The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (10 page)

While the twins hardly made a ripple in the media all the time they were in Australia, they caused something of a stir when it became known that they were leaving the country.
Australian Variety
made them cover girls in its June 10, 1916 edition and ran this story:

The Myers were anything but paupers as they prepared to sail for San Francisco. At a time when the average factory worker in America was working more than fifty hours a week and earning less than $800 a year, Myer and Edith declared they were leaving Australia with the equivalent of $1,500 in U.S. currency.

The 400-foot, 6,300-ton
Sonoma
operated by the Oceanic Steamship Company of San Francisco left the port of Sydney on June 21, 1915.
¹⁸
Captained by J. H. Trask, the
Sonoma
carried 221 passengers, 150 of them in first-class cabins, including the Myers. Myer Myers should have felt at home. There were enough show people aboard to constitute a quorum for a group that could have called itself “The Society of Showfolks Who’ve Had It Up to Here with Australia.” In addition to the Hiltons and the Myers, the liner carried Max Steinberg, a carnival man; E. C. Jenkins, the operator of a medicine show; Meagher, Morris and Musette, a song and dance trio; and Tom Fox, the owner of two large chimpanzees, Casey and Bizz.
¹⁹

Captain Trask recorded in his log that the seas were calm throughout the voyage. The trip did have its share of drama, however. One passenger, John Tomarces, of Greece, died of tuberculosis and was buried at sea.
²⁰

After having been at sea for nearly three weeks, all the passengers were on deck at noon on July 10. Tears were streaming down the cheeks of some. Others were cheering. The
Sonoma
had nearly reached the shores of California and the city of San Francisco. Daisy and Violet, Myer and Edith, and Mary were feeling elated as a gigantic red, white, and blue flag appeared in the distance. But their elation did not last. America, the promised land of unlimited opportunity, had hardly come into view when serious doubts arose about whether the twins would ever be able to step ashore.

M
yer Myers opened the buttons on his wool coat, then the buttons of the vest corseting his big stomach. He loosened his necktie and tugged at the yellow-stained collar biting into his neck. He was still having trouble breathing. He worried that unless he could start taking more air into his lungs, he was going to pass out.

He was in a small, windowless interrogation room, seated on an upright wooden chair before a small metal table. Across the table, wearing a green uniform, knee-high boots of shiny brown leather, and a holstered pistol, was an inspector for the United States Immigration Service.

Hours earlier, the
Sonoma
had steamed into San Francisco Bay and docked at Angel Island. Federal officers boarded the ship and, after looking incredulously at the fused bodies of the eight-year-old twins, separated them from Myer, Edith, and Mary. Myer was still shaken from the scene. As Daisy and Violet cried hysterically, a uniformed officer pushed and pulled the pair down the gangplank and then led them to the island hospital where they were to be given a medical examination.
¹

Next, guards led the Myers and Mary Hilton down the gangplank and shepherded them into an administration building. They were given numbered cards to pin to their clothes and directed to take seats
on a bench inside a large hall. The hall was occupied by dozens of other detainees, almost all of them immigrants from China. Four or five hours passed, and then Myer, Edith, and Mary were finally ushered into the interrogation room.

The inspector had already received a written report of the physical examination conducted on Daisy and Violet. It was when Myer saw the twins’ documents folders on the table as he settled onto the chair before him that he began having trouble breathing. Penned in large black letters on the folders were the words: Unfit for Entry.

The inspector removed the medical reports from the folders and began studying them. Listed under “unusual identifying physical characteristics,” the examining physician had written “Grown together at sacrum with sibling.”
²

The inspector’s eyes widened. With hundreds and sometimes thousands of immigrants passing through Angel Island every day, he must have believed he had already heard of every sick and sorry condition a person could possibly have. But … 
grown together
? He had never before seen a medical report with such a description. He seemed momentarily bewildered. Then he opened a drawer and brought out a thick, black manual. He turned to the index and, with a bony finger, started scanning its pages. He stopped somewhere midway through. He pushed the manual across the table to Myer’s side and spun it 180 degrees. He tapped a finger on the appropriate regulation.

“Can you read, sir?” he asked. “Here is what the code says. You can see with your own eyes: ‘Federal law prohibits the entry into the U S of A of any alien who has a physical deformity affecting his ability to earn a living.’ ”
³

The inspector lifted his gaze from the manual and, for the first time, made eye contact with the man across the table.

“This means, sir, that you never should have tried bringing them freak girls here. America is not a dumping ground for foreigners with
deformities that could make them liabilities to the government. My advice, sir, is that you and your family book passage for an immediate return to Australia. Entry into the United States is denied.”
⁴

The Myers, Mary, and the twins had been at sea 19 days and 22 hours. They had traveled 7,411 ½ miles.
⁵
They were now just three-and-a-half miles from America’s shore, and the family patriarch had just been told they could not advance any farther. Myer couldn’t speak. He could scarcely breathe. Mary and Edith had been silent during the brief meeting, but now Mary asked for permission to speak.

She identified herself as the twins’ foster mother and spoke in a deferential tone to the inspector. Unusual though it might seem, she explained, the girls’ deformity was not an impediment to their ability to earn a living. On the contrary, the sisters’ physiognomy had been a source of substantial earnings. Doctors and scientists throughout Europe and Australia had pronounced them human wonders. People from everywhere flocked to see them, and paid to do so. Surely this would also be true in America.

The inspector replied that he was sorry, but he had to go by the book and the book was clear on the subject. Because of their gross deformity, the children could not enter the country. “Them little girls is human freaks,” he stated again.
⁶

Mary respectfully acknowledged that the inspector was only following the law by denying the twins entry into the country. Then she asked him whether there might be a process by which the family could appeal his decision.

The inspector’s face became red and his expression grew taut as he rose from his chair to signal that their meeting was over. He was irritated that anyone, let alone a woman and a foreigner, could even suggest that he might have erred in his decision. He sternly told Mary that there was but one official who had the power to overturn his
ruling in the matter, and that was the quarantine officer for Angel Island. He warned her it could be weeks, even months, before they were granted a hearing, and even then, ultimately, the family would likely be wasting their time.

The postcard reads “Daisy and Violet” although Violet is on the left and Daisy is on right. (Author’s collection)

Because their papers were found to be in order, Mary, Myer, and Edith were free to board the ferry to the mainland. Under no circumstances, however, could Daisy and Violet leave Angel Island. They
had been declared “physically and biologically inferior” by the health inspector who examined them at the hospital, and they were placed in detention.
⁷

Throughout the tense ordeal, Edith said not a word nor expressed any emotion. Totally dependent on her husband and her mother, she was painfully shy and self-conscious, and tried always to avoid attention by staying in the background. Edith was all but incapable of making any decision more complicated than choosing which of her two plain, ankle-length, cinder-colored dresses she should wear. Indeed, she seemed barely to have an existence except as a near invisible appurtenance to the twins.

Inwardly, Edith felt relief when the immigration inspector ruled that the twins were unfit to ever enter the United States and advised Myer that he and his family should go back to wherever they had come from. Myer and Mary had been so sure they were going to find fortune in America. Edith understood how crushed they must have been at the ruling. But she secretly hoped that now, finally, they would see that it was time to quit their endless travels and return to Brighton, where everyone could resume a more familiar and quiet life.

Edith was crestfallen when almost the moment Mary and Myer left the interrogation room, they told her they were not ready to abandon their dream. Mary had already conceived a plan: She and Myer were going to take the next ferry to the mainland, and Edith was to stay behind on the island with the twins.

Edith became undone. She begged them not to abandon her. She told them of her fear that the guards would put her and the twins on a ship bound for Shanghai and that she would never see her mother and husband again. Through her sobs, she kept crying “No, no, no” as Mary outlined her scheme.
⁸

Mary and Myer tried reassuring Edith. They didn’t expect to be on the mainland for more than a day or two, and by then, the wheels on
Mary’s plan would already be turning, and in time, all five of them could legally enter California. Myer and Mary embraced Edith and begged her to be strong. Mary’s plan may have been the longest of long shots, but it was perhaps the family’s only chance.

All of the island’s detainees were held inside a compound ringed with a high steel fence laced with barbed wire. At the center of the containment compound was a watch tower with a searchlight that, after night-fall, continually panned the barracks and the fences. The men and boys were segregated in one area, the women and girls in another. The separation necessarily resulted in the breakup of family units. Wives and daughters were cut off from any communication with husbands, fathers, and brothers; and even very young children could be torn away from a parent and warehoused with strangers in same-sex barracks.

Edith was terrified as she presented herself to the uniformed officers at the gate of the compound. After checking her papers, the officers summoned a matron who led her to the barracks where the twins were being held. Except for the guards strolling the stockade with leashed dogs, everyone Edith saw was Asian. Most of the detainees were by themselves, sitting on the ground with their backs against the whitewashed sheds. Edith had never seen faces etched so deeply with despair. Many of detainees had been held in the compound for months. A few had been there a year or more.

Opened in 1910, the Angel Island Immigration Station had been established primarily to dam the ever-increasing flood of Chinese laborers into the United States. The first Chinese workers started arriving during the Gold Rush of 1848, and by the time construction started on the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, they were surging into the U.S. at the rate of 30,000 a year. Because the Chinese were willing to work for low wages, political forces claimed they were stealing jobs from American (meaning Caucasian) workers. So in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration
law ever to bar citizenship solely on the basis of race. Until it was repealed in the 1940s, the law all but put an end to what anti-Chinese politicos called the “yellow peril.” The law, however, did not altogether stop Asians from trying to gain American citizenship. The country was still open to Chinese immigrants whose fathers had become naturalized citizens before passage of the Exclusion Act.