout? Agnes Park believed that Kenner “had negro blood in [his] veins.” She informed her husband, then on a mission in Scotland, about the matter. If Kenner “mixed the blood,” Hamilton Park wrote, he would follow him “to the ends of the earth but he would be revenged.” It is possible that Kenner’s middle name alarmed Isabel’s parents, who did not know that Scipio Africanus was the Roman general who defeated Hannibal in the Second Punic War.
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