In 1904, an American missionary brought Ota Benga, a pygmy from the central Congo, to the United States. He was placed in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York City, where his filed teeth, disproportionate limbs and tricks helped attract 40,000 visitors a day. He was exhibited alongside an orangutan, with whom he performed tricks, in order to emphasize Africans’ similarities with apes. An editorial in the New York Times, rejecting calls for his release, remarked that “pygmies are very low in the human scale.... The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.”
Jason Stearns
***
PREFACE
In 1906 a young man from the Congo known as Ota Benga became the subject of headlines around the world when he was exhibited in a cage with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo Monkey House. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers flocked to the zoo to behold the so-called pygmy, who stood four feet eleven inches and weighed a little over one hundred pounds. That this occurred in a preeminent American city in the twentieth century would seem enough to cause astonishment. But there’s far more to the story than meets the eye.
While on the surface this appears to be the saga of one man’s degradation—of a shocking and shameful spectacle—on closer inspection it is also the story of an era, of science, of elite men and institutions, and of racial ideologies that endure today. Benga left no written account of his own, and others have filled the gap with conspiratorial silence, half-truths, and even flagrant deception. As a result, what has been officially recorded and recycled in hundreds of accounts around the globe is a flourishing, ever-expanding fiction. So this book is also a story of secrets, lies, denial, and overdue reclamation.
Through a forensic-type inquiry we can unearth missing chapters from Benga’s extraordinary journey and in the process retrieve portions of our past from the waste bin of history. As we retrace Benga’s footsteps from Central Africa through Europe and America, we find him in the shadow of a lettered elite. In its correspondence, journals, books, photographs, and other historical documents, he clings to the margins, doggedly asserting his humanity; insisting that his story—that our story—be truthfully told. If we lean in we may hear the muffled voice of a man long thought silenced, and see ever more clearly who we were as the century turned in America’s imperial city.
**
Waves of women in long skirts and bonnets and men in suits and derbies streamed along the path from Fordham Road, scaled the graceful winding stairways, and went past the pool of sea lions. They had come from mansions along Fifth and Madison Avenues, and from teeming ghettos on the Lower East Side and in the Tenderloin District. They eagerly flocked to the left side of the court, to the elegant beaux arts pavilion flanked by columns with the words “Primate House” etched into the stone lintel above its ornate archway.7 High above the doorway, carved into the triangular tympanum crowning the building, was an intricately depicted family of orangutans, foreshadowing what lay ahead.
They filed along the narrow, dark corridor, through the stench of humid feces and monkey musk. Undaunted, they marched over a carpet of discarded peanut shells, carefully scanning the monkeys, lemurs, chimpanzees, orangutans, and baboons, until they reached the far end, where they found, displayed in an iron cage, Ota Benga, his slight 103-pound, four-foot eleven-inch chocolate-colored frame sheathed in white trousers and a khaki coat. His small brown feet were bare.
“Ist das ein Mensch?”—Is it a man?—one woman asked in German.
“Something about it I don’t like,” said another.8
Could this caged creature be, many no doubt wondered, the incarnation of one of the characters in best-selling books like Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast, published in 1900, or the “half child, half animal,” described in Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, published the previous year, “whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger”?
Could he be the missing link, the species bridging man and ape that preoccupied leading scholars?
Some were probably made uneasy by eyes that radiated understanding. This small being with smooth brown skin and small solemn eyes sat erectly and neither swung from an apparatus nor made seemingly vile gestures. He was composed, if somewhat sad. In fact, except for his child-size stature and teeth meticulously filed to sharp points, he appeared no different from an ordinary “Negro.” But if he was wholly human, would he be in a cage in a fetid monkey house?
As many as five hundred people at a time crowded around to gawk at the diminutive Ota Benga while he preoccupied himself with a pet parrot, deftly shot his bow and arrow, or wove a mat and hammock from the bundles of twine placed in the cage. Children giggled and hooted with delight while adults laughed, many uneasily, at the human spectacle.
**
The cage Benga inhabited had been built at the southern end of the Primate House to keep the monkeys warm and make the orangutan easier to observe. Benga’s cage, like those of his housemates, was connected to a room inside the building. And like the orangutan and monkeys, he was at the mercy of the keepers, who decided when he could enter the building and elude the crowds. Until then, he was unavoidably on display and, like his housemates, subjected to the disquieting hysteria and stares of a seemingly endless stream of spectators.
Benga became the object of pointing fingers, audible gasps, and bellowing laughter. Alone and locked in a monkey house cage he could, in the September Indian summer heat, smell the stench of ape feces, urine, and musk laced with the foreign odors of hundreds of spectators packed into the steamy, cramped quarters. He did not initially comprehend their language but could feel both the sting of their scorn and the pang of their pity. In their wide eyes he could see his humanity, like one’s image in a fun house mirror, monstrously distorted. He was cornered, and exposed to cackling hyenas under a glaring spotlight.
We cannot know exactly what Benga felt, but research on the psychological trauma associated with shame suggests that it is not substantially different from the effects of physical torture. Studies also consistently show a strong correlation between event-related shame and post-victimization symptoms including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, withdrawal, and phobias.2 One researcher, J. P. Gump, found that the most profound shame results from the destruction of your subjectivity when “what you need, what you desire, and what you feel are of complete and utter insignificance.”3
That would certainly apply to Benga as he endured the gawking of spectators utterly indifferent to his feelings. They howled. Gasped. Gaped. Pointed. Jeered.
Benga frequently walked to the door with eyes pleading for his keepers to release him from public view.
“Shame is such a searing painful experience that its characteristic defense is turning away from the stimulus situation,” another researcher has said.4 Andrew Morrison observes, “Shame induces a wish to become invisible, unseen, to sink into the ground or to disappear into the thick, soupy fog that we have just imagined.”5
Occasionally Benga was mercifully permitted to roam the forest under the watchful eye of park rangers. However, once discovered, he was hungrily pursued by park-goers, and returned to his cage. He was a sensation.
“Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes” was the headline in Sunday’s New York Times. The five-hundred-word article described Benga’s captivity as a dark comedy, in which the tragic hero was, in the view of the Men of Science, an inferior creature. The article would cast the newspaper as a central character in Benga’s unfolding trauma.
“The human being,” the article said, “happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale. But to the average non-scientific person in the crowd of sightseers there was something about the display that was unpleasant.”6
However unsettling, the exhibit on the respectable grounds of a world-class zoological park had been sanctioned by Hornaday, one of the world’s leading zoologists, and by Henry Fairfield Osborn, among his era’s most eminent scientists.
(...)
For Benga, each second may have seemed an eternity, but for Hornaday, the debut was a resounding success. He assured a reporter that the exhibition had been authorized by the Zoological Society. Madison Grant, the society’s secretary, had in fact been intimately involved in the negotiations to secure Benga. As an exhibit, Benga personified the society’s mission, expressed by Osborn on the park’s opening day: the zoological park was meant to educate the masses who could not travel and explore, and to serve as “a delightful pleasure ground.”10
Hornaday also insisted that the exhibit was in keeping with human exhibitions in Europe, breezily suggesting the Continent’s indisputable status as the world’s paragon of culture and civilization.11 Hadn’t Sara Baartman, a southern African woman, been exhibited, barely clad, throughout London and Paris as the “Hottentot Venus” until her death in 1815? The famous scientist Georges Cuvier, professor of comparative anatomy at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and founding father of vertebrate paleontology, believed Baartman’s ample derriere was evidence that her people, the Khoikhoi, were oversexed. After her death he performed an autopsy and concluded that she and the so-called Hottentots were more akin to apes than to humans. He made a cast of Baartman’s body and preserved her brain, genitals, and skeleton, ensuring that even in death, she’d draw a crowd. While Benga was being exhibited in a monkey house cage, Baartman’s remains—her brain, genitals, and skeleton—were still on display in case number 33 at the Paris Musée de l’Homme.12While today most people of all races would find such behavior both racist and morally contemptible, in the era’s elite white circles Cuvier was generally considered an embodiment of scientific truth.
Long after Baartman’s death human zoos celebrating Europeans’ conquest of purportedly primitive people remained popular in Europe; these included zoos in Hamburg, Barcelona, and Milan. Carl Hagenbeck, a seller of wild animals, exhibited Samoan and Sami people to great success in 1874. So popular was his 1876 exhibit of Egyptian Nubians that it toured Berlin, Paris, and London.13 A year later Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimation in Paris, organized exhibits of Nubians and Inuit seen by one million people; and in 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium exhibited several hundred of his newly conquered Congolese people in Brussels to appreciative crowds.14
Hornaday conceded that these had all been human zoos; none of the people had been exhibited in a monkey house cage. But he was an inveterate showman, and he saw the exhibition as in keeping with the mission of the zoological gardens. He hoped that he had not given his colored brethren reason to believe that Benga’s placement in a monkey house suggested any close analogy of the African “savage” with apes.
“Benga,” he wryly assured them, “is in the primate house because that’s the most comfortable place we could find for him.”15
**
Shortly before 2 P.M., Benga appeared in an arena-like cage, equipped with a bow and arrow, a new target made of clay, and a pet parrot. A short time later, he was joined in the cage by Dohong, an orangutan.
Three hundred to five hundred spectators at a time crowded around to gape at the pair. Those who had been present the day before noted that Benga’s feet, which had been bare, were now covered by canvas shoes. The two captives were sometimes locked in each other’s arms; at other times, Dohong was placidly perched on Benga’s slight shoulder, or the two frolicked with Benga flinging Dohong like a ball. The crowds reveled in these antics. For Benga, Dohong provided a needed distraction, and also companionship and affection, all of which he had been denied.
The Times reporter noted the similarities between Benga and Dohong, saying that Benga was not much taller than the orangutan, and their heads were alike. “Both grin in the same way when pleased,” he added, casually suggesting a closer kinship between Benga and the ape than other humans shared.7
A bewildered Benga occasionally sat silently on a stool, staring—at times glaring—through the bars as his tormentors hysterically howled their approval. Benga occasionally mimicked the menacing mob, as he did when a knicker-clad boy goaded him to shoot his bow and arrow, commanding, “Shoot, shoot.”
“Shoot, shoot,” Benga mocked back.8 The crowd roared. In fact, Benga found that, like the monkeys, he was a source of amusement whether he sat motionless, erupted in anger, or sought to allay his anxiety by playing with Dohong or shooting his bow and arrow.
But not everyone was amused by Benga’s misfortune. The Reverend Dr. Robert Stuart MacArthur, the influential pastor of Manhattan’s Calvary Baptist Church on West Fifty-Seventh Street, stood among the heckling, howling herd that Monday, and he was outraged.
“The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African,” MacArthur said. “Instead of making a beast of this little fellow we should be putting him in school for the development of such powers as God gave him.”9 MacArthur said he would contact the city’s black clergy to organize a protest against the exhibit. “Our Christian missionary societies must take this matter up at once.” In MacArthur, Benga had found a formidable ally.
**
By Sunday, September 16, a week after his debut, Benga was no longer in the cage, but roamed the park under the watchful eye of park rangers. Still he was not free. That day a record forty thousand people visited the zoo, nearly all to see Ota Benga. Wherever Benga went, hordes followed in hot pursuit, “howling, jeering and yelling,” reported the Times.15 The rowdy crowd pursued Benga, and when he was cornered, some people poked him in the ribs or tripped him, while others merely laughed at the sight of a frightened “pygmy.” In self-defense, Benga struck several visitors, and it took three men to get him back to the monkey house.
Hornaday had long shared Osborn’s and Grant’s contempt for the lower-class zoo-goers, whom he privately described as “low-lived beasts who appreciate nothing and love filth and disorder.”16 Now, the unruly mobs overwhelmed the park rangers. Benga had excited their raw emotions and Hornaday had tired of the chaos. He wrote to Verner on Monday, September 17, to report that Benga had again resisted authority.
“I regret to say that Ota Benga has become quite unmanageable,” he wrote.17 “He has been so fully exploited in the newspapers, and so much in the public eye, it is quite inadvisable for us to punish him; for should we do so, we would immediately be accused of cruelty, coercion, etc., etc. I am sure you will appreciate this point.”
Immune from punishment, Hornaday complained, “the boy does quite as he pleases, and it is utterly impossible to control him.”18
Unable to fathom Benga’s resistance to his captivity with monkeys and apes, Hornaday expressed dismay that Benga threatened to bite the keepers whenever they tried to bring him back to the monkey house “and would undoubtedly do so if they should persist.”
Given the insurrection, Hornaday was prepared to relinquish the reins. “I see no way out of the dilemma but for him to be taken away.”19Meanwhile Benga’s daily adventures in the wilds of the New York Zoological Gardens had become a newspaper publisher’s dream. Neither journalists nor the public could get enough of Benga, whose adventures in the picturesque zoological park were a daily source of headlines. “Zoo Has a Pygmy Too Many,” reported Monday’s New York Sun. From the depths of his debasement, Benga was a star.
That day, a keeper managed to catch Benga after he was once again chased through the park by a jeering mob. He reportedly asked how Benga liked America. “Me no like America,” Benga forlornly replied.20
**
Finally on the afternoon of Friday, September 28, Benga, escorted by the long-overdue Verner, bade farewell to the zoo. Benga asked to say good-bye to the attendants, to whom he gave his arrows, reserving the bow for the chief keeper.
Hornaday breathed a sigh of relief as Verner quietly left the park with the person who had first been exhibited in a cage twenty days earlier. The exhibition had contributed to a doubling of park attendance compared with the preceding year. Some 220,800 people had visited the park in September and nearly all, if not all of them, had seen Benga.8
Benga’s departure would be as calm and contained as his debut was frenetic and flamboyant. Hornaday apparently did not wish to invite the fanfare that had accompanied the debut. No reporters were alerted to witness Benga’s farewell.
Benga, wearing the same khaki uniform with gold buttons as the attendants, would be quietly lifted from the bowels of debasement in the Bronx Zoo monkey house to the height of African American achievement in Brooklyn’s Weeksville section. There, he would enter the city’s largest and most affluent African American community, complete with schools, churches, businesses, doctors, lawyers, and teachers steeped in Victorian ideals, to live in a finely appointed orphanage. Gordon was ecstatic.
“He looks like a rather dwarfed colored boy of unusual amiability and curiosity,” Gordon said.9 “Now our plan is this: We are going to treat him as a visitor. We have given him a room to himself, where he can smoke if he chooses.”
Concerns had been raised by relatives about the welfare of the children residing at the orphanage once Benga—who had routinely been described in the press as a savage cannibal—arrived. “Why he’ll eat my Matilda alive,” one anguished mother told Gordon.10
Gordon assured anxious relatives that Benga would not board with the children, and that he would dine with the cooks in the kitchen. Gordon said Benga had already learned a surprising number of English words and would soon be able to express himself.
“This,” he asserted, “will be the beginning of his education.”11
**
From the moment Benga set foot on American soil he had been held up to public ridicule by those determined to prove he belonged to an inferior species. Now, at the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn’s Weeksville section, he would be surrounded by elite African Americans determined to show that blacks could be fully integrated into American life as respectable and self-sufficient citizens.
Named for James Weeks, a stevedore from Virginia who in 1838 bought a plot of land in the ninth ward of central Brooklyn, by the 1850s Weeksville had become one of the largest African American communities, a picturesque suburb bounded by present-day Fulton Street and East New York, Troy, and Ralph Avenues. Its population had swelled to nearly seven hundred after the 1863 draft riots made it a refuge for blacks fleeing Lower Manhattan.1
Hundreds sought safety in Weeksville and Flatbush, where, according to an account in the Christian Recorder, “the colored men who had manhood in them armed themselves and threw out their pickets every day and night, determined to die defending their homes.”2
***
At the end of 1909 Gordon wrote to Verner, who by then was working on the Panama Canal, to report that Benga was still working on the farm. “He has a bank account, and is saving his money to go back home or to do whatever is thought for him,” Gordon said.21
Gordon said the educational project had “proved to be a failure,” given Benga’s age. “It was simply impossible to put him in a class to receive instructions, from a literary point. . . . I have done the best I could in trying to develop him, from every standpoint, and I find that the only thing to do is to let him work.”22
Soon afterward, in January 1910, Benga made his second pilgrimage to Lynchburg, Virginia. That spring William Sheppard settled in Staunton, Virginia, seventy-four miles away. Sheppard would never return to Africa—a fate that Benga desperately hoped would not befall him.
**
So Benga, with his halting English and little more than a rudimentary education, found himself in an academically rigorous environment surrounded by black intellectuals who were dedicated to attaining racial equality in the United States and abroad. Accordingly, their students were held to the same high standards as white students at top colleges.
A survey of the required curriculum in 1917 found that it included three years of Latin and Greek and one year of German.13 Such an environment would be daunting, even overwhelming, for many American students. Now a person who had spent most of his life as a hunter was thrust into the vortex of a vigorous debate over the course of education most suitable for Africans and their descendants. While Benga might have found greater satisfaction in the woods or on a farm than he could find learning Latin, such thinking would be deemed heretical among the school’s academic elite.
Benga would, however, find a kindred spirit in one of his instructors. Annie Bethel Spencer was not quite twenty-six when Benga arrived at Virginia Seminary. She had been born on a farm in Henry County, Virginia, to mixed-race parents. Her father, of black, white, and Seminole Indian ancestry, had been born into slavery in 1862, and her mother was the biracial daughter of a wealthy Virginia aristocrat and his enslaved mistress. In America, where “one drop” of African American blood outweighed such nuances of ancestry, Annie Spencer was considered African American, a designation she proudly embraced.
**
Benga took elementary courses alongside children believed to be less than half his age, but outside the classroom he became a trusted teacher and companion to neighborhood boys. For Gregory, Hunter, and Wilelbert Hayes, who were born between 1903 and 1906 and lost their father before his memory could become indelible, Benga became a father figure and hero.
Often barefoot, though wearing western clothes, Benga would lead a band of boys—including the three Hayes boys and Annie Spencer’s son Chauncey—and teach them the secrets of the forest, including how to shave the tips of hickory wood to sharp points to make spears, or how to make bows from vines. With Benga the boys also learned how to gather blackberries and spear fish. The man they called Otto Bingo also taught them how to hunt wild turkeys and squirrels with a bow and arrow and how to trap small animals. They learned to forage for roots to make sassafras tea and marveled at his ability to collect honey from the bees without being stung.
Years later Hunter recalled with amusement how Benga rolled on the ground, overcome with laughter, after Gregory stuck his hand in a hive as he had watched Benga do. Unlike Benga, Gregory was stung, and ran home crying to his mother.
In his scrappy Congo-infused English, Benga regaled the boys with stories of his adventures hunting elephants, pantomiming how he stalked them—“Big, big,” he’d say with outstretched arms—and recounting how he would celebrate a kill with a triumphant hunting song.
In Benga they found an open and patient teacher, a beloved companion, and a remarkably agile athlete who sprinted and leaped over logs like a boy. And with his young companions Benga could uninhibitedly relive memories of a lost and longed-for life and retreat to woods that recalled home.
Benga also delighted in eating, and at the sound of the noon whistle at the cotton mill, he would drop what he was doing to race home and fix his lunch. “Gotta go cooka eat,” he’d say.7
He especially relished Mary’s cooking and she happily indulged him, often specially preparing for him the baked yams that he so enjoyed. He delighted in the hog-killing season, and enthusiastically joined the men in the time-honored communal ritual that took place throughout the South—and nowhere more than Lynchburg—and that had many of the characteristics of his own hunter culture.
The slaughtered hog would be placed in a barrel and then boiled over hot sandstones to soften the bristles. With the hog splayed on a long table, Benga would go to work, vigorously scraping it to remove the hair, which he then used for ticking. With the hog hung by its feet, and cut from bung to throat, he’d clean its insides with a sharpened broomstick.
The hog would then be divided into parts and products: bacon, belly, ham, shoulders, feet, ears, sausage, spareribs, neck bone, tail, brains. The fat would be used for soap and the small intestine for chitterlings. What wasn’t cooked for the day’s feast was salted, dried, and seasoned and days later hung in the smokehouse to be preserved for future meals. The ritual, for the hunter, surely evoked home.
In Lynchburg Benga had found a surrogate home and family and would learn their customs, and the contours and boundaries of their binding blackness. When he crossed into neighboring Cottonwood, a white working-class community, he was heckled and pelted with rocks. “He would come back and ask why they did that,” Chauncey recalled years later. “He didn’t understand.”8
However, long before he arrived in Lynchburg Benga had seen that scowl of scorn; he had seen it on the faces of the chicotte-wielding capitas; in the jeering crowds in St. Louis, and among the spectators outside the cage at the Monkey House.
The experience in Lynchburg probably triggered memories of earlier trauma.
A study on shame and post-victimization released in 2011 found that individuals who, like Benga, had experienced shame-related trauma risked developing severe psychological symptoms, and also that “shame is more likely to be evoked in these individuals, increasing the risk for re-traumatization.” New trauma, the athors of this study said, caused “a significant increase in the frequency of post-traumatic stress reactions to the original trauma.”9
Whether Benga internalized shame or blamed his oppressors, he would know that he was not free. He learned to live within the carefully drawn lines of Lynchburg’s black community and practice customs its people had crafted from memory and centuries-old oppression. In their sermons and spirituals he may have recognized a sorrow as familiar as the forest dew. They were the descendants of a people who knew the despair of displacement and the loss of language and of friendships, family, ritual, sights, scents, and sounds.
These people, cobbled together from a far-off continent and made anew, sang of being “r’buked and scorned,” and yet drew him to their bosom. Some had lost loved ones to slavery; some bore the children of their enslavers. Yet with all of their travails, they had made room for a homeless stranger.
Still, they did not know the piercing rupture; the vacuous eternity of alienation that many of their forebears had known—and that the man they called Bingo now knew. While they were burdened and disdained in America, it was the land they had tilled and spilled blood on, the land where they created life and buried their dead. For all the rejection and hardship, they were home.
Benga had only memories, and no one but he could know what form they took. Was his sleep troubled by nightmares of being stalked by howling mobs, or being caged with apes? Was he haunted by visions of murdered loved ones, or of starving, tortured, chained Congolese? Did he dreamily drift into joyful gatherings of kin and clan, only to awaken alone?
Some nights, beneath a star-speckled sky, the boys would watch Benga build a fire and dance and sing around it. Chauncey, Gregory, Wilelbert, and their friends were enraptured as he circled the flame, hopping and singing as if they weren’t there. They were no older than ten, too young to grasp the poignancy of the ancient ritual, or the urgency of Benga’s refrains.
**
Benga did odd jobs for Anderson and sometimes stayed in her hayloft, where he spent countless hours delighting children with enchanting tales of home, of hunting and singing in a mythical forest teeming with creatures reminiscent of Noah’s Ark. After a few years attending school he had taken a job at a tobacco factory.
But by 1916, something had changed. Benga was no longer the eager friend of the neighborhood children. He had lost interest in their excursions to the surrounding woods to hunt or to fish in nearby streams. Many had noticed his darkening disposition, his all-consuming longing to go home. For hours he would sit alone in silence under a tree. Some of his childhood companions would decades later recall a song he’d sing that he had learned at the Virginia Theological Seminary:
I believe I’ll go home,
Lordy, won’t you help me
It had been ten years since he left the Congo, and his tie to home was fraying. He would know nothing of his village, of the family and friends he left behind. The decade had been marked by his exhibition in a cage and by World War I. During that period the earth seemed to spin off its axis, increasingly consumed by a war that would, over the next four years, claim nine million lives. (...)
The man who had been referred to by so many names—including Mbye Otabenga, Ota Benga, Otto Bingo, Otto Binga, Bengal, Artiba, Autobank, and Ottobang—was in Lynchburg without any known intimate relationships. For all the many kindnesses he had been shown in Lynchburg, he was isolated—an ocean and a river away from the life he knew. In a city of thirty thousand people, he alone sang lustily to the forest and had roamed amid beasts, wild and free.
The music of home was getting fainter; the drumbeats, the rumbling elephants, a distant dream.
In the late afternoon on March 19, 1916, the boys watched as Benga gathered wood to build a fire in the field between Mary’s house and the seminary. As the fire rose to a brilliant flame, Benga danced around it while chanting and moaning. He danced faster and faster, twirling and moaning, as the boys watched in solemn silence. They had seen his ritual before, but this time they detected a profound and boundless sorrow. This time their beloved Benga seemed eerily distant, as vacant and frightening as a ghost.
That night, as they slept, Ota Benga entered the battered gray shed behind Mammy Joe’s store where a chorus of giggles had pierced the air. Sometime before daybreak he recovered a gun he had apparently hidden in the hayloft and fired a bullet through his broken heart.
And in the harrowing stillness, he was free.
SPECTACLE.
Pamela Newkirk
