CHAPTER ONE — FINDING “ANAKA”
[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.]
Anarcha was experimented on by the surgeon, J. Marion Sims, who went on to be known as the “father of gynecology.” His so-called “cure” of Anarcha became central to the career narrative he crafted in becoming one of the world’s first “celebrity surgeons.” In the 1950s, artist Robert Thom, commissioned to produce forty-oil paintings telling the history of medicine, included the milieu of Sims’s backyard “hospital,” where the experiments he performed on Anarcha and approximately nine other women took place.
Sims claimed that Anarcha came from the Westcott plantation in Montgomery, Alabama, and for 170 years he was the only source that she’d even existed.
The Westcotts had originally come from South Carolina. A man named David Westcott married a much younger woman, Eliza, and moved from South Carolina to Alabama — a brand new state — in about 1820. They started a plantation.
David Westcott passed away, probably of an illness, in 1828. Like his father before him, he died “intestate,” without leaving a will.
I found the records of the Westcott plantation, which at one point took up a large chunk of the area that is now Montgomery, Alabama, at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. In the 1820s, the Westcott plantation was still small, and growing.
But the archives were not actually the best place to go to view these records. That was the Montgomery County Archives, where you could just ask to see the actual documents — they’re public.
What happened was that when David Westcott died, intestate, his entire estate, everything he owned, had to be carefully inventoried, so that his debts could be settled. At this time, the whole of the South was a “debt economy.” Everything was purchased on credit.
You can learn a lot from looking at plantation inventories like these. The Westcotts owned a gold watch and a shotgun. They had about twenty five cattle, 50 sheep, and a “stock” of hogs. They had tables, and sideboards, and glassware, and cookware. They had two cotton gins.
And of course they owned slaves. At the time of his death, David Westcott owned 29 people, several large families, several couples, and a handful of men and children listed individually.
It was here that I found Anarcha, or “Anaka.” In 1828, she’s listed as the fourth of five children of a man named Jerry, and his wife Sue. Their children are Manuel, Mary, Ben, Anaka, and Joe.
About the name, Anaka. The name “Anarcha” appears only in Sims’s autobiography — the “h” was added to her name decades later, by the secretary who transcribed Sims’s story. It wasn’t ever really her name. I’ll describe that more in detail in a future essay.
Anaka is the “Anarcha” from the Westcott plantation, and in our next video we’ll begin to see how that name evolves over time.
The bottom line is that Anarcha and her family were valued at $1500, which represented approximately 15% of the total value of the Westcott plantation. It’s very likely that Anarcha’s mother, Sue, was bearing children regularly, so, as the fourth of five children, Anarcha was probably 1 or 2 years old in 1828. This matches perfectly with Sims’s later claim about Anarcha’s age.
When I first went to Alabama, there was no evidence of Anarcha’s life that did not come from Sims himself — and even Sims’s defenders had acknowledged that he was a serial exaggerator. The 1828 Westcott plantation inventory offers the first evidence ever found that proves, beyond all doubt, that Anarcha truly existed.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll look at another set of Westcott plantation documents, from 1841, when Anarcha is thirteen years older, and her name has already begun to change.
