Just a quick note before we begin. In order to best honor the stories of the people you will meet here, this episode features some sensitive material and language about racially motivated violence. Listener discretion is advised. It's possible that giving someone a hand had never been such a bad idea. On that April morning of John Hicks Jr. Was hard at work at the New York Hospital. As one version of the story goes, he leaned out the window and waved to some boys playing below. But it wasn't his
hand that he gestured with. Instead, he was holding an entire severed arm, freshly dislodged from its corpse, which lay flayed open nearby. The boys climbed up to the window on a ladder. Once inside, they had questions, and Hick, no pun intended, was armed with answers. Ever, the trickster Hicks tease that the limb belonged to one of the boys mothers, and if that wasn't bad enough. What Hicks didn't know was this the boy's mother had in fact recently died. The boy ran off to tell his father,
who was working as a mason nearby. According to some accounts, the grieving father was alarmed. He rushed off to his wife's grave, and sure enough, when they opened her coffin, her body was gone. He went back and told his co workers about what happened and about the medical student who had claimed to be the perpetrator. The group of workers quickly formed into a mob and marched off towards the hospital. Once there, they rushed the doors and the
rioting began. They poured into the building, smashing anatomical specimens as they went. They came upon cowering medical students, hanging corpses and boiling kettles full of bodies. News of the rabble made its way the mayor, who ordered doctors and medical students to be held in jail for their own protection.
The mob eventually dispersed for the day and things settled down, but people continue to talk about what they had seen at the hospital that evening, and by the next morning, unrest and anger about the use of robbed bodies for anatomical lessons spread like wildfire. The mob once again assembled and spread throughout the city, looking not only for other bodies that had been snatched, but also for doctors and
medical students themselves. Estimates placed the size of the crowd and about five thousand, with rioters attacking the jail and yelling for the doctors to be handed over. The city deployed a militia to squash the uprising, but left and estimated twenty people dead. Knowledge of the human body and how to treat its ailments requires well bodies, and the study of bodies is of course not a neutral pursuit. It's deeply entwined with pre existing convictions of the value
of such bodies. In some places, body snatching was illegal, but only as a misdemeanor, while in most the possession of stolen bodies was not actually a crime. Other places had nothing on the books at all, and in any case, there were only so many corpses to be had, far fewer than needed for training, which led many medical students to take their education into their own hands and acquire
cadavers by other more nefarious means. This was a situation that was bound to spark backlash and even violence, but for some time no one had ever felt the need to do anything about it. So why now, Well, it seems that it all has to do with what kind of bodies were taken and from where the outrage was fueled, not simply by the fact that graves had been desecrated and bodies stolen and dissected, but the fact that wealthy
people were also being snatched. You see, as long as they were the corpses of black or indigenous people, or of people of poor European in stock, no one seemed to care. It's not clear what happened to the bodies of those left dead in the riot's wake. It's lost to history whether they were able to remain in their graves or if they too ended up under the knife. But what is clear is just how pervasive the underlying attitude of whose body was worth what was becoming, and
sadly it would only get worse. I'm Aaron Manky and welcome to the side show. There was a scent of low tide and opportunity in the air, and the merchants of South Streets liked it that way. In eight thirty five, the seaport on the southernmost part of Manhattan was hopping.
On any given day, there might be a thousand ships, all bobbing like ducklings, waiting to unload their wares, and just steps from the box were rows of shops, their doors swinging in constant motion as money came, and goods went p t Barnum leaned against the counter of his grocery store. He tugged at his collar and dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. The sea breeze did little
to mitigate the humid, damp shop interior. It could feel cavernous at times, Stacked high with burlap sacks and novelties of all kinds, it had been a tough winter. After leaving Bethel with his wife Charity and daughter Caroline, they, like so many others, had made their way to the big city. But work didn't come quickly, and neither did the debts that customers back in Connecticut owed him. When that money did finally come, Barnum began to breathe a
little bit easier. He opened a boarding house and soon after bought equity in a local grocery store. It was here, in his claustrophobic mercantile kingdom that Barnum's life took a turn. What happened next became the subject of a lifelong, ever shifting narrative. Like many goods stories, it all began with someone at the front door, and we can imagine that with a flip of his wrist. Barnum quickly folded his handkerchief and tucked it away as Coley Bartram walked into
the shop. Coley Bartram was an acquaintance of Barnum, but he didn't come to buy anything that day. No, Bartram was here with other business matters in mind. Barnum's reputation as a wily businessman had preceded him, and Coley was here to talk about a sale at this very moment. He told Barnum there was a woman traveling the East coast who might be of great interest to him. Reaching into his pocket, Bartram unfolded an advertisement from the Philadelphia
Inquirer Joyce. Heth it read a Negress aged one hundred sixty one years who formerly belonged to the father of General Washington. General Washington as in President George Washington. He went on to tell the tale that for almost a hundred years she had lived with a family in Kentucky. As the story goes, the family retained her original bill of sale, signed by none other than George Washington's old
dad himself. In fact, Coley went on she had been little George's nursemaid, raising him from infancy and into his role as founding father. And now she had alighted out on tour, but of course not on her own. You see, Joyce Heth was on the human curiosity circuit, a form of entertainment popular in the days before Netflix. Because of that, she had managers. And one of those managers included one
of Coley's former business partners. And this business partner and I tinerant showman by the name of R. W. Lindsay, was eager to sell his act, his act being the living, breathing, elderly Joyce Heth. Now, if this sounds gross, well that's because it is. What we're talking about here is, in effect human trafficking, the selling of a black body from one set of white hands to another. If you are under the impression that the North had an enlightened position
on owning people, well you'd best think again. The year before, New York City had been torn apart by anti abolition riots. It took days for the military to squash the upheaval. In their wake, the rioters left destruction of homes, businesses, and churches. The mob tortured, raped, burned, and lynched folks of African descent and demanded their deportation. This horrific violence
took place in the blocks surrounding Barnum's grocery. So when we talk about someone being the product of their environment, this was the water he was swimming in. It's easy to imagine Collie not suffering from too many moral quandaries. When he offered to put Barnum in touch with our w Lindsay, Barnum took the bait. He would later write in his biography that the prospect of Joyce made him considerably excited. He immediately decided that he would close up
shop and head down to Philadelphia. Ever since his first taste at the showman life, he'd been hankering for another act, one that was much more permanent. Joyce Heath held a court befitting her age. She was a community elder, after all, with many decades and roads behind her, But the true story of her life and the story that she spun for her audience were not one and the same. In fact, the tale she told was an outright yarn. Joyce's brown
and wrinkled face looked utterly ancient. She had no eyes, sights, and no teeth, but she still retained a charisma that outsized her small frame. One of the first lies that the papers told about her was that she was a century and a half old. The second lie was that she had raised George Washington. Although the man had died decades earlier, Washington still loomed large in America's collective imagination.
He was a man made of myth in a country so enamored with their own homegrown demigod, it's not hard to understand why Joyce's audience wanted so badly to believe her. For a woman so small, oh black, and so enslaved, it seemed almost unthinkable that she could make a name for herself out of proximity to celebrity, but she did so. She sat there in her rocker, her pipe smoke curling around her head. From there she reached across to the past, directly linking herself to one of the greatest legends in
the American experiment. Scholars don't know about her early life, but it's thought that Joyce was originally enslaved by a man who had cross paths with Washington, although frankly, it's believed this connection amounted to nothing more than a bit of braggadocious spirit on the part of her owner. Joyce was then sent to live on a tobacco farm in Louisville, Kentucky. From there she came under the ownership of a fellow named John S. Bowling. Historians believe that John got into
cahoots with our W Lindsay. But it's here that her story gets hazy. But what we do know is that she went on the road with the latter. Newspaper advertisements announced her impending arrivals, her stature growing with every run of the printing press. Her appearances were announced as early as January of eighteen thirty five, touting her as one
of the greatest natural curiosities ever exhibited. When Barnum finally arrived in Philadelphia, Joyce Heth was in full form, entertaining a crowd, singing old church hymns and telling stories of Little Georgie. What happened next is a bit murky, but undeniably exploitative. We don't know what Barnum really thought about Joyce at that moment. In some ways, he's one of
history's most unreliable narrators. He was a master of story craft, after all, spinning spectacular fictions from bare threads of fact. You see over his life he published various editions of his own autobiography, and in these different versions across the ages, his account of the Joyce Helf affair evolved. There's a fair case to be made that Barnum didn't really believe that Joyce was one d sixty one years old. In fact, he may have believed that not a lot of people
did either. It's possible that he, like those in Joyce's audience, so badly wanted to believe the story she told. This willingness to be duped was part of the human psyche that Barnum loved to manipulate, So in order to make her case more convincing, it's possible that he took it upon himself to remake her in his own design. And because of all of this, we can't know for sure
who he understood Joyce heth to be. But what we can be certain of is this he believed that she was going to make him a lot of money, so he bought her, or at least he bought some of the rights to her. Scholars have debated for years about the wording of the contract that he signed. Did he now own her or was he just leasing her from our w technicalities aside a better question to ask might be, this doesn't matter if the end result is the same.
America was created on the backs of enslaved people, and now Barnum had chosen to continue at legacy. P T. Barnum and his newly acquired sidekick, Levi Lyman arranged to have private meetings with the press, teasing them with the promise of exclusive access to Joyce. But the men had an ulterior motive. This wasn't a pr stunt, but a paid endeavor on the part of the journalist to suddenly
miraculously turn any of their critics into believers. Any media scholar would tell you that this also was a pretty dubious move. Joyce became a kind of analog click bait that drove profits into the hands of her keepers and newspaper publishers alike. To this end, Barnum was honing his skills as a master manipulator. In New York, Joyce put on a convincing show. She went on to Providence and then to Boston, with a mix of Manhattan and Albany
in between. Newspapers likened her to an Egyptian mummy and spoke of her skeletal frame. Others claimed that she wasn't really an enslaved person at all, but rather a puppet made of whalebone, rubber and springs. Then, in the winter of eighteen thirty six, she grew sick. To recuperate, she was sent to Bethel, Connecticut, to the home of Barnum's brother, and he also sent along a nurse to keep a watchful eye on her, someone to protect his most valuable asset. Sadly,
it wouldn't help. Joyce passed away on February of eighteen thirty six, but whether or not she would rest in peace is an entirely different story. Joyce Heath's live performances made P. T. Barnum the talk of the town, and he wasn't about to let her death put an end to that. On February eighteen thirty six, just six days after her death, Barnum packed about spectators into a makeshift operating theater in New York City. He invited the public
and some very prominent news paper editors as well. You see, the Penny papers, which had for several months been writing about Joyce extensively, immediately clamored for an autopsy after she died. They saw her potential scientific value, particularly as part of
the broader science of inquiring into racial difference. So when The New York Sun ran an article announcing Joyce's passing, it included the question whether, for the sake of science, would not a post mortem examination of this aged person be of use. After all, the black market for corpses was robust, and medical curiosities, as they termed them back then, commanded top dollar. The New York Sun then quickly published another article objecting to the autopsy, but not for the
reasons you might assume. No, the writer wasn't concerned with retaining Joyce's individual dignity, but rather wanted to respect her due to her connection to George Washington. Because of her association to a name so seemingly immortal, some papers argue that she should be spared the indecency that a public autopsy would bring. But even though a heated debate formed around it, none of it mattered to Barnum. He intended to capitalize on all of it, and he did so
in spades. Barnum quickly contacted Dr David Rogers, a pre eminent surgeon who had already expressed a desire to conduct an autopsy after Heath died. Dr Rogers, it seems, had been quite skeptical about who Joyce really was. He visited her and had conducted a physical exam and found no signs of what would be expected had the person been the age that she claimed to be. Roger skepticism was noteworthy.
The fact that Barnum hired him to do the autopsy not only gave the whole spectacle some degree of credibility, but also turned skepticism into a major draw for the event. He was manipulating all sides to his own advantage. The procedure kicked off at noon in an operating theater next door to what would later in fact become Barnum's Great American Museum. Heth body had been placed in a mahogany coffin, all eyes stared down, and next craned for the best angle.
We can hear the hush fall over the audience, and it's easy to imagine how small she looked in death, her body still just a tool used by others in their relentless pursuit of profit. Dr Rogers split Joyce apart, narrating to his audience as he went, explaining his incisions and what things he was looking for in determining the authenticity of Barnum's claims, he proceeded to thoroughly examine her chest, cavity, liver, heart, skull, and other areas where telltale signs of an ancient life
might be found. Yet he found nothing indicating such old age. In fact, he decided that she probably couldn't have been more than seventy five years old. Barnum later claimed that the doctor pulled him aside and said what a shame it was that he had been tricked. Yes, you heard that right. Poor Barnum was the victim. At least that's what some of the papers reported, and Barnum led them to believe it, just in case any of his customers
might call foul. Later. Meanwhile, he had Lynman plant a different story in the New York Herald, one that claimed that Joyce Heath was still alive and that the autopsy had in fact been done on an entirely different woman, an impostor. Months later. Levi would laugh when confronted about this lie, and would proceed to tell one last story with the assurance that this one was the truth. He swore that Barnum had found Joyce in Kentucky, pulled her teeth out and taught her how to tell stories about
George Washington. Levi's version would go on to haunt Barnum until the end of his days, one that could never be erased, even by the abolitionist causes he took up later in life. The public autopsy of Joyce Heath became a spectacle through the media firestorm that ensued. Various penny press publications who were always at war with one another, published competing countrydicting stories while each purported to reveal the truth, and people couldn't look away. As the old saying goes,
there's no such thing as bad publicity. The story of Joyce he and P. T. Barnum is a complicated one, even for Barnum himself. On one side, it was through exhibiting her that Barnum found his calling as a showman. In a lot of ways, she helped to launch him into stardom. During the exhibits hey day, thousands of visitors paid money to stare, to touch, to question, and to marvel at a human being as though she was a
circus attraction or a painting in a museum. But there were also those who questioned the morality of how they participated in this act, how they were complicit in their spectating. You see, entertainment, it is never quite a neutral entity, and in the case of Joyce Heth, the fears, biases, and prejudices of those in the Antebellum North came to the foreground. In later years, the idea of being a Northern slave owner became much more socially repugnant. As time
went on, Barnum tried progressively harder. It seems to put some considerable distance between himself and this episode from his past, so we see that his hand was heavy in the making of Heth. But scholars have also posed another question, what if Joyce hath story had actually been created by her? Because it's typically the powerful ones who hold the pencils
and write the narratives. We don't have a complete understanding today of who she was, but one can wonder this was she the author of her own gaff, actively fooling the willing naive white audiences and white press. Could it possibly have been Joyce and not Barnum nor his predecessors who invent did this particular humbug? And if she was behind it, then it certainly paints a powerful image for us a black woman living in a time when people like her were at the bottom of the social letter
becoming the author of her own story. Now that's an ending I can get behind. As I mentioned before, the story of Joyce Heth is a complicated one, and I know some of the details can be hard to stomach, but nevertheless they are important to tell because they shed light on how we understand the world we live in. And because of that, we've set aside one more example, and if you stick around through our brief sponsor break, my co producer Robin Miniter will tell you all about it.
If you wanted to get business done, the city tavern was the place to be, and Henry Moss knew this well. Taverns played an important role in the lives of early Americans. It was a place to find the news, to test out ideas, and to be entertained. Being able to get a stiff drink certainly didn't hurt either. The Philadelphia air
was heavy and full of possibilities. The July day that Henry went into town, it was and America was on the brink of a new century, and for over twenty years the city had been at the center of a growing nation it was a time when America was trying to forge its own identity. The personalities who determined what unalienable rights were and who those rights belonged to, still walked these streets. Their ancestors had im graded here, trafficking
people from the African continent and desecrating indigenous communities. And along the way, these people were able to install themselves as a ruling class in this new nation, and it behooved them to retain this power at all costs. So when the faces of these men came to see Henriett the tavern that day, he smiled at them and to himself. Not a great deal is known about him beyond his exhibit persona. Most of what we know specifically concerned his body,
which of course became his legend. You see, he wanted to be looked at. Advertisements were planted in newspapers. He was called a curiosity. The printing presses likened his celebrity to that of Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. And when President George Washington stopped by, we can imagine that Henry nodded in his direction, knowing he was holding court for American royalty.
And on these occasions he would roll up his sleeves, unbuttoned his shirt, and show the crowd his spots across his skin were splattered pink patches, little islands of pale spreading across his body like constellations, and the onlookers tried to find meaning in their shapes. You see, Henry was a free black man with videlago, a condition which causes
skin cells to lose their pigment. He invited gawkers to come touch him for themselves and witness how as he told them, he was turning white through his own design. He became a walking war shark test for a new American anxiety. As Henry spoke to the crowd, he was sure to answer any questions that they had about him. He claimed to have been born entirely black, and as he got older, according to one paper, his natural color
began to rub off. The paper went on to say that he had become white and was as fair as any white person, save a few patches of melanin that remained. What at this all mean, the audience wondered, If our skin can shape shift, and can this change happen with our proximity to different kinds of people? Does it have to do with our living environment and maybe the tasks we engage with. And if a black man could morph into a white one, does that mean an Anglo countryman
could likewise turn dark? And if one turns dark, does that mean that one could also regress and do savagery. These people inhabited a world that was beginning to understand a social hierarchy contrived from arbitrary groupings, one based on skin color, and one that was on the brink of becoming the new world order. Soon, the American Philosophical Society decided that he was to be more than just an oddity.
He would become an object of scientific study. They poked him, needled him, rub solvents on his skin to see if they could expedite his metamorphosis. This was a dangerous turn in his story, as the field of philosophy these curious minds inhabited would go on to evolve into a burgeoning field of anatomy, and anatomy as we know then began to dovetail with the world of exhibitionism, trying to say
the appetite of the ever curious, paying public. Henry would move on from the taverns of Philadelphia and continuous travels In fact, he traveled all over the Eastern seaboard, but at some point history lost track of him. It's fair to say that Henry gave us a distinct prototype that
would go on to evolve into the American Sideshow. He created a story, placed himself on the center stage and tapped into the fears of his countrymen, fears that asked audience members to look on, to examine, but to remain flushed with relief that it wasn't them on stage. But what Henry also suggested was something alarming. It wasn't them on stage then, but his acts suggested that this reality
might someday change. And with that he would take a bow and thank his audience, Fastening his buttons and smoothing his sleeves, he would take his leave, his pocket heavy with coins and a smile on his lips as he walked out of town. After all, for him, it was all in a day's work. Sideshow was written by Robin Miniter, with production, narration and audio editing by me Aaron Mankey. Research for the series was done by Robin Minater, Taylor Haggerdorn,
and Sam Alberty. Grim and Mild Presents was created in partnership with I Heart Radio. You can learn more about this show and everything else going on from Grim and mild over at grim and mild dot com, and, as always, thanks for listening.