From Freak Show to Jim Crow: A Siamese Twin and His Deaf Daughter in the Antebellum and Postbellum South
- From Freak Show to Jim Crow:A Siamese Twin and His Deaf Daughter in the Antebellum and Postbellum South
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 [End Page 553] 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. As we shall see, Louisa's life was largely determined by the choices that her father made in his efforts to negotiate those intersections.
An Introduction to the Bunkers' World and the State of the Scholarship
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 [End Page 554] 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
As for the family's view of its...
