Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum — John Shaqi
Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. BarnumBarnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor)
General
Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum
Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor)
Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891; Circus owners -- United States -- Biography
Mr. Bartram further stated that he had sold out his interest to his
partner, R. W. Lindsay, of Jefferson County, Kentucky, who was then
exhibiting Joice Heth in Philadelphia, but was anxious to sell out and
go home--the alleged reason being that he had very little tact as a
showman. As the New York papers had also contained some account of Joice
Heth, I went on to Philadelphia to see Mr. Lindsay and his exhibition.
Joice Heth was certainly a remarkable curiosity, and she looked as if
she might have been far older than her age as advertised. She was
apparently in good health and spirits, but from age or disease, or both,
was unable to change her position; she could move one arm at will, but
her lower limbs could not be straightened; her left arm lay across her
breast and she could not remove it; the fingers of her left hand were
drawn down so as nearly to close it, and were fixed; the nails on that
hand were almost four inches long and extended above her wrist; the
nails on her large toes had grown to the thickness of a quarter of an
inch; her head was covered with a thick bush of grey hair; but she was
toothless and totally blind and her eyes had sunk so deeply in the
sockets as to have disappeared altogether.
Nevertheless she was pert and sociable, and would talk as long as people
would converse with her. She was quite garrulous about her _protege_
“dear little George,” at whose birth she declared she was present,
having been at the time a slave of Elizabeth Atwood, a half-sister of
Augustine Washington, the father of George Washington. As nurse she put
the first clothes on the infant and she claimed to have “raised him.”
She professed to be a member of the Baptist church, talking much in her
way on religious subjects, and she sang a variety of ancient hymns.
In proof of her extraordinary age and pretensions, Mr. Lindsay exhibited
a bill of sale, dated February 5, 1727, from Augustine Washington,
County of Westmoreland, Virginia, to Elizabeth Atwood, a half-sister and
neighbor of Mr. Washington, conveying “one negro woman, named Joice
Heth, aged fifty-four years, for and in consideration of the sum of
thirty-three pounds lawful money of Virginia.” It was further claimed
that as she had long been a nurse in the Washington family she was
called in at the birth of George and clothed the new-born infant. The
evidence seemed authentic and in answer to the inquiry why so remarkable
a discovery had not been made before, a satisfactory explanation was
given in the statement that she had been carried from Virginia to
Kentucky, had been on the plantation of John S. Bowling so long that no
one knew or cared how old she was, and only recently the accidental
discovery by Mr. Bowling’s son of the old bill of sale in the Record
Office in Virginia had led to the identification of this negro woman as
“the nurse of Washington.”
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