Foreign Bodies
Historian Douglas Baynton tells Ed Ayers why immigrants with disabilities were denied access to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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ED AYERS: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory… with the American Backstory hosts.
BRIAN BALOGH: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.
ED AYERS: Hello, Brian.
BRIAN BALOGH: And Peter Onuf’s with us.
PETER ONUF: Hey, Brian. We’re going to start today’s show with a story of two sisters, Millie and Christine McKoy. They were born into slavery at a North Carolina plantation in 1851.
JENIFER BARCLAY: And right away, their owner recognized that they were an interesting sort of spectacle.
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PETER ONUF: This is Jenifer Barclay, a historian at Washington State University.
JENIFER BARCLAY: And the twins, from a very early age, began to be exhibited in different ways throughout the southern states.
PETER ONUF: Millie and Christine were born conjoined at the hip, and, like hundreds of other 19th century Americans with disabilities, the twins made their living by exhibiting their bodies in sideshows, or, more crudely, “freak shows.”
JENIFER BARCLAY: These would have been folks with unusual bodies, perhaps amputees, folks missing limbs, or folks who were considered to be giants, or folks who were considered to be midgets. So, just a whole diverse array of people.
PETER ONUF: Barclay says that, in the case of the McKoy sisters, while the twins’ extraordinary bodies got them on the stage, it was their performance as the two-headed nightingale that astounded audiences.
JENIFER BARCLAY: Performing dance routines that were choreographed whilst they sang. They were both multi-lingual so, as part of their performance, one would carry on a conversation in, say, French, and the other would carry on a conversation in German.
PETER ONUF: The McKoys’ act paid off. By the time they retired from the stage in their 30s, the twins had made enough money to live comfortably and buy a farm for their parents. They even founded a school for black children in their home state. But the McKoys’ use of their disability as a source of financial independence is hardly unique.
MAT FRASER: I think the agency that maybe disabled people got in those days was the fact that they were fiscally independent, and that they had a group of equals.
PETER ONUF: This is Mat Fraser. You might recognize him from the TV show American Horror Story: Freak Show. He’s an actor and sideshow performer who integrates a congenital deformation in his arms into a show. Fraser’s done a lot of research into his profession and says that, like the McKoy sisters, many 19th century sideshow performers leveraged their disabilities for a better life.
MAT FRASER: And I think that was more the agency because the alternative of being—I’m going to use phrases of yesteryear here—the school cripple or whatever you get numbered as identity-wise, could often be improved by going on the road and being a fabulous freak and an exotic that people desired and wanted to know more about.
PETER ONUF: But both Barclay and Fraser stress that this agency is easy to romanticize. In the 19th century, sideshow performers with disabilities still regularly faced exploitation at the hands of showmen like P.T. Barnum.
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PETER ONUF: In the Millie and Christine McKoy’s case, they were forced to undergo invasive medical examinations to prove they were “real” freaks, and even the very presence of gawking onlookers complicated any financial success. Barclay says in the 1830s and ’40s, sideshow audiences weren’t exactly looking to celebrate diversity.
JENIFER BARCLAY: Antebellum America, when these kinds of productions first emerged, was a time of tremendous change and upheaval. Industrialization, things like abolition, I think, in many ways, were anxieties that spectacles like freak shows helped to give folks a place where they could sort of test their own normalcy.
PETER ONUF: In other words, the audiences used performers’ disabilities to feel normal. Mat Fraser says these dual strands of agency and exploitation are ever-present in sideshow history.
MAT FRASER: Where is the line between being a self-respecting, fiscally-independent, treated-as-an-equal performer that celebrates their beautiful difference to the hideous notion of people coming to gawk at someone’s deformity because they can’t do anything else because society won’t let them work, which is the other side of the coin?
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