![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This essay examines the theatrical spectacle – and vexed legacy – of Joice Heth, an elderly and severely disabled black female performer whose role play as a putative ancient negress garnered her brief acclaim. Specifically, in 1835, P.T. Barnum fraudulently staged Heth as George Washington's 161-year-old nursemaid in New York (and elsewhere) until her death in 1836. I discuss these elusive somatic acts through, first, the careful scripting of Heth within freak-show dramaturgy and a uniquely fictionalized national past. I argue that through Heth's mythic impersonation as a black female surrogate for a collective American memory, we come to see how the latter was as much a tenuous and rehearsed fiction as her corporeal stagings. In the second half of this article, I approach the quagmire of Heth's free will vis-à-vis her brute objectification through the emergence in the archive of her vocal resistance, a disruptive sound I call a “sonic of dissent.” Ultimately, the spectral traces of Joice Heth's performances as an ancient negress intimate the longing for a black maternal national memory.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Debra Levine, Pam Cobrin, and the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments, my colleagues Victor Bascara, Keith Camacho, and David Hernandez for their collective suggestions, and Danny Andrews for his unfailing support.
Notes
1. For more on urban culture in 1830's New York City, see Karen Halttunen (Citation1982).
2. For more on Heth's engagement at Niblo's, see Matthew Goodman Citation2008, 120–5.
3. This, by no means exhaustive, body of work includes the scholarship of Jennifer Brody, Jayna Brown, Daphne Brooks, Nicole Fleetwood, Monica L. Miller, Tavia Nyong’o, E. Patrick Johnson, and Harvey Young.
4. William Henry Johnson, for instance, was an African-American man who had microcephalia, a medical disorder, which gave him an unusually small head. He was exhibited as part of P.T. Barnum's “What Is It?” exhibition. For more on him, see Robert Bogdan Citation1988, 134–42. For more on Johnson and microcephalia, see Harriet A. Washington Citation2006, 89–90. Henry Moss was an African-American man afflicted with the skin disorder, vitiligo – which caused his skin to turn “white” – who self-exhibited himself in Philadelphia in 1796. For more on Moss, see Harriet A. Washington Citation2006, 80–1, 88.
5. In my larger manuscript, I interpret Heth's performances alongside two other peculiar stagings of elderly black women in the nineteenth century, post-Heth, who were enacting versions of mammy–memory, on and off stage. Ironically, the sobriquet of one of these cultural figures – Joice Heth's Grandmother – not only referenced Heth, but also suggested an even more hyperbolic time span that this cultural actor supposedly embodied.
6. The range of people who were exhibited, or self-exhibited themselves, as “freaks” in the nineteenth century is staggering, and too exhaustive to include here. While these types of freaks were often either a) racial minorities and exotic non-Western subjects or b) physically and/or developmentally challenged, some straddled both categories, such as conjoined African-American twins Millie–Christine or Afong Moy, a Chinese woman with extremely small feet exhibited the same time as Heth. David A. Gerber (Citation1996, 48), furthermore, notes how a significant number of microcephalics were African-American or non-Western, which he argues suggests the imbrication of racism and colonialism with the already “vastly unequal power relations” inherent in these shows. For a brief mention of Moy, see Benjamin Reiss Citation2001, 95. For more on Circassian women, see Robert Bogdan Citation1988, 237–40.
7. While, for purposes of article length, I do not discuss how Heth's performances utilized the fourth category of freak-show narrative devices – visual technologies – I do analyze this at length in the larger manuscript, particularly a crude woodcut of Heth commissioned by P.T. Barnum that was reprinted in newspaper advertisements as forms of publicity.
8. The specific order of events, P.T. Barnum biographer A.H. Saxon notes, were as follows: “[The show] usually began with the reciting of her history and the reading of the bill of sale, followed by questions put to her by Barnum and managers.” He adds, “Spectators were then given the opportunity to question Joice and her managers, and the former also regaled her auditors with several of her choice hymns.” See Saxon Citation1989, 74.
9. Heth's exhibits, originally scheduled to run from 8 a.m.–10 p.m., were reduced (due to Heth's fatigue) to 9 a.m.–1 p.m. and 6–10 p.m., six days a week. See Reiss Citation2001, 38. Regarding Heth's bodily ailments, in another account published under an alias, Barnum detailed Heth's other corporeal deficiencies, such as the inability to straighten her “lower limbs” or move “her left arm [that] lay across her breast,” both presumably the product of a stroke. See Barnum Citation1872, 74.
10. I thank and acknowledge one of the anonymous board member's for their reader comments in pushing me to think more about this.
11. Levi Lyman's job, “whose job was to introduce Heth and answer spectator's questions,” revealed this information in a series of four newspaper articles. See Saxon Citation1989, 72.
12. These would include interiority and consent theory, as well as the moral question of the freak show itself. For an extended discussion of these questions of free will versus coercion in freak-show performances, see Gerber Citation1996, 38–55.
13. I am concerned here with the methodological challenge this focus poses, or what Diana Taylor asks explicitly in the form of a question: “If, however, we were to reorient the ways social memory and cultural identity in the Americas has traditionally been studied, with the disciplinary emphasis on literary and historical documents, and look through the lens of performed, embodied behaviors, what would we know that we do not know now?” Quoted in Taylor Citation2003, xviii.
14. Here, I am thinking of a similar discursive and historical challenge cultural historian Saidiya Hartman faces in attempting to construct a narrative of a murdered slave woman from little information: “I too am trying to save the girl, not from death or sickness or a tyrant but from oblivion. Yet I am unsure if it is possible to salvage an existence from a handful of words: the supposed murder of a Negro girl. Hers is a life impossible to reconstruct, not even her name survived.” See Hartman Citation2007, 137.
15. See “The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction” in Phelan Citation1996.
16. I am referencing here conceptualist artist Adrian Piper's “The Mythic Being” performances, which occurred from 1973 to 1975 in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. I discuss these performances at length in the larger manuscript. For more on these performances, see Piper Citation1996.
17. There are numerous recent examples of this phenomenon, both fictional and real. For instance, the main character in playwright August Wilson's play Gem of the Ocean, the first in his 10-play cycle of the African-American experience that ran on Broadway 2004 and 2005, is Aunt Esther, a former slave who claims to be 285 years old. Likewise, in popular music, rapper Talib Kweli's song “For Women” – a reinterpretation of Nina Simone's searing “Four Women” – transformed the character Aunt Sarah into a 107-year-old black woman in Brooklyn who had “ lived from nigger to colored to negro to black/To afro then African-American and right back to nigger.” Yet, the archetype of the elderly black woman as the embodiment of history resurfaced most recently in the news coverage of 106-year-old Georgia resident Ann Nixon Cooper voting for President Barack Obama in the presidential election of 2008 and, concomitantly, Obama's careful mention of Cooper in his televised acceptance speech in Grant Park in Chicago the night of 4 November 2008.