In other words, Ota’s transit from outside to inside the cage was such a stealthy, seemingly casual progression that later Hornaday and everyone else involved could maintain that it wasn’t even deliberately planned. (In his private letters to Josephine, there is a passing suggestion that this exhibit might even have been years in the making. In a letter dated May 27, 1902, on New York Zoological Society letterhead, Hornaday wrote: “To speak first of important things. . . . I will tell you that the hunt for a dusky maiden of Congolese ancestry has just been begun.”)35
Yet Ota Benga’s confinement had been foreshadowed, not just in Professor Osborn’s comments about “an Indian in a teepee” at the zoo’s opening ceremonies, but in something Hornaday had written ten years earlier. He had imagined what he conceived of as the “ultimate” zoo exhibit—the pseudoscientific display of “American aborigines” in their natural habitat. It would be both educational and unforgettable, “at once getting hold of the Public,” by “illustrating the house life of aborigines of North America.” Such an exhibit could “be made a very picturesque, striking, and popular feature, at very moderate cost; and it would be ‘something new under the sun.’” Left unsaid was the presumption that an exhibit like that would require real, living aborigines to be kept in some kind of confinement. Despite Hornaday’s disdain for the cheap theatrics of P. T. Barnum, Barnum would have loved it.
Pleased by this new, if temporary, acquisition, Hornaday wrote a short article for the Zoological Society Bulletin called “An African Pigmy,” with a photo on the front page of Ota holding a chimp named Polly. “On September 9, a genuine African pigmy, belonging to the sub-race commonly miscalled ‘dwarfs,’ was employed in the Zoological Park,” he began in a dispassionate, scientific-sounding way. A handwritten version of the piece describes the pygmies as “the smallest racial division of the human genus, and probably the lowest in cultural development,” but Hornaday struck these lines from the published piece.36
In fact, Ota Benga had become an “employee” of the zoo several days earlier, and the press had quickly gotten wind of this. On Saturday, September 8, 1906, the first headline appeared, in the New York Times: “Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes.”37 The story explained that the tiny “Bushman,” wearing nothing but a bark loincloth and accompanied by an orangutan named Dohong, was locked in the cage except when his keeper let him out, and that throngs of curiosity-seekers had begun to crowd around his enclosure. “Ist dass ein Mensch?” asked one German visitor. “Is it a man?”38 The exhibit “had for many visitors more than a provocation to laughter,” the Times reported. “There were laughs enough in it too, but there was something about it which made the serious-minded grave.”39
The next day, Sunday, September 9, Director Hornaday had a sign installed outside the enclosure at the Monkey House:
The African Pygmy, “Ota Benga.”
Age, 28 years.
Height, 4 feet 11 inches.
Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State,
South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner
Weight 103 pounds
Exhibited each afternoon during September.40
The sign was meant to be subdued, scientific, and nonjudgmental, like every other sign in the park, but by now Hornaday found he had a mob scene on his hands. Having read in the papers about the “pygmy in the zoo”—or, better yet, the “cannibal in the zoo”—thousands had made their way out to the Bronx to see him for themselves. “The Bushman didn’t seem to mind it, and the sight plainly pleased the crowd,” the Times reported that day. “Few expressed audible objection to the sight of a human being in a cage. There was always a crowd before the cage, most of the time roaring with laughter, and from almost every corner of the garden could be heard the question:
‘Where is the Pygmy?’
And the answer was, ‘In the monkey house.’”41
But already there were rumbles of outrage. The Reverend R. S. MacArthur, a white preacher, thundered: “The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African. . . . We send out missionaries to Africa to Christianize the people, and then we bring one here to brutalize him.” That Sunday, a committee of Clergymen from the Colored Baptist Ministers Conference called the exhibit “an outrage” and announced that they would appeal to the mayor of New York, which chartered the zoo, to put a stop to the “degrading exhibition.” The delegation’s leader, the Reverend James Gordon, said that “our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.”42 But the ministers were angriest about the fact that the exhibit seemed to insinuate that Ota Benga was the “missing link” between apes and humans, thus adding credence to the godless theories of Charles Darwin.
“This is a Christian country . . . and the exhibition evidently aims to be a demonstration of the Darwinian theory of evolution,” Gordon fumed. “The Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be permitted.”
By Monday, September 10, Hornaday waded in, defensive and angry. He seemed hurt that he was being misunderstood. In response to MacArthur’s remarks about “brutalizing” Ota Benga, Hornaday said:
This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of. As for the boy being exhibited in a cage, it was done simply for the convenience of the thousands of people who wanted to see him. We have no platform that we could place him on, and this big open air cage was the best place we could find to put him where everybody could see him. Why, we are taking excellent care of the little fellow and he is great favorite with everybody connected with the zoo. He has one of the best rooms in the primate house.43
Not then, nor at any time later in his long life, did Hornaday publicly apologize for the exhibition, nor did he ever quite seem to understand why it could be considered offensive. But as the situation escalated into something akin to a slow-motion riot, Hornaday was the public face of the New York Zoological Society, trying to explain the zoo’s intentions and fending off body blows from the public, the press, and the preachers.
The role of Madison Grant in all this was, as usual, a backstage affair. After the preachers were turned away by Mayor George B. McLellan Jr., who refused to help them, they marched into Grant’s law office. But when they asked to be given custody of Ota Benga, in order to free him, Grant told them that the zoo was only holding him in trust for Dr. Verner and had no authority to hand him over. This, the preachers said afterwards, was “no satisfactory reply,” although it was perfectly in character for Grant: a muffled “go away” from behind a walnut-paneled door.44
Nevertheless, the next day, Grant ordered that Ota Benga no longer be displayed in a cage, although he was still “employed” by the zoo (as Hornaday put it) and still slept in the primate house at night. But by now the news had spread through the city. On Sunday, September 16, 40,000 people came to the zoo, and, according to the Times, “nearly every man, woman, and child of this crowd made for the monkey house to see the star attraction in the park—the wild man from Africa. They chased him about the grounds all day, howling, jeering, and yelling. Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him.”45 Ota threw a tantrum, tried to bite one keeper, and at one point even brandished a stolen knife. Hornaday, alarmed by all this, tried to contact Verner to get him to take Ota Benga away, complaining that “the boy . . . does quite what he pleases, and it is utterly impossible to control him.”46
Although Madison Grant may not have been the public face of this affair, his deeper convictions about race were glaringly on display—and would later become well known to the world. He was not just insensitive to the issue of race; some historians would later call him “the nation’s most influential racist.”47
To men like Madison Grant, the tidal wave of unkempt immigrants who filled the streets of New York—and now the Beaux-Arts pavillions and gardens of the New York Zoo—was deeply alarming
. These people were a threat to his class and, he felt, a danger to the nation. Grant was a deep believer in the theory of eugenics, a word coined by Darwin’s eccentric and erudite half-cousin, Sir Francis Dalton, in 1883. Simply put, eugenics meant the program of improving the human race through controlled breeding, much as horse breeders refine a bloodline of thoroughbreds. The idea caught hold in America and spawned a new generation of “scientific racists” who came to believe that to invigorate humankind, the dominant Teutonic or Nordic races should be selected for breeding, while the weak, the infirm, the feebleminded, and those of degenerate races such as Jews and blacks should either be encouraged not to reproduce or forcibly sterilized. Eugenicists believed that “charity” was misguided because it enabled the weak to survive, therefore diminishing the vigor of the race.48
The most famous book about eugenics to emerge from America, published in 1916, was The Passing of the Great Race. Its author was none other than Madison Grant. The book attempted to explain all of Western history in terms of racial theory, showing how great nations crumbled and fell when their strength was sapped by interbreeding with the “mongrel races,” and other nations rose on the majestic power of racial purity. Grant actually argued in his book that Negroes were so much less developed than Nordics that they belonged to a separate species—possibly even a separate subgenera. The book became enormously influential, going through four editions in the United States and many translations, including a translation into German. Years later, at the Nuremberg trials, it emerged that Grant’s book had found its way into the hands of Adolf Hitler himself.
“Entertaining, passionate, erudite—The Passing of the Great Race did for scientific racism what The Communist Manifesto did for scientific socialism,” writes historian Jonathan Peter Spiro in a biography of Madison Grant. “Fortunately for Marx and Grant, they both died before they could see the horrors that resulted when a regime embraced their philosophy and tried to remake society in its name.”49
Spiro points out that, to Grant, the cause of conservation and his battle to preserve the purity of the race were both intertwined and both deeply personal. He was trying to save an old, threatened world, a world as safe for the pale patricians of the Upper East Side as for the monk seal and the eider duck. Surveying the hordes coming ashore at Ellis Island, Spiro writes, Grant “had to accept the fact that yet another mammal—the blue-eyed, long-headed Teutons—needed to be added to the list of endangered North American species. After all, it is one thing to learn that the bison are headed for extinction; it is quite another to learn that you yourself are similarly doomed.” Even so, his conclusions were so repellent that when Grant died in 1937, his family fed his personal papers into a fire.50
While there is no evidence that Hornaday was a “scientific racist” like Grant, there is no question that he was (by modern lights) shockingly insensitive to matters of race. In Our Vanishing Wild Life, he wrote that “toward wildlife the Italian laborer is a human mongoose . . . wherever they settle, their tendency is to root out the native American and take his place and his income,”51 a charge as unfocused and dangerous as a blast of buckshot. When some Piegan Indians stole a buffalo that he’d killed in Montana, he called them “a gang of coyotes in human form.”52 And his explanation for why he was now exhibiting Ota Benga in a cage did not quite suffice. “I do not wish to offend my colored brothers’ feelings or the feelings of anyone, for that matter,” Hornaday told the press. “I am giving the exhibitions purely as an ethnological exhibit. It is my duty to interest visitors to the park, and what I have done in exhibiting Benga is in pursuance of this. I am a believer in the Darwinian theory.”53
In other words, Ota Benga was a vivid display of human evolutionary progress as described by Darwin—the steady progression from “lower” to “higher” living forms. Hornaday was not alone in these beliefs, of course. The New York Evening Post pointed out, helpfully, that Benga was not actually at the bottom rung of human development. Because he wasn’t coal-black, there were darker-skinned blacks who were lower.54
(In an interview with a newspaper in Bridgeport, Connecticut, twenty years later, Hornaday further clarified his views about the hierarchy of sentient life, including animals. “There is not the slightest doubt that the highest races of animals have more intelligence than the lowest races of man. . . . The highest animals are far better developed, more consistent, worthier and even more spiritual than the lowest men.” Furthermore, Hornaday added, “if there is a direct, personal, high interest in the lives of human beings, I have every reason to believe that the same interest extends to animal beings. If all humans have souls, some animals have souls.”55 In further defense of four-legged beings, Hornaday added in one of his books, Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: “If every man devoted to his affairs and to the affairs of his city and state the same measure of intelligence and honest industry that every warm-blooded wild animal devotes to its affairs, the people of this world would abound in good health, prosperity, peace and happiness.”)56
But the clamor, and the outrage, persisted. On September 11, Hornaday seemed to amend his earlier position, telling the New York Times, “[I]f Ota Benga is in a cage, he is only there to look after the animals. If there is a notice on the cage, it is only put there to avoid answering the many questions that are asked about him. He is absolutely free. The only restriction that is put upon him is to prevent him from getting away from the keepers. This is done for his own safety.”57 The director also disavowed the Darwinian connection. “I hope my colored bretheren [sic] will not take the absurd position that I am giving the exhibition to show the close analogy of the African savage to the apes. Benga is in the primate house because that was the most comfortable place we could find for him.”
Nevertheless, Hornaday ultimately bowed to public pressure. After eighteen days, he had Benga removed from public display, although the little man—now a star, but one attempting to hide—continued to live at the zoo. Afterward, Hornaday was dismissive of the whole drama, calling what had happened an “absurd matter. . . . The whole episode is good comic-opera material, and nothing more. When the history of the Zoological Park is written, this incident will form its most amusing passage.”58
The furor gradually died down. Toward the end of 1906, Benga was released into the custody of the Reverend Gordon, superintendent of a church-sponsored New York orphanage called the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. But the public’s frenzy of interest in this “cannibal” from darkest Africa continued unabated. In January 1910, Gordon arranged for Benga to be relocated to Lynchburg, Virginia, away from the unpleasant glare of the big city. (It was, of course, a crashing irony that Gordon’s idea of where to send Benga for greater peace and safety was to move him to the South.) Tutored by black Lynchburg poet Anne Spencer, his English improved, and he sometimes attended elementary school at the local Baptist Seminary.59
Ota Benga also liked to frequent the woods around Lynchburg to fish, hunt, and gather wild honey. Often he was accompanied by a small gang of white boys, aged five to eleven, many of them children of the town’s most prominent citizens. Despite some worries that Benga might be a subversive influence on the boys, the youngsters loved these forays into the forest with the little African. In an interview nearly eighty years later, one of them recalled that when Benga strung a long bow that was as long as he was tall, it sounded “like Beethoven.” Another described Benga as a hero, a genuine pal, a “close relative.” It was the children, more than anyone, who saw him not as the Other, but simply as a human being, no matter how small or dark.60
Benga showed the boys how to imitate the calls that would attract quail and wild turkey. He showed them that bee stings suffered in the hunt for honey, rather than being painful, were actually hilarious, the pygmy equivalent of slipping on a banana peel. Back in the town, Benga learned to make compromises with the society that he was living in. His name was Americanized to “Otto Bingo.” The pointed teeth that once had been used to stigmatize him as a cannibal were no
w capped by a dentist, so his smile looked cheerful rather than horrifying. He wore trousers, shirts, and shoes, though somewhat uncomfortably. On certain moonlit nights, often accompanied by his band of boys, Ota Benga would return to the forest dressed only in a bark loincloth. There he would light a ceremonial fire, dance the ceremonial dances, and sing the ceremonial songs that were to be performed only on such occasions. He told the boys that this was how he had danced and sung in Africa. As Peter Matthiessen writes of such ancient tribal practices in African Silences: “All songs are implicitly sacred. ‘The forest gives us this song,’ the people say. ‘The forest is this song.’ ”61
But outside of Lynchburg, the Great War was raging and Ota knew it, from having heard people talking. He knew that the war had even spread to the Congo, to his beloved African forest. He understood that it would be impossible to return home. He confided to the boys, sometimes with tears in his eyes, that he wanted to go home. But now he couldn’t go home. Even Samuel Verner, the man he knew as Fwela, the man who had rescued him and promised one day to take him back to Africa, had disappeared, pursuing schemes and business ventures that had led mostly to poverty and despair. Benga could not afford a steamship ticket back home, even if it were possible for him to go there. And once he arrived back on the Kasai River, in the Congo, he might well discover that he no longer belonged there, either. He had become a man without a country, a forest without a song.
Increasingly despondent, on March 20, 1916, in the late afternoon, he walked into the woods outside Lynchburg. He built a ceremonial fire. He knelt in front of it and broke off the caps that covered his pointed teeth. Then he took out a revolver he had stolen earlier that day, pointed it at his heart, and pulled the trigger. His small body was found there the next day, sprawled beside the fire-pit. He was later buried in an unmarked grave, in the black section of the Old City Cemetery.
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