by Yunte Huang
Since their arrival in North Carolina in June 1839, Chang and Eng, having been accepted as honorary whites in the Southern hierarchy of races, were two reasonably happy “lords” busy running their general store, raising corn and hogs, and traveling constantly to Wilkesboro and the surrounding area for business or pleasure. About eight miles northwest of the county seat was Mulberry Creek, a valley that grew out of a natural pass through the Blue Ridge, cut by a steep and twisting road that presented broad vistas. Traveling in this direction, the twins often stopped by the residence of David Yates, a rich planter with six children, seven slaves, and an estate that grew to a thousand acres. In his biography of the twins, Judge Jesse Graves described the Yates domicile as a large house standing upon a high hill, painted in white, surrounded by orchards and slave cabins, which gave the place “an aristocratic aspect.”3 Alston Yates, David’s oldest son, was a frequent customer at the twins’ store, having purchased such items as linens, ladles, axes, locks, hinges, coats, shirts, pantaloons, dried fruits, tables, tubs, buckets, and even a book on constellations. Occasionally, the twins would “borrow” a slave from David Yates to work on their land. Since state laws did not allow slaves to hire themselves out for extra work, the twins would have to pay Yates the wages. Their relationship became even closer when, in November 1840, the oldest Yates daughter, Letha, married Samuel Baugus, brother of Charles Harris’s wife, Fanny. In this remote mountainous region, blood is certainly thicker than water. “So in their frequent visits to and from town,” as Graves put it, “Chang and Eng fell into the habit of stopping at Esq. Yates for dinner, or in the evening to stay all night and chat with the old gentleman and the old lady.”4
As the friendship grew, the twins turned their not-inconsiderable attention to the two younger Yates daughters, Sarah and Adelaide, who had reached the prime age of (as was said then) maidenhood at eighteen and seventeen, respectively. Not regarded as classic beauties, the two girls, nurtured by the mountain climate, were vivacious, imaginative, and, in nineteenth-century parlance, exuberant like wildflowers. Simpler in personality and plumper in body than her younger sister, Sarah had “rich, auburn hair, fine teeth, and hazel eyes.” Adelaide was a tall, slender brunette with “a free and open countenance.”5
The twins had first met these girls at the wedding of either Charles Harris and Fanny Baugus or Samuel Baugus and Letha Yates. Either way, the attraction was immediate. Their initial lively tête-à-tête was described by Shepherd Dugger:
Eng said [to the girls], “My brother wants to marry; and if any young lady here will have him, we will have a wedding today.”
“It is he who wants to marry,” said Chang, “and he is putting it off on me just to raise a conversation with you about love. He’d marry at the drop of a hat, and drop it himself, if he could get the ugliest girl in town to say ‘yes.’ ”
“The reason I don’t marry,” said Eng, “is because I’m fast to him.”
“The reason I don’t marry,” said Chang, “is because I’m fast to him. Isn’t it a pity that neither of two brothers can marry, because he is fast to the other?”
“Indeed it is,” said Sarah, “is there no chance for you to be separated?”
“The doctors say not,” said Eng, “and each of us decided that we would rather look on pretty girls, with a lean and hungry love-look, and continue to want a wife than to be in our graves.”
“What a pity,” said Adelaide, “that you who love ladies so dearly can’t marry, and that two young ladies can’t have such lovely husbands as you would have been.”
“Good-bye,” said the girls. “Good-bye,” said Chang.
Eng said, “Good-bye, my brother will be back to see you some day.”
“If I come back,” said Chang, “I will leave him behind, because he always monopolizes the conversation of the girl I love best.”
Eng said, “To show that I want to be fair, I will let him take choice of you girls now, and if we get back, the other shall be no less a choice to me.”
Chang chose Adelaide, and they parted joking as the young ladies left.6
Even though Dugger claimed to have known the twins and interviewed their descendants for details about their lives, the above conversation might have been imaginary, judging by the numerous factual errors Dugger made in his book. But it certainly captures the dynamics between the twins, the kind of Click-and-Clack Tappet Brothers humor (“Don’t drive like my brother”), a comic routine Chang and Eng had practiced to perfection in their decade-long performance.
A more reliable account of how the romance began is supplied by Judge Graves, who had befriended the twins for many years. Graves claimed that the twins had first met the Yates girls at Charles Harris’s wedding, when guests came from miles away to enjoy the banquet and celebration in Traphill. The next morning, when everyone was leaving, “Chang observed that a rather handsome young fellow dashed up by the side of Miss Adelaide as she cantered off on the prancing bay; and Eng saw that a rather good looking young Methodist preacher, named Colson, rode more soberly along by the side of Miss Sally [i.e., Sarah]. If any emotion of interest stirred the breast of any of the parties at that time it is one of the unrevealed secrets.”7
It was at this point that the twins began to make what one might describe as more frequent “rutting trips” to the Yates house in Mulberry Creek. As they became more familiar with the Yateses, Graves wrote, “they often devoted much of their time to the young ladies, whom they entertained most agreeably with accounts of their adventures and the amusing scenes they had witnessed—interspersed with very soft, sweet notes on their flutes—melody very greatly admired by the girls who had never heard such instruments before.”8 Like Odysseus returning from his epic journey, these two seasoned globetrotters, who had honed their interpersonal skills in front of millions of faceless strangers, undoubtedly were fascinating interlocutors to the two young women who probably had never ventured beyond the county line. The twins’ charm, aided by their worldwide fame and substantial wealth, proved almost irresistible.
Their obstacles, however, were also nearly insurmountable.
Laws prohibiting marriage and sex between whites and people of color had been in existence since colonial times. In 1691, Virginia passed the first anti-miscegenation law in the colonies, followed by Maryland in 1692 and then by Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and others in the years to come. In North Carolina, a 1741 statute fined any white man or woman who married “an Indian, negro, mustee [octoroon] or mulatto man or woman, or any person of mixed race to the third generation.” A second 1741 statute forbade any cleric or justice of the peace from performing any such marriage. In 1839, just when Chang and Eng arrived in North Carolina, the state assembly, as if anticipating troubles brewing in its northwestern mountains, “took a step to strengthen normative marriage by prohibiting marriage between free persons of color and white persons and by declaring any such marriage already entered into to be null and void.”9 The issue of miscegenation also drew national attention that year when the Massachusetts General Assembly waged a debate over repealing the ban on interracial marriage. The repeal, opposed by the abolitionists, who advocated freedom for blacks but feared racial mixing, failed in the former Bay Colony. It was not until 1967 that the ban on marriage between people of different races was, finally and definitively, ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia. At the time of the ruling, sixteen states still had miscegenation laws on their books.
Legal clarity notwithstanding, reality was murkier. The mere fact that in 1839 the North Carolina state assembly needed to pass a new bill to reinforce the existing prohibition was a clear indication that interracial liaisons must have taken place in spite of the laws. In her book on interracial sex in the nineteenth-century South, Martha Hodes points out that white anxiety about sex between white women and men of color, especially blacks, is not a timeless phenomenon in the United States and that the most virulent racist ideology about black male sexuality eme
rged in the decades that followed the Civil War. In the antebellum era, “white Southerners could respond to sexual liaisons between white women and black men with a measure of toleration; only with black freedom did such liaisons begin to provoke a near-inevitable alarm.” In North Carolina in the 1830s, as Hodes’s research uncovers, “marriage between free people of color and whites was more explicitly prohibited, yet such alliances did not cease.” In a western county, a black man and a white woman had lived together and cohabited as man and wife for a decade before the court voided their union in 1842. In eastern North Carolina, a black man and a white woman had no trouble getting a marriage license from a county clerk in 1840, and the census taker that year recorded the household as consisting of one white female and one free man of color.10
This is not to paint a rosy picture of North Carolina in the 1840s, but only to reveal the gray area where interracial unions were allowed to take place despite state laws and communal sanctions against them. In her study, Hodes draws an important distinction between tolerance and toleration: “Tolerance implies a liberal spirit toward those of a different mind; toleration by contrast suggests a measure of forbearance for that which is not approved.” The latter, not the former, describes white attitudes toward sexual liaisons between men of color and white women in the antebellum South. Yet, as Hodes reminds us, “the phenomenon of toleration, no matter how carefully defined, cannot convey the complexity of responses: white neighbors judged harshly, gossiped viciously, and could completely ostracize the transgressing white woman.”11 These were the racial dynamics and communal forces at work when Chang and Eng courted the Yates sisters with their globetrotting tales and tintinnabulating flute notes.
Just as the twins obtained citizenship by benefiting from the invisibility of Chinese as a racial category, they might also have been able to circumvent marriage laws by jumping through the same loophole. In US Census Bureau documents, Chang and Eng, like many Chinese at the time, were—given the white–black hierarchy—considered “honorary” whites. Even in 1870, when “C” had been created as a catchall category for Chinese and all Asians on the US census, Chang and Eng were still recorded as being white by the census takers. But what is recorded on paper can have very little bearing on how people really feel about race. Chang and Eng were Asian in the eyes of Wilkes County residents, no matter what the census taker decided to put on the form. So we are back to square one, to the question: Would the white sisters marry these Asian men? In the words of Judge Graves, the initial difficulty the twins encountered in their courtship came not from the fact that these prospective husbands were attached at the liver, but from the “ineradicable prejudice against their race and nationality.”12 Even if the girls were tempted by the twins’ advances, their father was appalled by the prospect of marrying his two daughters to two swarthy Chinese who, to make matters worse, were freaks.
Over the years, newspapers had now and then published idle speculation and made a farce out of rumors about Chang and Eng’s romantic intrigues. The very first of such reports came when they arrived in England in 1829. As previously quoted, the twins were portrayed as being innocently flirtatious with the hotel chambermaid in London. From that period, there was also the story about a British society woman named Sophie, who was enamored of one of the twins but had to give up her amorous designs because of the fear of bigamy. In November 1834, a rumor surfaced again, according to the Mobile [Alabama] Register and the Baltimore Patriot, that “the Siamese Twins have had a falling out with each other, and that a duel would have ensued sometime since, but the parties could not agree upon the distance. The quarrel originated from the interference of Chang, in a love intrigue of his twin brother Eng.” But other newspapers soon disputed the claim and tried to set the record straight, as did the Pittsfield [Massachusetts] Sun: “The Siamese Twins are at Columbia, S.C. The report that they had quarreled about a love affair turns out to be ‘a weak invention of the enemy.’ ” Or, as the New Hampshire Sentinel put it, “Chang and Eng are still good friends, though some malicious people did report that Chang had a love affair on hand which he wished to conceal from Eng.” In December 1836, the Portsmouth [New Hampshire] Journal reported: “One of the Siamese Twins is said to have fallen in love with a young lady at Wilmington, Del. She likes Chang well enough, but objects to marrying both.” A few months later, in February 1837, the New Hampshire Sentinel, quoting other sources, claimed that the twins “flatly deny the story, which some mischievous persons have put in circulation, respecting their having fallen in love with the same young lady, and fought a duel at ten paces. Eng says he wishes to marry, but he cannot, without the consent of his brother, who is inclined to a life of a single blessedness.” The latest, and most farcical, update on this front came out in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on June 6, 1838, claiming that one of the twins would marry “Miss Afong Moy, the little Chinese lady,” a popular exhibition at New York’s Peale Museum, where she had often shared the stage with the twins since her debut in 1834. “The happy bridegroom,” the newspaper added, “had invited his brother to stand up with him and act as groomsman.”13
Many of these reports were nothing but tabloid pabulum concocted by editors to sell papers at the expense of the twins’ perceived monstrosity. But it is true that the twins, despite their abnormality, had always pursued an interest in women, as any heterosexual men would. Based on what the twins later recalled for interviewers, the mythical Sophia from the London days might have been real. Nor did their dalliance with the British chambermaid sound too far-fetched. Completely different from visitors who came and went in public, maids or daughters of innkeepers were the only members of the opposite sex the twins could meet for an extended period in a more intimate setting. Their ledger reveals expenses on gifts apparently for these women. For instance, on August 5, 1833, they spent $1.50 on a ring as a present, romantic or not, for one Caroline Scovill, daughter of the hotel owner in Cleveland, Philo Scovill. Though she was not the romantic interest for the twins, Fanny Harris (née Baugus), if we recall, was the charming daughter of the boardinghouse keeper in Traphill.
And then there was Catherine Bunker, daughter of a New York businessman, with whom Chang had allegedly fallen in love. According to some biographers, Chang had such a lingering crush on her that when the twins later had to adopt an official surname, they chose “Bunker.” Moreover, when Chang drew up his first will, he even named Catherine, by then married to someone else, as his major heir.14 Also, in early 1832, about the time they turned twenty-one, Chang and Eng had tried to use their former manager, James Hale, as an intermediary in their wooing of a young lady in the Northeast. They sent her at least two letters via Hale, who mocked them as “my old stick-in-the-mud rapscallions” and tried to boost their morale when she failed to reply: “Don’t be uneasy my dear fellows for I expect the former letter must have miscarried—and no doubt the last will be shortly answered.”15
None of these romantic capers, real or fictional, had been taken seriously by the press or the twins’ associates. They only helped to pique interest in the freak show, inviting the public to visualize the conjoined twins in a fool’s errand of wooing a single damsel. As long as they played the part of fools, the twins could be celebrated and ridiculed as carnival clowns, and expressions of their carnal desire, genuine or contrived, only further spiced up the comedy. But now, at the foot of the Blue Ridge, the carnival play was about to become a reality—to the horror of the peering and cheering crowd.
Earnest as they were, the twins were no fools regarding the mountainous hurdle facing them in the matter of matrimony. The five-inch ligament that connected them would stop any maiden dead in her tracks. A bedroom dialogue between the twins after their meeting with the Yates girls, a sort of chest-baring in the dark, is dramatized by Shepherd Dugger in his biography:
Chang said to Eng, “We will keep in touch with those girls, for they think more of us than we are thought of by all else in America.”
“Maybe you are mistaken,�
�� said Eng. “It was only a show acquaintance, and they did not want to render things unpleasant by bluffing our familiarity.”
“It was more than that,” said Chang. “I felt the thrill of their sympathy deep down in my soul. Maybe they will marry us.”
“Marrying with us is a forlorn hope,” said Eng. “No modest girl is apt to marry, where the pleasures of her bridal bed would be exposed, as ours would have to be.”
Chang, always more the go-getter of the pair, would not accept Eng’s defeatism. And he saw a reason to remain hopeful.
“Brother, you see it wrong,” said Chang. “It is the refined (and those only) who can excuse whatever is necessary to become a mother. We are not responsible for our physical condition, and we should not have to die childless on that account. We will see again, the dear girls who talked so good to us today, and, through their love we may have children to carry our blood and image in the world, when we and their mothers have gone to the Glory Land.”