CHAPTER ELEVEN — ANARCHA GOES NORTH

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In this essay, we’re skipping ahead a little bit in Anarcha’s story — to New York City, in fact.

This came as a complete surprise to me.

When I first started researching Anarcha, I traveled to Alabama — in 2015 — and found the first evidence of her life that didn’t come directly from the man who experimented on her, the so-called “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims.

At that point, I had no idea what happened to Anarcha.

In fact, I thought there was a very good chance that she had been buried here, in the Westcott Cemetery, which was on the plantation where she had been born and raised.

After I returned home from that first trip, I set about researching Sims’s story. I already knew that Sims had opened a hospital in New York, but I had no idea how to find the records of that hospital.

Fortunately, there are archivist. An archivist named Tim Pennycuff at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, had already been very helpful, and he put me in touch with an archivist at the Mt. Sinai archives in New York City, Barbara Niss, and Barbara put me in touch with another archivist named Nancy Panella at Roosevelt hospital.

Nancy has now retired, and the archives at Roosevelt have closed — but they had the original case record books from the hospital that Sims opened in 1855.

Suffice it to say, Nancy was very anxious for something to be done with those books. I arranged to go see them.

The hospital that Sims opened was called Woman’s Hospital. It was first pitched as a bigger version of the small hospital — for lack of a better word — where Sims had experimented on Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey. But almost immediately Sims turned it into his own private laboratory, and began conducting experiments on Irish women — immigrants who had recently fled the potato famine in Ireland on board so-called “coffin ships.”

The oldest of the three books dated from the very beginning of the hospital, 1855, and covered cases from then until 1861. It was a huge book, very heavy, and the first thing I did was open the heavy cover. In those days, the index of the book was in the front.

I passed my finger down the page, and I didn’t even make it four names. Anacha (slave). There she was. Page 26.

That was a spine-tingling moment. Just like finding Anarcha in Alabama, it was a needle in a haystack. But even more so, because Anarcha was supposed to have been cured. She was the first cure. If she was cured, then what was she doing, being experimented on by Sims again, in New York City?

I turned to page 26.

Page 26 offered a lot more detail. This was now 1856, and Anarcha was now owned by a man named William L. Maury, from Caroline County, Virginia. Archivist Kate Cordes at the New York Public Library helped me work out that name. It takes a while to learn how to read this old handwriting. Later, Philip Sutton, also at the New York Public Library, also helped to find connections.

The full record revealed a great deal more about Anarcha’s life at this moment, and for the past several years. She had been experimented on additional times, in Richmond, by a man named Charles Bell Gibson. Gibson couldn’t cure her, and she was sent to New York. And at this point she’d had five pregnancies. As we described in an earlier essay, she first became pregnant in late 1844, and gave birth to a probably stillborn child in 1845. This is late 1856. Five pregnancies in twelve years.

The case register claims that Anarcha entered the hospital in early December 1856, and was discharged, cured, on January 22. But there’s reason to doubt all the particulars of the case record.

At this point, Sims had already staked his career on being the surgeon who managed to cure fistula. It didn’t matter that many others had cured fistulae before him. Anarcha was already central to the self-serving narrative of his career. He couldn’t have had rumors about Anarcha not being cured leaking out into the world.

It took me a while, from here, to verify that it was Sims who operated on her again, at this point — but eventually I did. Sims’s assistant at this time was away when the case record claims Anarcha’s operation took place. It had to be Sims. Woman’s Hospital had no other surgeons at this time.

This opened up a whole new trajectory in Anarcha’s life story. I knew now that hadn’t stayed in Alabama, and that she had been in Richmond for a time. There was a great deal more to learn.

In the next few essays, we’ll be exploring the implications of this discovery, and shedding more light on how and why Anarcha was sent out of Alabama.