21 
The Congo is not more different from Massachusetts or Kansas or California. So I have chosen to write of Alabama not as a state which is part of a nation, but as a strange country.
—Carl Carmer, Stars Fell on Alabama (1934)
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks,” remarked Flannery O’Connor, “I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” A great novelist from Georgia, author of gothic stories about escaped criminals exterminating families or Bible salesmen prowling for girls with wooden legs, O’Connor insisted: “To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man.” She went on to explain that in the Christ-haunted South, “the general conception of man . . . is still theological,” a creature “formed in the image and likeness of God.” Man, in other words, is a shadow, a ghost, or possibly a freak. Thus conceived “as a figure for our essential displacement,” O’Connor concluded, the freak attains the depth and prevalence in Southern culture and literature.1 Whether or not O’Connor was right in her diagnosis of the Southern fascination with the freakish and abnormal—she did admit that “almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety”2—there is no denying that Chang and Eng stumbled upon a gold mine when they ventured into the Southern states in the fall of 1833.
After a brief tour in Kentucky, the young men opened in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 10 and grossed more than $500 during their nine days there. For the month of October, when they moved (as Elvis Presley would do about a century later) between Tennessee and Alabama, their receipts jumped to $1,104.50. If numbers tell a story, their income ledger suggests that the Deep South was smitten with the men from Siam: In November, they grossed $985.75, and in December, as Christmas approached, $1,447.
The road to the South, however, was not a smooth one. It was—as the twins would come to realize and take to heart—a different country. In this chapter’s epigraph, what Carl Carmer said about Alabama may sound a bit hyperbolic, but as W. J. Cash reminds us, it is a hyperbole “applicable in one measure or another to the entire section” of the South.3 Crossing from Tennessee into Alabama, Chang and Eng quickly learned a lesson about law and punishment and strange ways of life in the heart of Dixie, where even freed blacks, if they still existed there, were forbidden to travel. On October 26, roving in Huntsville, Alabama, the twins were snagged by local authorities for not having obtained a license. They had to pay a fine and costs of $26.60, and then in Athens, the next town, they got into trouble again.
A cotton village founded in 1818, Athens, like countless townships that sprouted in early nineteenth-century America, had an optimistic name but boasted only a few hundred souls. Yet, it had the unique distinction of being the hometown of William Wyatt Bibb, elected the first governor of the State of Alabama when it joined the Union in 1819. In less than a year, however, Bibb died in a fall from his horse, and his brother Thomas succeeded him in office. The lesson that Chang and Eng learned in Athens was not about fraternal bonding or how to keep things in the family, but Southern pride and a penchant for violence.
On the night of their exhibit, October 28, almost the whole town turned out and crowded the parlor of the only hostel in town, operated by one Mr. Bass. Ruddy-faced farmers in their overalls drawled melodiously, chewed on tobacco, and spat with abandon. Women in their puffy, flowery dresses brought their crying babies. Restless kids fidgeted on stools and picked their noses out of habit. Sitting amid the colorful audience was a local doctor named Bolus, who, trying to distinguish himself from the crowd, proposed to examine the “connection” of the twins. The idea pleased the onlookers, who wanted to get their money’s worth by looking at God’s miracle up close. But the twins were appalled. After years of being prodded, poked, and examined by numerous eminent physicians in big cities both in the United States and abroad, they were reluctant to make themselves available to a country doctor. Also, they were now their own men and had to please no master, who surely would have ordered them to strip and gratify the paying crowd. So the twins politely declined the doctor’s request.
Ruffled by the two freakish Chinamen’s challenge to his authority, Dr. Bolus announced that the twins were imposters, a declaration that caught fire in the room. The insult immediately opened up an old wound for the twins: In Liverpool, during their trip to England, they were attacked by an arrogant Briton who called them frauds after they had refused to undress themselves before the ladies in the room. At that time, as tender youths inexperienced in the world, they rushed toward the man from behind the table, Chang pulling out his purse and giving the man a shilling, asking him to leave. The Briton punched him in the nose instead.
And now, in what purported to be the entertainment center of a Southern village, they again faced the same baseless accusation. Their tempers flaring, they walked up to the doctor, and one of them knocked him down—from the perspective of their opponent and the bystanders, it was hard for anyone to figure out which of the twins had delivered the blow. Regardless, pandemonium ensued. Rushing to the defense of their village doctor, the crowd assailed the twins with a kettle of hot water, chairs, drinks, or whatever came in handy. Chang and Eng “narrowly escaped with their lives,” wrote the Alabama Athenian. Since they delivered the first blow, the twins were arrested and taken before a magistrate. After an investigation, they “were bound to appear at the next Circuit Court in a bond for three hundred and fifty dollars. They gave the requisite security and were discharged.”4 The news about the incident reached as far as England, where the Times lampooned it as a “battle-royal in Athens,” stressing the happy fact that the twins were not hurt but “bound over” for the flagellation of a country doctor.5
In the twins’ income ledger, the entry for October 28 in Athens was marked with a cryptic “~.”
A few days later, in Florence, Alabama, they appeared before the circuit judge, Sidney C. Posey. Hailing from Pendleton, South Carolina, Judge Posey also carried the license of a Methodist minister and was attended on his trips by a black slave, a wedding gift from his father-in-law, a wealthy plantation owner in Columbia, Tennessee.6 During the hearing, Judge Posey, a Southerner who thoroughly understood a man’s right to defend his honor in face of a false accusation, took it upon himself to verify the mysterious band, and, after being satisfied with the examination, dismissed the charges against the twins and required only that their manager, Charles Harris, publish a statement of explanation in the local paper so as to appease the agitated Athens citizenry. That judicious ruling led to an entry for November 1 in the twins’ expense ledger: “Judge Posey for inserting C.H.’s statement of the Athens affray in Florence ‘Gazette’ $2.”
Ironically, the Athenian fracas seemed to have boosted the twins’ popularity in Alabama, for folks down South seemed to like nothing better than a good fight. For the three days Chang and Eng appeared in Florence, the receipts totaled more than $200. Their biggest haul was in Tuscaloosa, then the state capital, in western Alabama. Staying at a local tavern called Mr. Ewing’s, Chang and Eng spent two days in this city by the Black Warrior River, paid a steep $27 for corporation tax, but grossed $308 in receipts. The hundred or so students of the newly founded University of Alabama were treated to a rare view of these wonders from afar, not realizing how these Siamese men, outlandish and freakish as they were, would slowly and resolutely inch themselves into a Southern world in ways no one could ever imagine. “For ways that are dark / And for tricks that are vain / The heathen Chinee is peculiar,” as F. Bret Harte would suggest in his wildly popular satirical poem, “The Heathen Chinee” (1870).7 But it was still four decades before that familiar nineteenth-century refrain made its way into the American lexicon.
The Siamese Twins, however, were hardly the only exotics in the Bible belt. In the woods south of Tuscaloosa, an area of backcountry that would become famous in the twentieth century thanks to the work of James Agee and Walker Evans, there was a town named Demopolis, where Chang and Eng would stop for one night. In the words of Carl Carmer, Demopolis was where “the Deep South’s most romantic story had its beginning.”8 Just like the Siamese Twins, whose story began on the other side of the globe, the genesis of Demopolis also had to do with events that unfolded in a distant land.
On Bastille Day in 1817, a band of about 150 French exiles, led by General Charles Lefebvre Desnouettes and Colonel Nicolas Raoul, heroes of Napoleonic campaigns across Europe, arrived at what then was known as the White Bluff. They had been banished from their native land by King Louis XVIII following the downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Lured by the dream of a new beginning, they decided to settle in the wilderness of Alabama and grow olives and grapes to sustain themselves like common people. They first called their settlement “Aigleville” (French for “Eagleville”), in memory of their dethroned emperor, whose royal insignia included a figure of an eagle, but they later changed the name to “Demopolis” (meaning “city of the people”), in keeping with their desire to live among ordinary folks.
Women in silky, brocaded gowns and men in tricolored military uniforms, these aristocrats, who had never done a day’s manual labor in their lives, set out courageously to clear woods, plow fields, raise cattle, milk cows, and cook meals over coals. In the evenings, after the sun had long set behind the white bluff by the river, they would light fires, play guitars, read books, drink rich wines from the Old World, and dance in the moonlight.
But the Gallic tale with a romantic beginning soon came to a tragic ending. The crops of olives and grapes failed year after year because these “farmers manqué” knew nothing about the soil or the frost that would soon ravage the Mediterranean trees and vines. Moreover, fever and diseases also significantly reduced the population of the colony. While the wealthiest among them could afford to live on imported goods (their own meager products were never adequate to sustain the group), the less fortunate had to lead lives severe beyond their imaginations. Colonel Raoul became a ferryman in a nearby creek, while his wife, formerly the Marchioness of Sinabaldi, flipped flapjacks for ferry passengers in a lonely cabin on the bank. When amnesty was finally granted by Louis Philippe a few years later, those who could afford it would either return to France or move on to other American cities. Their history remained star-crossed, for in 1822, on his way back to Europe, General Desnouettes drowned when his ship, the Albion, struck a reef off the Irish coast.
By the time Chang and Eng arrived in Demopolis, on February 26, 1834, the former French settlement had already lost most of its Gallic luster. Only a few of the olive trees that had survived frostbite were scattered around town, bearing fruit each year to the delight of the more hardy avian population. Anything else left of this strange episode of Alabama history seemed to be buried in place names scattered in the area, words with etymologies rooted in Napoleonic imperial dreams: Marengo, Linden, Arcola, and Moscow. The twins made stops at these Alabama towns and counties on their way back from a two-month tour in Mississippi and Louisiana, which included a stint in America’s capital of carnival, New Orleans. Near Demopolis, they paid Colonel Raoul a dollar to be ferried across the creek and stayed at a hostel run by one Mr. Drummond. In a town of only a few hundred souls, their one-day show grossed $61. At the ticket price of twenty-five cents per person, not including the sale of lithographic portraits, biographical sketches, and cigars, it amounted to more than two hundred visitors. That’s nothing less than a riot in the woods.
Perhaps the French authority had been right four years earlier, when they denied entry to the Siamese Twins for fear of maternal impressions. Judging by their phenomenal popularity among the French expatriates, it seems that the twins would not only wield a sort of necromantic power over pregnant women but also appeal to displaced souls, or anyone troubled by a sense of alienation from one’s self. Whether it’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the picture of Dorian Gray, the freak, to quote Flannery O’Connor again, is “a figure for our essential displacement,” an estrangement from ourselves, from God.
As the twins traveled in the backwoods, bayous, and swamps of the antebellum Deep South, a fad simultaneously began sweeping through the United States, a new so-called science of mind, one lacking empty theological speculations and futile metaphysical doubts. It was nothing less than a supposed intellectual fever that would grip almost everyone in nineteenth-century America, including Chang and Eng.