Uniseann Holata Kelly

Digital painting of Kelly

### Relatives

Hachi Turner (Mother), William Kelly (Father), Angela Kelly (Daughter), Yvonne Kelly (Daughter), Jamie Kelly (Daughter), Arland Kelly (Son)

### Occupation

Soldier (1914-1918), Student (1918-1922), Attorney (1923-1951), College French teacher (1951-1964), Socialist public speaker (1960-1999)

## Physical description

### Eye color

Pre-1917: brown;Post-1917: light brown-gray

## Appearances

### Debut

"50th Anniversary of the Armistice in Long Island, New York" (1968)

Uniseann Holata Kelly is a primary character in the Greensmith Archives. All unlabeled quotes come from Kelly himself, and are from the Greensmith Archives unless otherwise specified.

**There are no trigger warnings on this wiki due to the inability to cover all bases, so please read at your own risk and check topic sentences!**

## **Biography**

### **Personality**

To those who knew him in life, Kelly was a blunt, logical, and introverted family man with some blood on his hands that deserved to stay in the past. From hearing his speaking style in Greensmith Archives tapes, a specialized 2000 interview, and family tapes held by his son, his personality type was assumed to be ISTJ-T, and the posthumous test is structurally sound due to his surviving son being a firsthand source. Kelly held the same group of friends from childhood and struggled to make new ones, but loved the ones he had with his all. Outside of social activity, Kelly enjoyed painting, violin, piano, and studying the extremes of the economic left. One of his 1924 paintings sold for approximately $3 million in 2004.

### **Early Life**

Kelly was born into the extremely rich, but aging, family of Hachi Turner and William Kelly on October 28, 1898. He was the only living child in the family to make it past the age of two and one of the few to not be stillborn, which had been the fate of his prior ten to twelve siblings. For that reason, he was overprotected and spoiled, particularly by his mother. He was homeschooled in language and mathematics by a hired tutor to avoid residential schooling and was taught Irish, Maskókî, and English from a young age. As he was semi-verbal, he declared signing fluency in all three from the the age of eleven. He had a mastery of algebra by twelve.

Kelly was very close with his mother and father, who cared for him a great deal. His mother was a veterinarian and his father dealt with the stock market, although his official job title is unknown and the role may be eliminated today, and was a Civil War veteran for the Union, living in New Hampshire at the time. Kelly was also cared for by his maternal grandfather as a child, known in records only as Turner, and he would later award him with his two eagle feathers for his accomplishments in World War One. Turner kept a strict Roman Catholic household and Kelly stated that his grandfather and mother were a major influence in instilling the religion in him.

#### **Childhood Disorders**

In 1905, Kelly was diagnosed with schizophrenia -- later changed to Asperger’s syndrome and, posthumously, autism -- and involuntarily committed to a mental asylum. He escaped through the ventilation system two months later and was not recommitted, but would testify as an adult that the stint traumatized him permanently.

In 1908, Kelly began developing white patches in his scalp hair, brows, and eyelashes. Out of paranoia for their only surviving son, his parents overreacted to what would be harmless poliosis. He struggled with medicinal side effects for several weeks, such as regular vomiting and lightheadedness, as his father repeatedly cut off the white areas of hair, leading them to simply grow back. Kelly came out of it unharmed aside from the permanent patches, but was reluctant to tell his parents if he was ill afterward.

##### **Childhood Trauma**

As a boy, Kelly was surrounded by death. His family visited the graveyard every year in memory of their son who had passed in 1897 and shared the same first name was Kelly. As he got older, he recognized the morbidity of seeing his name already on a gravestone with set birth and death dates, and stopped going when he was eleven. Kelly suffered from survivor's guilt, and was even more terrified by the reality of being the only surviving child when his mother gave birth again in 1907, only for the baby to die eighteen months later. He was the first to find her body and, having figured out that she choked on the blanket in her crib, tried to revive her with feeding bottles. After knowing she was truly dead, he cried out to his parents and they went out and buried her at two in the morning in the same cemetery as the other fetuses and infants that were lost before him.

#### **Religion**

Kelly was a lifelong Roman Catholic, as were most of his family. As part of his practice, he wore opaque clothing from the neck down past the age of five, just as all the people in his family did when in the presence of people they were not married to, as the Kellys treated the prominentia laryngea as a sexual characteristic. He also regularly wore cross accessories, such as pins on his clothing or pendants. In sporting matches, Kelly wore wool athletic pants under his uniform and a dark undershirt that was made of more comfortable but varying materials. When in church, until the age of ten, he also veiled his hair due to its length. He was given the option to leave the Catholic faith in 1908 and again in 1912, at ten and fourteen, respectively, but revoked the offer both times. He would go on to pass his religious beliefs onto his four children, and two would continue it on.

#### **Friendships**

While an introverted child and teenager, Kelly maintained several friendships at once as the social handiwork was done by the other children. In later writings, he compared being friends with himself to being "like graduating and finding that every job requires experience that one doesn't have."

Amongst them were Michael Lambourgh and Wesley Lambourgh, two brothers adopted into a crime family. Kelly became friends with Wesley in 1903 when the boys played soccer together, Wesley aged 8 and Kelly aged 5. He befriended Michael through Wesley when the they moved from soccer to rugby as older children. They needed more players, and due to the Lambourgh family's connections, the brothers were able to get many other friends to join, including a two girls named Lillian Meyer and Cara Bülcher, the latter whom Kelly would later marry. Kelly would later drag his chance-encounter friend Juho Waara and, through him, his half-sister Rennie Waara onto the team as well.

##### **Marriage**

Kelly and Bülcher were wed in June of 1914, when both parties were fifteen. Rather than wanting to marry, they were pushed into it by their respective families and agreed that they were simply friends. Bülcher lived with Kelly's family after the wedding and, rather than the tradition of consummating the marriage, the two teenagers were disgusted by the idea and just played cards while calling out random intimate sounds whenever they thought somebody walked by the closed door and laughing. Kelly would later mention that he liked Bülcher's ability to make sex jokes and build off of his ones, but was not interested in her in that way, nor was he in anyone.

#### **World War One and *Punta da Barca to Paris* Creation**

##### **Escape Plan**

In 1914, the First World War broke out. As Kelly found his life in the United States very boring, he believed joining the fight would be "fun." Leading up to October 21st, Kelly wrote out his plans in English cursive on maps and without arrows, primarily because he knew his parents could not read English and that J. Waara could not read cursive. Bülcher was the only one he had to worry about catching him, so he hid the pages in the back of several drawers across both his room and his passed sister's room. Upon going through his late parents' home with J. Waara after his father's death, Kelly's yellowed maps and drawings were rediscovered. He did not take them most of them with him when he finally ran away, nor could they be read by anyone but him until J. Waara learned to read cursive English in his mid-adulthood, but it was clear that Kelly had greatly studied the topography of the area from Raleigh to the Atlantic coast as well as the entireties of Spain and France.

On November 5th, one week after his sixteenth birthday, Kelly left a rugby game, lying to the Waara siblings that he was simply going to the bathroom. Juho believed him, but Rennie suspected trickery, writing in 1917 during one of her parts of their shared war journal, "Who the fuck brings a bike to go take a piss?" (R. Waara). She followed him and grabbed him by the shirt collar when he got on his bike, preparing to go down a predetermined trail to Morehead City. When Kelly refused to tell her what he was doing, R. Waara opened his bag, dumping his maps on the ground. She threatened to leak the information to Juho as well as the Lambourgh brothers about his plan if he did not tell her everything and, once he spilled, she stated she would be joining him. J. Waara, the Lambourghs, and the rest of the rugby team would be unaware of how the two disappeared for the next four years.

##### **Travel**

Due to not expecting a second person on his trip, with the original plan being that he would bike most of the time, Kelly switched between using the bike himself, letting R. Waara use the bike, and the person not using it would run the trail, catching up by nightfall. At one point, R. Waara took the bike and simply walked it alongside Kelly and they talked. Kelly shared his massive interest in warfare and, despite R. Waara telling him that his father surviving the Civil War was "shell shock and luck" (R. Waara), Kelly argued that there was no way World War One would last past 1915, and could therefore be nowhere as deadly. The two came to a compromise to create a war journal, separating their takes with their names, and would compare their outlooks from late 1914 to the end of the war. R. Waara wrote in Finnish for speed and efficiency, and Kelly wrote primarily in English, although he would substitute words in Irish or Maskókî if he could not recall an English translation or such a translation did not exist.

Upon reaching Morehead City, the two trekked to the Atlantic coast and snuck into the cargo hold of a small Spain-bound passenger ship. Kelly hid behind luggage, while R. Waara hid herself inside a package, which would be where they stayed until the boat left. A crew member walked down the steps into the hold and saw Kelly, but was very passive about his presence. Kelly patted the box R. Waara was in to let her know to come out. The man acknowledged the stowaways and made a deal with them that he would give them food during the two week trip if they rummaged through the passengers' items and found valuables for him to sell in Spain. During the trip, the two were even given two slices of the captain's birthday cake after the crew celebrated. In return, R. Waara found a diamond necklace in one bag, handing it over to the sailor the next morning, when the ship docked in Punta da Barca. Kelly and R. Waara were snuck off by the crew member and began their trip across Spain to France.

The title of their shared journal, *Punta da Barca to Paris*, comes from the locations Kelly documented. They stuck primarily on the north coast of Spain and turned further north on the French west coast. Kelly mistook the distance they covered and the two wound up on the English Channel. After dual passive-aggressive entries in the book, they went south to Paris. All of their walking took a collective twenty days, and they arrived on December 9th.

##### **Beginning Combat**

Kelly shaved the sides and back of his hair into an undercut, and, while it violated his religious and cultural beliefs of significance, he recognized that long hair would give him problems in basic training. R. Waara cut off her hair short to her head and donned heavy chest coverings to appear male. The teens forged their names and ages on their volunteer pages. Kelly kept his French-based first name with slight alteration, "Vincente," went with the last name "Corbin," and fully left out his middle name under the worries that his birth-given one would get him kicked out for lack of proper immigration status and his anglicized one would bring about great anti-German sentiment. R. Waara chose "René Abel" and both she and Kelly felt that they were to go for stereotypically French names instead of trying to get unique names, which would take more time to think of and may have made them stand out more than they wished.

They got through and were put into basic training, which was shortened due to wartime. Kelly heard that it was eight weeks and got upset, while R. Waara wrote that they would have to stick it through to late January. Instead of following her advice, Kelly found a loophole to get into the trenches sooner than that, by December 18th, and took her with him on a three day trek to Tournai under the night. Each of them were armed with an 1886 Lebel bayonet and the packs on their back, both marked as soldiers, first class.

Once in the snow-covered trenches of Belgium, Kelly and R. Waara considered splitting up. R. Waara suggested finding a corporal and convincing him that they were sent from the most recent class of basic training graduates, while Kelly wanted to do whatever he wished and shoot a gun. They began arguing, but had to limit their communication as they did not want other French soldiers to discover they were not French, yet were in the native legion. On the way there, they stole uniforms off of fallen British soldiers as well as wrote down their names to pass as them if asked. R. Waara took the journal, and Kelly's input is lost until December 24th.

###### **Christmas Truce**

While the truce was not very active on their front, Kelly would note that he had "lesser fears of getting shot in the head." He longed to reach out to the German front for Christmas, but was not so impulsive that he would walk out into No Man's Land without warning. However, scrawled in the margin was the note arrangement of an unheard-of German song, indicating he heard someone playing an instrument in the opposing trench. When R. Waara looked away, Kelly climbed out with a pack of cigars to offer the soldier who was playing. The young man, an eighteen-year-old private, dropped his violin and drew his gun when he saw Kelly walking toward him and his squadron. He paused when Kelly put his hands up in peace and held out the pack as an offering, a cigar in his own mouth as well. They traded, Kelly receiving a Bible in return, which reinforced his belief that he was meant to be there. He returned to R. Waara, who was both happy that he was alive and mad that he left her alone. The two joined with other troops to bury a major, who had died of dysentery, and returned to battle on the 26th.

##### **Discovery of Socialism**

After four months of constant attacks on their physical and mental wellbeing, Kelly and R. Waara were in great suffering. In early April, Kelly was shot in the shoulder and had had to tear off a piece of his uniform to wrap around the wound. Their week-long breaks came at different times, and they agreed that whoever was left on the front line would keep the journal. Kelly, however, took the book into Paris one week and started writing about his infatuation with the economic system that he found in underground meetings. His writings became much more choppy, and Kelly noted that he had "uncovered the developing cure for the third-worldliness of the broken American south." It is presumed the group he spoke of met in the Catacombs of Paris, and he would begin sharing that he joined the SFIO later in life.

##### **Gas Attacks**

On April 22nd, 1915, Kelly and R. Waara were caught in the largest use of chlorine gas to date. They were both severely injured by the attack as it seeped through their clothes, burning seventy-five percent of Kelly's body and the back of R. Waara's neck, torso, and legs. Kelly had taken burns to the face, and his eyes had already started to break down. He would later have to get his right eye surgically removed, and his left eye would go all the way down to five percent of his original vision. Half of his hair also fell out, and he would shave his head to be a more even undercut. R. Waara had some of her hair fall out as the burns took over the back of her head.

###### **"Blind Death" Alias**

When the gas cloud split the two up, Kelly ran south, where he slammed into a German soldier and they both fell into poisonous water. The man came at him with his bayonet, and Kelly grabbed the body of the gun and pushed it into the man's abdomen. He then turned the weapon around and held the knifepoint against the soldier's face. When he tried to grab at the gun, Kelly stood on his arms and then stood on his neck, which crushed the man's trachea and two vertebrae. Kelly, out of fear that he would survive and be one more troop in the enemy lines, proceeded to cut through his neck "like a poor spear through stale bread" and fully decapitated him. He continued to hold the head while he made it further south, admitting later that such a reaction was purely from shock, and reunited with R. Waara. However, a photographer caught a glimpse of Kelly and the head and got his attention. A photo of him looking right at the camera and holding a decapitated head spread like wildfire on both friend and foe propaganda posters. The Germans portrayed him as the awful side of the British army, while the British and French armies waved him around like their best soldier. The photograph and subsequent illustrations earned him the titles "Blind Death" and "Die Fledermaus," after both the operetta and the animal.

##### Latter half of the War

Almost nothing appeared in their shared war journal during 1916. It is speculated Kelly wrote out his woes and victories in currently-lost letters sent to his parents and Waara, many of which were intercepted by German forces and were destroyed or hidden. Waara received two anonymous letters, which he would state gave him slight hope that they were from his sister or Kelly, and R. Waara sent care packages to her mother after she learned of the cult's destruction.

###### Armistice

Upon the announcement that the war would come to an end at eleven o'clock sharp, Kelly began crying and realized that he could still cry out of his right socket, although they were tinged with blood that had remained from the eye removal surgery in a case of haemolacria. He began visiting with some soldiers in his group of whom he had never bothered to speak to before, although extremely limited due to the onsetting post-traumatic stress disorder that included selective mutism. R. Waara began packing her cigarettes and books, encouraging Kelly to do the same, As the British army began closing in on Germany, Kelly and R. Waara noted that they greatly considered going back to the United States immediately.