Name: Joseph Nicholas Chester

Nickname: Stumps

“Whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.”

Age: 23

Appearance
Every scar on Stumps can be traced back to the handiwork of a lynch-mob. Raw-red imprints of flaxen ropes and chains around his neck during a stay in Missouri. Burns on his hands and feet from Georgia. Healed cuts from Louisiana. He sometimes jibes that he’s the only Negro alive to have gotten scarred in all 50 states in America, which is heavily subjective to claim.
Perhaps the most defining physical characteristic of Stumps isn’t the heavy amount of bruises and past scars that appear to be on his black skin nor is it his small frame that belies his stout strength, it’s his left arm or rather, what remains of his left arm. Stumps left arm has been completely amputated from the elbow up, leaving only a bandaged scab as a grim reminder of the incident that crippled him. His former background as an amateur boxer have conditioned his body for the many trials and tribulations of working as a stable-hand in the Tackett Farmstead. His paunchy face remains solemn and stoic as always, only cracking up with a crinkled smile in the presence of the farm’s horses. His soft brown eyes conceal a maelstrom of anger and fury that he has resolved to keep locked inside him, until he gets back to the stable to practice boxing as the blistered knuckles on his fist can testify to.
Personality
Like everyone in the farm, Stumps works hard without complaint in order to maintain his usefulness and position of stable-hand to the Tackett Family, no matter how unfair the conditions are or how low his pay is. Due to his position as one of the only Negroes working in the farm, he is perpetually stuck in a quagmire of loneliness and solitude, only having the horses to converse with. His desperation for social interaction is buried underneath the fear of being kicked out of the Tackett Farmstead or attracting too much attention to himself. Stumps wants nothing more than a relatively safe and somewhat secure life in order to avoid the possibility of being lynched. Thus, he acts completely subservient to the demands of farmhands, no matter how absurd their requests are.
However, Stumps is an ardent pacifist at heart who is sometimes too kind for people who are prejudiced to Negroes to bear conversing with, sometimes frustratingly so. Despite his frustrations with the current status of Negroes in the USA, he remains indifferent and stoic towards the disparaging and demeaning comments of the other farmhands, only replying back with tacit comments. He never bites back. He never retorts. He never punches back. Above all, he never kills another person, no matter the race or background of the individual. This has stemmed from observing the horrors of lynching on fellow African-Americans such as him and teachings from his Baptist father during his own childhood. This has also led to him developing an overall open mind-set towards people of other backgrounds in fear of becoming the thing that he despises most.
Stumps has been willing to bend the rules of his pacifism though, as observed with his love of boxing, admiring both white and black fighters alike such as Jack Dempsey and John Johnson. Stumps mainly uses his passion for boxing as a means of releasing his anger and stress from the world that he lives in and as the only aspect of his life in which he has some tangible sense of control and choice in.
History
Joseph Nicholas Chester was born in 1911,March 16th, in the urban environment of Houston, Texas in a family of former slaves who worked as cotton pickers in Mississippi. His father was an amateur heavyweight boxer who regularly fought matches to feed the hungry crowd of boxing spectators and his mother, a worker in a dairy factory. Their family struggled to live a comfortable life in a hostile neighbourhood that seemed to outright reject their presence with young Joseph constantly wondering why he had to use a different bathroom compared to all the other kids in school.

Joseph grew up in the boxing ring, aspiring to become an amateur boxer just like his father and was his only source of pride in a neighbourhood where black kids like him were picked on every day in the playground by other white kids. Joseph eventually rose to the ranks of one of a proper boxer in Houston and began to fight professional live matches in front of crowds who betted on him to get his ass smeared on the ground. Much to the surprise of the crowd, Joseph eventually earned the nickname ‘The Rifle’ for his ability to deliver lightning quick jabs in the blink of an eye.

In 1932, after critically injuring a white boxer, Billy Barnes, in response to a racist jibe, Joseph and his entire family were lynched by supporters of Barnes as a means of revenge for beating the boxer, breaking his left arm in the process and the entirety of his family including him being hanged under the shade of an oak tree. By some miraculous chance, Joseph managed to escape from the noose, running and hopping onto a train that was leaving Houston by the skin of his teeth, adopting a stalwart pacifism in order to never repeat the same order of events again. Joseph eventually amputated his mangled left arm with the help of a black physician in Louisiana before being ran out of the state as well. No boxing ring rejected his offers of fighting in their ring, a Negro, much less a crippled Negro, and Joseph continued his country wide trek of searching for viable employment.

After travelling from state to state in search of a job that would offer employment for a Negro, Joseph eventually found himself in the town of Cypress Grove, securing a job as a stable-hand in the Tuckett Farmstead. He eventually grew into the role of stable-hand, being tutored by the geriatric former Negro stable-buck, Lewis Barrett, before his untimely passing. Nowadays, Joseph endures the conditions of working as a Negro on the Tuckett Farmhouse whilst hoping for a better future.

Traits
Positive
Pugilist (+2) " Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."
Prize-Fighter (+3) " You can't touch what you can't see."
Observant (+1)
Hardy (+1)
Agile (+1)
Sprinter (+1)
Animal Whisperer (+2)
Rider (+1)
Negative
Church-Going (-2)
Maimed (-4)
Unlucky (-2)

Skill Value: 4

Speech Color:
Maroon

Inventory
- Roll of Gauze
- Horse-Brush
- Personal Comb
- Lucky Horseshoe Necklace
- Bag of Sugar-Cubes