Chapter One
When First We Met
Monday, December 10, 1842
North Carolina
Chang-Eng," the children chanted. "Mutant, mutant."
Now and then the little innocents sprang from the dustcloud chasing our carriage to cry my name and Chang's. The pathwe traveled cut through a droughty careworn field, and to eitherside of us a fast-passing scene of blond grass and dead milkweedthirsted under the burnt sky of sunset. My ear tingled with thenearness of my brother, who picked lint off of my shoulder andknew not to bump my head as he did so. His dark eyes showed littlereflections of me. I was thirty-one. My life was about to begin:I was entering North Carolina.
My brother and I did not know that love was soon to deliverus. But twenty-one children and three decades later, how obviousit seems that everything to follow was a consequence of that evening.When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly fromyour bedside like embers off a bonfire. Alone in the dark with afinal chance to bind together circumstances that have made you apeasant who sells duck eggs on the Mekong one day and theSouth's most famous temperance advocate the next, you see a curtainopen onto the landmark moments of your past.
When Chang and I arrived in North Carolina, we were comingto the end of yet another tour, exhibiting the bond that thepublic could not see without assuming we two were so very differentfrom everybody else.
The halfwit we'd hired drove at a quick pace. And now,jounced inside a rickety carriage that had the legend THE SIAMESETWIN in chipping yellow paint on its doors, I was trying to napbeside Chang.
My eyes were not closed for long. My brother tapped myshoulder. "Eng?"
I knew better than to ask him to quiet when he was in one ofhis talkative moods.
"Maybe," Chang said, "you read out loud?" He spoke in a softvoice whenever asking me for something.
"Now?" I made a show of closing my eyes more tightly. "I'dprefer not."
"A Shakespeare speech from your book, make the trip gofaster?" There was a shiver in his words from the bustle of ourride. I felt his half of our stomach spasm.
"Let me please catch a little rest," I said, opening an eye. "Whydon't you read it yourself?"
"Me? You joking." The listlessness in Chang's smile suggestedwhat it is to spend three decades within five to seven inches ofone another. "Eng?"
Reporters love to mention that I am the "less dominatingmember of the pair." A man may be quiet, does that mean he isnot assertive?
"Eng?" That we hadn't eaten in hours spoiled his breath.
I shut my eyes tight again. Nailing down a personality is aboutas easy as pinning marmalade to a wall. I faked a snore.
"Eng!" he said, patience being a luxury allowed those whohave more obliging brothers. "I know you not asleep."
The dust of riding whisked us into Wilkesboro, the last stop onthis junket of somersaults and smiles that had spanned the easternseaboard. I could not have imagined that in Wilkesboro we wouldmeet the women who would—for all the kings I'd met and thenations I'd been—make up the kingdom in which I'd walk.
Chang had the driver bridle our two horses to a stop in a grassysquare near the center of town: a little commons that had notyet changed its name from "Union Square" to "Westwood Park."This open space was blotchy with killed grass, its unused flagpolestood without purpose in the wind. A line of four threadbare treesgesticulated like marionettes behind the flagstaff.
Townspeople rushed at us from every direction. Dozens of unkemptchildren and their unkempt parents gathered round ourcarriage, pointing fingers. The rest of the population climbed onroofs for a better view. My brother grinned at them all. He deliveredhis patented wave, like a little boy proving with a casual flickthat his hand is clean on both sides—the motion Queen Victoriaused to greet her masses.
"Come down, carriage man," my brother called out to ourdriver, wetting my face with spittle. "Will you please open door?"
The driver muttered at us from his buckboard. I asked thisidiot, "Did you say something?"
He let us out, his well-shaved cheeks pink as Mekong tunameat. He said, "Nothing, sirs."
"You are addressing Eng alone." I accepted the man's hand,stepping from the carriage with my brother close on my left. "Doyou hear my twin talking? You must say, `Nothing, sir.'" I wastired and irritable. "When you speak to Eng, you speak to one`sir,' not two."
Far away, between the rough corners of Wilkesboro's buildings(small white Presbyterian church with no steeple, narrow whitebeer parlor, small white general store displaying all its stock in itswindow), rows of sleeping blue mountains hid in shadow, eachmore blurred than the last. And the full moon had begun its crawlacross the sky.
Everything about this environment seemed animated by ourarrival: the crowd gathering on all sides of us; the bandy-leggedold man in a white suit who limped across Union Square with ayellow rose in his lapel, and the pair of young girls who ran overand walked him arm in arm toward our carriage; the slaves acrossthe courtyard pitching straw and pretending not to look; the dirtylittle white hands poking our ligament as we stepped from the carriage.Several reached for my face.
"Chang-Eng!" Even the dirtiest of children radiant like they'djust been given candy. "Mutant, mutant!"
"Thank you," Chang and I said as the dust gathered on ouridentical black suits—tight and crisply English in cut, the veryones Barnum had bought for us. Strolling through the crowd, mybrother and I were two complete bodies affixed at the chest by afleshy, bendable, seven-inch-long ligament resembling a forearm.
"Chang-Eng acknowledging you, good people" Chang said.We crossed Main Street side by side, in the calibrated rhythm ofour united movement, arms sweaty over each other's shoulders.Like Chang, I wore my hair in a black braid long enough to curlaround my head. I tied it in a blue silk tassel that fell over mybrother's shoulder, as his fell over mine.
North Carolina was a welcome change from Boston, Washington,Philadelphia, New York, that series of East Coast cities thateven before the War of Yankee Aggression had become as vulgaras a row of women of easy virtue on a street corner. Some believethe war divided America's history in one stroke, all at once advancingNorthern manufacturing and the forward parade of Yankeeprogress. But by December 1842 the North had swelled sohastily it simmered with industry and crime and most of all toomany people, while Southern towns like this remained in ruralcondition, natural as ever. Wilkesboro was among those bygonecheerful hamlets that were so numerous across the map of NorthCarolina they seemed like stars in the nighttime sky, before Reconstructionhobbled the South.
My brother kept his smile and hadn't quit waving to the townsfolk.Few returned his greeting. A yellow-skinned man and hisconjoined twin may be admitted into a village in North Carolina,but will never be adopted by it fully.
Main Street was rounded, with a humped center and slopingsides, and it led us across town. Chang and I were silent as wewalked; I rarely spoke to him. At all times, a wordless debate concerningthe fundaments of movement traveled across our bondlike a message across telegraph wire, and that was conversationenough. I called this the Silence, and I was comforted by it.
The people of Wilkesboro had begun to follow us at a distance:here two blond schoolgirls crouched behind a craggy blackoak tree to stare; there, in the Law Office Building, under thepressed-metal facade, a few cheerful boys shouted taunts. Onebrave Negro walked near us before scampering off to giggle behindsome wagons tethered to the Court House gallery; across thestreet near a livery stable a woman froze in her tracks to gape atthe Twins, her face turning pale as death. A few townsfolk, however,did smile openly at us as we passed, and let fly a friendly gigglewhenever Chang waved.
"Eng," Chang said, crimping his eyes as he often did when hefound his happy place in the world. "It is exciting, yes?" With hisfree hand he smoothed the lapels of his jacket.
"Brother, I don't know what you mean."
Chang was taken off guard; he always managed to discount thatwe were miles apart in temperament.
"Well," he said, searching my face, "this, I mean!" Crookingour ligament, he drew himself in front of and even closer to me,and he looked over my shoulder at the now large crowd followingat our heels. Chang and I continued to walk in this manner—nearlyface-to-face, with my brother striding backward—as heflung his hand in the air and waved at the people. Everyoneclapped. Chang swung around to face forward again.
It was this sort of pandering showmanship that I hated, andstrove to avoid for most of my career. (Like most everybody, I amproud of certain accomplishments: that we never participated in,nor were in any way associated with, an American circus; mypredilection for reading, which saved me from the manner of immigrantspeech that Chang never lost.)
Main Street came to an end at the Yates Inn. A Southern communitysuch as Wilkesboro, in its distant relation not only to thecentral government, but also to neighboring villages, believes itselfan individual, free from all others. And yet, little inns just likethis one were features of nearly all minor Southern towns, and bynow Chang and I felt at home loitering by innyards, waiting to beadmitted.
Wilkesboro's version of the Southern hostel was a two-storyunpainted log house, its modest front yard overgrown withchokecherry. A giant woman sat on the inn's drooping frontporch, fanning herself in the skeletal shade of leafless oaks. Shewas some five hundred pounds, if not more, this innkeeper. Moistpatches of her scalp were visible under her thin gray hair, like peatbog spied through the reeds of a marsh, and her hairline gave wayto a glistening forehead just as a marsh would open onto a river.
My brother and I came to stand before her, resting our two freehands on the porch railing. The lady innkeeper scrutinized Changand me in our unforgiving black. "A charming creature"—herbassy voice wiggled the flesh hanging below her chin—"justabout as strange as they say." I could not tell whether the woman'sface was friendly or taunting. She wore a homemade dress of graycloth-stuff made with no thought to style. Her skin refused contour.Birds shrieked in the trees.
I imagined this woman a courtier in His Majesty King Rama'spalace, bejeweled, dressed in silk while four or five husbandsdanced around her, runty men with short life spans.
To her left stood a frowning boy in a straw hat with a crookedrim. To her right, a pair of blond women—her daughters, I guessed,though they were not so young—long-faced, flat-chested, and eachwith lip rouge on her front teeth. The taller one's eyes flickered impatiently,like the wings of little birds. The way she did not turnaway in horror gave me the urge to saw through my ligament. It wasthe light at that hour, or my fatigue pressing in, but I believed shewas smiling at me.
My brother's skin was mucky as the Mekong itself, his breathinga gasp.
The declining sun acted on the girl's fine hair, cutting it intoelements of gold and pink gold and shadow. She blushed andbowed her head, but she continued to peek at me from under herbrows with eyes the color of blueberries. She bit her lip. A younglady was looking at me, of all things, and smiling. I could notfathom it—looking into my eyes! I returned her stare, I don'tknow where I discovered the courage.
Only a few seconds passed, evidently, though I was sure themoment slipped from the calendar. For the seeming eternity Istood there, my heart pounded only once, a single thunderclap,echoing. This strange girl's clear eyes looked like safe worlds inwhich to escape the circumstance of what I was.
Chang's heart, too, began to go frantic for this tall blondinnkeeper's daughter—I felt it. Was it me the girl was fixing hergaze on, or the twin close at my side?
The whole time, the girl's sister stood in shadow and chewed ather nails. But before long this one was looking up into my face,too, without smiling or frowning. The entire town had gatheredbehind us, watching everything. And the sisters' large motherleaned forward in her groaning seat and straightened her dress,patted her hair.
"Jefferson," the large woman said to her boy. "Go get your father."Daintily, she removed a little gnat that had flown into hermouth. "Tell him I found a pair of husbands for your sisters."
I swear the townsfolk cheered.
Continues...
Excerpted from Chang and Engby Darin Strauss Copyright © 2001 by Darin Strauss. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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