by Yunte Huang
32
The Last Radiance of the Setting Sun
Death is the black camel that kneels unbid at every gate.
—Charlie Chan
Friday night, January 16, 1874, was bitter cold. The field was frozen, pines crusted with snow, junipers lacquered with ice. The mountain air, moving heavily like an invisible glacier, cut the skin like a sharp blade. The Cherokee called the month of January Unolvtana, “windblown.” There was no moon in the sky; it was the penultimate day of the lunar month.
Eng’s house stood quietly on the icy farm, looking from afar like a desolate bird’s nest abandoned on a barren tree. In the parlor, the conjoined brothers sat on a double chair in front of the fireplace. Chang was coughing, complaining of cold. All day he had been in a foul mood, sullen, sulky, and snappy. Eng tried his best to humor his peevish brother, but his patience began to wear thin. The room was too hot for him. Tossing another log into the fire, Eng might have cursed under his breath. Nothing could escape his brother, whether a wordless mumble or even a fleeting fancy. There was such telepathy between the twins. Chang snapped, struggling to get up. Eng angrily pulled him down by the sheer weight of his own body and the resilience of their connective band. He reminded Chang whose house this was—it was Eng’s; and by the rule of the agreement to which they had steadfastly adhered all these years, his brother would have to defer to Eng’s wish in everything. Chang whimpered like an injured dog.1
ENG’S HOUSE, WHERE THE TWINS DIED
Many writers have tried to imagine this unusual scene, when one twin is sick while the other remains well. William Linn Keese, a witty poet of mediocre repute, would write about it in a poem published in 1902:
Suppose, for a moment, Chang were ill,
And felt like remaining perfectly still,
And Eng felt splendidly, au contraire,
And of all things wanted to take the air—
How would they fix it! Why Eng, of course,
Must stick to his brother’s side, perforce,
And hear him fret and murmur and groan,
And see pills and powders down him thrown—
Be dragged off finally, willy-nilly,
To bed at an hour absurdly silly,
And lie there, trying to sleep in vain,
With thoughts that were certainly most profane.2
Comedy aside, there were rumors of sibling squabbling, which allegedly had turned violent at times. Chang’s addiction to the bottle not only had ruined his health but also made him more irritable, becoming a nuisance to his brother and turning their connecting band into a virtual thorn in Eng’s side. Kay Hunter, in Duet for a Lifetime, mentions one occasion when the two got into an argument, with an inebriated Chang throwing a featherbed on the fire.3 Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace also describe one particularly bitter quarrel between the brothers, “during which one of them, probably Chang, pulled a knife and shouted, ‘I’m going to cut your gut out!’ ” Eng dragged his brother to Dr. Hollingsworth, their family physician, and begged him to separate them at once.4 Though fictional, Mark Twain’s humorous sketch, “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins,” published in 1869, five years before Chang and Eng’s demise, might also contain a nugget of truth in its description of the brotherly brawl: “Upon one occasion the brothers fell out about something, and Chang knocked Eng down, and then tripped and fell on him, whereupon both clinched and began to beat and gouge each other without mercy. The bystanders interfered and tried to separate them, but they could not do it, and so allowed them to fight it out. In the end both were disabled, and were carried to the hospital on one and the same shutter.”5 In fact, the twins had indeed gotten into a fistfight in 1845 and were hauled into court for disturbing the peace. The presiding judge, Jesse Graves, whose unpublished biography of the twins I have drawn upon, gave us the final word on the outcome of this earlier fracas: “Mr. Lee Reeves, then county attorney, sent a bill for an affray against them which was returned a true bill. They appeared at the next term of the court and submitted to be fined; and as they had become entirely reconciled and were as friendly with each other as they had once been the court imposed only a nominal fee.”6
Curiously, the extant version of Judge Graves’s manuscript, kept at the State Archives of North Carolina, ends abruptly, indicating that pages may be missing, pages that might shed more light on the relationship between the twins during their final days. Instead, we find a postscript in a woman’s handwriting that reads:
Eng’s treatment of his brother was very kind and forebearing [sic] during all the long period of his sickness, showing great tenderness and affection for him and endeavoring by every means in his power to alleviate his suffering. His kindness was received with the warmest appreciation by Chang, whose disposition was very different from the morose, ill nature so falsely ascribed to him.7
This postscript, apparently intended to dispel rumors about bad blood between the seemingly companionable twins, raises more questions than answers.
Whatever the truth, the twilight years of the world-famous Siamese Twins presented a bleak picture, almost as gloomy as that of the South, mired in the protracted and painful Reconstruction. After receiving a grim prognosis from the British doctors, Kate, Eng’s firstborn, never recovered her health. She died in 1871 at twenty-seven, plunging the conjoined Bunker households into the depths of mourning. As the Chinese would say, “Misfortune never travels alone.” Nannie, Kate’s confidant and travel companion in Great Britain, contracted the same disease and soon, like her cousin, fell victim to tuberculosis. (Ironically, Nannie would outlive the twins only by a month.) Two other Bunker children, Louisa and Jesse, being deaf and mute from birth, had been sent to the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind in Raleigh, far from home. Pushing sixty, the twins themselves had become hard of hearing—Chang in both ears and Eng in his left, the one closer to Chang, as if he would not need it to hear what his twin brother had to say while keeping his right ear tuned to the world, listening on behalf of both. What the world was saying, however, perturbed them.
As they slowly lost their appeal as curiosities, the twins seemed to become more desperate. Throughout their performing career, they had always taken pride in the fact that they were never part of a circus. But in 1870, they were booked for a three-week stint at a German circus in Berlin. For that trip, they took along Eng’s twenty-one-year-old son James and Chang’s twelve-year-old son Albert. Their appearance at the Circus Renz on Friedrichstrasse, in the momentous year of German unification and on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, was a traumatizing ordeal for them, akin perhaps to France’s impending ignominious defeat by Germany. Every night for three weeks, after a high-wire act, clowns, and bareback riders, the brassy circus band’s fanfare brought out the Siamese Twins as the highlight of the night. As a sympathetic observer later recalled, “Two aging men trotted out on the podium, cavorted and bowed, and instead of being greeted with applause they were met with laughter. . . . The two seam-faced, sixty-year-old men, stiffly, awkwardly moving about, seemed ridiculous in this carnival atmosphere. . . . It was pathetic that they had to perform in this undignified manner and in this place. What might have been charming and amusing when they were younger now appeared infinitely sad.” In the words of another writer, “They had lost their vigour, and were two elderly men, with the result that their performance had become merely freakish and tasteless. Behind their pleasant, but now wrinkled smiles, and their stiffer bows lay fear in their eyes, and a hatred of those who came to stare and deride.” Even though they could not hear well, the guffawing faces of the audience, like stony gargoyles, turned the whole scene into a mime, one in which the whole world ridiculed them silently and mercilessly.8
As soon as their Berlin engagement was over, they wanted to move on to tsarist Russia and then France, to strike out again on their own, as they had used to do when they were young. But on July 19, 1870, France declared war on Germany, putting an end to the twins’ European dream and, unbeknownst to them, to
their career as performers.
As described in the prologue of this book, the twins and their sons boarded the Palmyra on July 30 in Liverpool and started their homeward journey. On the steamer, they played a game of chess with Edward James Roye, an American expatriate and son of a fugitive slave, newly elected president of Liberia. The game ended abruptly when Chang suffered a stroke and became paralyzed on the left side of his body. Years of hard drinking had finally caught up with him. Even though Eng, a teetotaler but an addict of late-night poker, was still healthy, the two became bedridden for the remainder of the voyage.
After the twins arrived back home, and while they convalesced, bad news reached them concerning President Roye in Liberia. The railroad funds he had tried to raise in America never materialized. The usurious loan the London bankers had forced upon his country went bad and subsequently doomed his presidency. In October 1871, one year after his chess game with the twins, Roye’s political enemies staged a coup d’état, and he was killed by an angry mob that dragged his naked body through the streets of Monrovia. Upon Roye’s death, mayhem and violence continued for sixty days in the capital city—named after James Monroe, one of the architects of the American dream of liberty for blacks.9
During those turbulent months, the twins would enjoy sitting on the porch on fine days, in their double elm chair, under the shadow of the Blue Ridge. Often they would read, rather than lollygag or whittle, as their fellow Southerners were wont to do. They were avid readers; ever since they had set foot in the Western Hemisphere and learned to read and write, they were always eager to acquire new words and embrace books, reading anything they could get their hands on—newspapers, farmer’s almanacs, encyclopedias, and, best of all, literature. On long winter nights by the fireplace or cool summer afternoons on the porch, they would each pick something to read, or share a book by reading aloud to each other. They had read Alexander Pope at least ten times because Eng was partial to this semi-invalid English master for his writing about the conjoined Hungarian Sisters who shared a single pair of legs. If that Missouri boy Samuel Clemens had published Pudd’nhead Wilson a bit earlier, they would have loved the story about those extraordinary Italian twins, who also walked around with only one pair of legs, and they certainly did not mind his caricature of them in that humorous sketch; it was all for good fun.
Now that Chang was not well, Eng would read everything for him.
In the local papers, they came across disturbing news about the rioting mobs in faraway Liberia and reports about the death of President Roye. They were no strangers to mobs, whether a crowd of gawkers packing an exhibition hall or an angry throng taunting them with accusations of “fraud.” Several times they had even got into fistfights, tables turned over, chairs flying. But Roye’s death grieved and infuriated the twins. As much as they had disagreed with him over the evils of slavery—a topic cautiously broached and then quickly dropped during their conversation aboard the Palmyra—they liked Roye, because he was, like them, a self-made man. They recalled Roye’s words, as the former Negro barber-turned-president of a free nation told them his life story. Roye explained why he had left America: “I have steadily had mind fixed upon a foreign land since early youth, a land of African government; for there I believed our elevation would take place.”10 Those were the words of a man pursuing his dream, seeking freedom and liberty in spite of who he was. But what is freedom, and what is liberty, after which Liberia was named?
Inside their house, lying on the mantel above the fireplace, next to Pope, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and John Fleetwood’s Life of Christ, was a tattered copy of George Crabb’s Dictionary of General Knowledge. It was the first book they had ever owned, given to them as a gift during their first visit to London in 1830, when they were still learning their ABCs. In that dictionary, where they had seen for the first time half-nude pictures of women, all goddesses of Greek and Roman mythologies, the word liberty was defined as “a privilege by which men enjoy some favour or benefit beyond the ordinary subject.”11 That definition puzzled them. Their experience with the real meaning of the word had been a bag full of ironies. And irony hardly has any place in a dictionary. They had been sold into slavery by their loving mother, later managed to free themselves and became their own men, and then they bought and owned slaves. In fact, when Roye asked offhandedly, while moving a piece on the chessboard, whether they had ever whipped their slaves, the genial chat ended abruptly. The penny press had reported that the twins were hard on their slaves, prone to using the lash without mercy. Some even claimed, falsely or truthfully, that they had once rewarded a bounty hunter for having shot and killed one of their runaway slaves, and that they bet and traded Negroes during card games. They would not deign to comment on whether or not those rumors contained a kernel of truth. The populace, attracted to a Manichaean tendency that shunned half-tints, liked to reduce the river of human variations to diametric opposites: good vs. evil, master vs. slave, victimizer vs. victim. Those people could not stand, or understand, the gray zone of humanity, a treacherous terrain of ambiguity where an exchange of roles between oppressor and victim constantly occurred.12 P. T. Barnum, that Connecticut Yankee, a character the twins otherwise loathed with their guts, rightly called those people “suckers.” The truth, as Chang and Eng insisted proudly, was something between them and their Maker.
On this winter night of January 16, 1874, the twins again thought of President Roye, their shipboard acquaintance. They had tried not to read too much into that encounter on the Palmyra, but it was, in fact, the beginning of their decline, because after Chang became ill during their chess game, he had never fully recovered.
Earlier on Monday, January 12, Chang had suffered from a bout of bronchitis, coughing and wheezing. The doctor was called in, and Chang was better the next day and the day after that. Come Thursday, it was time to move to Eng’s house, according to their three-day rotation schedule. Considering Chang’s condition and the doctor’s advice to stay indoors and keep warm, Eng suggested that perhaps they should break the rule for once and stay put. Chang, however, was adamant about leaving, refusing to let illness or weather stop him from taking the one-mile ride. Besides, he insisted, they were in his house; therefore, he could decide what they should or should not do. Eng had no choice but to get ready for the move.
They rode in an open carriage, as they always did. Chang donned extra clothes and wrapped himself in a horse blanket. Eng drove the horse over the rough and frozen road, Chang clinging on to him like the baby brother he was. Bouncing and huddling together on this coldest day of winter, as frost covered everything, white as the ashes they remembered from their father’s funeral, they suddenly felt closer than ever before. Momentarily, they forgot about the cold, wishing they could go on forever, as they had used to do on the open road of this country they were happy to call home.
Upon arriving at Eng’s house, Chang started coughing again. The lack of alcohol at his brother’s house, a deliberate choice, made it even harder for him to cope with the worsening of his condition. He turned nasty, indigent, and snappy. Eng built a fire in the parlor and sat with his brother in front of the fireplace for a long time, until Chang felt a bit better and was sleepy enough to go to bed.
The next morning, Friday, Chang seemed fine when he woke up. Apparently it was, as the Chinese say, hui guang fan zhao (the last radiance of the setting sun). The ray of hope quickly dimmed after the twins got up. Having been away from his home for three days, Eng needed to take care of some routine business, but dragging a cachectic and disgruntled Chang around the house was like trying to swim with a dead weight tied around his neck. Chang only became worse. According to a report later provided by the Philadelphia Medical Times, Chang complained by nightfall of a severe pain in the chest, and “so much distress that he thought he should have died.” Eng coaxed him into turning in early, but only for a short while. Chang, however, could not fall asleep, his breathing becoming increasingly stertorous. Tossing and turning, he constantly had to sit
up in bed, claiming that “it would kill him to lie down.” Because of their conjoinment, Eng, of course, had to do everything in tandem. If Chang wanted to turn over in bed, Eng would have to roll over the top of his brother and move to the other side, and vice versa. And if Chang had to sit up, so would Eng. Because of Chang’s restlessness, Eng, too, was now exhausted.13
At some point, the twins got up and went out to the porch to have a drink of water. On a moonless night, it was pitch dark. Yet beyond the light of the gasoline lantern, they could sense the dark presence of the Blue Ridge in the distance. The stillness of the night was unsettling. Even the wind had died.
Refreshed by the cold water and frozen air, they returned to bed. Soon Chang roused Eng again and said he was too cold. He wanted to go to the parlor and start a fire. Eng refused at first, saying that it would be warmer to stay in bed than to sit by the fire at such an ungodly hour. But Chang persisted, and Eng, always the more thoughtful of the two, obliged, even though this was his house and he could decide on everything. They hobbled to the parlor, like those Italian twins conjoined by a single pair of legs. Eng started a fire and again sat with his brother in the double chair. Even though the fire toasted Eng like a loaf of bread, Chang still shivered and whimpered, a leaf clinging to a limb.
Thankfully, perhaps out of sheer exhaustion, Chang finally dozed off, and Eng managed to drag both of them back to bed.
In the wee hours of January 17, the family heard a scream that might have come from the twins’ bedroom. Or was it just someone’s nightmare? The house fell quiet again. No one stirred until dawn cracked open a chink in the eggshell of the dark, frozen world. One of Eng’s sons got up and went to check on his father and his uncle. Holding up a lamp, the boy saw the ashen face of Chang and said to his father, “Uncle Chang is dead.”