Authors: Matthew Goodman
On this last point Olmsted was adamant; the deal itself hinged on the security. There, in those expensive downtown rooms, Barnum suddenly felt himself poised at the turning point of his fortune. In his mind he raced back over his past, going over all that he had gained and lost, searching for anything that he might grasp on to, to pull himself out of the mire in which he currently struggled, up to the high ground he had always envisioned for his future. Surely there was something he could find. At one time, as a boy, he had considered himself wealthy; now, as a man, he might actually become it. He knew at once what he must do. Everything in his life had led him to this moment.
“I have,” said Barnum, “five acres of land in Connecticut which is free from all lien or encumbrance.”
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c h a p t e r
7
Strange Attractions
When p. t. barnum first laid eyes on Joice Heth, she looked to be a thousand years old. She was reclining on a high lounge in an exhibition room in Philadelphia’s Masonic Hall, where Barnum had arrived after a long and tiring journey from New York. Coley Bartram, he now saw, had not been exaggerating: everything about Joice Heth evoked antiquity. With her wizened face, toothless mouth, and impossibly slight frame (advertisements put her weight at only forty-nine pounds), she seemed to have been shrunken by a great expanse of time, like an Egyptian mummy just exhumed from its sarcophagus. Her eyes, totally sightless, had sunk so deeply into their sockets that, from Barnum’s vantage point, they seemed to have disappeared. She lay on her right side with her knees drawn up toward her chest, her left arm—the arm, like her legs, was paralyzed—draped over her chest, her knobby fingers drawn tightly together. A thatch of gray hair sprouted unkempt from her head. Standing with the rest of the crowd, Barnum took all this in with great interest, noting to himself that the nails of her left hand had grown to a length of four inches, that the nails on her big toes were nearly a quarter-inch thick.
Although the thought seems not to have occurred to him (if it did, he never let on), P. T. Barnum was examining this woman much as other white men were then doing in slave marketplaces elsewhere in the United States: scrutinizing the body with an eye toward the profit that might be wrought from it—although this would-be buyer was looking for precisely the opposite attributes. Barnum, after all, wanted not youth but age, not vigor but feebleness, not strength but fragility. In Joice Heth he had found just what he was hoping for, a perfect combination of mental acuity and physical decrepitude. Though blind and paralyzed in nearly all of her
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limbs, the old woman had not lost her power of speech, and Barnum was struck—as were all who came to view her—by how sociable she was, how she kept up an almost constant conversation on a wide variety of topics.
She sang old Baptist hymns for her visitors, she discoursed on religious subjects, she related charming anecdotes about her young charge George Washington, whom she referred to always as “little George.” She laughed often at her own remarks, with a heartiness that belied the frailty of her body, and (as observers often remarked) gave every indication of good cheer. It is, of course, possible that Joice Heth was naturally garrulous and truly enjoyed the attention being paid her at long last. But it is also indis-putable that she had lived out her life as a slave in Virginia and Kentucky, and over those many years she had surely learned how to act for the white people who controlled her fate. The songs and the stories had gotten her off the plantation, a place where she now lacked all practical value, and had landed her on this comfortable couch in a big northern city, and were keeping her well fed and warmly clothed; and she would continue telling those stories and singing those songs for as long as she possibly could.
Barnum was exceedingly impressed by Joice Heth, but before he set out to purchase her contract from R. W. Lindsay he needed to be sure of what he was getting. He asked Lindsay for proof of Joice Heth’s extraordinary age, and in return was shown a faded, crumbling piece of paper mounted under glass. Dated February 5, 1727, the document appeared to be a bill of sale for a slave named Joice Heth, “aged fifty-four years,” who had been purchased for thirty-three pounds by Elizabeth Atwood of Virginia from her brother-in-law, Mr. Augustine Washington—the father of the future president. Lindsay explained that Atwood was a near neighbor of the Washington family, and that when “little George” was born, Joice Heth, as the family’s former nurse, was called on to help care for the new baby.
The story seemed plausible enough to Barnum, but there was still something else he didn’t understand. How, he wanted to know, had the existence of this remarkable woman not been made public until now?
Lindsay told him that Joice Heth had long ago been purchased by a Kentucky slaveholder named John S. Bowling, and she had been living quietly in one of the outbuildings on Bowling’s estate. Her true age had been un-covered only recently by Mr. Bowling’s son, who had been doing some research in the Virginia state records office when he found an old bill of sale for a woman named Joice Heth. Realizing that this was very likely the Joice Heth owned by his family, he excitedly returned home and con-
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Strange Attractions
firmed the information with Joice Heth herself, who by his calculation had been alive for no less than 161 years.
“This whole account appeared to me satisfactory,” Barnum would later write. Of course the account was absurd: a woman with a life span ap-proximately four times that of the average—and who just happened to have been the nursemaid of George Washington, the most revered of all Americans past or present. Nor could an authentic-looking bill of sale have provided conclusive evidence, as the practice of prematurely aging documents—by immersing them in tea or tobacco water, burning them, rubbing them with dirt, and various other stratagems—was hardly unknown at the time, especially to someone as well versed in the arts of deception as P. T. Barnum; and even if the document itself was authentic, there was no proof that this elderly black woman was truly the “Joice Heth” recorded there. For such a shrewd Yankee trader, Barnum seems to have been unusually credulous in the matter of Joice Heth. More likely, he recognized the fraudulence of the account offered by Lindsay—as one showman speaking to another, with a little nod and an implied wink of the eye—but he always denied this, firmly attesting to his belief in what he had been told. Barnum would thus have been, in a sense, enchanted by Joice Heth and by the prospect of the career that now awaited him: he had a vested interest in the truth of her story and was not keen on being convinced otherwise.
Having decided that Joice Heth would make a worthwhile investment, Barnum now turned to the matter of price. By Lindsay’s estimation, Joice Heth was worth three thousand dollars, but Barnum, with his long experience in horse trading with farmers and peddlers (combined with Lindsay’s desire to forgo the life of a showman and return home to Kentucky), was able to negotiate the price down to one thousand. He had only five hundred dollars in cash, but he left Philadelphia with a signed contract from Lindsay giving him the rights to Joice Heth if he obtained the remaining five hundred within ten days.
Hurrying back to New York, Barnum first consulted with Charity on the new venture, which would require all the money they had saved from their boardinghouse and grocery; it was a risk, he admitted, because at any moment the old woman might die and cause them to forfeit their investment. (Barnum had not yet figured out how to make money from Joice Heth even after her death.) Charity, younger and less worldly, deferred as usual to her husband’s business instincts, which were mostly
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(though not always) sound. Having gained his wife’s endorsement, Barnum next set about raising the rest of the money; with his gift for sales-manship, this proved not very difficult. Eloquently evoking the “golden harvest” that the Joice Heth exhibition would produce, Barnum convinced a friend to lend him the five hundred dollars, at which point he hastened again to Philadelphia to sign the contract.
There has long been some dispute as to whether, in handing over his thousand dollars to R. W. Lindsay, P. T. Barnum had in effect become a slave owner. (One biography of Barnum, for instance, states that he “became Joice Heth’s sole owner,” while another has it that he “overnight became showman and slaveholder.”) Barnum himself muddied the question in his autobiography,
The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself,
when he wrote, rather imprecisely, that the contract with Lindsay meant that he had “become her owner.” Elsewhere, however, he referred to himself not as the owner but as the “proprietor of the negress,” and in the first edition of the book Barnum presented in full the contract he had signed with Lindsay, which made clear that he was simply purchasing the right to exhibit Joice Heth for the ten months that still remained of the twelve originally contracted by R. W. Lindsay; after that time, all claims to Joice Heth would revert to her owner, John S. Bowling of Kentucky.
Still, even if he was not legally her owner, Barnum was nonetheless proposing to earn his living on the labors—even if those labors consisted only of singing and storytelling—of a slave. This was not a situation that seems particularly to have troubled him, at least at the time. For all his passionate advocacy of the freedoms of religion and expression, Barnum’s views on racial issues were not especially distinguished, even by the standards of the age. His early livelihood had come, in part, from the comical derogation of blacks—he often employed blackface performers in his traveling shows—and as late as the 1870s he was exhibiting a mentally retarded black man named William Henry Johnson as a putative “missing link” between man and monkey, dressing him in mock African costume (Johnson had been born in New Jersey) and calling the “marvellous creature” only by the name What Is It? Unlike many of his fellow Universalists, Barnum did not support the cause of abolition until near the start of the Civil War, when he became an abolitionist as well as a champion of extending the vote in Connecticut to blacks. Once, in Great Britain in 1844, he became involved in a heated debate with a group of Scotsmen who were espousing abolition. Barnum took great exception to their crit-
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Strange Attractions
icism of Southern slavery, arguing that slave owners had an economic interest in caring for their slaves and were compelled by law to provide for their comfort into old age (his own history with Joice Heth must have crossed his mind in saying this), and further asserting that “if the blacks were unceremoniously set free and there was no army to protect the whites, the blacks would murder them and take possession of their property.” “I am no apologist for slavery,” he explained afterward to the New York newspaper the
Atlas,
“and I abhor its existence as much as any man.
But the rabid fanaticism of some abolitionists is more reprehensible than slavery itself and only serves to strengthen instead of weaken the fetters of the enslaved.”
A far greater blot on Barnum’s character can be found in an unsigned article published in the
Atlas
the following year, when he was a regular contributor to the paper. The article (or “sketch,” as Barnum would refer to it in his autobiography) related incidents in his early career as a showman, including the time he spent touring the South with a circus company. During the winter of 1837, while in Mississippi, Barnum made two notable purchases: the first one a steamboat, named the
Ceres,
so that the troupe might avoid having to travel on the region’s muddy roads; and the second one a black man to serve as his valet. At some point during the tour Barnum suspected the valet of thievery when several hundred dollars went missing from one of his pockets; Barnum, the article reported, searched “the nigger” and found the money, whereupon he “gave him fifty lashes, and took him to New Orleans, where he was sold at auction.” Later, when the company had finished its tour and Barnum sold the
Ceres,
he took his payment in “cash, sugar, molasses, and a negro woman and child. He shipped his sweets to New York, sold his negroes in St. Louis, and arrived in the city in June, after a very successful tour.”
(While Barnum mentioned the
Ceres
in his autobiography, the story of the valet and the mother and child, unsurprisingly, did not appear in any of the various editions; however, he cited the
Atlas
article in the book, and neither there nor anywhere else did he dispute the truth of any of its
“numerous anecdotes.”)
So the Joice Heth tour was not, as Barnum claimed in a post–Civil War edition of
The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself,
“the least deserving of all my efforts in the show line”—not when compared with his subsequent tour of Mississippi. Still, there was plenty in the Joice Heth tour of which he might later feel ashamed. At Philadelphia’s Masonic Hall
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Barnum had Joice Heth carefully bundled up and carried to a railroad car where, as James Gordon Bennett reported in the
Herald,
the other passengers “gazed, wondered, looked” at her, and “some laughed.” Barnum was bringing Joice Heth to New York, that most Southern-leaning of all Northern cities, a city where the evil of slavery was still very much an open question.
Fortunately, William Niblo did not remember Barnum from their meeting earlier that year, when he had rejected Niblo’s offer of a bartending job. Barnum seems never to have second-guessed that decision—second-guessing was not really part of his nature—and he would certainly have been glad of it now, when he was coming to Niblo as a full-fledged showman with an exhibition that he was convinced would prove a sensational money maker. Niblo must have felt likewise, for he agreed to put up Joice Heth in one of the rooms that adjoined his saloon and begin exhibiting her there as soon as possible. He would provide the exhibition room, pay for all advertising and other expenses, and handle ticket sales, in return for half the proceeds. This turned out to be a highly lucrative deal for Niblo, but it was no less a coup for Barnum, still unknown in New York, to be associated with such an illustrious showman.