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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2015
Histories of emancipation find ballast in the moments we memorialize. This piece tracks possessive investments and emancipatory challenges with origins in eighteenth-century New England. In the face of Connecticut's 1784 gradual manumission Act, slaveholders in a New England town protected their family's interests by transforming their human property into intellectual property. In 1798 an enslaved man named Fortune was dissected after his death by his owner, Dr. Preserved Porter, and the skeleton exhibited as a symbol of medical and social capital. Renamed Larry, the bones paid professional dividends for more than a century afterward, and were rearticulated in 1930s Europe before becoming the most popular exhibit at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut. This article fleshes out the buried histories of dis(re)membered black subjects by examining white ownership and display of black bodies after death. By unearthing the relationship between medical knowledge generation and white uses of black bodies, I illustrate how white knowledge and status is indebted not only to black labor in life but also to the work that black bodies continued to do in the name of medical “progress.” This essay interrogates the politics of black death and dissection and the contemporary complexities of historical recovery and resuscitation.
1 One could add Bolivar's yoking of the end of Spanish rule to the end of slavery in the vast territories of Gran Columbia, but as there is no specific associated date (decrees occurred from 1816 to 1828) it is not widely celebrated.
2 In the chapter from The Art of DisMemory: Historicizing Slavery in Poetry, Performance and Material Culture (forthcoming) from which this piece comes, I engage a larger set of archival and secondary sources on New England (anti-)slavery, the history of (racialized) medicine, North and South, and black expressivity and mortuary and medical culture.
3 That such contests begin when Africans arrived assumes that Indian genocide is called something other than slavery.
4 Now called the Mattatuck Museum (hereafter MM), “it was established as the Mattatuck Historical Society in 1877 to preserve the history of that part of Connecticut ‘anciently known as Mattatuck.’” The American Association of Museums accredited it in 1976. See www.mattatuckmuseum.org/aboutus, accessed 20 July 2013. Haddon refers to it as a museum in letters.
5 Preserved Porter was a direct descendent of Daniel Porter, known as the state's first bonesetter. “Dr. Daniel Porter,” Folder M-12 (1652–1726), notes on and copies of documents re: his life. Box 7, Folder EEE, MM.
6 “Mrs. Alexius McGlannan 115 W. Franklin St. Baltimore Maryland” written on letterhead, dated 25 Sept., no year included. “1832?” noted in pencil by archivist; the sequence of the extant exchange confirms that supposition. MM, “Research File,” Fortune's Bones Folder.
7 Undated note, “1938?” written in pencil at its top. “It's been five long years ago that I've been sending you a box of Porter treasures every week.” MM, “Research File,” Fortune's Bones.
8 Haddon to McGlannan, 28 Oct. 1932.
9 The characterization of “medical students” is a loose one considering the fact that few at that time received formal medical-school training and there was no medical school in town area during these years.
10 Haddon to McGlannan, 28 Oct. 1932.
11 Ibid.
12 “I have deliberately avoided … the hundreds of antiquarian histories of New England towns … most written in the 1880s and 1890s.” Melish, Joanne Pope, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 9.
13 He makes this explicit when he writes that the country “all about is full of picturesque spots.” Anderson, Joseph et al. , The Town and City of Waterbury, Connecticut: From the Aboriginal Period to the Year Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Five, 2nd edn, rev. (New Haven: Price & Lee Co, 1896)Google Scholar, 28.
14 MM, Slavery File, “Larry.” Plaque transcribed from photograph. Fortune died in 1798, not 1789.
15 Halloran, Vivian Nun, Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum (Charlotte: University of Virginia Press, 2009)Google Scholar, 6.
16 In 1797, a once-enslaved Connecticut resident published A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a native of Africa, but Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself. It was reprinted in New London in 1798, the year of Fortune's death (and again in 1835 and 1896).
17 Dinah was left to Porter's widow Lydia and was worth ten dollars. The skeleton in their possession is valued at fifteen follars. Preserved Porter's Estate Inventory, 1804, from the Collection of the Connecticut State Library, State Archives. Original reproduced at www.fortunestory.org/waterburysslaveowners/porter.asp, accessed 3 March 2014.
18 Wilf, Steven Robert, “Anatomy and Punishment in Late Eighteenth-Century New York,” Journal of Social History, 22, 3 (1 April 1989), 507–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 511.
19 Cobb, Montague W., “Surgery and the Negro Physician: Some Parallels in Background,” Journal of the National Medical Association, 43, 3 (May 1951), 145–52Google Scholar, 148. Cobb quoting his “Human Materials Available in American Institution for Anthropological Study,” 151 n. 3. The study was conducted on behalf of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. For more on the South see Savitt, Todd L., Medicine and Slavery (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Robert, L. Blakely and Judith, M. Harrington, eds., Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Training (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
20 See www.fortunestory.org/waterburysslaveowners/porter.asp, accessed 20 July 2013.
21 Sappol, Michael, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, 64.
22 See the Fortune chapter in my The Art of DisMemory for a fuller account.
23 Sappol, 51.
24 As quoted by Cobb, 147.
25 Frederic Wells, History of Newbury, Vermont with Genealogical Records of Many Families (St. Johnsbury, VT: The Caledonian Co., 1902), 630; Toby A. Appel, “Disease and Medicine in Connecticut around 1800,” in Howard R. Lamar and Carolyn C. Cooper, eds., Voices of the New Republic: Connecticut Towns, 1800–1832, Volume II, What We Think (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2003), 95–104, 102. Ironies abound; as in the article, McKinstry's headstone simultaneously forever links and distances him from the reputational harm of being considered a “quack.”
26 Appel, 102.
27 Yale University Archives, New Haven County Medical Society, Reel 1, YRG 37–Z–acc. Y81 (on tape). Box 1, Folders 1–4. 3 9002 07512 1831, 14.
28 Brown, Vincent, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 93.
29 Ibid., 92.
30 Yale Archives, New Haven County Medical Society, Reel 1, YRG 37–Z–acc. Y81. This section not paginated.
31 The small notebook appears in a collection with medical lectures that seem to be copied from a book onto a long folio in the same hand. The script matches the “receipt from Dr. Porter for payment” by “Dan Cambridge for medical services rendered,” written in Porter's hand. Collection of the Connecticut State Library, State Archives; reproduced at www.fortunestory.org/waterburysafricanamericans/dancambridge.asp, accessed 3 Jan. 2013. I compared matching capital C, A, L, and T, as well as lower-case “w,” final “d” (with long flourish), and medial “s”; a close examination of distinctive numbers 3 and 7 also shows them matching exactly. Though not trained in this area, I am confident that “The Art of Dissecting the parts of a human body” is written in Porter's own hand. MM, medical papers collection, M-16 Medical Anatomy Notebook 1780, Box 1, Folder K. Not attributed.
32 Mrs. Alexius McGlannan, letter to MM, dated 25 Sept., “1932?” noted in pencil, emphasis mine.
33 Bergin Funeral Home Records, Book 5, 1908–10; email exchange with Scott Griffith, 17–19 July 2013. Article not dated.
34 Hartford Courant, 28 Sept. 2002; and MM “research summaries,” Tab 3, “On Fortune,” Fortune Research Folder, Notes on Fortune Exam, 3/2/00, by Nick Bellantoni, Connecticut State Archeologist; Michael Park, professor of biological anthropology; and Warren Perry, professor of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. Their report suggests that Fortune was between 45 and 55 at the time of death. They are clear that the markings I cite here occurred at the time of preparation “by Porter.” The report by Howard University's Dr. Mark Mack states, “skeleton was prepared in a very deliberate manner … which was one reason the bones survived in such good condition.”
35 Draft 1/20/2002, Tab 3, “research summaries,” “On Fortune,” Fortune Research Folder, MM.
36 Stuckey, Sterling, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, 11.
37 Brown, 61; and Fabian, Ann, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 171.
38 Brown, 61.
39 Anderson et al., The Town and City of Waterbury, 53. Slave-owners were required to enter into town records the names of children born after the gradual emancipation Act; Porter did so for Fortune and Dinah's children – which is the first definitive date by which we can establish ownership, though it may have dated much earlier. “Record of Fortune, a Negroe's children: Jacob, b. May 27, 1786. Mira, b. Dec. 19, 1788. Roxa, b. April 30, m 1792 [Added in a different hand] Africa, b. Sept 16, 1772.”
40 Glaude, Eddie S., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 110.
41 Blakey, Michael, “The New York African Burial Ground Project: An Examination of Enslaved Lives, a Construction of Ancestral Ties,” Transforming Anthropology, 7 (Jan. 1998), 53–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 53.
42 A 23 July 1803 land deed recording Porter's purchase of a house from Joseph Fairchild of Watertown details “one small dwelling house standing on the north side of the highway … about 80 rods eastward of Porter's dwelling house. It being a small house which lately belonged to Fortune, who is now deceased.” MM, exhibit script, Draft 1/20/2002, Tab 3, Research Summaries, Fortune Research Folder.
43 Brown, 65.
44 See note 42.
45 Fortune Research Folder, MM, 5 Nov. 2012, Record of Mortality from Historical Sketch of Watertown (1858).
46 Lois Brown, “Memorial Narratives of African Women in Antebellum New England,” Legacy, 20, 1–2 (2003), 38–61, 38.
47 Ibid., 39. Joseph Amato's term “death stories,” which I refer to here, is cited in Brown.
48 Ibid., 44.
49 Ibid., 38.
50 This language comes from the museum's website, www.collegeofphysicians.org/mutter-museum, accessed 2 Aug. 2013.
51 Gretchen Worden directed the Mütter from 1988 to 2004, transforming it from “a collection of bones into a work of art that spoke for itself,” as reported in her Philadelphia Inquiry obituary. She roused it “from a dusty, almost secret jumble of curiosities that drew 5,000 visitors annually to one of Philadelphia's best-known cultural institutions, attracting 62,000 visitors” in 2004, according to the NYT article that announced the naming of the Gretchen Worden Room. Her quote is taken from her seven-page report to the MM. Worden, Director, Mütter Museum, 13 May 2002, to Ann Smith, curator, MM, Fortune research files. John Strausbaugh, “A Curator's Tastes Were All Too Human,” New York Times, 11 Oct. 2005. Obituary, “Gretchen Worden, Mütter Museum chief,” Gayle Ronan Sims, Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 Aug. 2004.
52 Worden report, May 13, 2002, MM; Fortune research files.
53 Hartford Courant, 28 Sept. 2002. Notes on Fortune Exam, 3/2/00, by Bellantoni, Park, Professor of and Perry, MM files.
54 I take this language from the Fortune Web exhibit. “These injuries, which were not unusual for agricultural workers at the time, did not kill him. He was generally in good health at the time of his death,” www.fortunestory.org/fortune/who.asp, accessed 29 Aug. 2013.
55 Fett, Sharla M., Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar, 6.
56 Ibid., 6.
57 Myrsiades, Linda, Medical Culture in Revolutionary America: Feuds, Duels, and a Court-Martial (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp, 2009)Google Scholar, 70; Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 3.
58 Wilf, “Anatomy and Punishment,” 513.
59 Ibid., 517; and Sappol, 109–10.
60 Gwendolyn Brooks's famous poem, “The Last Quatrain of Emmett Till,” begins “(after the murder, / after the burial.” See www.allpoetry.com, accessed 15 Dec. 2013.
61 See poet Marilyn Nelson's Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem, which first inspired this research and which I address in my The Art of DisMemory.