CHAPTER FOUR — ANARCHA AS NURSE

[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 the fourth essay in this series, let’s back up and try to figure out when Anarcha first met the man who would experiment on her, the so-called “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims.

For many years, all that anyone knew about Anarcha was what Sims himself had said and written about her, and the two other young women who were the named subjects of his earliest fistula experiments.

Anarcha was the first woman Sims saw, and before she presented with obstetric fistula, he performed a forceps delivery of her first baby, which, as we discussed in an earlier video, was probably stillborn.

Betsey, owned by a man named “Dr. Harris,” was brought to Sims about a month later. She too had a fistula.

A month after that, Sims saw Lucy, who was owned by a man named Tom Zimmerman, from Macon County, Alabama, where Sims had lived for a time a few years earlier.

Initially, Sims sent all three women away, only to call them back after he had a kind of “revelation” about how he might cure fistula. Of course, his goals were professional — he wanted glory — and financial. He was proposing to cure enslaved women so they could return to their plantations to work, to be bred, or to be used sexually. That was the life of enslaved women.

The question I want to ask now is whether this was the first time Sims met Anarcha.

Before answering that question, let me say two things about Sims as a writer. First, he was prolific. Second, he was pretty good with words. By that, I don’t mean he was a beautiful author. Rather, what I mean is that he knew how to twist words to his advantage. In article after article, he was devious and duplicitous — he would say one thing at one moment, and another a moment later, and he was so slippery you might not even notice it.

In other words, Sims was a good propagandist. And that’s remarkable, particularly in light of his autobiography, because compared to his other work, the autobiography is a terrible book.

That might be because he dictated it, and it was never finished. His secretary for the autobiography — or amanuensis — was a man named Hiram Oatman, and as we said in an earlier video, the “h” in Anarcha’s name appears to be Oatman’s addition. It doesn’t appear that way in any other source.

But here’s something strange — the description of Sims performing a forceps delivery of Anarcha’s baby is not the first time someone named Anarcha appears in his autobiography.

As I said, the autobiography is a bad book. It’s just a terrible read. So the many people who have written about Sims and Anarcha can be forgive for skipping over some of the earlier portions of the book, which are quite tedious.

Anarcha first appears in the book as a young girl who cares for Sims during a bout of malaria that he suffered in 1836. It was not long after he arrived in Alabama — and he described the girl tending to him, sitting up with him at night, while others died in the rooms around them.

Now Sims doesn’t explicitly say that this Anarcha is the same Anarcha that would later play such an important role in his career. He doesn’t deny it either. Anarcha was not a common name, and an Anarcha who could be described as a “young girl” in 1836, could easily be a 17 year-old nine years later, in 1845.

What tipped the scales for me, about this, was something Sims wrote years later, when his experiments were underway.

He was writing to a man who had recently been cared for by Anarcha. I’ll detail this in a later video, but in writing “Anarca, our Anarca,” Sims was saying that he too knew what it was like to be cared for by Anarcha. This is the only time her name appears in Sims’s own handwriting.

In other words, Anarcha, even as a young girl, had been trained and had worked as a nurse. And that’s going to fit with a lot of the rest of her story. Long before Sims performed a forceps delivery of her baby, Anarcha nursed him back to health — she took care of him at a time when he wondered whether he might die.

Today’s essay is a piece of the larger puzzle of Anarcha’s life. It would seem that Anarcha first met Sims not as 17 year-old girl, but when she was much younger — when she was already learning to be a nurse. This part of her story will echo through the rest of her life.