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3 LABOR AND OWNERSHIP IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH A฀ complex history looms behind the exhibition of unusual bodies for monetary profit. Susan Schweik’s account of unsightly beggar ordinances in the United States, colloquially known as “ugly laws,” shows how disability and class disadvantage have repeatedly converged from the late nineteenth century onwards. People with sensory impairments, amputations, and other disabilities have had to negotiate legislative measures taken against them to prevent their appearance in public spaces. These actions on the part of state authorities both reflected and informed popular opinions about the nature of work and self-sufficiency. Although the sphere of ritualized performance seemed to legitimate the labor of entertainers employed by sideshows, carnivals, and circuses, the organic and spontaneous appearance of beggars on public streets called into question all forms of conspicuously brandished anatomy . Whether these incidents took place in show business or on the sidewalk, “both were reduced to examples of disgusting bodily display.”1 The already porous line between the agency of the working body and appeals to charity on the part of the “nonworking” poor is blurred even more when transposing Schweik’s class-based analysis onto existing scholarship about the history of the sideshow. Schweik goes on to clarify that “unsightly begging was work.”2 The class advantage that Chang and Eng Bunker amassed during their career, then, is tinged with these troublings of laboring selfhood and property ownership. These Enlightenment-era ideals, in turn, are every bit as much about race as they are about class when it comes to the logic of material gain in the display of socially troubling bodies. In 1835, a young man named Phineas Taylor Barnum purchased an elderly enslaved woman from her previous owner who had been exhibiting her with 1 16 Chapter 1 declining success. Despite his predecessor’s difficulties, the emerging business tycoon was able to turn this human curiosity around through shrewd and aggressive marketing.3 The woman, Joice Heth—rumored to be 161 years old and a former nursemaid to George Washington—was blind, almost completely deaf, and had very little physical mobility. As she toured all across the antebellum Northern and Southern states, she was reported to have chatted amiably with spectators about Washington, recounting the events of his birth and her nursing and raising of him. After she died, the joke was ultimately on those who believed in her performance, a contingent in which Barnum claims to include himself because her autopsy revealed her to be no older than 80. What seemed like a transparent, acquiescent display of “the black mammy” held up for the epistemological ownership of Barnum’s customers was merely an act. Benjamin Reiss makes an important claim about the speciousness of Barnum ’s insistence that he, too, was duped by Heth. Similar to how Saidiya Hartman troubles the forced performances of enslaved people on the auction block, Reiss is not so quick to let Barnum off the hook and indulge the possibility of Heth’s agency. He implicates the famous showman in systems of chattel slavery despite Barnum’s copious efforts to cover his tracks.4 This chapter in P. T. Barnum’s professional trajectory initiated an important milestone in American social history, for it was this radically uneven economic relationship between a disabled black woman and a class-privileged white man that marked the beginnings of mass entertainment in the United States. The coerced compliance in Heth’s dealings with her handler-owner gave way to a very different relationship later in Barnum’s career with a pair of already famous sideshow entertainers. In 1860, Chang and Eng Bunker signed a three-week contract with Barnum to appear in his American Museum in New York, and eight years later, they entered into another brief agreement with him on a tour of England.5 Contrary to popular belief about the stardom of the Original Siamese Twins, the making of the Bunkers’ reputation had very little to do with Barnum. At the time of their association with the showman, they were already well-established celebrities who had toured extensively over the world. Even though the Bunkers endured a stint in indentured servitude when they first arrived in the United States, they were able to wrangle themselves out of their contract with Abel Coffin, whereupon they began a career as self-made managers of their own act. Like Barnum, who owned Heth, the Bunkers were also slaveholders, and their tobacco plantation in North Carolina provided income. By the...

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