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Joice Heth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joice Heth (c.1756–1836) was an African American slave. Toward the end of her life, in 1835, blind and almost completely paralysed (she could talk, and had some ability to move her right arm), she was purchased by P.T. Barnum who began his career as a showman by exhibiting her, claiming her to have been the nurse of George Washington, and to be over a hundred and sixty years old. She died the next year; probably her actual age at the time of her death was no more than 80 years.
As a travelling exhibit for Barnum, Heth told stories about "little George" and sang a hymn. Eric Lott claims that Heth earned the impresario $1,500/week, a princely sum in that era.
- Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507832-2. p.76–78
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- The material in question is in the EB article on P.T. Barnum.