Chapter Thirty-Three
Though we did not yet see the storm on the horizon, we could feel the rising wind.
At first it was only talk—debates in the newspapers, petitions in faraway cities, the occasional pamphlet that made its way
down to us, full of righteous indignation. We dismissed it as distant noise, the bluster of politicians and zealots who had
no understanding of our lives.
“Abolitional nonsense,” Eng scoffed, flapping a folded broadsheet onto the sideboard.
But the noise didn’t fade.
We began to hear reports of mobs in Northern cities invading pro-slavery meetings, shouting down Southern speakers in Boston,
pelting them with eggs in Philadelphia. The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper, printed letters from alleged former slaveowners renouncing the practice, claiming their conscience
had been stirred.
Then came acts of defiance.
Runaways slipped away under cover of night, in greater numbers than ever before—not just lone men or women, but whole families disappearing into the dark.
Word spread of strangers along the way offering food, shelter, safe passage, entire networks of people risking prison or worse to send them north.
The boldest act in recent memory came in the fall of 1859, when a white man named John Brown stormed the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with a ragged band of followers, hoping to spark an armed uprising, a revolution that would topple slavery from the heart of slaveholding territory.
They were captured, tried, and hanged, but not before Brown declared that he was “quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
The men who gathered around our dining table to play cards dismissed all this as Yankee meddling, political theater, the posturing
of radicals who could afford to be righteous. It was easy for Northerners to preach abolition from their small farms and bustling
cities, where a man’s labor could sustain his family. But here in the South, the land was vast and unyielding.
“Those Northerners have no understanding of what it takes to keep our farms running,” our neighbor Colonel Whitaker said.
“Nor do they care.”
The others nodded.
“They call it a moral crusade,” Chang said, dealing out the cards. “But they wouldn’t be so righteous if it cost them their
livelihoods.”
Whitaker slid a cigar from his coat pocket. “It’s easy to moralize when your crops don’t rot in the field.”
The word Republican had started to show up in the papers—a rising political party built around the idea that slavery shouldn’t be allowed to
spread west. But it wasn’t just about the territories. The party threatened to upend the Southern order. And now there was
a name attached to it: Abraham Lincoln.
At the general store one afternoon, I turned from the shelves of calico and ribbon, drawn to a knot of men clustered near
the stove, speaking in that way men often do in public—their voices pitched low enough to feign discretion, just loud enough
to be overheard.
Nathan Hill, a barber on Main Street whose voice tended to rise with his convictions, shook his head. “That fellow is trouble
for the South.”
The man beside him snorted. “He’ll never win. But he sure does like to stir up trouble. Remember Harpers Ferry?”
“They want to ruin us.”
“Force their ways on us.”
“Make us abandon everything we’ve built.”
“Tell us how to live.”
A wiry shopkeeper interjected. “He could win. The Democrats are split. And folks up north like that he keeps a level head.”
There was a pause.
“Then where will we be?” someone asked, his voice uncertain.
“Secession,” Hill said flatly. “That’s where we’ll be. Can’t have a president who wants to take away our livelihood.” He looked
around the group. “Wait and watch, gentlemen. Lincoln in the White House will mean the end of the South as we know it.”
A restless agitation stirred in me as I listened—not just at their words, but at my own reaction. A secret part of me hoped
they were right: that Lincoln might upend the very order they were so desperate to preserve.
Eng and Chang were in New York with Barnum when Lincoln was elected president in 1860. He’d won without carrying a single
Southern state.
Their contract with Barnum had brought them steady income and attention, but little control over how they were perceived.
He cast them in roles that exaggerated their foreignness, flattening their identities into caricature. Marvels, yes, but also
a punch line.
By mid-November, they’d had enough. The twins ended their contract and planned a tour of their own, determined to reclaim their image and their dignity.
They calculated that the expanding Western territories might offer not only profit but a different kind of stage.
California, they believed, held the most promise: a new audience, a fresh start.
They sailed to Panama, crossed the isthmus by train, and boarded the Uncle Sam, a steamer bound for San Francisco.
When they arrived two weeks later, South Carolina was teetering on the edge of secession.
At first, as they’d hoped, San Francisco welcomed them with fanfare. In a letter, Eng described throngs packing the streets,
life-size full-color portraits of The World-Renowned Siamese Twins plastered across buildings, sold-out shows night after night. The earnings, he said, were excellent.
But something else was in the air. The same newspapers that once marveled at their symmetry and manners now used the word
yellow to describe them.
In his next letter, Eng enclosed a clipping from the Daily Evening Bulletin—an editorial claiming that the Chinese were “lower than the white man, whose political equal he can never be allowed to become,”
fit only to be “slaves, peons, and colored apprentices.”
Of course there had always been cruelty, but this was different. It was political. Institutional. A line drawn in ink.
For years, Eng and Chang had allowed themselves to believe that if their tuxedos were pressed, their speech fluent, and their
manners impeccable, they might be accepted as equals. The editorial laid bare what they hadn’t wanted to see: that no matter
how carefully they dressed, spoke, or behaved, it would never be enough.
They’d left Barnum to claim their independence. But in California they were learning just how fragile that freedom could be—how
quickly the gaze of others could change from curiosity to contempt.
Eng wrote that he felt the shift in the way people stared too long, their fascination edged with something colder. Suspicion.
Disdain. After performances, the questions were no longer only about their lives. They were also about their “kind.”
As I read Eng’s letter, I imagined him scanning the words in the newspaper, then folding it slowly, his jaw tightening the way it did when he felt disrespected or dismissed.
He never said as much, but I knew him. I knew how much it had cost him to believe that he and Chang could shape their own story—and how crushing it must have been to realize that story had already been written for them.
Back home, wherever we went, talk turned to secession. In parlors and on porches, at quilting bees and market stalls, voices
dropped to whispers and took on a harder edge.
“They want our cotton but not our say.”
“My grandfather fought for this soil. I’m not handing it over to Washington.”
“What do they know about running a tobacco farm from behind a desk in Boston?”
“Let the Union go—we can stand on our own.”
When Eng and Chang returned to Surry County in February 1861, seven states had already severed their ties to the Union and
re-formed as the Confederate States of America: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas.
Lincoln refused to acknowledge them as a sovereign country. “States in rebellion,” he called them.
Then, one morning in April, The Fayetteville Observer published an article likening Eng and Chang to the national fracture:
If one of the Siamese brothers, disgusted with his life-long contact with the other, rudely tears himself away, snapping asunder
a bond that God and nature intended to be perpetual, he inflicts upon himself the same precise injury that he inflicts upon
his fellow. Each spouting artery, each quivering muscle, each wounded nerve that he tears in the lacerated side of his discarded
companion, has an exact counterpart in his own equally lacerated side. He commits fratricide and suicide at once.
For most readers, it was just a clever metaphor. But inside our four-cornered marriage, the image struck close to the bone.
When news arrived that Confederate forces had opened fire on the Union garrison stationed in Charleston Harbor, the prospect
of war no longer felt like a threat. It felt like a certainty. The bombardment lasted more than a day. No one was killed,
but the meaning was clear: the war had begun. In Mount Airy, church bells rang and flags were hoisted. People gathered on
porches and in parlors, voices high with excitement. I watched my fifteen-year-old Stephen at the edge of the crowd in the
town square, his eyes alert, his spine straight. Young men drilled in tight formations, their calls and commands echoing down
the lanes. Stephen was already talking about enlisting. I clung to the mercy of his youth—three more years until he was eligible.
Surely the fever would break by then.
Within weeks, our state had seceded and the boys were gone, swept up in a tide of gray uniforms. Those of us left behind carried
on as best we could, tending to everyday tasks that now felt both trivial and crucially important.
“It’ll be over by Christmas,” Chang said. “One good battle should resolve it.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Eng said. “The North has factories and railroads. All the South has is its pride.”
The brothers were wealthy again. Touring had left them flush with gold and the farms were finally turning a steady profit.