Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

28 With Amusement for Allshe picked up some of the goat’s droppings, dismissed them as “nothingbut dried cherries,” ate them, and then promptly became ill and fled thebuilding. 51After a year away from Bethel, Barnum returned, eventually operatinga country store, dabbling in real estate, and, at age twenty-one, launchinga small newspaper, the Herald of Freedom. His short-lived journalistic experimentmainly allowed him to vent his anger against the “purse-proudoverbearing lordlings,” aristocrats, and overzealous Congregationalistswho ran the state. Such attacks, besides revealing his plebeian sympathies,opened him to criticism and lawsuits. After he mysteriously accused achurch deacon of “taking usury from an orphan boy,” he served a sixtydayjail sentence. His supporters, however, celebrated his departure fromjail by staging a parade, shooting off cannons, and undoubtedly thrillingBarnum with the excitement of being the center of attention. 52But New York City continued to lure Barnum, who, in 1833, got a jobclerking in a lower Manhattan dry goods store. As a financially strappeddenizen of the low-life Bowery area, he identified with the working class,frequented taverns and gambling dens, and cultivated his distaste for whathe described as the “codfish aristocracy”—the privileged elites with their“many fine ladies” or the prudish middle class with its zeal for moral uplift.He apparently felt a kind of instinctive tie to the Bowery toughs, even ashe looked for his main chance, his own formula for fame, fortune, andrespectability. 53In 1835, two years after Barnum returned to Manhattan, he took abold step, quitting his job, borrowing money, and joining the itinerant“hawkers and walkers” who trudged the countryside with acts and exhibitsranging from animals to peep shows and freaks. Barnum, however, hada particularly audacious exhibit: Joice Heth, whom he touted as “TheGreatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World”—natural becauseof her alleged age of 161 years and national because of her ability to tappatriotic emotions regarding the great American hero, George Washington.She was, as Barnum advertised her, “the first person who put clothes on theunconscious infant who was destined . . . to lead our heroic fathers to glory,to victory, and to freedom.” When Barnum first learned about the agedslave whom two men, including R. W. Lindsay, were showing in Philadelphiawith only modest success, he examined her carefully and, as he later wrote,“was favorably struck with the appearance of the old woman.” The decrepit,wizened slave “might almost as well have been called a thousandyears old as any other age.” She could barely move, and her left arm andboth legs seemed paralyzed. “She was totally blind, and her eyes were sodeeply sunken in their sockets that the eyeballs seemed to have disappearedaltogether. She had no teeth, but possessed a head of thick bushy grayhair.” Despite her infirmity, she seemed “in good health and spirits” and,