Joice Heth. P. T. Barnum's advertising poster from December 1835 reads, "JOICE HETH is unquestionably the most astonishing and interesting curiosity in the World! She was the slave of Augustine Washington, (the father of Gen. Washington,) and was the first person who put clothes on the unconscious infant, who, in after days, led our heroic fathers on to glory, to victory, and freedom. To use her own language when speaking of the illustrious Father of his Country, 'she raised him.' JOICE HETH was born in the year 1674, and has, consequently, now arrived at the astonishing AGE OF 161 YEARS." Courtesy of the Somers Historical Society.

Heth, Joice (17??-19 Feb. 1836), performer, exhibited by P. T. Barnum as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. Circumstances of Heth's birth are murky, as is virtually her entire life before her first encounter with Barnum in Philadelphia. By 1835 she was held as a slave by John S. Bowling of Paris, Kentucky, and exhibited in Louisville, Kentucky (at the Louisville Museum), and Cincinnati, Ohio, where the outlines of her stage act began to take shape. Telling stories about her swaddling of the young Washington, singing hymns that she supposedly taught him, answering questions from curious visitors, and submitting her remarkably frail and wizened body to public scrutiny, she became known at once as a person of historical significance and as a natural curiosity, or freak.

In June 1835 the ailing Bowling sold half of his interest in the exhibit to itinerant showmen R. W. Lindsay and Coley Bartram. Lindsay and Bartram took Heth east, exhibiting her from Pittsburgh and Greensburg to Philadelphia. Apparently failing to adequately profit on their attraction, they sought to sell out. Bartram approached his acquaintance Barnum about the exhibit; Barnum was a former newspaper editor from Connecticut who was then running a grocery store in New York. Upon first visiting Heth at the Masonic Hall in Philadelphia, Barnum was impressed by her sociability and rapport with visitors; but he was more intrigued by her grotesque appearance and the signs of her apparently preternatural old age: she was toothless, paralyzed in both legs and one arm, blind with deeply sunken eyes; she had "a head of thick bushy hair" (P. T. Barnum, The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself, p. 149) and long nails curling out from her fingers. He purchased the right to exhibit her (and, ambiguously, the right to "the possession of the person of . . . Joice Heth" [p. 151]) for a period of twelve months for one thousand dollars. Thus began one of the most storied careers in the history of American entertainment.

Starting with a two-and-a-half-week engagement at the fashionable Niblo's Garden in New York, Heth was exhibited across the Northeast in taverns, museums, pleasure gardens, lodges, railroad houses, concert halls, saloons, boarding houses, and hotels as "the greatest curiosity in the world, particularly to Americans," six days a week, sometimes for as long as twelve hours a day--this schedule was almost continuous from August 1835 through January 1836. Newspapers in Providence, Boston, Lowell, Hingham, Worcester, Springfield, Hartford, Lynn, Albany, Newark, New Haven, Bridgeport, Albany, Paterson, and other towns and cities reported her comings and goings. When attendance flagged or controversy threatened, Barnum and his assistant Levi Lyman drummed up novel publicity stunts. For instance, in Providence, abolitionist ministers protested the exhibit on the grounds that entry fees would only enrich the slaveholders behind the exhibit; Barnum and Lyman countered by drawing up elaborate handbills and planting newspaper stories claiming that the exhibit was actually an antislavery benefit, the proceeds of which would free Heth's still-enslaved great-grandchildren. (Such claims became central to The Life of Joice Heth, a bogus "biography" created by Lyman and sold at the exhibit.)

Everywhere Heth went, questions about the authenticity of her claims followed. In New Haven, Lyman exploited these doubts for publicity. He placed a story in a local paper asserting that Heth was not only not the former nurse of George Washington but that she was not even human: she was, instead, an ingeniously contrived automaton made up of India rubber and whalebone, fashioned by "some of those cunning fellows who deal in gum elastick overshoes and waterproof boots" (Reiss, p. 115). In Barnum's subsequent retelling of the episode, customers flocked to find out the truth for themselves.

When Heth died, Barnum sought to further capitalize on public skepticism about Heth's authenticity by arranging to have an autopsy performed in public. Soon Heth became the subject of one of the first American media spectacles. Of course, Barnum charged fifty cents admission; by his reckoning, over a thousand spectators witnessed the dissection, which was performed by the renowned New York physician David L. Rogers. Rogers announced at the conclusion of his investigation that Heth could have been no more than eighty years old and that every aspect of her performance was a hoax; this announcement set off a frenzy in New York's lively journalistic world, as the results of her autopsy were debated by New York's commercial press for weeks. Some newspapers publicly questioned Rogers's findings while others questioned the questioners; meanwhile Barnum and Lyman fed the flames by offering an exclusive interview to the New York Herald, in which they claimed, among other things, that Heth was actually still alive and would soon make a triumphant reappearance.

Barnum soon claimed responsibility for the whole affair, even amplifying it in his 1841 mock-autobiography The Adventures of an Adventurer, in which he claimed to have scripted every element of Heth's act, including forging documents attesting to her authenticity, coaxing (or coercing) her performance by plying her with whiskey, and putting her on a diet of eggs to reduce her weight. His aggressive telling of the story was more muted in his 1855 autobiography, The Life of P.T. Barnum; and by 1869, when he was trying to refashion himself as a respectable Republican politician who was a friend of former slaves, he disavowed his earlier exploitation of this enslaved woman, presenting himself as a dupe of her deceptions. Nonetheless the episode remained one of the most famous in his career, and it was often used to discredit Barnum.

Heth's story has generally been linked to Barnum's rise to fame and fortune, yet she was a remarkable performer in her own right. Despite Barnum's early claims to have invented her act, the historical record is clear that she developed her nurse-of-Washington routine well before she ever encountered the now-famous showman.

Heth's career may therefore be understood not just as the first chapter in Barnum's half-century-long manipulation of a mass public or as a symptom of nineteenth-century racist culture, but as a complex instance of African American "signifying"--in which black performers and storytellers revise cherished American narratives in order to shed light on the underside of the American story.

A rich selection of primary documents related to Heth's performance with Barnum is available at the Lost Museum Web site (http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/home.html). James W. Cook Jr.'s The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It in the Universe (2005) reprints a number of other relevant documents, including the complete text of Barnum's 1841 account of the exhibit, The Adventures of an Adventurer. A full-length study of the exhibit and its place within nineteenth-century American culture is Benjamin Reiss's The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (2001).