Inseparable
Page 27
Nineteenth-century Americans were not new to the scandal or outrage of nonwhite men luxuriating in the privilege of the slaveholding class. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, many Native American tribes had owned slaves, though none exploited slave labor on a large scale. With the introduction of African slavery, Indian nations also participated in the practice. At the time of Chang and Eng’s settlement in North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation possessed a few thousand black slaves. The wealthy family of the Cherokee chief, James Vann, owned more than a hundred in 1835.16 What magnified the scandal of Chang and Eng as slave masters was their perceived monstrosity and miscegenation.
It would be hard to overestimate the enormous impact these perceptions had on the populace, both the wealthy and the poor, who lived in the vicinity of the twins’ homestead and in the surrounding areas. The rich white unquestionably begrudged having to share class and status with two Asians; just consider the reaction of the twins’ closest associates when Chang and Eng expressed their wishes to live the normal lives of country squires. The poor white was especially resentful and envious, his place on the social ladder suddenly at risk. Local rumor mills churned out endlessly salacious stories about the foursome that was going on by Stewart’s Creek, on farmland owned by two “colored” men with slanting eyes, masters to a bunch of Negroes. The résumé of a local boy, who would later become a leading voice in explosive national issues such as abolitionism and the anti-Chinese campaign, might give us a rare glimpse into how the unusual lifestyle of the twins as slaveholding landed gentry had affected the American heart and soul.
Born the same year as Chang and Eng’s arrival in America, Hinton Rowan Helper (1829–1909) was the son of a struggling North Carolina farmer who owned a small plot of land and a family of four slaves in Mocksville, about sixty miles south of Mount Airy. When Helper was less than a year old, his father died from mumps, leaving his widow and seven children near poverty. Living under his mother’s care until he was a teenager, Helper graduated from Mocksville Academy in 1848 and went to California in 1851 to seek his fortune. He was utterly disappointed, because he had difficulty finding a job in a region flooded with non-Caucasian immigrants such as Mexicans and Chinese. Disillusioned with his California experience, he turned to writing to vent his resentment and to prescribe a cure for what he thought had afflicted the nation. Drawing upon his three years of drifting in the Wild West, Helper’s first book, The Land of Gold (1855), exposed the California dream as a hoax perpetrated by greedy financiers and inept politicians. He was particularly alarmed by the state’s estimated forty thousand Chinese, whose presence offended his strong Anglo-Saxon prejudice. In a sensational chapter titled “California Celestials,” he waged an all-out war against the Chinese, mocking their appearances, dismissing their habits, and condemning their immorality. “I cannot perceive,” he wrote, “what more right or business these semi-barbarians have in California than flocks of blackbirds have in a wheatfield.” But no worries, he reasoned, because fate was against the Chinese. “No inferior race of men can exist in these United States without becoming subordinate to the will of the Anglo-Saxons,” as it had been with the Negroes in the South, whose enslavement stood as the central issue in his subsequent book, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857).17 Combining statistical charts and provocative prose, the new book attacked the evils of slavery and its devastating effects upon the people to whom the book was officially dedicated, “The Nonslaveholding Whites of the South.” Enjoying popularity exceeded by no antebellum publication other than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this abolitionist tome argued that slavery ruined the South by preventing economic development and industrialization, and that it hurt the Southern whites of moderate means, who were oppressed by a small aristocracy of wealthy slaveholders.
Although there was no direct evidence linking Helper’s animus toward both the Chinese and the slaveholding aristocracy to his in-person experience with the Siamese Twins, it is not inconceivable that, as Robert G. Lee suggests, “the young Hinton Helper, in addition to sharing the salacious but almost universal fascination with the imagined sexual practice of the twins and their wives, resented the fact that the Siamese twins were land owners of substance and slaveholders to boot, while Helper’s own family found itself in reduced financial circumstances on its small farm as the result of his father’s early death.”18 When the twins gave one of their last performances in the summer of 1839 in Statesville, ten-year-old Helper was but a few miles away. Spending his formative years in Mocksville, Helper, if he did not live within a stone’s throw of Chang and Eng’s domicile, certainly came of age within the earshot of all those ribald rumors that rippled through the hills and hollows of western North Carolina.
There are at least two central motifs in Helper’s writings that can assist us in detecting the invisible but discernible presence of the Siamese Twins in his racial imagination. First, he was obsessed with the Chinese in California “as a deterrent to the immigration of respectable white women and thus a barrier to ‘normal’ family development.”19 To Helper, nothing would be more abnormal as a family unit, both racially and structurally, than the abominable union of the Asian twins and their white wives. Second, Helper’s belittling descriptions of Chinese people made them seem like freaks, evoking the eerie monstrosity of the conjoined twins:
[John Chinaman’s] feet enclosed in rude wooden shoes, his legs bare, his breeches loosely flapping against his knees, his skirtless, long-sleeved, big-bodied pea-jacket, hanging in large folds around his waist, his broad-brimmed chapeau rocking carelessly on his head, and his cue [sic] suspended and gently sweeping about his back! I can compare him to nothing so appropriately as to a tadpole walking upon stilts.20
What offended Helper’s Anglo-Saxon sensibility was not just the freakish, exotic appearance of the Chinese but also the strange phenomenon that the Chinese all looked alike to him. “All their garments look as if they were made after the same pattern out of the same material and from the same piece of cloth. In short, one Chinaman looks almost exactly like another, but very unlike anybody else.”21 We know for sure that in mid-nineteenth-century America, no two Chinese men looked more alike than Chang and Eng, who in fact always wore clothes “made after the same pattern out of the same material and from the same piece of cloth.” As Helper wandered around the city square or walked down Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, where the Chinese thronged the “cow-pens” and “human stables,” as he put it, his mind might have easily been tricked by the memories of the Siamese Twins, who had undoubtedly haunted his childhood.22
In the early 1850s, when Helper returned from the California nightmare to his humble homestead in North Carolina to nurse his injured sensibility while writing his first two books, the gentrified life of Chang and Eng in the next county was just getting more complicated. Since 1844, each twin and his wife had increased their brood at a steady pace of one child a year. The crowded house led to more tension. The two sisters squabbled, spurring the twins to set up two households within a mile of each other on their farm outside Mount Airy. Since they could not go separate ways as ordinary men would, they alternated three days at each home and each conjugal bed—a rigid routine they would follow religiously till their last breath. While the fear of miscegenation between black and white had remained the driving force behind Helper’s abolitionist rhetoric, the union between Asian and white, let alone the abnormal kind, would only intensify racial anxiety. In fact, white supremacists like Helper rallied under the banner of abolitionism not with the purpose of saving blacks from the injustice of slavery but with the goal of protecting the purity of the white race from the menace of miscegenation. In this regard, Chang and Eng might have disturbed the racial paradise as imagined by the ilk of Helper not only through their marriage to two white women but also through their possible relations with their slave women.
Now—back to the Bunker reunion in 2003. It was a grand occasion of celebration, a gathering of people who were products of a union unthinkable to most.
The Bunker descendants certainly proved how wrongheaded Helper and other nineteenth-century racial apologists were, or how unfounded their crackpot racial theories were. Contrary to the fear of racial contamination and degradation, the Bunker progeny were all respectable citizens. Many of them were highly educated, smart, savvy; some were army generals, presidents of major corporations, and elected government officials. In the midst of this multiracial harmony, however, the appearance of a black woman with a claim on the proud Bunker genealogy wreaked no small havoc. Subsequent steps taken by some of the Bunker descendants indicated how sensitive the matter was, or how unbearably haunting family history can be.
Even before the 2003 reunion, some Bunker descendants, perhaps motivated by the Jefferson/Hemings controversy, had made inquiries in May of 2002 to the staff at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, where the autopsy of Chang and Eng had been conducted in 1874 and where the fused liver of the twins is still preserved. These descendants had asked about “the possibility of testing hair trapped in the plaster of Chang and Eng’s body cast to confirm anecdotes about hereditary lineages that issued from their slaves.” Although there was no extant record or newspaper report on such a matter during or after the twins’ lifetime, these descendants had grown up with family stories about how Patrick Bunker, Eng’s son, “used to play with his half-sisters and half-brothers who were enslaved.” Now that a descendant of a Bunker slave woman had surfaced, the issue took on added urgency and interest. Gretchen Worden, the curator of the Mütter Museum, who received the inquiry from the Bunker descendants, contacted a forensic scientist at George Washington University about the possibility of “obtaining DNA from either Chang and Eng’s hair or liver.” The expert replied and affirmed the feasibility of conducting such a test if nuclear DNA was available in the hair root, “if any part of it came away from the follicle when it was pulled away by the plaster.”23
There was, however, no follow-up to this flurry of inquiries. There is no definitive conclusion. Unlike the Jefferson/Hemings situation, in which DNA results brought clarity to a past that many of Jefferson’s white descendants had denied for centuries, most Bunker family secrets remain shrouded in the fog of time. However, even without scientific corroboration, family lore still endures, such as the following about the twins:
They attended the local shooting matches, where a turkey or beef was the reward for the best marksman, and Chang and Eng acquired reputations as crackshots with rifles or pistols. It was the object of much curious speculation on the neighbor’s part how two men tied together could be so adept, often more adept than a single man.
The farmers in Surry County were frequently plagued by wolves, who wreaked havoc among their livestock. There existed one particularly notorious wolf, christened “Bob-Tail,” because he had lost part of his tail in a trap. This wolf did not merely limit his dinings to sheep and cattle, but was believed to have eaten a negro baby who wandered into the woods. Bob-Tail made trouble for three years, and no one was able to trap him, until one night when Chang and Eng were awoken by noises coming from among their livestock. They ran out, taking with them a gun and a slave carrying a lantern. It was Bob-Tail, and the wolf breathed his last at the twins’ hands. This coup gave Chang and Eng considerable prestige in the community, especially as no more negro babies were ever known to be stolen or eaten.24
This family vignette, passed down orally through generations, seems to be about the twins’ remarkable marksmanship and heroic deed of ridding the community of a dangerous pest. But a more discerning and curious reader, mindful of the genealogical intricacy of a slave-owning household in the antebellum South like that of the twins, might rightly ask, “Negro babies? Whose Negro babies?”
28
The Age of Humbugs
There’s a sucker born every minute.
—attributed to P. T. Barnum
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
In “Ulysses,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson, imagined that the eponymous hero, having returned from his epic journey and reunited with his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, grows weary of the humdrum life of domesticity. Speaking in dramatic monologue, the former voyager yearns for the road again: “I cannot rest from travel; I will drink / Life to the lees.”
Mount Airy was decidedly no Ithaca, and the Siamese Twins were certainly not mythical characters—although they had been regarded as living proof of a miracle from God. But they did share with the Homeric hero the discontent with lassitude and the urge for action. Avid readers who stocked their bookshelves with the works of Shakespeare, Pope, Byron, and other eminent British authors, Chang and Eng could easily have read “Ulysses,” a popular poem published in 1842 by the most popular poet of the Victorian Era. The twins would certainly recognize that raw yearning for the road.
In the spring of 1849, opportunity knocked at their door, offering the twins a reprieve from the rustic life of landed gentry. An old friend, Edmund Doty, whom they had met during their decade-long odyssey, approached them with a proposal. Now that they had married and had kids, Doty wanted to exhibit two of their brood as well as their conjoined bodies, to show the world that however abnormal they might look, their conjugal ties to two white women were able to produce normal children. Making the twins a handsome offer of $8,000 a year, all expenses paid, Doty rekindled the twins’ wanderlust and financial appetite.1
In April, as gold dreamers from all over the world flocked to California for a chance to “strike it rich,” Chang and Eng journeyed with their five-year-old daughters, Katherine and Josephine, to New York to dig for their own gold. It had been ten years since their withdrawal from the public eye and their settlement in the Rip Van Winkle State. Just as the henpecked Dutchman in Washington Irving’s classic tale who slumbers through the Revolutionary War in the misty Catskills and wakes up to a world beyond recognition, Chang and Eng also found that the country, which they now proudly called their own, had profoundly changed during their somnambulant decade in the mountains. Show business, in particular, had entered a golden age of chicanery, at the center of which now stood the Prince of Humbugs, P. T. Barnum.
Even before Barnum burst onto the scene, America had already seen many elaborate hoaxes or sensational scams. Under Jacksonian democracy, which was now entering its third decade, the rise of the common man meant that everyone had an opinion or was entitled to have one. When the popular will becomes paramount in a nation’s political life, the manipulation of public opinion also becomes a necessary art and evil, thus giving rise to a new army of confidence men, crooks, tricksters, charlatans, swindlers, fakers, frauds, cheats, hustlers, bilkers, sharks, racketeers, mountebanks, and humbugs, who pervade every trade and every walk of life. One of the most elaborate hoaxes was pulled off in New York in the summer of 1824, when two men, a retired carpenter by the name of Lozier and a butcher who went by the affectionate epithet of Uncle John, announced that they had been hired to saw off Manhattan Island and turn it around. The duo emerged from City Hall, where they supposedly had held a meeting with Mayor Stephen Allen, and claimed that Manhattan Island was beginning to sag because of the weight of new business buildings on its southern end. Flaunting a huge ledger containing the names of out-of-work laborers who had applied for the task, the two con artists managed to engage scores of carpenters and contractors to furnish lumber to build barracks for the workmen. They also hired butchers for the purposes of preparing cattle, hogs, and fowl to feed the workmen. And, of course, they drew up plans for hundred-foot saws and other mechanical appliances, which blacksmiths and mechanics feverishly set to work designing. Five hundred to a thousand people turned up on a July day at the designated street corner. But, as if anticipating the turn-of-the-twentieth-century exploits of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, Lozier and Uncle
John never showed up or were heard from again.2
Another scam took the nation by storm in August 1835, when a series of six articles appeared in the New York Sun, that era’s version of the National Enquirer, announcing the discovery of lunar life with the aid of a seven-ton telescope invented by Sir John Herschel. The articles claimed that scientists had observed fourteen species of animal life on the moon, including unicorns, two-legged beavers, and brown quadrupeds resembling bison. These fantastical animals were seen to roam a lunar landscape of massive craters, pyramid-shaped mountains of amethyst crystals, rushing rivers, and lush vegetation consisting of about thirty-eight species of trees. The most astonishing discovery of all was winged humanoids walking on the moon. “They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair. . . . The face, which was of a yellowish flesh-color, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orang-outang.” These stories were so sensational that they fooled not only the gullible readers of the penny press but also a committee of Yale University scientists, who traveled to New York for further investigation. A women’s club in Springfield, Massachusetts, eagerly raised funds for sending missionaries to the moon.3
One may wonder whether those devout Christian ladies in Springfield had ever considered how in the name of sweet Jesus their missionaries would travel to the moon. Interestingly, someone else had already taken care of the need for space travel. Just two months earlier, Edgar Allan Poe, always game for a spoof, had published in the Southern Literary Messenger a story titled “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” which details a journey to the moon via a revolutionary new balloon and a device that compresses the vacuum of space into breathable air. In fact, Poe had planned to write sequels to the “scoop” and to continue to keep readers on tenterhooks of curiosity, but the Great Moon Hoax stole the thunder from him. However, nine years later, Poe got to pull another fast one on the credulous when he sold a sensational story to the Sun, the same tabloid that had upstaged him with the Great Moon Hoax. On April 13, 1844, the newspaper carried the headline,