by Yunte Huang
Part Four
LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL
(1839–1861)
CHANG AND ENG’S HOUSE, TRAPHILL
24
Traphill
Traphill—a rustic name derived from rail-pen traps that an early settler had built on the hills to ensnare wild turkeys—sat quietly in a verdant valley between the Blue Ridge and Stone Mountain, twenty miles northeast of Wilkesboro. Close to the Roaring River, Traphill was so isolated that later it would become the locale of frequent robberies and murders by bushwhackers and deserters during the Civil War. And if we move the needle of time even a bit farther toward the future, Traphill would become a center for mass production and exportation of moonshine in the Prohibition era. In the hills, hollows, caves, and “cutthroat ridges”—so named because they were inaccessible to intruders without the use of lethal force—flourished countless moonshine stills hidden well beyond the reach of law. Even as late as the 1960s, as depicted on The Andy Griffith Show, the area was still a haven for bootleggers.
It was here that Chang and Eng, outlaws in a very different sense, would build their first homestead, buying a plot of land and signing a deed:
October 17, 1839. From Caleb Martin to the Siamese Twins, Chang & Eng. 100 acres plus 50 acres, for $300. Along Little Sandy Creek.1
Closing the deal, the seller, an honest, red-faced planter, was flummoxed when both of his hands were shaken simultaneously over a transaction. To make the occasion even more surreal, at least for the mountaineer, the twins, as legend has it, paid for the purchase with a bag of tingling silver coins.2
The land purchase was the first step the twins took to plant their roots in the Southern soil, after a summer of peregrination, search, and happenstance. Having performed their last show in Jefferson on July Fourth, the twins spent the next three months roaming the hills and hollows, looking for game, fish, scenery, and a place they could call home. Once again, their expense record captured a vivid picture of their movements. For the months of July and August, expense items that constantly showed up in their ledger included lead, buckshot, bullets, gunpowder, copper caps, and bills for boarding outside Wilkesboro. They had traveled so much during these hot months that horseshoeing became a recurrent entry, as did laundry and bootblacking: “July 18. Charles the negro for cleaning boots $1.50.” On July 20, they paid sixty cents for a tin bucket in Traphill, possibly for holding fish they had caught in the nearby river. That fishing and hunting trip might have led to their eventual move to Traphill. According to Joseph Orser, their initial connection to this neck of the woods was Robert J. Baugus, a slaveholding farmer, who also ran a boardinghouse.3 When the twins and their entourage—in addition to Charles Harris, two other men, Peter Marsh and George Prendergast, continued to be on the payroll until the end of August—stayed at Baugus’s, affections grew between Harris and one of the Baugus girls, Fanny. The budding romance soon blossomed into earnest courtship. Over the years, thanks to the generous salary the twins had paid him, Harris had built up a sizable nest egg, which would make him a good catch for any young woman in Wilkes County. In October, Harris and Fanny became engaged to marry, and Harris decided to settle permanently in the area where his in-laws had an extensive network of family ties. In this way, Harris, an Irishman and a stranger who ordinarily would have been viewed with suspicion by the mountaineers, was accepted into the community. In turn, this opened the door for Harris’s closest associates, Chang and Eng.
October became a month for celebration, and the twins and Harris seemed to be having their own Oktoberfest, a ritual for which North Carolina would become famous. In addition to the twins’ buying land and Harris’s getting hitched, the three foreigners also took another major step toward acclimating themselves in America: applying for citizenship. On October 12, 1839, Chang and Eng filed a petition to the Superior Court of North Carolina to become naturalized United States citizens. Their sworn statement—in essence, a micro-autobiography submitted on October 1—read:
Chang and Eng (commonly known as the Siamese Twins) represent to this Honorable Court that they are natives of the kingdom of Siam, in Asia; that they arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, on the 16th day of August, 1829. In October of that year they went to England and returned to the United States in March, 1831, and resided therein without leaving there until the fall of 1835, when they went to lower Canada, soon after they went to the continent of Europe and were absent about 12 months. After their return in 1836, they went to the province of lower Canada where they remained until October 1836, when they returned to the United States and have continued therein without leaving there ever since; and since the 1st day of June 1839, have continued within the State of North Carolina; they further represent that during their continuance within the United States they have behaved as men of good moral character; that they are attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and are well disposed to the good order and happiness of the same—and they here before this Honorable Court declare their intention to become citizens of the United States and to renounce his [sic] allegiance to the King of Siam and of every other state, King or Prince and Potentate, and they respectfully pray that this Honorable Court may receive their declaration, made before this Court with the view of becoming naturalized citizens of the United States and that a record thereof be made and such order or judgment in the premises as is by law required.
CHANG
ENG
Sworn to before me, Oct. 1,
1839. J. Gwyn, Jr. C.S.C.4
It was puzzling that the twins were able to acquire citizenship when federal laws at the time forbade this. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited the privileges of naturalized citizenship to “free white persons,” a legislation that, incredibly, would not be repealed until 1952. Even the two laws enacted later—the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 granting citizenship to African Americans and the Snyder Act of 1924 recognizing indigenous people as citizens—would not have applied to Chang and Eng. But in the years before the rise of anti-Asian or anti-Chinese sentiments, loopholes did exist to allow a small number of “Orientals” to become citizens. According to John Tchen, at least one Chinese-born male had been naturalized by the time the twins took their oath, a seaman who had come to America in the same year as did the twins, anglicized his name to John Houston, and married an Irish woman in New York. In subsequent years, a handful of Chinese were also naturalized in the state of New York.5
One reason why some Chinese were able to fly under the radar might have had to do with the fact that before the 1849 gold rush, the number of Chinese in the United States was minuscule. Sightings of individual Chinese were reported in Pennsylvania as early as 1785, and the few documented examples of migration were mostly caused by returning missionaries who had brought Chinese men and women back with them to work either as servants or interpreters. For instance, in 1842, Reverend William J. Boone, founder of the American Episcopal Mission in China—or, one might say, a trailblazer like his distant relative, Daniel Boone—brought back Sin Say, a language teacher, and Wong Kong Chai, a young man who helped to care for Boone’s children.6 These long-queued Chinese were rare sights in America—as rare as the Siamese Twins in North Carolina. In fact, the US Census Bureau did not have a category for Chinese until 1870, when the color/race question was expanded to include “C” for Chinese, which in turn stood for all East Asians. Before that, the Chinese were considered white for census purposes. In the early nineteenth century, the near-invisibility of the Chinese as a racial group ironically had worked in their favor at times, as in the case of the naturalization of the Siamese Twins.
In circumventing legal restrictions, the twins might also have received help through the local network. Orser points out that the county’s superior court clerk, James Gwyn, who notarized and processed the twins’ petition, knew them well because he had also stayed at Abner Carmichael’s boardinghouse whenever court was in session. Friendships struck up among fellow boarders at a country inn might not a
lways have been as strong as the bond between Ishmael and Queequeg, but familiarity grown out of greetings at the breakfast table, postprandial fireside chats, and bed sharing (called “bunking” at the time) when necessary would foment a relationship good enough to get things done at the county courthouse. As Orser puts it:
Until the 1870s, county officials determined a person’s fitness for citizenship. Local standards, not national laws, influenced the process. The twins were applying in a county that had very few immigrants and no other Asians, in a region whose color line was drawn decisively between white and black, in a court where they had been neighbors with the man administering the oaths. The twins were able to take advantage of the community’s standards and its social network to gain citizenship.7
The drama of what sociologists have called Gemeinschaft (community) versus Gesellschaft (society)—the dichotomy between communal, personal dealings and systemic, impersonal interfaces—seemed to be played out in full view by the twins’ experience. Even more than a century later, in the early 1990s, when I, as a struggling foreign student in Alabama, wanted to open a Chinese restaurant in Tuscaloosa and went to the city hall to apply for a business license, the amiable clerks there, looking at me as though I were fresh off the boat, never bothered to inquire about my immigration status, which could have jeopardized my chances of getting a license. Federal law be darned, these local folks were just happy to see a new business in town, another place where they could order egg rolls and General Tso’s chicken, followed by the obligatory reading of fortune cookies.
In the case of the twins, they might also have benefited from the fact that they were world-class “celebrities,” which would open many doors for them in a small place like Traphill.
Having acquired land and citizenship, these two new Americans set out to get themselves settled. The first order of business was to have a house built. Next to the bubbling creek and overlooking the single-rock Stone Mountain, the wooden house eventually was “two stories high, with a spacious veranda on three sides of the ground floor.” It sported an extra-wide staircase to make it easier for the twins to ascend side by side to the second floor. There were two smaller buildings next to the house, one used as a kitchen, which contained “the largest fireplace in the area,” and the other as “a dwelling for slaves, a storehouse, and a stable for horses.” One other special feature about the house was that most of the rooms were designed with oversize windows, because the twins “wanted a view from every part of the house, as well as plenty of daylight inside.”8 The windows in the back, in particular, presented a spectacular view of Stone Mountain, the largest monadnock in North America, a twenty-five-square-mile pluton with a dome shape and a surface resembling a lunar landscape. The mountain air was, in the words of the geologist Dr. Mitchell, “salubrious and healthy.” In the coming years, tourists seeking to restore health would, as their doctors recommend, come to this area for clean air and mineral waters.9
While their house was being built, Chang and Eng, almost as though they were newlyweds, slowly began to accumulate such household items as dishes, knives and forks, linen for sheets, funnels, pitchers, door locks, candlestands, and so on. When the house was ready for them to move in, they dispatched Harris to New York for a shopping spree. Their house might not have been as gorgeous as those big mansions along the Yadkin River, but, given a certain acquisitive proclivity, they knew how to live, and in style. The luxurious items Harris brought back from the big city, recorded in their ledger as “Articles purchased for the private use of CE by Harris at New York in June 1840,” included rugs, silverware, ivory knives and forks, ivory carvers, brass candlesticks, tea trays, glasses, tumblers, tablecloths, silk handkerchiefs, wool shirts, soap, tea, coffee, brandy, sauce, spice, and more. They spent a total of $467.62½ on these eighty or so items.
Even though their $10,000 savings would make them two of the richest men in Wilkes County, Chang and Eng, parsimonious by nature, did not want to live the idle life of country squires. Some newspapers reported that they had “purchased a farm” in North Carolina and had “gone farming.”10 In reality, they had at first tried their hands at commerce. These former duck fanciers set up a general store in Traphill and started trading merchandise. Most of the store inventory, an assortment of groceries, hardware, crockery, and other “notions,” came from local sources. They bought beef, pork, corn, brandy, potatoes, coffee, turkey, bacon, eggs, cloth, and household articles from farmers and suppliers in the area, and they sold or bartered these at a profit. For instance, according to their account book, for a bushel of wheat they paid 75 cents and sold at 96 cents, netting a 28 percent profit. Or, they paid 37½ cents for a bushel of corn and sold at 49 cents on average, netting a 30 percent profit. They also bought beef, coffee, and cows from James Gwyn, their inside man at the county court; pigs from Nancy Gambill, widow of the famous patriot; brandy and cutting knives from her son, Martin Gambill; and honey from farmer Hardin Spicer. When a local planter died and his effects went on sale, the twins grabbed the opportunity and bought a gallimaufry of household things that they could retail at their store: stone jars, mugs, scythe blade, shear plough, hinges, and cast fire-iron. Their customers were also local; often the names that showed up in their expense book as sellers would reappear on their sale slips as buyers of other merchandise.11 This was a close-knit community where almost everything was produced and consumed locally, giving these mountaineers the strength of rugged individualism but also limiting the prospect of economic growth due to a lack of commerce with the outside world.
While running the general store, the twins continued to improve their homestead and their land, behaving more like gentry than greenhorns. They had no problem hiring maids to do household work, borrowing slaves from neighbors to do odd jobs, and employing masons and carpenters for home improvements. The names of some local women—such as Charlotte Pratt, Sally Walker, Rodha Rose, Polly Rose, Hetty Poplin, and Mary Tallby—regularly appeared on the ledger as recipients of wages. In November 1839, the twins borrowed slaves from David Yates and Abner Carmichael, and the next February they twice hired a slave named Lunn and paid his owner, Captain John Johnson, for the temporary employment. The male counterparts of some of those hired maids also showed up in the ledger: In 1840, Jesse Poplin was paid forty-five cents for splitting rails on February 27, and then $4 for the more demanding work of cleaning up the swamp on their land on August 8. Edward Rose was paid seventy-five cents for making two pairs of shoes and fifty cents for repairing boots on March 13. After a stormy spring in 1841, the house needed more work. In June, John Holloway of Traphill was hired for five days to build a chimney, fix the hearth, and put rock pillars under the house; he was assisted by another local man, John Sparks, a regular visitor at the general store. Records do not indicate how the local craftsmen felt about working for the twins, but money surely overcame any prejudice, while the slaves simply had no choice. Whether the slaves particularly resented being treated like chattel by these “freaks” who were only off the boat by a dozen years is another question that will remain buried in history, but the fact that local community members trusted Chang and Eng enough to rent out their slaves is telling, and it reveals both how the twins came to see their own new status in the Southern hierarchy and how they quickly came to be accepted as part of the oppressor class.
In this insulated rural community, far from the madding crowd, Chang and Eng, as a reporter from nearby Salisbury put it, “appeared in their unconstrained condition much more amiable and interesting than when encountering the gaze of the wondering crowd.” They were, in fact, “as happy as lords,” which they, as soon-to-be slaveholders, had become.12
A letter the twins wrote to their “discoverer,” Robert Hunter, described in their own words the kind of leisurely life these two country lords were living:
We live way off in the back wood at the foot of the mountains called the Blue Ridge—in a very healthy country within 25 miles of the State of Virginia and fifty miles from the Sta
te of Tennessee. We have wood and water in great abundance and our neighbors are all on an equality [italics added], and none are very rich—people live comfortably, but each man tills his own soil. . . . We enjoy ourselves pretty well, but have not as yet got married. But we are making love pretty fast, and if we get a couple of nice wives we will be sure to let you know about it.13
The letter is revealing in several ways, especially since it does not regard the slaves as “people” and certainly not people benefiting from any sort of “equality” bestowed on the white—and, in this case, Chinese—population with regard to social caste or wealth. Finally, the last sentence may sound like a joke, a typical Siamese Twins’ tongue-in-cheek self-mockery. But as the world would soon find out, they were, to use the local parlance, serious as a stone.
25
A Universal Truth
“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen declared in her classic opening of Pride and Prejudice (1813), “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”1 What the astute observer of the cloistered life of British landed gentry at the end of the eighteenth century could not have imagined was the possible complication involving the status of “a single man.” What if the single man were physically tied to another, as in the case of the Siamese Twins? Would the universal truth still be universal?
It would be decidedly unfair for us to disparage Austen for her lack of imagination or foresight. In 1843, when the news surfaced about the double wedding of Chang and Eng to two white sisters in a remote corner of North Carolina, most Americans were surprised, shocked, stunned, disgusted, or simply incredulous. MARRIAGE EXTRAORDINARY, screamed the headline in the Carolina Watchman. “Ought not the wives of the Siamese Twins to be indicted for marrying a quadruped?” asked the Louisville (Kentucky) Journal. William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, touting abolitionist and highly religious agendas, condemned the union as “bestial.” The Greensborough (North Carolina) Patriot resorted to a bare-bones notice of the fact and a disdainful aside, “Comment is useless.”2 Nonetheless, everyone was asking, “How did it happen?” To answer that question, we need not only heed the wisdom of Austen’s seemingly universal truth but also examine Chang and Eng’s real-life situation against the larger canvas of American culture as it entered the straitlaced, chastity-belted Victorian Age.