Chapter Thirty-Two
For years, Eng and Chang had resisted joining P. T. Barnum’s traveling circus. They despised everything about him, from his
oily bravado to his shameless hucksterism. How he’d remade the industry in his own image, filling tents and museums with human
curiosities, elaborate hoaxes, and so-called scientific wonders. The way he built a fortune on the backs of those he displayed.
Eng and Chang did not want to go back on the road. Their days of being exhibited, scrutinized like livestock, should have
been behind them. They no longer had the stomach for it—the endless travel, the leers, the indignity of being packaged and
sold.
But the economics of our lives had proved ruthless. Expansion had outpaced return. The cost of maintaining two separate, expanding
households drained their resources. Despite the slaves they bought, despite their relentless efforts, neither farm was profitable.
The land swallowed money faster than they could earn it. Expenses—food, tools, cattle, pigs, overseers—climbed faster than
their yields. Every spring brought fresh costs: seeds, repairs, clothes for the growing children.
Just when they were most vulnerable, Barnum reached out with a proposal. The twins knew he didn’t like them any more than
they liked him. They were too savvy, too independent, unwilling to play the fools he preferred. He liked his sideshow attractions
compliant and malleable, eager to perform whatever grotesquerie he devised.
But the Siamese Twins still held a certain mystique.
If he marketed them right, there was profit to be made.
His offer—$100 a week, a third of what they’d once commanded—was deliberately insulting.
But they couldn’t afford to refuse. If they wanted to draw crowds again, they would have to align themselves, however distastefully, with his empire.
The tour was grueling. They traveled thousands of miles, from town to town, enduring sleepless nights on clattering trains
and jolting stagecoaches. The halls reeked of sweat and pipe smoke, the lodgings small, poorly lit, cheaply furnished. The
greenrooms were dim, the floors sticky, the upholstery worn thin.
Addie and I received letters from the brothers every few weeks, written in Chang’s careful hand or Eng’s quick, slanted scrawl.
Whenever one arrived, we brought it to each other’s house to read aloud, piecing together their travels from the details they
chose to share: the cities, the theaters, the people they met, glimpses of their lives on the road.
In Baltimore, the curtain jammed halfway up. In Pittsburgh, their bed was infested with lice. In Cincinnati, a drunk in the
front row shouted, “Where’s the string?” and tried to climb onstage to inspect the band that joined them.
Chang complained to the manager, not that it mattered. They were no longer headliners. Just one more curiosity on a crowded
bill.
Eng’s letters were factual, clipped: the number of seats in each auditorium, the size of the crowds, the intake each night.
Chang’s were more vivid:
Barnum made a grand show of it in Philadelphia, standing onstage and proclaiming us “the most extraordinary gentlemen of the age” before launching into a winding tale of our supposed origins—half-truths at best. The audience gasped, laughed in the right places, and cheered when we emerged.
We dined late with a senator and his wife, returned to our lodgings even later, and rose before dawn to catch the train to Baltimore, where Barnum promises an even larger reception.
I confess the travel wears on me more than it used to.
Eng says the same. The grand showman is as odious as ever.
And so, night after night, they stood onstage beside Zip the Man Monkey, a former slave with an unusually large head; the
bogus Wild Men of Borneo; an entire albino family. Barnum’s menagerie of misfits, Eng called them in his letters.
For all its indignities, the road offered certain freedoms. It was a distraction from the monotony of farm life, the endless
repairs, the failing crops, the wear and friction of domestic irritations. At home, the brothers quarreled over petty things,
their frustrations chafing in the confines of home. Chang got drunk most evenings. On tour, there was no time for that. The
whirlwind of travel, interviews with the press and public receptions, the steady pace of performance: They knew how to do
this. They had been doing it most of their lives.
Still, as they stood under those bright lights, absorbing the stares of yet another restless crowd, eyes hungry for strangeness,
they surely must’ve felt that whatever dignity they’d once tried to carve out for themselves was slipping away with every
ticket sold.
These tours stretched longer. Three months became six.
Six became nine. The brothers returned home briefly between engagements—just long enough to measure their children’s growth with a yardstick, hear new words from toddlers’ mouths, deliver presents for birthdays they’d missed.
Then they were gone again, the seasonal work continuing without them.
Spring planting to fall harvest, Christmas to Easter, with only their letters bridging the distance.
Those years of raising children slide and jostle in my memory. It’s hard to say where they went. One child after another:
birth, diaper cloths, feeding, waking in the night. Crawling, babbling, walking, talking. I was always pregnant, always recovering.
Children everywhere—two to a room, then three, then four.
I can barely separate one babyhood from another. They merge into a single, throbbing chorus of need. There was always a child
underfoot, begging to be held. A blur of cotton napkins and feeding schedules, of scraped knees and sleepless nights. I’d
rattle off a string of names before landing on the right one. Some days I moved from baby to toddler without quite remembering
which one I’d just fed, or changed, or soothed to sleep. I often cradled one baby while two toddlers clung to my skirt and
another squabbled with a cousin over a wooden block, the weight of small bodies pressing in from every side.
Was it Katie or Josie who carried a pudding stick to bed like a doll? Stephen who broke his arm falling from the oak tree,
and Patrick from the mule, or the other way around? The milestones jumble together, half forgotten, lost in the patchwork
of my memory.
I couldn’t imagine there would come a time when life would slow. When the children would be old enough to see to their own
needs. When the house wouldn’t feel as if it was teetering on the edge of chaos. When I’d have a moment of peace.
As the children grew, their voices became more distinct. One by one, they stepped out of the chorus.
Katie—Kate now, at sixteen—was becoming the kind of beauty that made young men stammer, but it was her mind that set her apart.
She inherited Eng’s gift for numbers and Chang’s knack for pointed questions.
Late at night, I’d find her in the study, bent over ledgers and building plans, lamplight catching the furrow between her brows.
She read the papers now, tracking cotton prices and new railroad lines, watching the market grow more skittish with each month of 1860.
“Just making sure we’re getting a fair shake,” she said when Chang, home for a brief stretch between engagements, asked what the hell she was doing.
Soon enough, she was sitting in on their business meetings, her incisive questions earning even her uncle’s reluctant respect.
Julia Ann, delicate from the start, seemed never quite anchored to the world around her. She would disappear for hours, only
to be found in the apple orchard, high in the branches, spinning stories about magical kingdoms. She wove her father’s story
into a fable, a tale of twin princes bound by a thread no sword could sever.
Fourteen-year-old Stephen had Eng’s gentle way with horses. I watched him from the fence rail, speaking in a low voice to
a skittish colt, his brush moving in long, patient strokes. The day Nora Owens’s stallion broke loose, Stephen didn’t hesitate.
He walked out into the pasture and led the animal home by its forelock, whispering to it as if to an old friend.
James had music in his bones. But it wasn’t the flute that drew him. He spent hours at the piano, picking out melodies by
ear. Once we found him a tutor, he practiced until his fingers ached. At first, the house was filled with halting scales and
broken chords. But as the weeks passed, tunes began to take shape. The sound of his playing became the backdrop of our lives.
Patrick was Eng’s shadow—his father’s soul made young. He trailed him and Chang through the fields, mimicking the rhythm of
their gait. When Eng paused to crumble a clump of soil between his fingers, ten-year-old Patrick did the same, lips pursed
in concentration, studying the earth with the intensity of a scientist.
And then were the little ones: five-year-old William, three-year-old Frederick, and one-year-old Rosella—my first girl since Rosalyn, named in her memory.
The boys were old enough to wander, not old enough to manage on their own—constantly clambering over fences, pulling up unripe strawberries, stealing biscuits from the cooling rack. Rosie was just learning to walk.
The weight of her was so familiar. One evening, when she was restless and feverish, I began to sing to soothe her. Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, Go to sleep, little baby . . . The lullaby caught in my throat. For a moment, it had been Rosalyn’s face I saw in the lamplight—her cheeks, her lashes, the
curve of her mouth. I tightened my hold on Rosie, pressing my lips to her temple, and she calmed in my arms.
Our children navigated not only the noise and chaos of a bustling household, but also the expectations of a community unsure
what to make of them. They were subtly ostracized in countless small ways, and sometimes overtly. Invitations that didn’t
arrive, conversations that faltered when they appeared, polite smiles that never warmed into friendship.
Each child found their own way through. Some withdrew. Some tried harder to fit in. A few seemed not to notice the slights
that wounded their siblings deeply.
Over time, there were compensations. The children learned to anticipate and sidestep questions about their fathers, steering
conversations elsewhere. At home, they could relax into familiar routines, where having a father and an uncle from Siam, joined
at the ribs, was simply a fact of life.
One evening in late spring, nearly a year into Eng and Chang’s new life on the road with Barnum, Kate lingered with me on
the porch, her face serious in the candlelight. “Papa is Oriental,” she said. “Does that mean I am colored?”
I reached for her, smoothing her hair back, searching for the right words. Her father had lived in America for more than thirty years. He’d built a fortune with his own hands, paid taxes, voted, married a white woman. And still his face marked him as an outsider.
What did that mean for our children, with their dark eyes and golden skin?
“You are your father’s daughter,” I said. “And I am proud to be your mother. That’s all that matters in this house.”
She gave me a smile, but we both knew the words were inadequate. The world would draw its own conclusions. And perhaps I wasn’t
ready to name what she was coming to understand on her own.
I thought of that conversation a few weeks later, standing at the edge of a ballroom as Kate stepped onto the polished floor.
Our children had led largely sheltered lives, cloistered within the familiar circle of siblings and cousins. It was only when
they ventured into rooms like this one that they were forced to reckon with how others saw them.
Kate and I, along with Addie and her daughter Josie, had come to the Blackstone plantation on a rare social outing. The ballroom
air was warm, sweetened by jasmine drifting through open windows. A large chandelier shimmered overhead, its flames winking
in the draft from the open doors. The murmur of conversation was punctuated now and then by a burst of laughter.
Kate and Josie waited at the edge of the dance floor in pale spring dresses, their hair carefully arranged into intricate
twists and coils, pinned with mother-of-pearl combs. They had practiced their steps for weeks, meeting in the late afternoons
at my house or Addie’s to partner each other, their skirts brushing the parlor floor as they turned and dipped.
Now Addie and I stood at a distance, watching the girls take their first tentative turns around the room.
Kate moved with her father’s measured steps; Josie was lighter, quicker, like Chang.
Both were poised, friendly, self-possessed.
But as I looked around, I caught the furtive glances exchanged between mothers clustered around the punch bowl.
Lolly Blackstone touched her son Herbert’s sleeve, whispering something that made him turn from Kate mid-bow. Jolie Preston
steered her Graham toward the Simmons girl when he’d been looking at Josie.
The girls’ smiles remained fixed, their heads held high, their fans moving steadily against the warm air. I told myself they
may not have noticed the slights, but even as the thought formed, I knew it was foolish. Of course they noticed. How could
they not?
My heart contracted with the helpless longing to shield them.
Kate could run a household with the precision of a clockmaker. Josie charmed even the stiffest company with her infectious
laugh. And yet here they were, watching other girls’ dance cards fill while theirs remained empty.