The fingers of her left hand were drawn down so as nearly to close it and remained fixed and immovable.” Despite her appearance, she was friendly and talkative. She had no teeth, but she possessed a head of thick, bushy gray hair. She was “totally blind, and her eyes were so deeply sunken in their sockets that the eyeballs seemed to have disappeared altogether. She was, according to his account, unable to move from the lounge chair in which Lindsay had placed her. In Barnum’s first autobiography, published in 1855, he recounted receiving a tip about Heth from a friend and subsequently went down to Philadelphia to see her for himself. Lindsay, whom Reiss describes as “a hapless showman from Kentucky,” owned her. Heth and Barnum’s paths first crossed in 1835, when one R. That, in turn, cast doubt on her alleged connection to George Washington, whom she supposedly nursed when he was a child. Rogers, came to some interesting conclusions. On February 25, 1836, Heth’s corpse was cut open in New York’s City Saloon, in front of 1,500 paying spectators. American popular culture began with the autopsy of a former slave-that, at least, is the contention of Emory professor Benjamin Reiss’s 1999 article on Joice Heth.
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