CHAPTER THREE — THE FATHER OF ANARCHA’S FIRST CHILD

[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.]

When J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology,” was first called to Anarcha’s case, it was to perform a forceps delivery of Anarcha’s first baby. She was approximately seventeen, and had been in labor for several days, suffering from prolonged obstructed labor — a “passenger too big for the passage.”

Anarcha survived the birth — many don’t survive prolonged obstructed labor — and for the most part interest in her life has focused on what came next: the fistula, or hole, that formed inside of her as a result of the obstructed labor, and the later experiments that were performed on her. But who was the father of that first baby?

In the last essay in this series, we made a pretty strong suggestion that one of the two masters on the Westcott plantation when Anarcha was a teenager could have fathered her child. Many babies were born on the Westcott plantation between 1828 and 1841, and it wasn’t uncommon for enslaved women to bear the children of their enslavers.

But that’s not the only possibility. Breeding programs were also common at this time — there was an economic crash in 1837, and plantations were struggling — and Anarcha could have been bred to a man from another plantation, or to a man on the Westcott plantation.

This is the Westcott Cemetery in Montgomery, Alabama. The Westcott home was just a short ways from here, and it’s the site of the Westcott Meeting House, which was one of the origins of the First Methodist Church community in Montgomery, which we talked about in an earlier essay.

The Westcott family was buried here, but after the Civil War, when this part of Montgomery became a predominately black community, the Westcotts had their relatives disinterred and moved to a different cemetery.

Just outside the meeting house ruins, there’s a very small gravestone, barely twelve inches high.

Isaac Westcott, died May 30, 1882. I found Isaac in the 1870 Census. He still lived quite close to the Westcott family, and likely took their name after emancipation.

For the record, there is no evidence that Anarcha took the name Westcott. As we’ll see in later videos, Anarcha never took the name Westcott, and there is no primary source document that contains the name “Anarcha Westcott.”

But it’s not only that Isaac appeared in the 1870 Census. He was in the 1841 Westcott documents, as well. Like Anarcha, he was distributed to William R. Westcott, valued at $800. He was about 25 when Anarcha was 13.

It’s possible that, four years later, Isaac fathered Anarcha’s first child — but maybe it’s not likely. I wasn’t able to verify with 100% certainty who the father of Anarcha’s baby was.

Regardless, Isaac is the only Westcott in the Westcott Cemetery today who is connected to those who first lived there. The area immediately around his grave — just outside the original walls of the Westcott Meeting House — is empty. It’s very likely that there are other formerly enslaved persons buried alongside.

The thing everyone wants to know is whether Anarcha’s first baby lived.

The Westcott family claims that the baby survived, but Sims’s autobiography says only that the baby came away easily.

The answer to the question is that there isn’t an answer to the question. Anarcha had severe prolonged obstructed labor. Even today, in cases of obstructed labor, the baby dies upwards of 90% of the time. So it’s not 100%, but it’s very likely that Anarcha’s first child was stillborn.

In our next essay, we’ll look at the first time Anarcha encountered J. Marion Sims.