Inseparable Read online

  INSEPARABLE

  The Original Siamese Twins

  and Their Rendezvous with

  American History

  Yunte Huang

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Prologue: A Game on the High Seas

  PART ONE IN SIAM

  1. Siam

  2. The Chinese Twins

  3. Cholera

  4. The King and Us

  5. Departure

  PART TWO FIRST YEARS

  6. A Curiosity in Boston

  7. The Monster, or Not

  8. Gotham City

  9. The City of Brotherly Love

  10. Knocking at the Gate

  11. Racial Freaks

  12. Sentimental Education

  PART THREE AMERICA ON THE ROAD

  13. The Great Eclipse

  14. A Satirical Tale

  15. The Lynnfield Battle

  16. An Intimate Rebellion

  17. Old Dominion

  18. Emancipation

  19. A Parable

  20. America on the Road

  21. The Deep South

  22. Head Bumps

  PART FOUR LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

  23. Wilkesboro

  24. Traphill

  25. A Universal Truth

  26. Foursome

  27. Mount Airy, or Monticello

  28. The Age of Humbugs

  29. Minstrel Freaks

  PART FIVE THE CIVIL WAR AND BEYOND

  30. Seeing the Elephant

  31. Reconstruction

  32. The Last Radiance of the Setting Sun

  33. Afterlife

  Epilogue: Mayberry, USA

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Frontispiece: Chang and Eng (Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London)

  page xv: Cunard Steamer Palmyra (Courtesy of the Osher Map Library Collection, University of Southern Maine)

  page xxiii: Passenger List of the Palmyra (Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, DC)

  page 1: A Siamese Canal (Courtesy of New York Public Library)

  page 29: Robert Hunter’s House, Bangkok (Courtesy of Ira Hsiao)

  page 33: Contract between Siamese Twins and Robert Hunter/Abel Coffin, 1829 (Courtesy of Surry County Historical Society, North Carolina)

  page 37: Chang and Eng, Lithograph (Courtesy of Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  page 39: Passenger List of the Sachem (Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, DC)

  page 52: Chang and Eng in an Oriental Setting, Lithograph, 1829 (Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London)

  page 57: Advertising Poster (Courtesy of Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  page 70: Chang and Eng, Lithograph (Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London)

  page 84: Chang and Eng Playing Badminton, 1830 (Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London)

  page 95: Account Book of Chang and Eng (Courtesy of Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  page 137: Signatures of Chang and Eng (Courtesy of State Archives of North Carolina)

  page 185: Chang and Eng’s House, Traphill (Courtesy of Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  page 239: Grace (“Aunt Grace”) Gates, First Slave Owned by Chang and Eng Bunker (Courtesy of Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  page 240: Bill of Sale for Two Slaves Sold to Chang and Eng Bunker (Courtesy of Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  page 256: P. T. Barnum and General Tom Thumb (Courtesy of New York Public Library)

  page 269: Chang and Eng Bunker and Their Children (Courtesy of Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  page 281: Union and Confederate Dead, Gettysburg Battlefield, Pennsylvania, July 1863 (Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, DC)

  page 298: Chang and Eng Bunker Families, 1870 (Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)

  page 301: Chang and Eng Bunker and Their Wives and Children (Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)

  page 307: Eng’s House, Where the Twins Died (Courtesy of Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  page 331: Statue of Andy and Opie Taylor, Mount Airy, North Carolina (Photo by author)

  page 334: Chang and Eng Bunker’s Grave, White Plains, North Carolina (Photo by author)

  page 335: White Plains Baptist Church, North Carolina (Photo by author)

  page 339: Sign for Mayberry Campground, Mount Airy, North Carolina (Photo by author)

  Preface

  The focus of Inseparable is the extraordinary life of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese Twins, who, by virtue of their physical anomaly, were seen as freaks, subhuman, or, as Victor Hugo so devastatingly couched it in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, “an almost.” An odd pair, they beat impossible odds—touring the world, making money, getting married, and having children. Better yet, they did all of this with grit and gusto.

  It feels like a cliché to say that their story is an example of the triumphant human spirit. This is the kind of trope you might find in a high school primer, for their experience actually not only questions what it means to be a human but also examines the outer limits of living one’s own life and dying one’s own death. As the cornerstone of liberal democracy, individualism is not capable of defining or, conversely, confining the conjoined life of the Siamese Twins. To them, being human meant being more than one, inseparable from the other—never alone in life, death, happiness, pain, procreation, or even in answering the call of nature. They defy what Leslie Fiedler once called “the tyranny of the normal,” a cultural malaise the eminent literary critic cogently denounced.

  Writing this book at a historical moment when we see, once again, a rising tide of human disqualification, of looking at others as less than human or normal, has given me an acute sense of urgency. My concern has much less to do with partisan kibitzing (yes, a very unChinese word) than with the disquieting fact that, in the words of the great Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

  The fact that this remarkable story commences in the age of Jacksonian democracy and gathers steam at the apex of American humbuggery is not an insignificant aspect of my book. Although P. T. Barnum, much to his chagrin, did not play a key role in Chang and Eng’s career, the Prince of Humbugs was, in fact, a mover and shaker of American popular culture in his time, the progenitor of an industry that entertained and exploited and made money out of displaying curiosities, be they freaks, wonders, beauties, or beasts. Even the glitzy beauty pageant today has its origin in the nineteenth-century freak show as niftily orchestrated by Barnum. Or, for that matter, the film industry also began in the freak show before making the transition to projecting beautiful faces or beautified illusions, and part of the cinema’s power persists with shock and awe. As history reveals, the success of the freak show, indubitably the birthplace of American mass entertainment, relied not only on the ingenuity and sacrifice of superb showmen like the Siamese Twins but also on the braggadocio and charlatanism of impresarios, or carnival barkers, who enticed crowds via sales puffery and manipulation of public opinion. Barnum once said to the effect that the American people loved to be entertained and humbugged—or, more bluntly, according to some, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

  As I relate in Inseparable, it would contribute very little to our understanding of American culture if we were simply to dismiss Barnum and his ilk as conniving charlatans or Yankee peddlers. We need to recognize a humbug as a trickster, a
confidence man who is not necessarily the Devil, even though he often traffics in devilish ways. Being tricked by a con man, as Herman Melville reminded us long ago in The Confidence-Man, is a price we pay in the confidence game called Democracy. It is worth noting, then, that the boom of the freak show as humbuggery coincided with the rise of the common man during the Jacksonian Age, an era that nowadays some see as approximate to our own. When everyone feels entitled to an opinion but cannot, by virtue of ignorance or innocence, tell the difference between a gag and a gem, between what showbiz calls “gaffed freaks” and “born freaks,” the confidence man swoops in to make you feel better while he takes your money, or outright steals your soul. In this sense, the freak show, which lies at the heart of Chang and Eng’s story, is not just about looking at others as less human. To borrow a concept from the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a freak show is a “deep play.” Or, in the streetwise lingo of a humbug, it is “the long game.”

  Brushing against the grain of American individualism, democracy, and humbuggery, the story of Chang and Eng is also complicated by their imbroglio with the institution of chattel slavery, miscegenation, and a host of other incendiary issues that roiled nineteenth-century America. Virtually sold into slavery, they would later own and trade slaves themselves. Having married two white sisters—an unusual union denigrated as “bestial” by some penny-press editors—they might also have fathered children with their own slave women. As slaveholding Southern gentry, they stood staunchly with the Confederacy in the epic fight against the Yankees, who once exploited them. All these narrative strands, in varying shades of verity and plausibility, make their biography more complex even than the short, fleshy band that so famously connected them.

  The legacy of Chang and Eng, not surprisingly, survives far beyond their death. I don’t just mean the longevity of their brand name, which now applies to every pair of conjoined twins; or the thriving Bunker clan, their proud descendants numbering more than 1,500 today; or their shared liver on permanent display as an anatomical curio at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. As I will show at the conclusion of the book, after their story seems over (and, no, I’m not giving away anything), we are surprised to find what we can call their “Mayberry connection.” Most fans of The Andy Griffith Show would know that Mayberry, the fictional setting for that most popular 1960s American rubecom, was based on Griffith’s actual birthplace, Mount Airy, North Carolina. But, unknown to most, Mount Airy was also the adopted hometown of Chang and Eng, the place where they lived and died. It is fair to say that The Andy Griffith Show is supposedly about the “American normal,” Mayberry being a sleepy hamlet where everyone is kith or kin, an Arcadia where no trouble is too big for the amiable sheriff and his bungling deputy. The fortuitous coexistence of Andy Griffith and the Siamese Twins—one representing the “normal” and the other the “freakish”—is a case of cultural symbiosis. It is a condition often forgotten or willfully ignored, as were any racial themes in what, in fact, appeared like Jim Crow–era Mayberry, which featured virtually no black character in its folksy haven. The norm, to paraphrase Fiedler, continues to tyrannize the abnormal, burying it deep underground, into the granite foundation of America. Chang and Eng revolted against that tyranny, in part by mimicking it, and, in the course of their incredible life and beyond, revealed the inseparable tie between what’s accepted as human and what’s rejected as freakish—that is the story of the Siamese Twins I want to tell.

  Prologue

  A Game on the High Seas

  CUNARD STEAMER PALMYRA

  It was supposed to be a routine voyage. The Cunard Royal Mail steamer Palmyra left Liverpool on July 30, 1870, setting sail for New York City.

  Only five years earlier, the American Civil War had come to a close, with a loss of more than 600,000 lives. Not only had it ineradicably changed the nation and its way of being, it also had abolished the brutal institution of slavery and ended that tragic crossing known as the Middle Passage, a few thousand nautical miles to the south of the Palmyra’s route. The burning embers that had erupted in the wake of General Sherman’s March to the Sea had long since cooled off, but the South remained bitter and defiant, mired in the slow and painful process known as Reconstruction. At the same time, the North, along with the rest of the country, was hurtling along at almost unchecked speed toward the future. Few seemed to heed the backwoodsman Henry David Thoreau’s contrarian wisdom: “Why the hurry?” America was, in fact, in an existential hurry, with the iron horse—the train—leading the charge of economic expansion. The 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad, built on the backs and lives of Irish and Chinese coolie laborers, had brought the nation together, at least spatially. New towns sprouted along newly laid railroad tracks like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Cattle kingdoms arose like tumbleweed in Texas and the plains states. The dizzying pace of urban expansion and frenetic economic development had ushered in a new era in America: the Gilded Age.

  The Palmyra, built in 1866 to keep abreast of the exponential increase in transatlantic traffic, was a medium-size steamship—2,044 in tonnage, 260 in nominal horsepower, and a passenger capacity of forty-six in cabin class and 650 in steerage.1 On this particular westward voyage, the Palmyra, under the command of Captain William Watson, carried 29 passengers in cabin class and 377 in steerage.2

  A steamer like the Palmyra was a major improvement on a sailing ship, cutting the length of the transatlantic journey from an almost insufferable eight weeks down to two. However, these were the early days of cruise voyages, with conditions aboard still crude, if not primitive. Cabins were as small as a so-called cat’s ear, dimly lit by a single candle. Passengers had to wash their own dishes. To get fresh milk—before the age of electricity and refrigerators—the company actually carried live cows aboard. To control rats, cats—which, of course, were oblivious to the class divisions of cabin and steerage—were taken along for the cruise.3 Charles Dickens, who had crossed the Atlantic nearly three decades earlier on the SS Britannia to visit the United States, complained bitterly of tasteless food, inebriated cooks, and cramped cabins, about which the famous novelist wrote, “nothing smaller for sleeping in was ever made except coffins.”4 Mark Twain, the globetrotter who coined the term Gilded Age, blessed these newfangled steamships with an even more withering remark in his travelogues, characterizing the meals as “plenty of good food furnished by the Deity and cooked by the devil.”5 Colorful derision aside, the customary seagoing fare was a far cry from what the steamship companies had advertised as the luxury of “a cheerful, hospitable, and elegant Floating Hotel.”6

  On her second day at sea, as land faded on the horizon, the Palmyra glided toward the deep waters of the blue Sargasso Sea. The ship’s strong prow sliced through the water like a cheese-cutting knife, spewing fierce foam into the air. After breakfast, cabin passengers began to mingle or disperse. Those who felt queasy went to their cabins, while others lingered behind, engaging in all sorts of trivial pursuits to while away their time. Mr. John H. Slatt, a middle-aged English businessman, strolled on deck with his cane and stared at the vast monotony of the ocean, reminiscing about his first trip to America on the Europa more than twenty years earlier. Mr. Jacob Cigrange, a redheaded merchant, native of Luxembourg and now a proud resident of Fredonia, Wisconsin, lounged on a weatherworn deck chair, watching the vagaries of the clouds. Mrs. Rosa Prang, a Swiss blonde in her early forties, took her six-year-old nephew John to the stern rails to look for whales, porpoises, and sharks, which often frequented this part of the ocean. The boy was especially excited about seeing what the sailors called the Portuguese man-of-war, or Nautilus, that might appear in the ocean in days ahead. Those mystical sea snails, of light violet color under the sun, would ascend to the surface, putting up small “sails” and using their tails as navigating rudders. But there was nothing to see that day under a gray sky, except for scattered whitecaps that could easily be mistaken for sightings of something else.

  In her earlier years
, Mrs. Prang (née Gerber) had followed the footsteps of her brother and immigrated to America. On that trip from her native Switzerland to Paris, she had met a lanky young Prussian named Louis, whose deep-blue eyes had followed her across the aisle as the crowded four-wheeled diligence rumbled through Alpine mountain roads and flat French countryside. She had not thought much of him at the time, although she had been impressed by his story—he was running away from the Prussian police because he was a revolutionary radical. They went separate ways in Paris, and she set sail for America. Five years later, when one day she was milking cows on her brother’s farm in Ohio, she received a letter from Louis asking her to meet him in Boston and marry him. At the time, she had been entertaining a marriage proposal from a neighboring young farmer. Maybe it was Louis’s piercing blue eyes, or maybe it was his radical ideas and foolish ways, but the letter tantalized her with a future that was at least more appealing than the certain monotony of being a farmer’s wife. Without further reflection, Rosa sold her cows to pay for her fare and headed for Boston.

  The first few years of their marriage were hard financially. Louis had tried his hand at manufacturing stationery and leather goods, but he finally found his calling in wood engraving. In 1860, he founded L. Prang and Company, a brand that would soon become recognizable all over the world, for during the Civil War, the company sold millions of battleground maps and pictures of soldier heroes, living or dead. Unknown to Rosa, Louis’s bigger reputation would still lie in the future. After the printing of greeting cards during the 1873 Christmas season, the man Rosa had chosen to marry in a leap of faith would become known in history as the “Father of the American Christmas Card.”7

  Aboard the Palmyra, when little John became bored from watching the ocean, Rosa took him to the saloon on the quarterdeck. As they entered, she saw a strange scene unfolding, almost like a stage play. Though the windows were open to let in the fresh air, the saloon door had remained shut to avoid sudden drafts. Without thorough ventilation, the strong smell of tobacco mixed with the ocean’s salty tang. Mr. and Mrs. Herman and Honersia Ohly and their cousin were playing whist at a table with Mr. James Berrisford, an English merchant now living in Ohio. Earlier at breakfast, Rosa had chatted with Berrisford and his wife, Elizabeth, about the midwestern state where she had once milked cows.