—
Like so many cases involving unexplained phenomena, there is no satisfying resolution to Cloretta’s story.
The stigmata did not return during Easter 1973, just a “completely unsubstantiated report of one observer who claimed to have seen blood on one of her hands on one occasion . . .”46 The following year a church service was held in Cloretta’s honor on Palm Sunday with a benefit to raise money for her college education; she might have had a brief episode of bleeding on Good Friday, but in 1975 the phenomenon returned with its former intensity.
Services were just beginning at New Light Baptist on March 16, 1975, when thirteen-year-old Cloretta walked down the aisle to show her hand to the Rev. Hester. He turned her bleeding palm toward the congregation, and “[t]hey were so stunned, the pastor said, that it took 15 minutes for the people to regain their composure, so he could continue with the service.”47
After three years, Alice Robertson seemed calmer about her daughter’s peculiarity. Maybe she relaxed when the doctors decided it was not caused by a mental or physical illness, nor had it worsened. The stigmata were essentially a seasonal problem, something like hay fever, though there had reportedly been episodes during the summer as well (it would be interesting to know which books her daughter was reading, or what movies she saw, at the time). The press was invited to the Robertson home the next day (March 17), and when Cloretta’s palm started bleeding at 11:20 A.M., they took pictures.
She appeared in the Oakland Tribune again on March 22, 1975, but this time it was on the page for church advertisements. There, among announcements for the Salvation Army’s Citadel Songsters, and a Drive-In Worship Center at the Appian 80 Shopping Center, is an ad for the “Youth Supernatural End-Time Revival” presented by the East Oakland Faith Deliverance Center and New Light Baptist Church; it is illustrated with a photograph of Cloretta displaying the palm of her left hand. The copy includes a brief history of her stigmata and promises:
Supernatural Happenings at East Oakland Deliverance Center
Mass miracle healing services nightly. Bring the sick, troubled, the dope addict and the possessed, and depressed. Come expecting a miracle, for God will be moving by His spirit.
Furthermore:
Cloretta Starks will be present in each service.
(Healing gets a passing mention from the doctors, but Cloretta and the Rev. Hester emphasize it.)
She reportedly bled from all six sites again on Good Friday, 1975, but by then reporting about her stigmata had become routine, and the Rev. Hester had more to say about the revival, which reportedly attracted crowds of around 1,200. Cloretta bled during all but two of the meetings, and “miracle healings were claimed almost every night.”48
Though she now used the name Starks, being a headliner at religious revivals does not seem to have changed Cloretta any more than the media attention. She was an eighth-grader whose favorite subject was math, she enjoyed sports, and, as might be expected in someone who sees “her life as dedicated to relieving suffering in others,” she was planning to become a registered nurse.49
For the next two years, Cloretta appeared at the Youth Supernatural End-Time Revival and the stigmata returned at Easter time, usually during services at New Light Baptist Church. It might have become an annual event, but after 1977, when Mrs. Robertson told the Oakland Tribune that fifteen-year-old Cloretta’s “health and spirits are good and that the girl has seen a doctor about the recurrence of the bleeding,” the stories seem to stop.50
This may be a failure of research, but the lack of follow-ups or “where are they now” articles has led to speculation about her subsequent life.
Wounded
In Claudia Mair Burney’s novel, Wounded: A Love Story, a priest tells the story of “Cloretta of Oakland, California” to a twenty-four-year-old black woman with stigmata. The events of 1972 are recounted more or less accurately before considering what might have happened afterward.
The next Easter her family watched her carefully, but it never happened again. Or if it did, they didn’t let on, and I can’t blame them for that. She was a kid. You protect the defenseless.
Cloretta Robinson [sic] drifted into obscurity. Like the high school I wrote about years ago, few people cared about a black juvenile stigmatic. But sometimes I wonder what became of the little girl who was marked with the passion wounds of Christ one Eastertide. I imagine she wondered why she was chosen, questioned both her sanity and sanctity, and maybe when she was older, and those years were from her, she wondered if she made the whole thing up.
Then again, she could have died young, and her family let her rest in peace without the stain of stigmata to prick her eternal rest. Or perhaps she lived the rest of her life quietly healing the suffering and alleviating the pain of others through her prayers, knowing God so loved the ghetto, that he gave his only begotten Son, and left His mark on Cloretta to prove it.51
In fact, she still lives near Oakland, but what Burney calls a drift into obscurity might be someone who successfully reclaimed her privacy.
The Normalest Stigmatic
Cloretta is an anomaly among stigmatics. Beyond its unexpected appearance on someone of her age, race, and religion, there is a gulf of normality separating her from other cases. While they lay in bed bleeding on the sheets and radiating sanctity, Cloretta played basketball. (In fact, some stigmatics are not holy invalids. Father James Bruse, pastor of St. Frances de Sales Church at Kilmarnock, Virginia, is an active clergyman who experienced bleeding from 1991 to 1993 along with a variety of other phenomena. He is also a three-time world record holder for marathon roller-coaster riding.52 )
What became of her? When considering Cloretta Starks, it may be best to look for ordinary motivations. The bleeding could have stopped, she may have fallen in love, or perhaps identifying with St. Francis of Assisi drew her toward the Roman Catholic Church; one can imagine how its saints, mystics, and martyrs would appeal to a religious adolescent with bleeding palms.
Perhaps she simply went back to being “Cocoa,” an unremarkable woman who goes to church with a layer of absorbent gauze under her immaculate white gloves. Just in case.
The Four Wild Men of Dr. Dedge
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When Judge Braswell D. Deen Jr., retired head of the Georgia Court of Appeals, was young, he had a memorable face-to-face encounter with a wild man on the streets of Alma, Georgia.1
I was about twelve years old, working at Quality Cash Store, sometimes called Greenways Grocery Store, in Alma, Ga. The store was located on the main street, 12th St. It was in the middle 30s. I was inside the store when we heard a large noise and growl coming down the street.
We went outside and saw a pickup truck, which came by pulling a two-wheel cart containing a large cage containment with prisonlike bars; the wild man was inside roaring. As I remember, Albert Douglas, who was my boss, was laughing and said, there goes Dr. Dedge and his wild man . . . I actually saw and witnessed this, which was scary at my young age.2
Seeing a howling black man with two horns growing out of his head made an impression on Judge Deen, but who was Dr. Dedge, who was in the cage, and why were they driving around Georgia?
The answer involves economics, entertainment, folklore, science, and pseudoscience, all of which contributed to the creation of the “Okefenokee Wild Man.”
Compound Beings
Human-animal hybrids have occupied an important place in our imaginations since at least the Paleolithic Age, when a deer-headed man with a rack of antlers and tail was painted on the walls of the cave of Trois Frères cave at Ariège, France. The figure, dubbed “Le Sorcier,” is first in a procession of extraordinary beings that continues today. Discoveries made on the island of Flores in 2003 prove that a “hybrid” of ape and human was not imaginary just eighteen thousand years ago, yet even without Homo floresiensis, every society has its beast-men and they
serve a variety of purposes: gods (Pan), heroes (Enkidu), symbols of the wilderness (woodwoses), and uncataloged species of primates (Bigfoot), each of which reflects a somewhat different worldview.
Science, of course, has been shaping the Western outlook since the eighteenth century, and while cartographers stopped labeling unexplored sections of the map “here be monsters,” explorers and settlers kept encountering them. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced many reports of primitive, not quite human, beings, and these were incorporated into new intellectual frameworks such as medicine or anthropology.
Where a medieval traveler might have returned from Africa with tales of Ethiopian unicorn men, the Victorian Army surgeon wrote an article titled “Horned Men on Africa: Further Particulars of Their Existence” for the December 10, 1887, issue of the British Medical Journal, in which he describes three unrelated West Africans with the same remarkable “well-marked bony exostosis or knob-like growth of the infra-orbital ridges of the maxillary bones,” a kind of crossbeam between the nostrils and eyes.
Likewise, when Col. Percy Fawcett was passing through Brazil’s Cordilheira dos Parecis in 1914, he encountered the Maricoxi, a tribe of “large, hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and with foreheads sloping back from pronounced eye ridges, men of a very primitive kind, in fact, and stark naked.” For naturalist Ivan Sanderson, the Maricoxi were not a mystery but living representatives of a “neanderthaloid-type Submen living in the Matto Grosso.”3 Nor were beings like these restricted to distant and exotic places; American newspapers were once filled with accounts of “wild men.”
It was a catchall term applied to lunatics, hermits, and monsters, whether it was the 1883 sighting at Morganville, Georgia, of someone with “a sack round his head” who “has been seen to eat dead animals and wraps himself in horse hide” or the man captured swimming from island to island in Georgia’s Ocheecee Swamp, “destitute of clothing, emaciated, and covered with a phenomenal growth of hair.”4 There were also beings like the “wild man of Lookout Point,” which would now be called “Bigfoot.” The witness, a “reliable gentleman,” said it stood “about 7 or 71/2 feet high, hairy as an old bear, and would weigh, from his looks, 400 pounds; had a pole in one hand that looked to be about ten feet long, which he handles as easy as a stout healthy man would a pipestem. His name was asked, and the answer came in the shape of a large stone, which weighed at least 100 pounds.”5
Wild men fascinated the public, and exhibitors from P. T. Barnum to the proprietor of the lowliest mud show, set out to satisfy that curiosity for the price of a ticket.
At the Sideshow
The sideshow’s heyday lasted 110 years (1840–1950), and for ten of those eleven decades they were a staple of “dime museums, circuses, fairs, amusement parks, and carnivals.”6 Wild people were usually “pitshows,” in which members of the audience:
entered a tent with an eight by ten foot diameter enclosure in the center in which they could walk around. Down in the pit would be the wild person, moaning and snarling at the spectators. If there were snakes in the pit, the wild person might poke at them to provoke hissing sounds.7
Looking into the hole, visitors saw a dark-skinned and dirty savage with protruding fangs and long matted hair, dressed in rags, or an animal skin, with maybe some bone ornaments. Wild people ate raw meat or, in the lowest kinds of exhibits, bit the heads off live animals (“glomming geeks”), but most shows relied on the wild man’s acting ability.
They were a popular, if modest, attraction that had little in common with the original sideshow wild men discovered:
In the Island of Borneo, beneath an Eastern sky
Just under the Equator, with mountains towering high,
Where roves the wild Ouran-Outang, Gorilla and Malay,
And beasts of fiercest nature are watching for their prey . . .8
Like most wild people, they were captured by a group of armed men after a gory and dramatic struggle and then brought to civilization, where “Waino” and “Plutano,” the “Wild Men of Borneo,” first appeared on stage around 1850.
The pair stood three and a half feet tall and weighed forty-five pounds each (their tombstone at Mound View Cemetery, Mt. Vernon, Ohio, reads “LITTLE MEN”), yet these “Modern Sampsons [sic]” lifted heavy weights and even members of the audience, spoke gibberish, and recited poetry to demonstrate how civilization had lifted them above their former barbarous condition.9 They were, in fact, American brothers named Hiram (1825–1905) and Barney (1827–1912) Davis, whose size, strength, and goatlike, bearded faces suggested a blurring of boundaries between man and beast that became more pronounced in future wild men influenced by the popularity of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859.
Darwin’s book made concepts like evolution and natural selection part of Western thinking and added a scientific gloss to wild people. Someone like Krao Farini, a Thai woman with hypertrichosis (excessive growth of hair) was not just advertised as strange or exotic but as a scientifically important “missing link,” “Darwin’s Human Monkey.”
Likewise, posters for the most famous wild man, “Zip the Pinhead” or the “What-Is-It?” called him the “connecting link between the WILD NATIVE AFRICAN AND THE ORANG OUTANG,” with handbills claiming that he was captured in Africa by “a party of adventurers . . . in search of the Gorilla” and his “natural position was ON ALL FOURS.”10 Zip was William Henry Johnson of New Jersey and he had a strangely shaped head, but where the Wild Men of Borneo were fair complexioned, Johnson was black, and that agreed with the popular equating of dark skin with primitiveness.
Myths and Melanin
The origin of Western racial attitudes are too complex for this short history, but it includes the belief that nonwhites were created before Adam (Pre-Adamites) and a belief in polygenism, which is the separate creation of each race in ways suitable for their own part of the world. Perhaps the most influential idea, however, was the Great Chain of Being.
Beginning with Aristotle, and elaborated by classical, medieval, and Renaissance philosophers, the Great Chain of Being is a concept of the universe that dominated European and American thought until the eighteenth century and remained influential for considerably longer. The Great Chain of Being conceives of everything in the universe, both spiritual and material, as “linked” to the Creator through intermediate forms.
God is at the top of a scala naturae (“ladder” or “stairway of nature”), followed in descending order by angels, humans, animals, plants, the four elements, and minerals; dust or sand is at the bottom, and then nothingness. Every position is filled and every being’s place in the hierarchy immutably fixed by its ratio of spirit to matter; more spirit means a higher position closer to God, with greater abilities and intelligence, and wielding authority over those beneath them. Large categories like humankind contain numerous subdivisions, so that kings and queens are superior to commoners, and the white race higher than blacks. Some argued that primitive groups like Bushmen, Hottentots (Khoikoin), and Australian Aboriginals were not even humble kinds of people, but higher forms of ape.
The persistence of these ideas is evident in books like Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900), in which Adam and Eve are progenitors of the white race “[i]n direct line of kinship with God” and scriptural arguments are used for expelling “the negro from his present unnatural position in the family of man, and the resumption of his proper place among the ape.”11 Like the Great Chain of Being, in which superiors rule over inferiors, the black man was “created with articulate speech and hands that he may be of service to his master—the White man,” but Carroll does not rely solely on religion and brings in the findings of “race science.”12
Anthropology, taxonomy, and other disciplines had devised human pecking orders based on different aspects of anatomy, especially “facial angles” (i.e., prognathism) and cranial capacity: calculating intelligence by the size and s
hape of brains (measuring heads was considered so important that museums acquired enormous collections of skulls). The dimensions of different races’ skulls were tabulated, and researchers created painstakingly detailed charts showing the similarities between blacks and apes. Scientific racism, like racism based on religion, was used to justify slavery, colonialism, and antimiscegenation laws, with eugenicists decrying racial mixing and the resulting “feebleness and perishableness of the Mulatto.”13 The idea that blacks were somewhere between human and animal is reflected in the race of most sideshow wild men, but there were other desirable qualities such as ugliness (notoriously unattractive Brooklyn mobster Louis “Pretty” Amberg bragged about being offered a job as a wild man) or physical peculiarities like claws, fur, or horns, that could be portrayed as nonhuman.
The ideal candidate was probably black, ugly, a reasonably good performer, and a freak of nature, but if someone like that could not be found, they could be made.
Dentist and Doc
Much of this history takes place at, or around, the towns of Alma, Nicholls, and Waycross, Georgia. The area is north of Okefenokee Swamp, reputed home of several different monsters, including a thirteen-foot-tall “Man Mountain” who twisted the heads off five hunters before being gunned down in 1829, and “Pig Man,” a local version of Florida’s Skunk Ape; the eccentric wild men mentioned earlier are from all over the state, but whether these stories influenced Dr. Dedge, or his creation of the Okefenokee Wild Man, is unknown.14
The Dedge family came from France (D’Edge), and John R. Dedge was born at Baxley, Georgia, on March 11, 1865, one month before Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He married in 1886 and graduated from the Southern Medical College in 1890 as a doctor of dental surgery.
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 7