Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

30 With Amusement for Allspectators could even conclude that she was not human at all. In this respect,Barnum cleverly seized on charges that Heth was, in fact, a fraud. Heplanted newspaper stories and staged incidents suggesting that she was actuallymade of whalebone and India rubber (itself one of the era’s wonders)and that the contraption’s voice came from a ventriloquist. As Barnumsnickered: “Many who had seen her were equally desirous of a secondlook, in order to determine whether or not they had been deceived.”Whether they paid once or twice, Barnum reaped the dividends. In his effortsto extend his clientele beyond upper-class patrons, he also sought tolure female workers in factory towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, andadded to the exhibition a “Signor Vivalla,” who specialized in balancingand spinning such items as plates as he danced around, sometimes on stilts.Barnum changed Vivalla’s name from Antonio (which to Barnum did notsound foreign enough), paid him a fairly hefty salary, and required that hebathe more frequently. Ultimately, Barnum ventured beyond the posh settingsof the early tour and brought Heth and Vivalla to the quite unfashionableBowery, where working-class audiences reportedly turned out to seethem in large numbers. Walking a kind of cultural tightrope, Barnum wasattempting to craft an audience that bridged the elegant Niblo’s and Bowerydives. For the next two decades, he would do so with uncanny success. 56Joice Heth, for her part, served the cause exceedingly well. On an importantlevel, certainly, she had little choice; she was Barnum’s commodityto display. Still, as she became an early media celebrity, she may have relishedthe attention as well as the opportunity to step beyond traditionallyrestrictive roles for slaves and most women. In a real sense, she created herown persona, even as Barnum, Lyman, and the audiences shaped her in theimages they wanted. And she did so by demonstrating considerable theatricaltalents. Perhaps, too, she appreciated the relatively decent care thatBarnum provided, including a black female attendant to help her, a softbed, tobacco, and whiskey. Perhaps, even more important, she found empoweringthe chance to enact her own version of a familiar slave strategyof “puttin’ on ol’ massa,” embellishing to her great advantage the hoaxthat she was Washington’s nurse. She may even have come to believe manyof her own stories about herself. 57In any case, Heth was a superb performer. For eight to fourteen gruelinghours per day, six days a week—except when she was traveling, an ordealin itself—she was on display, resting, singing hymns, smoking a pipe,spinning tales about the baby Washington, shaking hands, letting peopletake her pulse, eating her food, joking, and answering questions playfullyand imaginatively. How long had she smoked? One hundred twenty years,she replied. When she quipped that she hoped soon to buy a wedding dress,a man asked whom she expected to marry. “Yourself sir,” she replied, “if Ican find no one else.” She added that there “are a great many others too