What Do We Do With Our Dead?

P. T. Barnum's first exhibit was a blind, crooked, and shrivelled old woman, a hundred and sixty-one years old, and his second was her dissection, conducted in an amphitheatre on Broadway in front of more than a thousand New Yorkers, who paid fifty cents each to see her get cut up. Her name was Joice Heth, and the story she'd told, long before she met Barnum, was that she was born in Madagascar in 1674, kidnapped into slavery in 1689, and transported to Virginia, where she became the property of George Washington's father. She said she'd been in the room when George Washington was born—“little Georgy,” she called him—and that she'd been the first to swaddle him. “In fact,” she said, “I raised him.”