Mary Cappello

by Swallow: Foreign Bodies

  In the wings of this rags-to-riches fantasia, buttressing the story of Jackson’s country home for class mobility, a group of stagehands held the scene together. Members of Pittsburgh’s nineteenth-century black community served Chevalier Jackson as a mirror that deflected rather than reflected an image; they represented what, in Jackson’s mind, he must not become. Young Jackson wanders down alleyways in the area that as early as 1850 was known as “little Hayti,” the Wylie Street district of Pittsburgh, where runaway slaves had settled. He’s sent there on “emergency errands” to gather four to six waiters, whom he has to convince to walk six miles back with him to the hotel if they want work. Most of these men take jobs that neither whites nor immigrants want: they are janitors and porters, coachmen and teamsters, who might work ten-hour days and earn just $2. Barbering was the only “elite” position available since the white male population relied on black men to cut their hair. If any of these barbers happened to cut the hair of a fellow black man, however, he’d lose his right to serve white bodies. In this very neighborhood, the famous black nationalist Martin Delaney co-edited the nation’s first black newspaper, the North Star, with Frederick Douglass. Delaney had tried to train as a doctor, and white Pittsburgh physician/abolitionists helped to give him his start, but after being accepted into Harvard’s medical school, he was later dismissed when white students protested his presence there.

  Jackson is maybe a teenager when he is sent to round up—in what almost sounds like slave-picking—“recruits” to wait tables at Idlewood. As an adult looking back, Jackson paints his black employees as squanderers of their hard-earned dollars, people with a hopeless relationship to capital. As soon as they earn a little money, they piss it away in “poolrooms” and “saloons” and “dens of iniquity,” and it’s hard, if they’ve already got some coins jingling in a pocket, to get members of what Jackson calls the “happy-go-lucky, floating negro population” to work. The dilemma, in Jackson’s words, has to do with black desires for independence, and one almost hears a proslavery rationale in his narration. “So long as any money remained” in the pockets of his would-be recruits, “an impenetrable armor of independence resisted all inducements” (LCJ, 47). What’s the proprietor of a rustic white watering hole to do?

  “Woo them with food” seems to be the answer Jackson supplies for himself, and he describes how not every man who agrees to follow him actually makes the steep climb to Idlewood but that each is encouraged by his offer to feed him the leftover “plate scrapings” that the “colored cook” will have waiting, simmering on the stove’s back burner.

  Once there, the black help would exceed their duties by supplying the white tenants with entertainment. “After dinner they would get very jolly, dance jigs, sing plantation songs, do impromptu minstrel acts” (LCJ, 46), which was all well and good until more black friends showed up with whiskey. Hilarity would soon give way to brawls and a “walk-out of all hands” (LCJ, 46), leaving Jackson no recourse but to resume his Wylie Street recruitments.

  Jackson strains to find a lesson in all of this, some tidbit useful to the future making of the self-made man. Recalling a fight between two black men flashing razors, “blood ... squirting” from the combatants, “tears streaming” from his eyes, he muses: “I little thought then that these razor cutthroat cases were to furnish me in later life with unique opportunities for the development of a system of laryngeal surgery” (LCJ, 47). It’s left to us to decide if Jackson meant that he, as a budding physician, learned from black Americans (from barbers with razors, in fact) how to cut, or if he is trying to tell us, with blithe disregard, that their wounds were the basis for his later achievements.

  There’s so much that we cannot know but must needs picture. Occasionally, Jackson will take his recruits to the train station rather than walk to Idlewood. He doesn’t describe their inevitable, mandated separation inside the cars, but perhaps we can imagine it: Jackson in one car, his recruits in another; how it felt to him to sit up front alone, how it felt to them to sit together.

  “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall now see how a slave was made a man.” What could this famous line from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography have to do with The Life of Chevalier Jackson? Jackson was a white man, and his book was written in 1938, not in the 1840s, but his autobiography bears traces of the slave narratives that were being published at the time of his birth. Strange as it might seem, Douglass’s oft-quoted line could describe the founding premise of The Life of Chevalier Jackson: it’s a classic example of a white writer using America’s slave past as an afterimage in forging the origins of his white self. Fantasies of abject blackness birth him.

  Hear how the opening sentences of Chevalier Jackson’s autobiography are marked by the terms of a pre- and post-Civil War nightmare-turned-dream:

  From the cradle to threescore and ten, I have been a slave to an innate and insatiable urge to make things, to achieve; though never for the mere glory; the achievement itself was the objective and the source of temporary satisfaction. The satisfaction was ephemeral because each achievement was quickly followed by another slave-driving urge to finish another task. (LCJ, 4-5)

  At the moment of my birth and for all my life thereafter, I’ve been a slave, the physician’s life-writing begins. Not a slave like those who taint the history of white America’s past, however, not a slave to labor, but a slave to advancement; not the subordinate of another, but to myself as master; slave to a passion, not savage, but refined.

  Chevalier Jackson’s life and The Life of Chevalier Jackson, like any life, are, as I have stressed before, “scenic,” rife with mementos that seem scored onto celluloid, that recur or fade with time, suddenly flash or hum, into which he inserts himself, out of which he makes himself—episodes that orient a “life story,” sometimes as acute as life sentences. Numerous scenes in The Life of Chevalier Jackson compete for emphasis, but none quite outstrips what we could call a master scene, an origin scene, a this-is-what-has-made-me tableau, a point of direction and of no return and of perpetual return, that is the happening of young Jackson upon a “huge, burly half-drunk negro” lashing “four beautiful, well-built young horses . . . hitched to a hopelessly sunken, heavily loaded wagon” (LCJ, 13). Because Jackson has no “prestige” at this point in his life, because at this stage of the game he lacks the “prestige” of a physician (yes, he says it twice), he can’t hope to coax the “savage brute” (LCJ, 13) carefully to unload the wagon, release the empty wagon from the mud in which it has sunk, and then reload it. This is something that only his father is capable of, and he’s not there.

  Instead, Jackson is forced to watch as the “negro bellowing like a bull and roaring curses . . . [lashes] his bleeding team seriatim . . . beating the leader over the head with the butt” (LCJ, 13). Jackson’s recounting of the memory is fierce and exacting, picturing for his readership the force of the blow, the helpless flinching, how “at each savage onslaught the hit horse would plunge into his collar” (LCJ, 13). Blinded by his tears as though it is he who is being beaten, Jackson beseeches the black teamster to stop, and expects to find a sympathetic community among the crowd that has gathered. “We will help unload,” he shouts, but his pleas are greeted with threats of violence from the teamster, who cracks the blacksnake whip in the boy’s direction. As if this were not enough to mark the scene as one of unforgettable horror, something entirely unexpected and more unspeakable occurs.

  The crowd begins to gather fence rails—to build a platform around the horses, Jackson hopes—but instead of releasing the horses of their load, they use their new proximity to beat the horses into further submission in concert with the teamster, and with “hickory coal-pick handles” (the words themselves are ghastly-sounding) as their aid (LCJ, 14). A robotic frenzy now sweeps the crowd as each man places himself directly next to a horse, so that each may beat the horses “synchronously” while the teamster continues his “seriatim” clarion call (LCJ, 14). If we reinsert this scene into the history
from which it issues as a kind of fantasy, the crowd appears to behave like any number of late-nineteenth-century lynch mobs: ecstatic, motivated, working in unison, fascinatedly, to brutalize black men. In Jackson’s story, though, it’s a horse that is being beaten rather than a man, and the black man is one of the animals’ persecutors—in fact, he’s responsible for stirring up the mob.

  Did this really happen? Could Jackson truly have witnessed a black man performing violence in front of a white crowd who comes to join him in the 1870s coal-mining districts of western Pennsylvania? Perhaps. But the relative probability of the event does not preclude its functioning as a powerful fantasy in the story Jackson will tell himself about who he is and whom he would become; nor does it mean that we cannot learn a great deal from the language that Jackson calls upon in remembering it and reattach it to the complex racist history of which our doctor is a part.

  Jackson positions this tableau as a founding trauma that, psychoanalytically speaking, would carry the weight of a “primal scene.” For weeks the episode comes “back upon [him] so suddenly and overwhelmingly that, repeatedly, [he] burst out crying” (LCJ, 14). But the effects do not end there. The story follows him for the rest of his life, still returning, acutely, even at the moment of his writing it: “Hundreds of times in later life the memory of it has rushed back with a vividness that has marred many a moment. Even as I write today, notwithstanding the fact that the horses are dead, the teamster is dead, all the men of the crowd have probably passed away, that horrid memory lingers” (LCJ, 14).

  For Jackson, the “terrible picture of it is burnt in my memory, like the red-hot branding iron that seared the Western horse” (LCJ, 12). By this account, the scene makes him into a slave, for slaves were also branded. But no, his sympathies, his identifications, are with the horse, not with the man. Like little baby Theodore in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, he really cannot be marked by his race in the way his black colleagues or his black patients are. He can’t be stigmatized even if he feels as though he has been; he can only be marked for glory and prestige. The horse-beating scene isn’t, then, something that only happened to Jackson; it was something that took up residence inside him, told him where his body began and ended, and left the impression of a distinction he had to hold fast to—the fact of being white rather than black—if he were ever to become a doctor. Left to die in a coal pit as a child, Jackson reappeared, in his neighbor Biddy Welsh’s words, “blacker ’n a nayger in a tar bawl,” and likely to “skeer yer mither tah death” (LCJ, 36), and his colleagues warned him that treating his assistants as his equals would lead his students to lick “all the ’lasses off his bread and then call him nigger” (LCJ, 155).

  Characters in The Marrow of Tradition are the collective victims of the mass trauma that was the end of the Civil War. The novel is populated by people who are operating under severe distress, which Chesnutt represents in the form of perpetual “shocks” to his characters’ nervous systems: at least one character actually dies of shock when she is robbed by a white man in blackface. The novel is keen to document the “effects of slavery upon the human mind,” white and black, and Chesnutt understands better than anyone that if the order of things is going to change fundamentally, psychic transformation must occur as well. Jackson’s pivotal formative scene, on the other hand, serves a more personal and individuating purpose. Jackson isn’t trying to study race-based trauma or illuminate anything about our nation’s past; instead, he’s drawing from that past as though from a reservoir of templates in his effort to picture nothing so much as himself. He relies upon a culturally available whipping scene, in other words, to distinguish himself—literally to imagine his own distinguishing features, the brand that marks him and his difference.

  There’s nothing, however, original about Jackson’s gesture: students of psychoanalysis and race have long noted the extent to which the modern self relies upon “finding one’s place within the mise en scène of racial trauma” (Calvo) and how Freud’s early-twentieth-century patients used Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the basis for the beating fantasies that they shared with him. Race-based slavery became a peculiarly available and convenient screen for white people’s dramatizations of their own complexes and conflicts. Into this mix, Jackson adds another ingredient drawn from the 1890s—the animal rights activism that reached its first fervor with the founding of the SPCA. At a moment of intense disapproval of the granting of rights to black citizens and the inception of newfound exclusionary, segregationist practices, a great many Americans saw fit to take up the cause of animal rights instead. The perverse replacement or substitution of man with animal is underscored by literary historian Jennifer Mason, who explains how early activists actually replaced the figure of an enchained slave that had served as the masthead of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator with a beaten horse. Charles Chesnutt, she points out, expressly wished for The Marrow of Tradition to become the “legitimate successor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Instead, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse (1877) came to fill that role, when, as Mason explains, MSPCA president George Angell discovered the book in 1890 and “promptly printed 600,000 copies,” heralding the book on its title page as “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Horse.”

  Chevalier Jackson seems to have wished throughout his life to extricate, insulate, and isolate himself from the social body even as his life’s work entailed treating individual bodies, but, as Jackson’s self-mining demonstrates, he was very much a man of his time. The Life of Chevalier Jackson’s primal scene mimics a popular sentiment of the 1890s—that the “negro’s” “savagery” was a rationale for lynching. It introjects and reverses a form of violence commonly found in slave narratives, for the kind of, degree of, and regularized, even syncopated, brutality that the black man visits upon the horse was enacted by white men against slaves. We could be reading a slave narrative. But we’re not. Presumably we’re reading the life story of a remarkable physician who changed the face of medical history. Just as the slave master lingers long after he is dead in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, just as he remains as terrorizing eyes and threatening phrases planted inside Jacobs’s ears, so, though all the violators at the scene are dead, they somehow continue to live in Jackson. That intractable living memory, intolerable as a foreign body caught in the throat, uncomfortable as a rigid instrument slipped in, forces him back not to the scene of his own victimization, but to a scene of forced voyeurism.

  Chevalier Jackson, we might have to note, runs from what he finds captivating and recaptivates us with his description. Or maybe he draws us only to repulse or repel us. It’s a tug of war, a tourniquet applied, a vying for attention, a jockeying for position, a shade that follows him, forcing him back to look again, to watch once more, perpetually to refind his place at a site of violation. Something is disintegrating, that’s for certain, and Jackson’s writing is an attempt to reintegrate it. He’s not after truth. No, he’s struggling with metaphor, because truth, as Chesnutt’s narrator reminds us, “sometimes leaves a bad taste in the mouth,” while the Fred J.’s of the world are caught in the crossfire.

  “Strange Things Were on the Run from Mary’s Deepest Depths”: Hardware, Swords, Scopes

  “Animals can be tamed,” Winnicott wrote ominously, “but not mouths.”

  —ADAM PHILLIPS, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

  The Chevalier Jackson foreign-body collection is certainly singular, but it’s not solitary. In Rosamond Purcell’s words, “the doctor as collector of medically engendered detritus persists throughout time.” Thus it should come as no surprise to read a 1930 New York Times article that pairs Jackson with a French colleague who also kept “a large and varied collection of strange objects removed from patient’s lungs, among them being false teeth, pieces of money, and one overcoat button which was swallowed by a baby.”

  West, East, North, South—a quick trip down the Roadside America Web site reveals more
museums of curiosa than meet the eye, several of them featuring fbdy displays. The Allen County Museum in Lima, Ohio, is home to a miniature (working) model of Mount Vernon that takes up an entire room; the largest collection of albino animal specimens in the world; and a macabre, whirring wonderland of taxidermied creatures proceeding along a conveyor belt in an imitation of Noah’s Ark. Formerly coin-operated, the moving diorama was fashioned by an Ohioan undertaker who turned to selling shoes and who entertained children with the display in his shoe store. Such charming novelties, ingenious forms of kitsch, share a space with a local Dr. Yingling’s collection of pins, dentures, and buttons swallowed and retrieved, each one centered and sewn onto a paper card, identified by patient’s name, age, and date, then thumb-tacked in long rows upon a board.