Turner Jack

"He looked to his right, and there stood a great Black man, broad-shouldered and powerful, with a handsome face, dressed in plain cotton clothes which Andrew, with a new clenching dread, recognized as the costume of the Colonial slave...The man's words were rich with the timbre of the Sénégal – it was English, but an English dipped in the mermaid-waters of West Africa."

- Andrew Lightfoot reliving the memory of his ancestor Nicky

Turner Jack, originally named Taanor, was a slave, and later a freedman and devoted companion, of Nicholas Tucker and especially the latter's son, Nicky.

He is the direct ancestor of Demetrius "Gramps" Jackson, entrepreneur and state senator from Jacksonville, Florida, in turn the grandfather of Marcus Jackson, who would date Andrew Lightfoot in a disastrous year-long affair that ended shortly before Andrew would meet Cody Tyree in 2012.

Biography
Born sometime before in the mid-1610s, Taanor was a Wolof man living at the mouth of the Sénégal River before he was enslaved as a boy and brought to Virginia during the latter's increasing importation of slaves after 1619. There, Taanor became Turner, with the added Jack designating him as a quick learner and skilled in many things. He was sold to Nicholas Lightfoot, a gunsmith and planter in the Virginia Colony, who treated him with unusual respect and dignity, even going so far as to buy Taanor's long-lost beloved Binata, otherwise known as Pretty Jack, whom he would soon marry.

Turner Jack and Pretty Jack, retaining their new names in the New World, accompanied Nicholas Lightfoot into the western mountains following the scandal surrounding the disappearance and presumed death of Nicholas' brother, Andrew, as detailed in "Her Judges Are Evening Wolves." Although Nicholas granted both Pretty and Turner manumission in gratitude for their loyalty, it was out of an equal devotion that the pair stayed with Nicholas, even caring for him during his last days from typhoid on the banks of the Greenbrier River.

For a few years Turner Jack was the guardian and tutor to Nicholas' son, Nicky, who changed his surname from Tucker to Lightfoot about 1660. The freedman taught Nicky numerous lifeskills, and served as bodyguard and chief aide-de-camp during the newly-minted Lightfoot's increasing campaigns of aggression against the Dogfolk, which culminated in the Massacre of 1666.

After conquering the Dogfolk and absorbing all their former tribal land, Nicky Lightfoot gave Turner Jack, now approaching old age, and Pretty Jack, along with their son, Jack Jackson, a large sum of money to start a new life elsewhere. How and when the Jackson family managed to get to Florida -- still free and decently well-off -- has not yet been explored, but certainly culminates in the strange twist of fate that Turner Jack's descendant, Marcus, would end up romantically involved with the descendant of his former master, Andrew Lightfoot.

Appearances

 * "Her Judges Are Evening Wolves" (mentioned)
 * The Dogs: Litany (flashback)