by Yunte Huang
In fact, their newsworthy quality was so taken for granted that in March 1833, the Boston Investigator printed three news items back to back: The South Carolina Convention had met to repeal the Nullification bill; the Siamese Twins had raided the South, moving from Ohio into Kentucky, with Tennessee in their sight; and “the amount of money deposited in the several Savings Banks in the State of New York is upwards of $3,000,000.”20 The first and third items were in fact major issues. The repeal of the Nullification bill by the South Carolina Convention defused an explosive situation. As David S. Reynolds puts it in his commanding study of the Jacksonian Age, “Resolving the nullification crisis was one of the great achievements of Jackson’s presidency. He established the principle that America was not a compact of loosely bound states but an enduring union of people.” It was a principle that Abraham Lincoln would adopt when the eleven Southern states, led again by the Palmetto State, separated from the Union in 1860–61.21 The third item in the Boston Investigator pertains to Jackson’s attempt to break up or at least weaken the influence of the Bank of the United States (BUS), forerunner of the Federal Reserve. Jackson never liked the BUS, regarding it “as a fountainhead of the evils” that derived from aristocratic privileges and centralized government. For him, “the bank, which had twenty-nine branches and controlled a third of the nation’s bank deposits, stole money from average Americans and handed it over to wealthy stockholders.” But his political enemies, Henry Clay and the Republicans, argued that the bank was a stabilizer of the economy, necessary for economic health. The 1832 election, therefore, became largely a referendum on the BUS, as Jackson had vetoed the bill for the bank’s recharter and tried to kill the “hydra-headed monster of corruption,” while his opponents cried foul and condemned him as the despotic “King Andrew the First.”22 Sandwiched between two explosive news items, the mention of the Siamese Twins’ itinerary indicates how much Chang and Eng grabbed the American imagination, and their ubiquity in the press of that era enables us two centuries later to have such a thorough portrait.
Attention proliferated whether in the North or the South. On March 31, 1833, for example, an advertisement appeared in a New Orleans newspaper stating that the Siamese Twins would arrive the next day aboard the steamboat Tippecanoe from Memphis. It advised the curious not to miss the opportunity of seeing the famous twins in their characteristic dress as they proceeded from the boat to their lodging on Canal Street. Thousands of people thronged to the show at the hour of the rendezvous, only to find that it was an April Fools’ Day prank.23
By July, several newspapers, quoting the Warren News Letter, reported that Chang and Eng had been tried in Trumbull County, Ohio, “for an assault and battery committed on an old and respectable citizen. The defendants pled guilty and were each fined five dollars and cost.”24 This incident, which took place in late June when the twins returned to the Trumbull–Warren–Youngstown area, was recorded in their ledger as “June 27th, Knock down to Old Hunter at Poland, $13.84.” As we know, this was not the first time that the twins had run into troubles with the law. Given their chair-hurling temperament and often fearless courage to stand up to any physical challenge, this would not be the last time, either.
Soon after the trouble in Trumbull County, Chang and Eng arrived in Cleveland, then a city of more than five thousand, where they stayed from July 3 to 5. The receipts from the three days of exhibits were a mixed bag: $26.50 for the opening day, $90 for the second, and $44.25 for the last.25 The sudden spike of interest on July 4 might have had to do with the holiday, but more likely it was attributable to a visit by a surprise guest, Black Hawk, the legendary Sauk warrior. After his failed attempt in 1832 to retake Indian lands from white settlers in a war named after him, Black Hawk had been captured and jailed in St. Louis, Missouri. In April, on the order of President Jackson, Black Hawk was brought to the East by steamboat, carriage, and railroad, and paraded around cities like a war trophy, to demonstrate the power of the United States. Everywhere Black Hawk went, large crowds awaited him, to get a peek at a real Indian, something that most white Easterners had seen only in pictures or plays. He had become a curiosity much like the Siamese Twins. In Washington, Black Hawk was met by President Jackson at the White House, about which the Indian warrior said in his autobiography, published later that year, “His wigwam is well furnished with everything good and pretty, and is very strongly built.” Jackson, an Indian fighter who had once adopted an orphaned Creek boy, acted like a stern father determined to punish his prodigal son and teach him a lesson. He sent Black Hawk to be imprisoned at Fort Monroe in Norfolk, Virginia.
After a few weeks in jail, where Black Hawk posed for portraits so often than he could not find the time to make his calumet (ceremonial pipe), he was released and taken to meet the president again, in Baltimore. Addressing Black Hawk and the accompanying Indians as “my children,” Jackson, the notorious Indian fighter, excoriated them for waging the war and warned them against any future mischief. According to newspaper reports, Black Hawk promised Jackson not to fight again, although Black Hawk’s version of the exchange, as he would later recount it in his autobiography, carried a slightly different flavor. In any case, Jackson was pleased with Black Hawk’s response, and he entertained Black Hawk by taking him to Baltimore’s Front Street Theatre, where the Sauk warrior in his traditional garb drew more curiosity and fascination than did the play of the night—in the same manner as the exotic Siamese Twins had once charmed theatergoers in London.26
His captivity finally over, Black Hawk was sent back to a reservation west of the Mississippi, but not before he had to do another circus tour in cities along the way. In eastern cities like New York and Philadelphia, Black Hawk, his son, and other tribal members created quite a spectacle. “We were called upon by many of the people, who treated us well, particularly the squaws,” Black Hawk recalled. But as they moved farther west and closer to battle sites and areas of conflict, the reception turned hostile. In some places, crowds burned and hanged his effigy, reflecting the hysteria still common among settlers closer to the untrammeled areas.
Cleveland, sitting on the verge of the frontier, was a relatively friendly zone for Black Hawk. Learning that the famous Siamese Twins were also in town, he could not resist the temptation to see the wonder of nature for himself. So, on July 4, Black Hawk and his entourage walked through streets decorated by American flags, their own buntings so extravagant that some curious bystanders mistook them for an Independence Day pageant. The colorful group arrived at the showroom inside Mr. Scovill’s hotel, a frame building on Superior Street that the owner, a carpenter by trade, had erected by himself in 1825.27 Black Hawk, a short man with a prominent nose and dark, beady eyes, addressed the twins through an interpreter for more than five minutes. According to the Cleveland Advertiser, the great Indian warrior told Chang and Eng that he and his friends had heard of the twins, and had been very anxious to see them, and that they were pleased to have their wish granted. “The Great Spirit had made them as they were, and would protect them and be their guide and protector, should they go again across the Great Waters,” the newspaper reported. “The Great Spirit will call both to him at once.”
At the end of the visit, the twins asked the doorkeeper to return the admissions that the Indian entourage had paid to get in. If we remember earlier in New York, Chang and Eng, known for their wry sense of humor, had once refunded half the admission fee to a man with one eye because “he could see only half of what the rest of the audience saw.” In this case, they told Black Hawk through the interpreter, “Your money’s no good here, chief,” eliciting a bittersweet chuckle from the veteran warrior. Chang and Eng also gave the special guest a copy of their lithographic portrait as a gift. Black Hawk was pleased and told the twins that “he would show his Red brethren the portrait which they had presented to him, and would tell them what he and his friends had seen.” The entire visit lasted about fifteen minutes.28
The spectacle of a powwow on so-called Ind
ependence Day between the conjoined twins in their Asian costume and a legendary Indian warrior in his native regalia reverberates down to us with crowning irony, but it must have been a feast for the eyes for the people in Cleveland. In the emerging entertainment business of America, the exhibition of Indians, real or fake, would become standard. In the coming years, whenever Chang and Eng got tired of the road and chose the convenience of displaying themselves at Peale’s Museum in New York, Albany, or Baltimore, they would inevitably be joined by exhibitions of Indians, Polynesians, Africans, and members of other exotic tribes who were part of the museum’s “collection.” But what made the meeting in Cleveland unique was the fact that we don’t know who was the gazer and who was the object of the gaze. A case of mutual curiosity, if you will. The Siamese Twins and Black Hawk certainly shared the fate of being looked upon without relinquishing their ability to look at others. Case in point: a week later, on July 11, returning from Painesville to Cleveland, Chang and Eng logged an expenditure of fifty cents in their ledger: “Going to see Lady Jane ‘Ourang Outang.’ ” Their onetime competition in Boston, the Ourang-Outang, with a new anthropomorphic epithet, had apparently followed them to Cleveland. There is no written record to help us fathom the depth of emotion that Chang and Eng must have felt when they joined the crowds and viewed the caged creature. Nor do we know how they felt when they had visited the Cincinnati Museum on February 11 that same year and saw monsters, cannibals, and Indians in wax—they also paid fifty cents for that museum visit, according to their ledger. Did they feel a sense of both wonder and revulsion, the same way the other gawkers felt when looking at them? Or were they gradually becoming like their former white captors, viewing the world through the Caucasian power structure so that they would not see themselves as oppressed underdogs, transferring that burden to those less fortunate? While we can only imagine those scenes, the paradoxical drama of the gazed becoming the gazer, the enslaved becoming the enslaver, will continue to unfold in the incredible life of Chang and Eng.
Despite their best efforts, the Ohio Valley did not prove to be fertile grazing ground for the twins. Ticket receipts could barely keep up with the high costs of travel and other expenses. For the entire month of July 1833, when they toured the Cleveland–Detroit region, they grossed $428.50 but paid $417.32¼ in expenses, leaving them with a paltry net of $11.17¾. August was worse, grossing them the minuscule amount of $136.75. After deducting $310.37 in expenses, they were $173.62 in the red. September was not much better, when they moved between Ohio and Kentucky and netted only a small profit of $126.26. “They appear eager for money,” declared a newspaper article published in Elyria, Ohio, where they visited on July 15. However, as the article goes on to say, they were happy. “They are now 22 years old, drive their own equipage, and direct their own movements. . . . They enjoy good health, and a fair flow of spirits, and appear perfectly content and happy. They often remark, that they never saw any single person as happy as themselves.”
The writer was very impressed by the deadpan wit that the twins showed during their one-day appearance in Elyria, where they grossed $57.25 in admission fees, second highest in the month of July. “A gentleman in the evening asked them if they ever conversed together when alone? Chang, exchanging a look with Eng, replied, ‘Me never alone, Sir.’ To the enquiry, why do you not converse together? Eng significantly answered, ‘Me no news, Sir.’ ” And in response to the gentleman’s observation that Chang seemed to pocket all the cash, Eng replied with a laugh, “Me rob him tonight. Me good pickpocket.”29
Despite financial setbacks, the Siamese Twins remained full of humor and verve, happy being their own men but eager to leave the not-so-lucrative Ohio Valley and seek new frontiers of adventure.
21
The Deep South
The Congo is not more different from Massachusetts or Kansas or California. So I have chosen to write of Alabama not as a state which is part of a nation, but as a strange country.
—Carl Carmer, Stars Fell on Alabama (1934)
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks,” remarked Flannery O’Connor, “I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” A great novelist from Georgia, author of gothic stories about escaped criminals exterminating families or Bible salesmen prowling for girls with wooden legs, O’Connor insisted: “To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man.” She went on to explain that in the Christ-haunted South, “the general conception of man . . . is still theological,” a creature “formed in the image and likeness of God.” Man, in other words, is a shadow, a ghost, or possibly a freak. Thus conceived “as a figure for our essential displacement,” O’Connor concluded, the freak attains the depth and prevalence in Southern culture and literature.1 Whether or not O’Connor was right in her diagnosis of the Southern fascination with the freakish and abnormal—she did admit that “almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety”2—there is no denying that Chang and Eng stumbled upon a gold mine when they ventured into the Southern states in the fall of 1833.
After a brief tour in Kentucky, the young men opened in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 10 and grossed more than $500 during their nine days there. For the month of October, when they moved (as Elvis Presley would do about a century later) between Tennessee and Alabama, their receipts jumped to $1,104.50. If numbers tell a story, their income ledger suggests that the Deep South was smitten with the men from Siam: In November, they grossed $985.75, and in December, as Christmas approached, $1,447.
The road to the South, however, was not a smooth one. It was—as the twins would come to realize and take to heart—a different country. In this chapter’s epigraph, what Carl Carmer said about Alabama may sound a bit hyperbolic, but as W. J. Cash reminds us, it is a hyperbole “applicable in one measure or another to the entire section” of the South.3 Crossing from Tennessee into Alabama, Chang and Eng quickly learned a lesson about law and punishment and strange ways of life in the heart of Dixie, where even freed blacks, if they still existed there, were forbidden to travel. On October 26, roving in Huntsville, Alabama, the twins were snagged by local authorities for not having obtained a license. They had to pay a fine and costs of $26.60, and then in Athens, the next town, they got into trouble again.
A cotton village founded in 1818, Athens, like countless townships that sprouted in early nineteenth-century America, had an optimistic name but boasted only a few hundred souls. Yet, it had the unique distinction of being the hometown of William Wyatt Bibb, elected the first governor of the State of Alabama when it joined the Union in 1819. In less than a year, however, Bibb died in a fall from his horse, and his brother Thomas succeeded him in office. The lesson that Chang and Eng learned in Athens was not about fraternal bonding or how to keep things in the family, but Southern pride and a penchant for violence.
On the night of their exhibit, October 28, almost the whole town turned out and crowded the parlor of the only hostel in town, operated by one Mr. Bass. Ruddy-faced farmers in their overalls drawled melodiously, chewed on tobacco, and spat with abandon. Women in their puffy, flowery dresses brought their crying babies. Restless kids fidgeted on stools and picked their noses out of habit. Sitting amid the colorful audience was a local doctor named Bolus, who, trying to distinguish himself from the crowd, proposed to examine the “connection” of the twins. The idea pleased the onlookers, who wanted to get their money’s worth by looking at God’s miracle up close. But the twins were appalled. After years of being prodded, poked, and examined by numerous eminent physicians in big cities both in the United States and abroad, they were reluctant to make themselves available to a country doctor. Also, they were now their own men and had to please no master, who surely would have ordered them to strip and gratify the paying crowd. So the twins politely declined the doctor’s request.
Ruffled by the two freakish Chinamen’s challenge to his authorit
y, Dr. Bolus announced that the twins were imposters, a declaration that caught fire in the room. The insult immediately opened up an old wound for the twins: In Liverpool, during their trip to England, they were attacked by an arrogant Briton who called them frauds after they had refused to undress themselves before the ladies in the room. At that time, as tender youths inexperienced in the world, they rushed toward the man from behind the table, Chang pulling out his purse and giving the man a shilling, asking him to leave. The Briton punched him in the nose instead.
And now, in what purported to be the entertainment center of a Southern village, they again faced the same baseless accusation. Their tempers flaring, they walked up to the doctor, and one of them knocked him down—from the perspective of their opponent and the bystanders, it was hard for anyone to figure out which of the twins had delivered the blow. Regardless, pandemonium ensued. Rushing to the defense of their village doctor, the crowd assailed the twins with a kettle of hot water, chairs, drinks, or whatever came in handy. Chang and Eng “narrowly escaped with their lives,” wrote the Alabama Athenian. Since they delivered the first blow, the twins were arrested and taken before a magistrate. After an investigation, they “were bound to appear at the next Circuit Court in a bond for three hundred and fifty dollars. They gave the requisite security and were discharged.”4 The news about the incident reached as far as England, where the Times lampooned it as a “battle-royal in Athens,” stressing the happy fact that the twins were not hurt but “bound over” for the flagellation of a country doctor.5
In the twins’ income ledger, the entry for October 28 in Athens was marked with a cryptic “~.”
