From Freak Show to Jim Crow: A Siamese Twin and His Deaf Daughter in the Antebellum and Postbellum South
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| Title: | From Freak Show to Jim Crow: A Siamese Twin and His Deaf Daughter in the Antebellum and Postbellum South |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Sayers, Edna Edith |
| Source: | Sign Language Studies. Sum 2022 22(4):553-589. |
| Availability: | Gallaudet University Press. 800 Florida Avenue NE, Denison House, Washington, DC 20002-3695. Tel: 202-651-5488; Fax: 202-651-5489; Web site: http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/SLS.html |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 37 |
| Publication Date: | 2022 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Descriptive |
| Descriptors: | Deafness, Twins, Exhibits, Family Relationship, Congenital Impairments, Racial Segregation, Fathers, Immigrants, Cultural Influences, Race, Physical Disabilities, United States History, Decision Making, Daughters, Educational History, Asian Americans |
| Geographic Terms: | North Carolina |
| DOI: | 10.1353/sls.2022.0006 |
| ISSN: | 0302-1475 1533-6263 |
| Abstract: | Eng and Chang Bunker (1811--1874) were conjoined twins of Chinese ethnicity born in Siam (today, Thailand). Before the Civil War, they toured the United States to exhibit themselves as a "human curiosity," a wonder of nature, their conjoined state documented by local doctors at each stop on their tours, and their exhibition touted as edifying and educational. The American public was amazed, therefore, or, rather, aghast to learn in 1840 that these racialized "freaks of nature" had bought land in North Carolina's Piedmont, built a house, taken US citizenship and the last name Bunker, married two farmer's daughters, Sarah (Sally Ann) and Adelaide Yates, and were fathering with them what would become, respectively, eleven and ten children. Two of Chang and Adelaide's children, Louisa and Jesse, were born deaf in 1855 and 1861, respectively, and would attend school at the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind (NCIDDB) during its chaotic Reconstruction years of partial racial integration, where Louisa would marry a deaf teacher of semi-segregated "colored" deaf pupils. Meanwhile, the twins had returned to the freak show touring circuit, now as conjoined Southern gentlemen and fathers of growing families, exhibiting, along with their own anomalous bodies, sample well-dressed offspring who bore marked resemblances to themselves. Naturally, the two deaf children were never selected as co-exhibits, the point of exhibiting sample children, after all, being to show that the offspring of these "curiosities" were healthy, handsome, and acceptably "normal." The lives of Chang and his daughter Louisa thus provide a two-generation immigrant story of negotiating the culturally constructed intersections of race and physical anomaly both before and after the Civil War. Louisa's life was largely determined by the choices that her father made in his efforts to negotiate those intersections. |
| Abstractor: | ERIC |
| Entry Date: | 2022 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1348564 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwFM-93jm8Vv4C0iOwIFGwJHAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDBBkA54o28GYbapjPQIBEICBm3_beAQVxlE3GnPmw9ddBD9NZniv6-T197uAv7WTdlEmvZXYXxNJ5G-xk4qPWK27B4E9Ngt9dmbkeC1Wb-jBjgwpNrh0aQtLqZFiGaW9TOk8v5yVukpxNjXuEabuTviBjDQ9pkNdFMyrgWQj1KUabhegN9l9uMWlFYNeVf-Tka29MdCQJG-_e2iV2dsKKctIb1i_CkrXYj6hrTbz Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0158941678;ngu01jul.22;2022Sep09.07:33;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0158941678-1">From Freak Show to Jim Crow: A Siamese Twin and His Deaf Daughter in the Antebellum and Postbellum South </title> <p>Eng and Chang Bunker (1811–1874) were conjoined twins of Chinese ethnicity born in Siam (today, Thailand). Before the Civil War, they toured the United States to exhibit themselves as a "human curiosity," a wonder of nature, their conjoined state documented by local doctors at each stop on their tours, and their exhibition touted as edifying and educational. At the same time, however, their skin and hair color and their facial features were widely ridiculed as racial markers. The American public was amazed, therefore, or, rather, aghast to learn in 1840 that these racialized "freaks of nature" had bought land in North Carolina's Piedmont, built a house, taken US citizenship and the last name Bunker, married two farmer's daughters, Sarah (Sally Ann) and Adelaide Yates, and were fathering with them what would become, respectively, eleven and ten children. Two of Chang and Adelaide's children, Louisa and Jesse, were born deaf in 1855 and 1861, respectively, and would attend school at the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind (NCIDDB) during its chaotic Reconstruction years of partial racial integration,1 where Louisa would marry a deaf teacher of semi-segregated "colored" deaf pupils. Meanwhile, the twins had returned to the freak show touring circuit, now as conjoined Southern gentlemen and fathers of growing families, exhibiting, along with their own anomalous bodies, sample well-dressed offspring who bore marked resemblances to themselves. Naturally, the two deaf children were never selected as co-exhibits, the point of exhibiting sample children, after all, being to show that the offspring of these "curiosities" were healthy, handsome, and acceptably "normal."</p> <p>The lives of Chang and his daughter Louisa thus provide a two-generation immigrant story of negotiating the culturally constructed intersections of race and physical anomaly both before and after the Civil War. As we shall see, Louisa's life was largely determined by the choices that her father made in his efforts to negotiate those intersections.</p> <hd id="AN0158941678-2">An Introduction to the Bunkers' World and the State of the Scholarship</hd> <p>The 1843 double wedding of the Siamese twins with the teenaged Yates sisters generated a great deal of prurient interest in the national press, which would seize on the fact that two of the children were "deaf and dumb" to extrapolate from there on how wrong it was for conjoined twins to marry. Obituaries of the twins from Boston newspapers, for example, claimed, variously, that all of Chang's and Eng's offspring had feeble constitutions, "several of them deaf and dumb," and that "six or eight deaf and dumb and otherwise feebly organized children" were the result of the marriages. In North Carolina, in contrast, the fact that the twins were conjoined seemed less problematic than other singularities. The girls' father, David Yates, opposed the marriages solely on the basis of "an ineradicable prejudice against [Chang's and Eng's] race and nationality." Their first biographer, and neighbor, Judge Jesse Franklin Graves, underplayed both their physical anomaly and their race, explaining that "Their manner of life was... very much like that of the better class of farmers around them," although, he admitted, at first the two couples shared a house and a "very wide bed" [emphasis in original]. It was rather two other peculiarities in the Bunker families that attracted attention among their neighbors. One was those two "deaf mute" children "at the asylum in Raleigh," which is how the locals understood attending the state school for the deaf. (The state had finally established a system for common schools in 1839, but few communities in the Piedmont had any public schools at all, and the other Bunker children who were in school at all attended a private school kept by two clergymen.) The other was that the Bunkers had a much larger number of slaves than anyone else did, and most of these enslaved persons were very young children, too young to do any work for their owners.2</p> <p>As for the family's view of its two deaf members, Louisa and Jesse were pitied. What with the rate at which children, white, brown, and black, were being added to the household, the frequent absences of the fathers, and scarcity of other adults, plus the fact that the deaf children's oldest sister, Josephine, could not have been much more than thirteen at the time that Louisa was discovered to be deaf, it's doubtful that anything at all was done for her and Jesse beyond seeing that they were fed, bathed, and clothed. It's unlikely that anyone had the knowledge, the ability, or the time to encourage curiosity and independence in the two deaf children, let alone language acquisition. Their father considered them so disabled that he left an extra five hundred dollars to each in his will, stating explicitly that this bonus bequest was "on account of their affliction."3</p> <p>The North Carolina white Deaf community, then forming around the NCIDDB in Raleigh, would not have considered deaf children "feebly organized," pitiable, or afflicted, though the school wasn't above playing the pity card when asking the state for money for a new roof or water closets. But the fact that the school and the nascent Deaf community around it did consider the children white comes as something of a surprise. As we have learned to our chagrin, racism in Deaf communities mirrors the racism in surrounding hearing communities. We know that Louisa and Jesse Bunker's parents were widely considered in the larger society, as well as by their Grandfather Yates, to be in a mixed-race marriage. Some part of the public, in fact, was so unable to grasp that the Bunker wives could possibly be white that they were sure Sally Ann and Adelaide were "mulattas." Also, the children's subsequent adult lifetimes would play out in the era of rising anti-Chinese hysteria and the classification of Chinese immigrants as "colored" under state laws. In fact, during Reconstruction and its violent aftermath, all other known Chinese immigrants to the former Confederacy were absorbed into African American communities, leaving the Bunkers, alone—or at least the Bunkers who stayed in North Carolina—to be absorbed into the white community. In Kansas, in contrast, census takers listed three of Eng's sons as "colored" in 1880.4</p> <p>The first question to be considered here is, how did Eng and Chang, even over their father-in-law's initial misgivings, manage to cross the color line so successfully that they and their wives' children were accepted as white in North Carolina, before, during, and after the Civil War? The measures the twins took in the 1840s and 1850s are relatively straightforward and recoverable in the historical record, though, as they said in the nineteenth century, "delicate," and thus understandably passed over by biographers. Judge Graves, who died in 1894, dropped genteel hints about the Bunkers's very large number of enslaved children, making comments about the twins' "increasing families" and the slaves' "prospective usefulness," while the most recent two biographers, Joseph Andrew Orser and Yunte Huang, present many details and then conclude that the purpose (and origin) of the very young slaves is "difficult to discern" or "poses some issues" (Orser), or they state vague aphorisms like "the victim turns victimizer" (Huang) and simply dodge educated guesses about the whys, whences, and whithers. This essay does not claim any original research on Chang and Eng, but rather reviews some usually ignored facts about human conception, childbirth, and breast feeding to connect the dots.5</p> <p>The second question to be considered is, how did the deaf Bunker children experience their entry into the Deaf World while growing up in Raleigh during and after Reconstruction? Twentieth-century histories of North Carolina's state residential schools for deaf and blind children all have difficulties parsing the semi-integrated years 1869 to 1894. Those histories focused on the North Carolina School for the Deaf (NCSD) in Morganton treat the years 1844–1894 as the historically white NCSD's prehistory, while others, those focused on black Deaf history, see 1869 as the year in which the first school for black deaf and blind children was founded. Neither reading is exactly right.6 From 1844 to 1894, there was one school, the NCIDDB, that theoretically served all deaf and blind children of state residents—with the understanding, until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, that "residents" meant "white residents." Through all these years, 1844 to 1894, the NCIDDB always maintained, or aimed to maintain, some combination of separate dorms, dining halls, workshops, and classrooms for deaf and blind, male and female, and age groups. After 1869 it did so with black and white pupils as well. Nevertheless, there was always only one admission policy, one set of rules, and one teaching staff (for each group of the all-deaf and the all-blind), and one administration, one budget, one board of directors, many overcrowded buildings, and many competing pleas for state funding for the school as a whole. Louisa and Jesse would both enroll shortly before the admission of black pupils was mandated, and would weather Reconstruction and its aftermath as honorary whites. What would roil their lives, and the lives of everyone else connected with the school, was not Reconstruction, but the Milan conference of 1880 and the subsequent breakup of the NCIDDB into the oral white NCSD, which did not integrate until 1967, and the manual black state school for the blind and deaf.</p> <p>Louisa and Jesse Bunker, unlike their celebrity father, Chang, did not live well-documented lives. Neither left any letters, diaries, or even schoolwork, and it's unlikely that either, especially Louisa, became comfortable using English, since her schooling started so late and, lacking any other kind of informed intervention, her early childhood would have been experientially and linguistically impoverished. Jesse, in any case, returned to the white hearing world after school, thus dropping off the Deaf record. Louisa, in contrast, married a late-deafened man, Zacharias Haynes, who had been first a pupil and then a teacher at the NCIDDB, for twenty years in the Colored Department, and then, for a few years before his death, in the new allwhite school in Morganton. Louisa raised a large family in Raleigh, followed her husband to Morganton, witnessed the school's rapid descent into oralism, which was closely followed by her husband's demise, and then returned to Raleigh, where, we hope, she was able to enjoy her last three decades among her signing Deaf friends who were no longer employable as staff by the newly oral school. Three or four of her hearing children stayed in Morganton to work at the school and, although we lose sight of her, she lived long enough to see World War I, the Great Depression, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the beginning and the end of the great era of silent films with the advent of the disappointing new talkies.</p> <hd id="AN0158941678-3">Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins</hd> <p>How did Chang and Eng, two "Mongolians," as East Asian immigrants were soon to be denominated in state laws, cross the color line in North Carolina in the two decades leading up to the Civil War? Before we can answer that question, we need to figure out why in the world they even wanted to. Why was it so important to them that they settle in a community like those of the American South that featured a rigid, binary (white/black), "one-drop" caste system enshrining race-based chattel slavery, where they would have to enact their preferred, adopted racial identity every day of their lives, or else have another racial identity enacted on them?</p> <p>The twins were first noticed by Westerners as a source of income when a British merchant, Robert Hunter, and a New England sea captain, Abel Coffin, arranged to take them on tour in 1829. The twins signed a contract agreeing to travel with Captain Coffin "wherever he chooses" for a period up to five years, after which Coffin was to return them home. However, that Hunter and Coffin regarded the twins as chattel rather than business partners was evident from the first. Sailing from Siam on a merchant ship laden with sugar and other goods, the only two passengers listed are Hunter and the Chinese youth brought along as a companion. This means that for the 138-day voyage to Boston, the twins were traveling as cargo.7</p> <p>Remarkably, Chang and Eng never commented on their treatment during this first voyage outside their natal land, but that fall, after having been exhibited in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, they were taken to Great Britain. For this trip, Coffin bought a $10,000 life insurance policy on them, which today would be a matter of course for travelers but which at the time was highly unusual: in fact, life insurance circa 1830 was commonly purchased only by planters insuring their capital (i.e. the lives of their enslaved work forces). Coffin also purchased embalming materials for the trip as another form of insurance on his investment. Then he bought first-class tickets for himself and his manager and booked the twins in steerage as "servants." Now Chang and Eng did complain, though at least they were not cargo this time.8</p> <p>How, exactly, were the twins exhibited? In Boston, Captain Coffin rented a tent that held thousands of spectators, each paying 50¢ to see the twins do back flips. In New York, the twins appeared in the Masonic Hall; in London, they were shown in the Egyptian Hall. But after that, they began travelling to smaller venues, and soon they were simply chatting with ticket buyers. The phrase "freak show" does not appear until 1887, and in these early years it was not what it became a century later, the large circus act depicted in Tod Browning's 1932 movie Freaks for example. Instead, the traveling curiosity show of the 1830s shared the same circuit with several other types of itinerant one- or two-man entertainments: jugglers, "rope walkers," and "intelligent" ponies or pigs who could do arithmetic; crafted works like a diorama of Waterloo; and minstrel shows, which is to say, white men performing ludicrous songs and dialogue in blackface. In all cases, audiences saw one or two white men touring alone (jugglers) or showing something (an animal, an object), or turning into a black man on stage with the help of burnt cork. When white men showing human curiosities joined this circuit, they fit this pattern because the exhibited body was almost always nonwhite, or racialized as such with tattooing or outré clothing and hair styling. Among the first freaks to be exhibited in the United States were Henry Moss, an enslaved black man experiencing depigmentation from vitiligo, and Joice Heth, an elderly enslaved woman who was exhibited by her owner, a young P. T. Barnum, as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. Barnum claimed variously to have bought or rented her from her previous owner, and when she died on the exhibition trail, Barnum sold 1,500 50¢ tickets to a public viewing of her autopsy—which is clearly what Coffin would have done with the twins had they died on the trans-Atlantic voyage. The twins crossed paths with Heth on the exhibition circuit in 1835, though they probably did not meet her. Other women exhibited for their racial otherness in these years were Sarah Baartman, as "The Hottentot Venus," and Ah Fong Moy, as "The Chinese Lady" who "performed 'Chineseness'" in the United States until 1837.9</p> <p>In this sociocultural environment, then, it's not a wonder that Coffin would have procured embalming fluid for the twins or that Chang and Eng would be regarded as servants or as slaves, or even as the thing that was exhibited, the cargo, the intelligent pony, the diorama of Waterloo that could be crated up and shipped. In 1832, when they were touring on their own hook with a hired business manager, Charles Harris, the Virginia state legislature enforced an exhibition tax "squarely in terms of the twins' status and race": it was not the twins who had to pay the tax, the lawmakers found, but rather their putative Northern owner, Charles Harris! The Virginia court simply could not see past Chang's, Eng's, and Harris's skin colors and their roles in the enterprise, the first two as the nonwhite exhibit, the second as the white man who must be their owner.10</p> <p>Odd as it may seem to us today, when racism directed at Asian Americans takes a much different form and draws from a much different impetus than does racism against African Americans, the antebellum "negroization" of the Chinese was underway. Chang and Eng found themselves described in newspapers as "ugly, tawny fellows, in features resembling the African quite as much as the European." Their utterances were given in the conventional caricature of black speech patterns. For the (white) American public, the twin brothers were as lazy as free blacks were alleged to be: "we know of nobody in this nation who does not work, unless it be the Siamese twins, and free people of color," a monthly magazine editorialized 1834. In 1831, while the twins were vacationing in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, a mob of fifteen or twenty white men gathered, calling them "damned niggers." The authorities arrested the twins for breaking the peace (for vacationing while Chinese?) and fined them two hundred dollars.11</p> <p>In the 1830s and early 1840s, as we can surmise from these examples, there were only two races in the American mind, as there were in California's 1854 People v. Hall decision: "white" and "not white" (Native Americans being presumed headed for extinction). It seems, then, that Chang's and Eng's experiences in America informed them that in the eyes of Americans, they were nonwhite at best, in fact, often only nonhuman exhibits or cargo. A lot of people would have gone back to Siam at that point. The twins decided, instead, to stay and join the master class.12</p> <p>Their "strategies to assert white manhood," as Orser phrases it, began with simple, though perseverant, resistance to any markers of nonwhite racial identification, refusing to permit anyone to call them "boys" and claiming, penniless at age nineteen, to be "young gentlemen." And they were pugilistic, attacking anyone casting racial aspersions on them (or their mother) with all four fists, which is what got them in trouble with the law in Lynnfield. While playing white-manhood defense along these lines, they also played white-manhood offense by tweaking the drawings of themselves that appeared on publicity posters and pamphlets, erasing their epicanthic folds, whitening their skin, and heightening their stature. An 1853 engraving shows Chang and Eng towering over their petite brides; in reality, Eng was barely five foot, two inches and Chang two inches shorter, while the brides most likely took after their mother, at least in height: Mrs. Yates was five foot, seven inches—and nine feet in circumference, weighing in at 500 pounds.13</p> <p>The fact is, though, that no effort by any East Asian immigrant to cross the color line during these years, however clever he may have been or however strenuous his exertions, could have succeeded without two essential ingredients: wealth and celebrity—and the connections these bought with wealthy white people, like the friend who introduced them into the white landowning community, a greatnephew of legendary Indian-fighter Daniel Boone and son-in-law of the county sheriff.14</p> <p>The twins' enactment of white manhood was a perilous undertaking in the Piedmont in these years, as we can see from the writing of Hinton Rowan Helper, who grew up in a neighboring county during the twins' residence in the state and became an outspoken racist and proponent of deportation. Helper aimed for the centennial year, 1876, for the completed racial cleansing of the United States, when there would be "No Slave or Would-be Slave, No Negro nor Mulatto, No Chinaman nor unnative [sic] Indian, No Black nor Bicolored Individual of whatever Name or Nationality."15 Helper looks like an equal opportunity racist, but he really did feel a special horror for the Chinese, and it's been speculated that this derived from his childhood acquaintance with the Bunkers and the rough outlines of their way of life, "the salacious but almost universal fascination with the imagined sexual practice of the twins and their wives," mixed with resentment for their wealth and ownership of so many slaves.16 But as the Bunker brothers acquired the cultural know-how to manipulate local social markers, they continued whitening their public image by going in for conspicuous consumption. They gave up the shop they'd started in Wilkesboro and began to work their farmland, speculate in real estate, lend money in the neighborhood and collect it with interest, and vote the Whig ticket in every election. And, most importantly, both at the Trap Hill house outside of Wilkesboro, and, later in Mount Airy, when Adelaide set up housekeeping there and where Louisa and Jesse would be born, the Bunker brothers bought, sold, reared, and apparently personally engendered dozens of enslaved persons of African descent.</p> <p>Slave trading was unusual in the Piedmont, where residents were farmers, not planters, and slave markets were far away on the coast. Even slave ownership was uncommon: in Wilkes County when the twins settled there in 1840, for example, 88 percent of households owned no slaves at all, and half of the slave-owning households owned no more than one or two persons.17 Records are spotty but a general picture of the Bunkers's slaves can be pieced together from the decennial U.S. census, scattered purchase and sales records, inventories, and other stray documents. The Bunkers's first slave, Grace Gates, was an 1843 wedding gift from their father-in-law, who, in 1830, had owned four young women and, ten years later, owned three women and four boys younger than ten.18 There are not many possible explanations beyond the obvious one for such a "staff" profile. As for the Bunkers, in 1845, they purchased three children, aged three to seven, and by 1850, owned eighteen persons: two men, one woman, and fifteen children including teenaged girls. By 1852, they owned thirty slaves.19 These statistics may puzzle some biographers, but it's pretty clear that the Bunker brothers, following their father-in-law Yates, were regularly raising enslaved children and selling them off, or the boys at any rate, when they reached maturity.20 Judge Graves, has this to say:</p> <p>Some few of their slaves were valuable to them, for their present ability to labor; but much the greater number of them were an absolute burden but very valuable on account of the marketable price and prospective usefulness. That the reader may see the rapid increase of the family it may be stated that Mrs. Sally's third son, Patrick Henry, was born May 7th, 1850, and during the same year three servants [sic] were added.21</p> <p>In fact, according to one recent biographer, Orser, an account book of Chang and Eng lists on one page the names and birth dates of "many" of the children born to Sarah and Adelaide intermingled with the names and birth dates, or just the years, of "some" of the black children enslaved to them. Some of these children were purchased after birth, while others were apparently born on the property. Again, records are spotty. A later hand has marked the recognized children with the word "white" plus a "C" or an "E" denoting the father, and some, but not all, of the other children with "col." ("colored"). Two of those children we know to have been purchased as children, and of the ten others marked "col." Orser concludes that "one can only speculate about what they might be doing here" on this list.22</p> <p>To return to Grace Gates, we don't know how old she was when her ownership was transferred to the Bunkers, but she was certainly not born in 1790, as Huang estimates: she was young enough to have served as the family's wet nurse from the births of the first Bunker children in 1844, ten months after the wedding. How do we know that? Family tradition, but also human biology. Pregnancy and subsequent lactation both suppress ovulation, while a gradual diminution of lactation as the child learns to eat other foods eventually allows for the return of ovulation, the entire cycle playing out in about two years. Both Sally Ann and Adelaide gave birth to their second child ten months after the birth of their first, and their third and fourth children were similarly spaced, which would not have been possible if the mothers were breast feeding their own infants. Grace Gates was the only other woman in the house and must have been the wet nurse, as the family always said she was. If we follow the biology just a bit further, we see that Gates must have given birth shortly prior to Sally Ann's and Adelaide's first childbirths, so that she would be in milk for their infants, and then periodically thereafter in order to continue nursing over more than two decades. And finally, what we know about human lactation tells us that nursing three infants (Sally Ann's, Adelaide's, and her own) simultaneously, and achieving three healthy children would have been next to impossible without an immensely calorie-rich diet for the nursing mother and a household staff to feed and wait on her. These forays into the biological facts of motherhood give us some grounds on which to speculate why Gates bore nine children and only three survived. As previously mentioned, it's not a pretty story and definitely not one a biographer of Chang and Eng would be eager to take on. But it certainly explains the otherwise unaccountable horror with which the Bunkers's racist fellow Piedmonter, Hinton Helper, described the intimacy of black wet nurses with white babies. When Helper wrote about the white Southerner being "an abandoned wretch, [who] sucked in the corrupt milk of slavery from the breasts of his father's sable concubines," it's not that Helper was "too prudish to face directly the question of interracial sexual relations," as one historian assumed, but rather that the black wet nurse was in fact the master's concubine, and Helper's contemporaries would have known that.23</p> <p>There certainly were a great number of children around the two Bunker households. According to Judge Graves, by spring of 1858, "the families had grown to be... numerous, numbering nearly sixty in all,"24 which, with two married couples, eventually twenty-one recognized children, and perhaps two or three enslaved adult "servants," means thirty-some enslaved children of color, if Graves is correct. With all these children, it's surprising to learn that Chang and Eng had resumed touring back in 1849, now as family men, exhibiting their five-year-old daughters Katherine and Josephine alongside themselves in New York. On that first foray as freak fathers, they were competing for audiences with the immensely popular Charles Sherwood Stratton, who exhibited under the auspices of P. T. Barnum as "General Tom Thumb," so after six weeks of anemic ticket sales, they packed it in and went home. Stratton was a white man, but the racialized freak show was coming into its full bloom. Back home, the black North Carolina conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy were born into slavery in 1851, sold to an exhibitor at the age of ten months, and spent their childhood in slavery on the circuit, billed as "The Two-Headed Nightingale." Barnum was exhibiting William Henry Johnson, a microcephalic black man of normal intelligence, billed as "What Is It?" and "The Monkey Man." And the popular "Circassian Beauties" were ordinary white women with their hair crimped and teased into afros to suggest, by some twisted logic, "white slavery." So strong was this link between the black body and the exhibited body that audiences who came to hear Frederick Douglass on the abolition lecture circuit sometimes saw him as a freak of nature, "akin to a learned pig or dancing bear." It cannot be the case that the twins didn't know the company into which they were introducing their children.25</p> <p>In 1853, now with Katherine and little Christopher, the twins tried again, touring the Northeast as far as Quebec for nearly a year. Louisa was born a year after their return from that tour, and then they were off again for six months in the fall of 1857 with Josephine and Decatur. Judge Graves frames these tours as needed to raise the money for tuition for their older children's schooling, but if so, why then did the fathers continue to take these older children out of school for months at a time to exhibit them? In 1860, when Louisa was five, P. T. Barnum finally persuaded the Bunker brothers to exhibit with sample children at his museum for one hundred dollars a week. The twins chose Montgomery, twelve, and Patrick, ten, for this gig, and Barnum placed the four between William Henry Jackson, "the Monkey Man," and a Dutch family of albinos posing as white Negroes from Madagascar. That fall, they set out with the same two boys for California, where white crowds, already overexposed to the popular bigotry of yellow-face minstrelsy and casual racism against their own Chinese immigrant population, were eager to see the famous Siamese Twins. Ticket sales soared, but when Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated the following year, Chang and Eng saw trouble brewing, and they headed home. Jesse would be born a year later. Then came the Civil War.</p> <p>Before we follow Louisa postbellum to her school in Raleigh, it is well to remind ourselves of just how difficult it is to imagine her childhood, living as we are in a world in which the public education of deaf children is considered a matter of course, freak shows embarrassingly distasteful, and legally enforced race-based sexual slavery so unthinkable that we simply do not know how to begin thinking about it. William Lloyd Garrison, writing almost two centuries ago in 1843, was able to fall back onto biblical language, when he wrote that only one</p> <p>whose mind had become besotted by the impurities of slavery could "solemnize" so bestial a union as this [the Bunker marriages]; and none but a community sunk below the very Sodomites in lasciviousness, from the same cause, would tolerate it.26</p> <p>Garrison may have been referencing the conjoined husbands in this passage, but he was very well aware, as well, of the sexual arrangements common among enslavers and their powerless female property. Or look at Melville writing in the same decade, when he calls slavery "foul as the crater-pool of hell" in a context of Southerners nursed by enslaved black women and of enslaved nurslings wrenched from their mothers' breasts.27 These words seem in retrospect to haunt the house in Mount Airy. Today, Mount Airy has been so successfully whitewashed by The Andy Griffith Show as the fictional Every Town of Mayberry that it's stunning to see it instead as akin to the Gothic horror of William Faulkner's Sutpen's Hundred and its mansion house haunted by incest and miscegenation. In fact, one might say that Thomas Sutpen, the character whose story is told in Absolom, Absolom, is our best literary parallel to the ghastly behavior of the Bunker brothers in establishing their white manhood.28 Of course Louisa, as a little deaf girl without access to language (let alone Faulkner novels) or any experiences outside her own peculiar family, would not have had the capacity to compare or analyze the family arrangements, or to imagine anything other than what she was immediately seeing and experiencing, to wit, growing up among a very large number of children of all colors. But during all these years, and apparently completely unknown to anyone in Mount Airy and surrounding hinterlands, North Carolina was educating deaf children at taxpayers' expense, at an all-white residential school in Raleigh, the state capital.</p> <hd id="AN0158941678-4">The North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind</hd> <p>The NCIDDB had got its start in 1844 the same way most state residential deaf schools did: a representative from another school—in this case, the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind in Staunton—brought some of its pupils to exhibit. Exhibits of educated deaf children and adults were an established method of fundraising and public relations for schools for the deaf. Indeed T. H. Gallaudet met Laurent Clerc when Sicard exhibited him and Jean Massieu in London, and Gallaudet, in turn, exhibited Clerc and George Loring around the East Coast to raise money for their new school in Hartford. Everywhere, such exhibits were widely attended by the curious public and enthusiastically reviewed in the press. These were, in fact, the educational exhibits that the twins were only pretending to provide, because when state legislators and the general public saw "deaf and dumb" children writing English on chalkboards and answering questions on their fingers, they understood that deaf children were educable, and they voted the money for schools in their own state. In North Carolina in 1844, legislators voted to educate their deaf children, and you certainly would have known about it if you read the papers and saw one of the many ensuing traveling exhibits. But the Bunkers, and their neighbors, too, seem to have missed that story.</p> <p>The school opened in 1845 in a rented building with seven pupils under Principal W. D. Cooke, who came to Raleigh from the vocational training department at the Virginia school in Staunton. First lessons, as described in the 1850 Annual Report by Principal Cooke, began with the premise that pupils arrived with a natural language that they had been using at home, and that the school built on this, connecting home signs with fingerspelled and written English words. Cooke's description of a sample sentence, however, shows not a string of home signs, but rather a grammatically sufficient utterance eerily identical to present-day "platform" American Sign Language.29 But although the former shop teacher Cooke may have thought that the children were combining home signs with English, it's clear that he, himself, had brought sign language from the Virginia school, whose principal, Joseph Tyler, had learned it direct from Clerc in Hartford during the 1830s. To see how the language spread so quickly without Cooke's even being aware of it, we learn that the school was soon lodging and boarding twelve pupils who were children, twelve who were adults (age limit: thirty), four teachers, several "servants" (enslaved), Cooke, his wife, and their six children.30 Policy on housing the staff is virtually never mentioned in annual reports or other official documents, but we can assume it was the default arrangement for teachers to room and board on the premises, in part, because salaries continued so low. The 24/7 presence of all these adults, increasing numbers of them Deaf adults, was an important feature of the school experience.</p> <p>The requisite new building, built by slave labor two blocks from the Capitol, was ready by 1849, complete with central coal heating, gas lighting, and cold water pumped to the top floor by a hydraulic ram from the well in the courtyard. But "[t]he chief merit of the Building," in the view of the state legislative committee report, "consists in its preserving of the two departments of Males and Females, as far as it relates to the accommodations, amusements and pursuits of the Pupils out of School, so independent in every particular, as to constitute them two separate and distinct communities." As we'll see, the NCIDDB was very fond of the word "department," and it's instructive to see it is used in these early years of the two sexes or two dormitories. The strict segregation of the sexes continued to be a major concern of the school well into the 1930s when half the student body was expelled for violations exposed by one pupil's pregnancy.31</p> <p>From our perspective today, the most salient feature of the new building was its print shop, where Deaf America's first "Little Paper Family" school newspaper, The Deaf Mute Casket, began its print run that year. The shop also turned out the nationally distributed American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb (as the Annals was still called in those years). Beginning in 1855, the year of Louisa's birth, and continuing until the War, Cooke instituted annual exhibits of selected pupils at churches and townhalls throughout the Piedmont and Tidewater, which "people attended in large numbers... showing intense appreciation." Indeed, the Biennial Report of June 1856 lists ten different towns or cities in North Carolina in which Principal Cooke exhibited pupils, and was everywhere received with "warm sympathy," interest, and appreciation. How did the Bunkers miss all this?32</p> <p>Had they contacted the school when they first realized that Louisa couldn't hear, at age three or four perhaps, still in the 1850s, they would have been told to start her on the finger alphabet, penmanship, and the spelled names of common objects, so that she would be ready for admission at age seven, when the school would teach her the signs for objects whose English names she had learned to spell.33 That there are no mentions in the surviving documentation of anything like manual communication occurring in the Bunker family strongly suggests that nothing along those lines was happening. The family was under intense public scrutiny; certainly, if they were "talking with their fingers," a visitor or two would have found it worthwhile to mention that.</p> <p>Once Lincoln was elected, educating Louisa was surely the last thing the family had to worry about, and no one would have noticed, when Jesse was born in 1862, about a year before the Emancipation Proclamation, that he, too, was deaf. Their livelihood was at stake: as late as 1864, they were continuing to pay taxes on a combined total of thirty-two slaves (were those the other thirty-odd family members counted by Judge Graves?) worth $26,550, perhaps around a million dollars in today's dollars.34 Louisa's brother, Christopher, enlisted in the Virginia Cavalry in 1863, only to be promptly taken prisoner, which fate likewise was soon to befall Eng's son Decatur. Meanwhile, under a new principal, former teacher Willie J. Palmer, and with forty-two deaf pupils (and two blind in the still small blind program), the print shop was turning out Confederate paper money, and pupils were making the paper cartridges for Confederate Army rifles, which explains, perhaps, why the NCIDDB was the only deaf school in the Confederacy to remain open during the Civil War. Louisa's future husband, Zacharias Haynes, born hearing in 1848 in Hamptonville, North Carolina, and deafened at age eleven from fever, had been enrolled in 1861 and was at the school throughout the war as older classmates were cranking out those Confederate dollars and rifle cartridges.35</p> <p>By the time Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the Bunkers finally had to admit that they'd lost their entire investment in human capital, writing pathetically to the New York Times in 1865 that the "the ravages of War have swept away our fortunes." Or as a Wisconsin newspaper paraphrased it, the war deprived them of "a considerable number of slaves of about the same color as themselves."36 Not everyone enslaved by the Bunkers left them at the end of the war, though. Grace Gates stayed on with the family as a servant, and her sons (and Chang's?) Jacob, Jack, and James continued to live in Chang's household. They may be the black men in some of the family photographs.37 For Louisa, the end of the war would herald the turning point of her life, for somehow it prompted the family to send her to school in Raleigh. We don't know exactly when she or Jesse was enrolled, because some records are missing in those immediate post-war years. Raleigh had surrendered to General Sherman in April 1865, and the federal authorities, apparently out of concern for the vulnerable deaf and blind, had taken charge of the NCIDDB and its record total of eighty-four pupils, providing them and the staff with food and medical supplies. When the school year ended on June 30, Zacharias and other pupils went home, leaving thirteen deaf boys at the school to live on "Uncle Sam's rations" and continue running the press. The school did not reopen until the first of the year, 1866, but communication with the families of pupils was difficult, and in any case, the building was in dire need of repair: the roof leaking, windows without glass, flooring rotted, dishes and furniture broken. Neither Louisa nor Zacharias was listed as in attendance during that spring.38</p> <p>Back in Mount Airy, Josephine, who had surely put in many hours caring for the two deaf children, died of a heart attack in 1867, when she was only twenty-three, leaving Adelaide and the rest of the family, now bereft not only of a grown daughter but also of the bulk of their enslaved servants, to deal with the languageless twelve-year-old girl, Louisa, and five-year-old boy, Jesse. But by the NCIDDB's Report for the year ending July 1, 1869, both Bunker children, as well as Zacharias Haynes, are enrolled.39 Because family tradition has it that Louisa was sent first and Jesse followed, and we know that Jesse was in the school in the autumn of 1868, Louisa was probably enrolled in September 1867, just after Josephine's death. This means she would have started school and language acquisition at the age of eleven or twelve. Haynes is also listed as an assistant teacher in this 1869 report—as we learn later, in the new Colored Department.</p> <p>A great deal had happened in those three years since the end of the war, and what had happened was Reconstruction, which required the former Confederate states to provide education to all their residents, a thing that, as we have seen, many areas of the state had previously not done even for their white, nondeaf resident children. Now the legislature was providing state funding for the education not only of indigent white deaf but of black deaf state residents as well, and in 1867, NCIDDB Principal Palmer reported that he had "received several applications for admission of negro deaf and dumb children, but there was no room." Palmer, who seems to have been a genuine friend of freedmen and would shortly decamp in frustration to head up the deaf school in Belleville, Ontario, immediately appealed to the U.S. Army to "buy and furnish a suitable building on a square adjoining the white school." But the Union Army had its hands full, and another agency was to step in.40</p> <hd id="AN0158941678-5">Louisa at School</hd> <p>The school was still in the 1849 building near the capitol, and was now, after years of wartime neglect, ramshackle. Louisa would have been in the beginner's class with Jesse and the seven-year-olds, some of whom (those whose parents had been in touch with the school and had been preparing their children) would already know how to write and fingerspell words like hat or pen. First lessons matched more three-letter words for nouns with the objects they denote and their signs. Pupils first learned to sight-read whole words, then to match the written characters in the word with those in the finger alphabet.41 Louisa would have blossomed in the signing environment, while doubtless struggling with English grammar. The subjects taught, in addition to grammar, were history, geography, arithmetic, catechism, and natural philosophy (science). Life for the pupils seems to have been quite austere, with all conversation forbidden at meals, no playing or loitering allowed in the hallways, no visits from anyone outside the pupil's immediate family, all pupil correspondence to be read and approved by the principal before mailing, chapel attendance required, and, and we have seen, the sexes strictly segregated outside the classroom, boys and girls having separate entrances from their dorms into the dining halls and classrooms. How did Louisa catch the eye of Zacharias Haynes, who was still a pupil, but would not have shared a classroom with a beginner like Louisa? It's hard to imagine how their paths could have crossed.</p> <p>Maybe it was in November 1868, when the school got a visit from Louisa and Jesse's celebrity father, Chang Bunker, with uncle Eng, sister Nannie, and cousin Kate. Chang and Eng had toured earlier that year, and Chang had been ill, and had lost most of his hearing as a consequence. He was now finding life very difficult, and perhaps was already beginning to drink heavily.42 He and Eng and their daughters were on their way to New York to take passage to Liverpool on a European tour, hoping, by plowing these farther fields, to recoup some of the capital losses they suffered as a result of the Thirteenth Amendment. One wonders what the school community made of the Bunker twins' visit. Were the pupils all kept in their classrooms or dormitories so that the family could have some privacy? Or did the twins wish to meet their children's teachers and friends? Or perhaps give the deaf children a free exhibit? Louisa probably never learned that in Britain, Nannie and Kate were to be regarded as the mulatta wives of the twins, and that ticket holders would outrage Nannie, who was traveling with a fan photo of the assassin John Wilkes Booth, by asking her about her "negro" ancestry. Nor would she have known that her own countrymen regularly remarked on the children's "flat, swarthy features, black coarse hair, and low, retreating forehead[s]."43</p> <p>Meanwhile, Principal Palmer, nudging Reconstruction forward at the school, was offered a temporary lease on a building into which the school could expand enough to enroll the "negro deaf and dumb children." The offer came from the American Missionary Association (AMA), a Protestant abolitionist group dedicated to the education of freedmen: the building belonged to their Washington School.44 This was not where Palmer wanted it, next door, but about a half mile away from the NCIDDB. Nevertheless, it was leased and repairs were made. Palmer reported in 1869 that classes were in session as of January, and that he was grateful for the assistance of the Rev. Mr. Fisk P. Brewer and Mr. James H. Harris, both members of the board of directors of the school, and both black men, though Palmer doesn't say so. Other than the half-mile distance between its two buildings, the NCIDDB continued to function as one school under the direction of a racially integrated board of directors. Harris, for example, had been born into slavery in 1830, had subsequently graduated from Oberlin College and served in the Union Army, and then sat on the board of the NCIDDB for some years between 1869 and 1879.45</p> <p>To staff its new Colored Department, the NCIDDB drew on its own students, hiring Zacharias Haynes from right out of the classroom. Presumably, Haynes was living in the teachers' lodgings at the rented AMA's Washington School building with his pupils, particularly since in the next academic year, he was "elected" to take charge of the entire Colored Department, perhaps as interim director until the school could bring in a suitable "colored" hearing man, which they soon did, naming Harris in that capacity in 1872, then hiring W F. Debnam, whom we meet below. Another teacher hired in 1869 was David Ray Tillinghast, a white native of the state who had been deafened in childhood and who had studied at the New York Institution (also known as Fanwood) under Harvey Peet, who, like Tyler at the Virginia school who taught Cooke, had learned to sign from Laurent Clerc in Hartford. Tillinghast arrived at the NCIDDB as a credentialed, experienced teacher, having taught at Fanwood for six years after finishing its course of study, and was probably assigned to the White Department and its eighty-six deaf pupils, since the pattern seems to have been that the Colored Departments' twenty-one deaf pupils, who were in no position to complain, got the novice teachers like "Zach" Haynes. Of course, they were lucky in Haynes, and no one would have foreseen at the time that articulation classes for the white pupils would eventually eliminate jobs for Deaf teachers in white schools, making David Tillinghast and Haynes among the last generation of the great nineteenth-century Deaf teachers of the deaf at the historically white state residential schools. Already, in the first report issued after the formation of the Colored Department, the principal announced the formation of a class in articulation of "semimutes," that is hard of hearing and late deafened pupils.46</p> <p>When Principal Palmer left for Canada, he was briefly replaced by John Nichols, who had been foreman of the print shop, but the board of directors was looking for a more academic approach, and soon replaced Nichols with S. F. Tomlinson, who lasted only a couple of years. These men were all apparently running into Reconstruction politics, and Tomlinson, like Palmer, hit a brick wall. The report for 1870 is missing, but in the Twenty-sixth Annual Report issued in December, 1871, David Tillinghast's older brother Thomas had joined the teaching staff, clearly in the Colored Department. Unlike the younger Tillinghast, who was deafened in childhood, Thomas had been born deaf, had attended the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind in Staunton, and had worked for two decades as a bookbinder before joining the NCIDDB in Raleigh, so he, like Haynes, was a novice teacher.47</p> <p>In the 1871 report, Tomlinson gave the total enrollment number of deaf pupils—male and female, white and colored—as 132, although the pupils are listed in the back of the reports in separate columns by race and sex. He goes on say that twenty-five "mutes and semi-mutes" were selected for an articulation class held outside of regular school hours in the afternoons. Only one class is mentioned, and it can't have been integrated, but the shoe shop apparently was: twelve white and two colored boys were making shoes for the entire school. The deaf girls were making clothes for themselves and the deaf boys. The print shop was closed except for raised-type printing for the blind classes, done by a former deaf pupil hired for that purpose. As for the school buildings, Tomlinson asked for repairs on the original building and urged the state to purchase buildings for the "colored deaf and dumb and the blind," because the AMA lease was expiring.48</p> <p>Enrollment was slightly down the following year, and only two pupils completed the seven-year program. Principal Tomlinson attributed the decline to the departure of children who demonstrated an "inability to learn," so it looks like he was raising standards. Jesse and Louisa both stayed on. Eight teachers are listed in the Deaf Department, tacitly distributed between the two school buildings. A new teacher was "wholly unacquainted with the language of deaf-mutes prior to her election" for the job, but was "making good progress," which suggests that hiring such a person was unusual. The annual examinations of pupils were conducted in public, as they were at the American Asylum in Hartford under Gallaudet and Clerc, and it must have been just as difficult for the pupils at the NCSDDB as it was for Alice Cogswell and her classmates to have to appear and perform in public. These public examinations, however, generated priceless goodwill from taxpayers or, in Connecticut, private donors, and so the children were put through their paces and gave the public a show. Tomlinson includes in his report a clipping from the Raleigh News that covered this event and deemed it "very entertaining." The pupils were told a story, according to the newspaper, in "natural signs," and were required to translate it into written English on their slates. It seems, from the way Tomlinson reports on the Colored Department a few pages later, referencing "the examination in June," that its pupils were examined along with the white pupils that day. He also writes about increasing the number of colored boys in the Shoe Department. For the girls, however, the white and colored departments each got its own sewing machine.49</p> <p>The separate-but-equal sewing machines didn't save Tomlinson's job, however, and he was let go in the middle of the school year, March of 1873, with Nichols again filling in temporarily. The state General Assembly appropriated five thousand dollars toward a new school building for the Colored Department, now to be sited a mile and half from the old building near the Capitol.50 Principal Nichols, however, had a new complaint to lodge on another topic: it seems that some of the parents of the school's white pupils were exhibiting their children!</p> <p>During the present year, one of the most promising pupils in the Blind department was taken from the Institution, by parental authority and carried over the State, in [the] charge of persons of questionable character, giving concerts, &amp;c. and grossly misrepresenting the Institution. When his services as a "showman" ceased to be profitable to those who controlled his movements, he was returned to the School, fresh from evil associations, with his morals and manners corrupted."51</p> <p>Nichols was probably sincerely concerned about his pupils' morals and manners, and one wonders what he thought of the Bunker family's commitment to exposing their children in that regard, but it's clear that he was also concerned about the school's monopoly on exhibition fundraising, here on the talents of a blind piano player trained by the school.</p> <hd id="AN0158941678-6">Mr. and Mrs. Haynes at the NCIDDB's Colored Department</hd> <p>Louisa is still listed as a pupil in the 1873 Annual Report, but she would marry at the end of that school year, after seven or eight years of study. Zacharias would have been about twenty-five and she eighteen. Presumably, the happy couple went to live in the rooms for married teachers in the Colored Department. One wonders what Chang thought about providing formerly enslaved children with white teachers, central heating, and water closets, or what his reaction might have been to a son-in-law who answered to a "colored" supervisor. But Chang died the following winter, after having suffered a series of strokes, and he took Uncle Eng with him, the latter apparently dying of fright upon finding himself tethered to a corpse. The twins were sixty-three. When the lurid obituaries appeared in newspapers trumpeting the twins' demise and rehashing all the salacious details of the Bunker families' bedroom arrangements, Haynes was outraged. As a new Bunker in-law, he was unaccustomed to this kind of prurient slander, and he was the only family member to register a public complaint about it, which he did in a letter to a Raleigh newspaper defending the family's morals.52 Louisa was likely pregnant with the first of the couple's seven children when she got the news of her father's death, and it's doubtful that either she or Jesse would or could have left Raleigh to participate in the desperate efforts the family was making to secure Chang's and Eng's bodies from grave robbers. It's unlikely that she even knew her father very well, given the language barrier and his very frequent absences from home, not to mention his heavy drinking.</p> <p>In the 1874 report, Principal Nichols mentions that "want of funds" made it necessary for the trustees to dismiss two of the eight teachers of the deaf, and that he believed that they would soon have to hire more teachers. What he does not mention is that they had already done so: the new, seventh teacher listed in the front of the report is W. F. Debnam. Not until the 1888 report, written by a subsequent principal, do we learn that Debnam has been</p> <p>in immediate charge, and has general supervision of [the Colored Department], subject to the direction of the Principal. Mr. Debnam is a well-educated colored man, of unusual intelligence, and makes a most efficient officer. In addition to his other duties, he teaches a class of deaf mutes.</p> <p>It was an odd omission for Nichols to make. Or perhaps it was not an omission: when he wrote that two teachers were dismissed "for want of funds," he meant that because the Reconstruction state legislature had specified that funding previously at the disposal of the school for defraying the expenses of white classes had to be shared with the Colored Department, the "school" had "lost" two teachers who were not compensated for by any black man who may have been hired to teach over in the shiny new building, which Nichols goes on to report was occupied and "reflects great credit on the liberality and Christian benevolence of our [read: "white"] people."53</p> <p>For his next report, submitted in 1876, Nichols, who, we remember, started out as a shop teacher, wrote at some length about the deaf department's language philosophy, as it affected incoming pupils:</p> <p>Anxious parents, loving brothers and sisters, kind friends labor all in vain to aid the sufferer. The sign language which is the principal means of reaching and awakening the slumbering intellect and communicating knowledge is far beyond their reach, as it can only be learned by contact with, and residence among those who are familiar with it.</p> <p>Nichols professed himself "not favorably impressed" by articulation, which he found of little value in the classroom, although he admits it's of some use when the pupils return home to a world where no one can sign, which is what Jesse Bunker would soon do. We notice that Nichols's thinking about sign language is entirely top-down: unlike the school's first principal, Cooke, Nichols does not expect that pupils are bringing language to the school. Louisa and Jesse were unlikely to have developed much in the way of home signs, but there were many large sibling sets among the pupils, especially in the Colored Department, and this year, 1876, there were two families of five siblings each, the Alexanders and the Boneys. Surely these children came with a functioning set of home signs that they added to the elegant sign language that originated in Hartford and was being planted all over the United States by its graduates and former teachers. Zacharias Haynes would have seen this linguistic event unfolding in real time, four years before the Milan conference, and just a year or two before the end of Reconstruction.54</p> <p>By 1879, Nichols was gone. So was Reconstruction. And so was the school's whole-hearted commitment to sign language education. Jesse was in his eleventh (and last) year at the school. H. A. Gudger, the new principal, had no knowledge of educating deaf or blind children, but as a friend of the governor—and of the regime of Jim Crow—he set about making his first report by boasting how much less he spent on the deaf and blind pupils than his "predecessor" had, less even than was spent per capita on the "insane," who cost less because they grew their own vegetables and whose keepers were uneducated! This is a "record of which we ought and do feel justly proud," he averred. As for the Colored Department, he alleged that it was a device to "prevent the breaking up of the Institution which the commingling of the two races in one school would have caused.... [N]o school can ever prosper which attempts [instructing the two races together]. Nor do the colored people themselves desire it, knowing, as they do, that they have full justice done them, and are treated as well as the whites, though contributing far less, by the way of taxes, to the public fund from which both are supported."55</p> <p>In the 1881 report, we see that Gudger has turned his wrecking ball from demolishing the budget and the pupils' civil rights, to beginning to destabilize the school's commitment to accessible language in the classroom: the teaching staff of the "deaf and dumb" is further reduced to six total across the two departments (but still including the Tillinghasts, Haynes, and Debnam), and there is a new job title, "Teacher of articulation," filled by Miss Mollie E. Baird. In his Principal's Report, Gudger writes that he has concluded "after a week of close observance of the system, and diligent effort to arrive at the truth," that the "pure oral system" is "entirely practical and infinitely preferable to the use of signs." In addition to his full week of "close observance," he ominously provides as evidence a copy of the resolutions of the 1880 Milan Congress.56</p> <p>After leaving school, Jesse spent a couple of years in Kansas but eventually (perhaps because he got tired of being regarded as colored?) went back to Mount Airy, bought land, married a local hearing girl, Emma Davis, and settled down to farming. Emma Davis was a cousin of two other spouses of Chang and Adelaide's children: Christopher's wife, Mary Haynes, and Margaret's husband, Caleb Haynes. All three in-laws may well have been related to Zacharias Haynes as well. However, Emma, Mary, and Caleb were local Mount Airy young people, while Zach was from Hamptonville, about eighty miles by modern roadways to the south. Also, Louisa and Zach were married in 1873 whereas the other three marriages took place in the 1880s.57 And Haynes is not an extraordinarily unusual name. But still, it's interesting to speculate that Jesse, as well as his and Louisa's brother and sister, Christopher and Margaret, may have married into a family that already knew a Deaf person—their cousin Zacharias. Maybe they even knew the finger alphabet.</p> <p>Back in Raleigh, Lizzie Turlington, a Deaf graduate of the school, was hired as a cooking teacher (she would be murdered in 1886), but Mollie Baird was still teaching articulation, and oralism appeared to be taking its usual course in the White Department. There is no indication that the school's directors were opposed to this new method (or to Gudger's views on African Americans), but they clearly were displeased by some aspect of his performance (perhaps that he was keeping pupils on starvation rations?) because he was forced out just days after he wrote the 1883 report, and was hurriedly replaced with W J. Young, a teacher in the Blind Department. Having no first-hand experience with deaf education, Young simply followed Gudger's oralist, Jim Crow policies and did him one better, doubling the articulation staff for the White Department by hiring Nettie Marshall, but stating explicitly that all the deaf pupils in the Colored Department were "taught by sign."58</p> <p>The school's balance of the races, however, was shifting, with white deaf enrollment increasing and black deaf enrollment flat. Principal Young ventured that this was "owing, no doubt, to the fact that large numbers of the colored people have left the State," though it seems more probable that by 1890, black families had been frightened into keeping their children at home, if for no other reason than that three of the colored pupils died at the school that year of unknown causes, not something that's going to inspire parental confidence in any "Colored Department." So, after two decades of teaching and living with black kids, Zacharias Haynes was transferred to the White Department, where, despite the alleged success with the "pure oral system," the school was still running five manual classes and only one oral. To replace him in the Colored Department, the NCIDDB hired another novice teacher, John C. Miller, born in 1865, deafened in infancy, and a graduate of both the NCIDDB and the NYIDD (Fanwood). Whether the Haynes family moved back to the White Department with Zach's transfer is unknown, but the old building for white classes was already overcrowded, and the Haynes family would have counted eight or nine members at this point, so perhaps they stayed put.59</p> <hd id="AN0158941678-7">The Haynes Family in Morganton</hd> <p>The following year, 1891, the state legislature appropriated money for a new white deaf school in Morganton, in the western North Carolina Piedmont, "in the foothills of the Blue Ridge [which] is noted for its healthfulness of climate" leaving "the blind white" in the old building in Raleigh.60 Work began in 1892, and the school opened as the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Dumb in 1894 with 102 pupils. The new campus would be a "combined school," with two separate departments for sign and oral instruction. Among the teachers moving to Morganton were three Deaf instructors: David Tillinghast, John C. Miller, and Zacharias Haynes. Thomas Tillinghast stayed in Raleigh with his pupils, and the former Colored Department building got the new boiler, steam pipes, and radiators it needed. The school for the black deaf and blind stayed on in Raleigh under various names into the second half of the twentieth century, while the white blind moved back into the original building two blocks from the capitol.61</p> <p>At the time that the white deaf school left Raleigh, Louisa and Zacharias had been married for twenty-one years and were still raising their family in Raleigh. Since Louisa undoubtedly was nursing her own infants, the children would have been spaced about two years apart, so that at the time the white deaf program was removed to Morganton and the Haynes family went with it, their three oldest would be about twenty, eighteen, and sixteen; the youngest, no more than eight years old.</p> <p>The superintendent of the new school made it immediately clear that the manual department was nothing but a means for the pupils to acquire written English (rather than academic subjects like geography, history, and arithmetic, or knowledge of the world, ethics, religious precepts, citizenship, etc.). The finger alphabet, he said, was a mere "scaffolding" that should be discarded before students leave school. Pupils were henceforth discouraged from signing among themselves. Yet despite the superintendent's rhetoric, Haynes, Tillinghast, and Miller taught in a department of five "manual" teachers, while the oral department, which must have had smaller classes, had only two teachers. The new school drew an immediate visit from E. M. Gallaudet, and, a year later, from A. G. Bell, and its enrollment doubled. When Gallaudet returned in 1898 to join a throng of a thousand spectators to view the laying of the cornerstone of a new building, he was quoted in local newspapers as having said "that a more meritorious exhibition of the methods and results of teaching the deaf he had never witnessed either in Europe or America." It's not immediately clear what aspects of the program he had in mind, but the new building would be considered a marvel, with steam heating and indoor plumbing.62</p> <p>One of the Haynes children, Carrie, got a job at the school right away: we see her listed among the staff in 1896 as "C. L. Haynes, Stenographer and Typewriter"!63 And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, Zacharias Haynes died in April 1900, at the age of only fifty-two after thirty-two years of teaching the deaf in North Carolina. Carrie was hired to replace him.64 And Louisa, for reasons we can only guess at, packed up and went right back to Raleigh. And there she apparently stayed until her death in 1934.</p> <p>Why did she leave Morganton and the Deaf community there, where she must have had friends or at least a social network of some sort? For one thing, when a man died on the job in those days, no employer, however benevolent, would have dreamed of letting his widow and children stay in company housing and continuing to eat at a company dining hall. Nor was there any concept of even a small pension for the widow. Widows and orphans were then the business of families and churches, not employers or state governments. And though Carrie was given her father's job, women were never paid anywhere near a man's salary for the same work and job title, and their jobs never came with family perks. In a word, Zach's death left Louisa and her children homeless.</p> <p>We should also consider the possibility that the school encouraged her to leave town. The Fifth Biennial Report published in 1900, which announced the death of "Mr. Z. W. Haynes," included a lengthy report by Anna C. Hurd on the Oral Department, explaining that all new pupils were enrolled in the program for one year, and only the failures were able to enroll in the Manual Department. This was, of course, common practice in state deaf schools at this date, and my own great-uncle was an "oral failure" at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in this period. The low prestige accorded the Manual Department is evident in the amount of space its report takes up in the Biennial Report. In full, it reads</p> <p>Manual Department</p> <p>The studies given in the Manual or Sign Department, except the development of speech and speech-reading, are the same as given in the Oral Department. "The sign language" is a means and not an end. It aids only in the teaching of written English and for chapel exercises, and after the pupil has learned written language he has no use for the sign language.</p> <p>Oddly, however, the report from the Oral Department does not, in fact, discuss any studies beyond oral training, so between the two reports, we learn nothing about what academic subjects the pupils were studying. If, in fact, they were studying anything at all.</p> <p>The teacher ratio between the two departments was now, six years later, ten teachers in the manual department to ten in the oral. Of the ten teachers in the Manual Department after Carrie replaced her father, only two of them were Deaf, and of those two (David Tillinghast and John C. Miller), Tillinghast was late-deafened, as Haynes had been, and would have retained some speech. So, we're looking at a school that thinks its graduates have "no use for the sign language," and therefore the school has no reason to retain monolingual signers as models. One can see that they'd prefer that Louisa go back to Raleigh, though they were happy enough to retain her adult children on their teaching staff, so we know this was not a racial matter, and that the family continued to be accepted as white. Each group photo of the NCSD teaching staff in those early years includes one very pretty, petite young lady in a white blouse, her dark hair in a bun, a slightly East Asian cast to her face. She could be Carrie, Mabel, or Effie Haynes, the three of Louisa and Zach's daughters who successively taught at the NCSD in Morganton.</p> <hd id="AN0158941678-8">Louisa's Later Years in Raleigh</hd> <p>Given that Louisa could not have stayed in Morganton, why, then, did she go to Raleigh instead of Mount Airy, where her brother Jesse and other family members could have taken her and the younger children in? Mount Airy surely had some sort of public school for the younger children by this date, but it was likely to have been rudimentary compared to what Louisa knew had been available to her older children in Raleigh. And a Deaf woman of a certain age (and 45 was not then the prime of life for a woman that it is today) whose only marketable skill was the sewing she'd learned in school would have needed not only some start-up capital to buy a sewing machine, but also, vitally, Raleigh's much larger and more affluent customer base if she wanted to make a living that way. Perhaps also she had a small network of friends in Raleigh with some resources, a boarding house, or a dressmaking business, for example. Perhaps she knew a widower who might be interested in remarriage, but if so, nothing came of it. Certainly she had some kind of signing community there, and any of those features could have been a bigger draw than any family ties in Mount Airy. One thing we can be certain of is that she would not—in fact, could not—have gone back to reconnect with any black Deaf in Raleigh, not if she expected her children to continue to be regarded as white. Here is a woman of biracial heritage whose childhood home was filled with black children, and who lived most of her married life surrounded by black deaf children. Yet in 1900, there would have been zero possibility of Louisa connecting with any black Deaf acquaintances in Raleigh. As for the white Deaf community in Raleigh, it's hard to say how big that might have been at this period. Thomas Tillinghast was the only white Deaf teacher still employed at the school, and he had a wife, and surely there were some white Deaf graduates around town, even though most graduates ended up, like Jesse, going back to the family farm.</p> <p>Jesse and Emma would raise a family in Surry County, near the other Bunkers in the Mount Airy area. He was killed on his farm by lightning in 1909 at age forty-eight. Adelaide Bunker survived not only Chang and Eng but also her sister Sally, living on into the twentieth century to hear tell of many wonders that she surely never saw with her own eyes, electric lights, airplanes, and movies being as remote from Mount Airy in her lifetime as the submarine warfare being conducted when she died at age ninety-four in 1917. Louisa and all seven of her children would live as white people in the Jim Crow South. Three of her daughters became teachers at the Morganton school, and a son, Christopher, served on the administrative staff there. Another daughter, Alice, taught at Kentucky's residential school for the deaf, also segregated. Another son, A. M. alleged to have been six foot, four inches tall, became a bank executive said to have "cheerfully answered to the nickname 'Chink.'"65 One wonders if "Chink" was one of the younger children who had spent five years in Morganton—just when did he acquire that nickname to which he so cheerfully answered? In 1927, when Louisa was seventy-one, a poll of white Americans found that only 16% were willing to consider living next door to a Chinese person.66 Apparently, some of those 16% lived in Raleigh, where white people knew that the Bunkers were not "colored," but rather were the descendants of international celebrities who had made North Carolina their home and had been steadfast in their gallant support of the Lost Cause and the southern way of life. Louisa died in 1934, living long enough to cast her vote under the Nineteenth Amendment—did she get out and vote?—and to see the Roaring Twenties, bob her hair, shorten her skirts, survive the Great Depression, and get just a glimpse of a new day dawning with the election of FDR (though not the Social Security Act that could have made a substantial difference in her last decades). But she was still in her fifties and sixties in 1910 to 1920, when the future looked so dark for sign language that the National Association of the Deaf was using the wonderful new technology of film in a heroic effort to preserve it from the relentless onslaught of oralism. The early decades of the twentieth century were dark days for many, of course, not only signing Deaf Americans, and the life of a daughter of a celebrity conjoined twin could not have been an easy one. We hope her years as a pupil, then as a wife and mother in a signing Deaf mixed-race environment were happy, and that she found community and friendship in Raleigh.</p> <ref id="AN0158941678-9"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Reconstruction (1865-1877) was the ill-fated federal program instituted after the Civil War to integrate formerly enslaved persons into the American citizenry and to transform the governments of the states that had attempted secession.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Boston newspapers quoted in Joseph Andrew Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America</emph> (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 188-89; Jesse Franklin Graves, <emph>Life of Eng and Chang Bunker, the Original Siamese Twins</emph> (Mount Airy, NC: Surry County Historical Society, 1970), quotations from 13, 15, and 25.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> This codicil from Chang's will is quoted in Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace, <emph>The Two: A Biography</emph> (New York: Simon &amp; Schuster, 1978), 305; David R. Collins, <emph>Eng and Chang: The Original Siamese Twins</emph> (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994), 104, speculates that Josephine was a primary caregiver, and that's indeed probable.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 195.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Graves, <emph>Life of Eng and Chang Bunker</emph>, 17; Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 126; Yunte Huang, <emph>Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History</emph> (New York: Liveright, 2019), 238.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Because many readers will be familiar with popular histories of deaf education and the like, and because nearly all such works have misunderstood, and thus mischaracterized, the chaotic and highly politicized post-bellum years, this brief discussion may serve as an introductory digest of the knowable historical facts about the school <emph>as they were recorded in primary, contemporary, official documents</emph>—the school's annual reports to the state legislature. The reports are crystal clear: There was only one deaf school in North Carolina before 1894, and it was semi-integrated.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Huang, <emph>Inseparable</emph>, 33-34, provides a photograph of the contract and discussion on it.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> Huang, <emph>Inseparable</emph>, 73 and 143; Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 55.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> For more on Joice Heth, see Benjamin Reiss, <emph>The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America</emph> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). The reference to crossing paths with the Siamese twins is on 38. Quotation on Ah Fong Moy from Robert G. Lee, <emph>Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture</emph> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 30.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 37–41, "squarely in terms" from 39; Huang, <emph>Inseparable</emph>, 125–30. Both biographers frame the twins' Virginia debacle in the reaction to the Nat Turner revolt.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Example quotations in Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 70; "damned niggers" quoted in Huang, <emph>Inseparable</emph>, 114; Lynnfield episode is retold in Huang, <emph>Inseparable</emph>, 112–15.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Najia Aarim Heriot, <emph>Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–1882</emph> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) provides the best coverage of this topic.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 124, for "strategies" quotation and 42–43 for the interview on "boys." The engraving of their wedding is reproduced in Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 111. Chang's and Eng's heights are given in Graves, <emph>Life of Eng and Chang Bunker</emph>, 8, and Mrs. Yates's dimensions are given on 12.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> This man was James Calloway, a physician. Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 79-80, casts some doubt on the story, but the Bunkers certainly knew and socialized with Calloway.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quoted in Hugh C. Bailey, <emph>Hinton Rowan Helper: Abolitionist-Racist</emph> (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1965), 134-35.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Lee, <emph>Orientals</emph>, 42. Both Orser and Huang cite Lee on this speculation.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 83.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 88.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 125.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Julian Lucas, "The Great Assimilationists." Review of Huang, <emph>Inseparable</emph> and Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph> in <emph>New York Review of Books</emph> Feb. 21, 2019, 24-26. This observation seems never to have been made by a biographer of the Bunkers.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Graves, <emph>Life of Eng and Chang Bunker</emph>, 17.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 200.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> George M. Fredrickson, "Antislavery Racist: Hinton Rowan Helper" in <emph>The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Equality</emph> (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 28–52.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Graves, <emph>Life of Eng and Chang Bunker</emph>, 18.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> For discussion about the racialization of freaks in general and on Millie-Christine, "What Is It?" and the Circassian Beauties, see Kevin Young, <emph>Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists. Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News</emph>. (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2017). The quotation on Douglass is from Reiss, <emph>The Showman and the Slave</emph>, 85.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> William Lloyd Garrison, "Marriage Extraordinary," <emph>The Liberator</emph>, May 12, 1843.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Herman Melville, <emph>Mardi: and a Voyage Thither</emph>, vol. 2, ch. 58.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Fredrickson, "Antislavery Racist," 50, makes the same analogy between Sutpen and Hinton Helper.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> The annual report for 1850 can be found in <emph>Acts and Documents of the General Assembly and Reports of the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from January 4, 1845, to December, 1852</emph> (Raleigh: Printed at the Institution, 1853). Cooke's description is found on 41–43.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Katherine Chrichton Alston Edsell, "A Century of Growth" in <emph>Centennial Program: State School for the Blind and the Deaf, Raleigh, North Carolina, 23 January 1945</emph>, 33.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>List of Officers with the Act of Incorporation of the North Carolina Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb</emph> (Raleigh: Printed at the Press of the Institution, 1949), 9. For the story from the 1930s, see Mary Herring Wright, <emph>Sounds Like Home</emph> (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999), 172–207.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Otis A. Betts, <emph>The North Carolina School for the Deaf at Morganton, 1894–1944: The Education of the Deaf in North Carolina, 1845–1945</emph> (Morganton, NC: Printed by the classes in printing, 1945), 24; <emph>Biennial Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, June 1856</emph> (Raleigh: Printed at the Institution, 1857), 6.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Biennial Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, from September 1, 1862, to September 1, 1864</emph> (Raleigh: Printed at the Institution, 1865): 20.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Huang, <emph>Inseparable</emph>, 297.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Betts, <emph>The North Carolina School for the Deaf at Morganton</emph>, 24.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Both quoted in Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 159 and 161.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> The names of these men are given in Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 153.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On federal troops holding the school, Betts, <emph>The North Carolina School for the Deaf at Morgantown</emph>, 24, and the Principal's Report, <emph>Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, from September 1st, 1865, to September 1st, 1866</emph> (Raleigh, 1867), 7–15.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> The NCIDDB annual report for the year ending July 1, 1869, is reprinted as an appendix in the <emph>Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of North Carolina for the Year 1869</emph> (Raleigh: M.S. Littlefield, 1869), 97–120.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Betts, <emph>The North Carolina School for the Deaf at Morganton</emph>, 25 and 35.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> This description of first lessons is given in the Principal's Report, <emph>Biennial Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from November 1, 1874, to November 1, 1876, Thirtieth and Thirty-first Sessions</emph> (Raleigh: Published by Order of the Board of Trustees, 1876), 1535.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Graves, <emph>Life of Eng and Chang Bunker</emph>, 24.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> See Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 162-68, for details of this trip. The descriptions "flat, swarthy" from a newspaper, quoted in Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 137.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of North Carolina for the Year 1869</emph>, 18.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> M. H. Crockett and Barbara Crockett Dease, <emph>Through the Years, 1867–1977: Light Out of Darkness: A History of the North Carolina School for the Negro Blind and the Deaf</emph> (s.l.: 1990), 10–11.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> The NCIDDB Annual Report, <emph>Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of North Carolina for the Year 1869</emph>, 100. On David Tillinghast, see Betts, <emph>The North Carolina School</emph>, 92–95, and John Vickery Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, <emph>A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America</emph> (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989), 48–59. On Haynes as supervisor, see Joseph E. Pogue, "Historical Narrative," in <emph>Seventieth Anniversary Exercises of the State School for the Blind and Deaf, Raleigh, North Carolina, Thursday, November 4, 1915</emph> (Raleigh: Edward and Broughton, 1916), 27–33, and Crockett and Crockett Dease, <emph>Through the Years</emph>, 316.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On principal turnover, see Edsell, "A Century of Growth," 35. On Thomas Tillinghast, see Van Cleve and Crouch, <emph>A Place of Their Own</emph>, 48–59.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Twenty-sixth Annual Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from January 1st, 1871, to December 1st, 1871</emph> (Raleigh: Press of the Institution, 1871), 10–16.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Principal's Report, <emph>Twenty-seventh Annual Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from December 1st, 1871, to November 1st, 1872</emph> (Raleigh: Printed at the Press of the Institution, 1872), 12–21.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Twenty-eighth Annual Report of the North Carolina Institution of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, from November 1, 1872, to November 1, 1873</emph>, 10.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Twenty-eighth Annual Report</emph>, 12.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Wallace and Wallace, <emph>The Two</emph>, 327-28, for excerpts from that letter.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Twenty-ninth Annual Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from November 1, 1873, to November 1, 1874</emph> (Raleigh: Printed at the Press of the Institute, 1874), quotations from 17–18. Description of Debnam from <emph>Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from November 30, 1886, to November 30, 1888</emph> (Raleigh: Joseph Daniels, 1889), quotation from 19. Debnam's position and various titles are also given in Crocket and Dease, 316.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Biennial Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from November 1, 1874, to November 1, 1876, Thirtieth and Thirty-first Sessions</emph> (Raleigh: Published by Order of the Board of Trustees, 1876), quotations from 25 and 32.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Biennial Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from January 1, 1877, to January 1, 1879, Thirty-second and Thirty-third Sessions</emph> (Raleigh: Published by Order of the Board of Trustees, 1879), quotations from 11 and 27. See also Edsell, "A Century of Growth," 35, on Gudger.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from January 1, 1880, to January 1, 1881</emph> (Raleigh: P. M. Hall and Edwards Broughton, 1881), quotations from 11.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On the relationship of Caleb Haynes, Mary Haynes, and Emma Davis, see Orser, <emph>The Lives of Chang and Eng</emph>, 197. On Zacharias's origins, see Betts, <emph>The North Carolina School for the Deaf at Morganton</emph>, 93.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Report of the North Carolina Institute for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from January 1, 1883, to November 30, 1884</emph> (Raleigh: Ashe and Gatling, 1884), 29.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Report of the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from November 30, 1888, to November 30, 1890</emph> (Raleigh: Joseph Daniels, 1890), quotation, "owing, no doubt," from 27.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Betts, <emph>The North Carolina School for the Deaf at Morganton</emph>, 80; Edsell, "A Century of Growth," 10.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Report of the North Carolina Institute for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind from December 1, 1892 to November 30, 1894</emph> (Raleigh: Josephus Daniels, 1894).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Betts, <emph>The North Carolina School for the Deaf at Morganton</emph>, 36.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Third Biennial Report of the Board of Directors of the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Dumb, Morganton, NC</emph> (Winston: Stewart, 1896).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Fifth Biennial Report of the Board of Directors of the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Dumb, Morganton, NC</emph> (Morganton: North Carolina School for the Deaf and Dumb, 1900).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Wallace and Wallace, <emph>Life of Eng and Chang Bunker</emph>, 333.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> James W. Loewen, <emph>The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White</emph> (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Edna Edith Sayers</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> <p></p> <p>Edna Edith Sayers is the author most recently of The Life and Times of T. H. Gallaudet (2018). She resides in Henrietta, NY.</p> </aug> |
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| Header | DbId: eric DbLabel: ERIC An: EJ1348564 AccessLevel: 3 PubType: Academic Journal PubTypeId: academicJournal PreciseRelevancyScore: 0 |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: From Freak Show to Jim Crow: A Siamese Twin and His Deaf Daughter in the Antebellum and Postbellum South – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Sayers%2C+Edna+Edith%22">Sayers, Edna Edith</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Sign+Language+Studies%22"><i>Sign Language Studies</i></searchLink>. Sum 2022 22(4):553-589. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Gallaudet University Press. 800 Florida Avenue NE, Denison House, Washington, DC 20002-3695. Tel: 202-651-5488; Fax: 202-651-5489; Web site: http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/SLS.html – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 37 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2022 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Descriptive – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Deafness%22">Deafness</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Twins%22">Twins</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Exhibits%22">Exhibits</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Family+Relationship%22">Family Relationship</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Congenital+Impairments%22">Congenital Impairments</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Racial+Segregation%22">Racial Segregation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Fathers%22">Fathers</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Immigrants%22">Immigrants</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Cultural+Influences%22">Cultural Influences</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Race%22">Race</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Physical+Disabilities%22">Physical Disabilities</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22United+States+History%22">United States History</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Decision+Making%22">Decision Making</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Daughters%22">Daughters</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+History%22">Educational History</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Asian+Americans%22">Asian Americans</searchLink> – Name: Subject Label: Geographic Terms Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22North+Carolina%22">North Carolina</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1353/sls.2022.0006 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0302-1475<br />1533-6263 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: Eng and Chang Bunker (1811--1874) were conjoined twins of Chinese ethnicity born in Siam (today, Thailand). Before the Civil War, they toured the United States to exhibit themselves as a "human curiosity," a wonder of nature, their conjoined state documented by local doctors at each stop on their tours, and their exhibition touted as edifying and educational. The American public was amazed, therefore, or, rather, aghast to learn in 1840 that these racialized "freaks of nature" had bought land in North Carolina's Piedmont, built a house, taken US citizenship and the last name Bunker, married two farmer's daughters, Sarah (Sally Ann) and Adelaide Yates, and were fathering with them what would become, respectively, eleven and ten children. Two of Chang and Adelaide's children, Louisa and Jesse, were born deaf in 1855 and 1861, respectively, and would attend school at the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind (NCIDDB) during its chaotic Reconstruction years of partial racial integration, where Louisa would marry a deaf teacher of semi-segregated "colored" deaf pupils. Meanwhile, the twins had returned to the freak show touring circuit, now as conjoined Southern gentlemen and fathers of growing families, exhibiting, along with their own anomalous bodies, sample well-dressed offspring who bore marked resemblances to themselves. Naturally, the two deaf children were never selected as co-exhibits, the point of exhibiting sample children, after all, being to show that the offspring of these "curiosities" were healthy, handsome, and acceptably "normal." The lives of Chang and his daughter Louisa thus provide a two-generation immigrant story of negotiating the culturally constructed intersections of race and physical anomaly both before and after the Civil War. Louisa's life was largely determined by the choices that her father made in his efforts to negotiate those intersections. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: ERIC – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2022 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1348564 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1353/sls.2022.0006 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 37 StartPage: 553 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Deafness Type: general – SubjectFull: Twins Type: general – SubjectFull: Exhibits Type: general – SubjectFull: Family Relationship Type: general – SubjectFull: Congenital Impairments Type: general – SubjectFull: Racial Segregation Type: general – SubjectFull: Fathers Type: general – SubjectFull: Immigrants Type: general – SubjectFull: Cultural Influences Type: general – SubjectFull: Race Type: general – SubjectFull: Physical Disabilities Type: general – SubjectFull: United States History Type: general – SubjectFull: Decision Making Type: general – SubjectFull: Daughters Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational History Type: general – SubjectFull: Asian Americans Type: general – SubjectFull: North Carolina Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: From Freak Show to Jim Crow: A Siamese Twin and His Deaf Daughter in the Antebellum and Postbellum South Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Sayers, Edna Edith IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 01 Type: published Y: 2022 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0302-1475 – Type: issn-electronic Value: 1533-6263 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 22 – Type: issue Value: 4 Titles: – TitleFull: Sign Language Studies Type: main |
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