Ada Bricktop Smith was born into a world that offered her little, but she built a life that made her a legend of the Jazz Age. Born Ada Beatrice Smith in Alderson, West Virginia, on August 14, 1894, she came from a family shaped by the legacy of American slavery. Her mother had been born during the Civil War, technically enslaved for the first years of her life. When Ada was young, her father died, and the family joined the Great Migration north to Chicago, where millions of African Americans were moving from the South to the industrial cities of the North.

Ada began working in Chicago bars at a young age, soon moving into theatrical performances. Her first appearance was in a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Haymarket Theatre. It was during this time she gained the nickname Bricktop, a reference to her reddish hair, an inheritance from her Irish ancestry. By the age of sixteen, she was touring the Midwest with a vaudeville troupe, eventually landing in New York.

She worked in Harlem at Barron’s, a club in a neighborhood that was rapidly becoming the center of a flourishing African American cultural renaissance. Despite modest success in the United States, Bricktop decided to leave for Europe in the early 1920s. The decision was driven by both ambition and frustration. As she would later recall, jobs were becoming scarcer for Black singers and dancers, and regardless of how refined they were, they all competed for limited places.

Musicians traveling across the Atlantic spoke of a better life in Paris, one free from racial prejudice. She dreamed of eating, drinking, and mixing wherever and with whomever she pleased. Paris was then the cultural capital of the world. In the years after World War I, a new generation of writers, poets, painters, and dancers had flooded into the city, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound.

This scene was fueled by a massive economic boom that began in 1923. In this environment, demand for jazz singers and dancers was high. Bricktop soon became a fixture of Parisian nightlife, a close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

She was often hired by Cole Porter to entertain at his parties, where she taught guests the latest dances, including the Charleston and the Black Bottom. It was even said she taught the future King Edward VIII how to perform them. In 1926, Bricktop finally opened her own club, Chez Bricktop. It was an immediate success and became an important cultural center during the second half of the Roaring Twenties.

The club produced many legendary stories. On one occasion, she threw the great American author John Steinbeck out of the club while he was drunk. He famously apologized by sending a taxi filled with roses across Paris to the club, and she welcomed him back. Fred Astaire visited and performed there, and the club was referenced in works by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, and others.

But success was short-lived. When the Wall Street crash hit in the autumn of 1929, followed by the Great Depression, the jazz-age party atmosphere faded. Clubs like Chez Bricktop suffered, and Bricktop eventually closed her doors. She returned to the United States to find only sporadic work, and her mother’s death in 1938 brought severe anxiety.

World War II further damaged an entertainment industry that had barely begun to recover. In 1942, Bricktop moved to Mexico, one of the few parts of the world relatively unaffected by the war. She established a successful club in Mexico City and ran it for several years. With Europe rebuilding and the economy recovering after the war, she returned to Paris in 1949.

But Paris was no longer the city of her memory. It had lost its status as the world’s cultural capital in the 1930s, and the title had passed to New York. Bricktop moved on to Rome, where she found a late period of prosperity. She ran a successful club through the 1950s, hosting notable guests including Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, and Martin Luther King Jr.

She also formed a close friendship with the deposed King Farouk I of Egypt, who brought her gifts from his travels. Bricktop’s marriage to saxophonist Peter Duconge had ended in estrangement during the 1930s after she learned of his infidelities, though they never divorced and remained legally married until his death in 1967. It is considered likely that she was also bisexual. She had told one of Josephine Baker’s sons years later that she and Baker had been in a romantic relationship during the 1920s when Baker was a regular performer at Chez Bricktop.

Bricktop closed her final club on Via Veneto in Rome in 1961. When asked why, she said she was tired of staying up until dawn every day. She returned to America, occasionally coming out of retirement to open clubs briefly in New York. She devoted her later years to charity work and became a devout Catholic.

She died in her sleep in her Manhattan apartment on February 1, 1984, at the age of 89. Though she had been out of the spotlight for years, news of her death received extensive coverage in the New York Times and other prominent publications. Millie and Christine McCoy were born into slavery on July 11, 1851, on a farm near Whiteville, North Carolina. Born conjoined twins, they were joined at the lower back and spine by cartilage, sharing some vital body parts but not all.

Their parents, Jacob and Monemia, were enslaved by Alexander McKay, and the couple already had seven other children, none of whom had any unusual physical characteristics. News of the twins’ unusual birth spread quickly, and people began flocking to the McKay farm to see them. Alexander McKay grew annoyed by the disruption, and when the twins were only ten months old, he sold them to John C. Purvis.

After about a year, they were sold again, this time to a man named Brower, who paid a staggering $10,000 for them, roughly $400,000 in today’s money. Brower began exhibiting the infant girls as a medical wonder under the name the Carolina Twins, traveling across the southern states. In October 1853, the twins appeared at the first official North Carolina State Fair, which attracted daily crowds of around five thousand people. Their success was immediate, but some doubted their condition, believing it to be a hoax.

While in New Orleans, Brower had local doctors examine them to confirm they were truly conjoined. Life under the public gaze was exhausting. The girls were often separated from their mother and subjected to public ridicule. They developed a distinctive sideways gait that eventually turned into a charming dance that delighted audiences.

While in New Orleans, Brower received an offer of $45,000, an equivalent of over $1. 8 million today, and eagerly accepted. But the deal was too good to be true. Brower had been defrauded, and the twins had been stolen.

They disappeared until 1854, when they reappeared at a museum in Philadelphia. During this time, bitter disputes raged over their ownership, with Brower, Joseph P. Smith, and even Alexander McKay all claiming rights to them. Their mother, Monemia, struggled to regain her daughters.

The kidnappers had moved north, exhibiting the twins at P. T. Barnum’s famous American Museum in Manhattan, then to Canada, and finally across the Atlantic to Liverpool, England. In 1857, after a grueling three-year search, a private investigator finally tracked them down in England.

Monemia and Joseph Smith traveled to Liverpool to recover them, and in Birmingham, the twins, then about five and a half years old, met their mother. But even after being rescued, their lives changed little. They were immediately put back to work, exhibited again in the United Kingdom and then the United States. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election, and the southern states began seceding.

The Civil War began in 1861. The war restricted the twins’ travel but also opened the door to their education. Despite being slave owners, the Smith family reportedly treated Millie and Christine well. Joseph’s wife illegally taught the girls to read and write.

They also learned several languages and received professional singing training. Joseph Smith died during the war, but the twins remained enslaved to the Smith family. With the end of the Civil War came freedom. The twins were emancipated along with their parents, siblings, and countless others throughout the South.

As teenagers, they toured again with a greater degree of independence. This was an era when circuses and so-called freak shows were at their peak. In an age before television and radio, curiosity often outweighed sympathy. Millie and Christine performed across the country and achieved great success.

They wrote their memoirs in the late 1860s, using the motto, “As God decreed, we are agreed,” indicating their acceptance of their condition. They returned to Europe and, like many famous circus performers, met Queen Victoria. A highlight of their act was their duets, with the sisters singing together or alternating verses. Many of these songs were published in a booklet detailing their lives.

The language used to describe them was often appalling. One biography referred to them as “creatures” and “a novel girl. ” An 1871 advertisement in Liverpool described them as a “shipment,” stating there was “a shipment arrived, which, in the words of Mr. Toll, may be described as extraordinary.

” A Cincinnati newspaper joked that the two-headed girl would be a good juror, as she could see both sides of a case at the same time. The sisters were capable of turning their fame into substantial wealth. They earned an estimated $25,000 a year from rural fairs, with major city shows or European trips offering the potential for even more. In the 1870s, they bought the McKay farm where they had been born over twenty years earlier and gave it to their father.

They later owned it themselves and built a large fourteen-room house where they lived with extended family. By their twenties, they had earned enough to retire partially, and if money ran low, they could return to touring for a season or two. In 1871, they embarked on a European tour, visiting Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Russia, often receiving gifts from European rulers and aristocrats. The twins retired fully from the 1880s onward, living a quiet life on the farm where they were born.

They secretly helped their community, funding a local school for Black girls and supporting colleges in Carolina, often anonymously. They lived to their early sixties, an impressive age for conjoined twins. Their deaths were caused not by complications from being conjoined, but by tuberculosis. Millie died on October 8, 1912, at age 61, with Christine reportedly dying about twelve hours later.

They were buried in Whiteville, and their headstone reads, “A soul with two thoughts. Two hearts that beat as one. ”

Cecile Fatiman was a vodou priestess who presided over a ceremony that sparked one of the most important events in Caribbean history: the Haitian Revolution. On the night of August 14, 1791, at a place called Bois Caïman on the northern coast of the island of Hispaniola, thousands of enslaved people gathered under the moonlight.

A vodou ritual was led by Fatiman and a slave leader named Dutty Boukman. Boukman began the proceedings, urging the crowd to throw away the image of the white god who thirsted for their tears and to listen to the freedom that spoke in their hearts. Fatiman then danced among the crowd. Accounts say she was possessed by the spirit Erzulie, and after, she sacrificed a creole pig by slitting its throat.

The foreheads of those present were smeared with the pig’s blood, or in some accounts, they were forced to drink it as an oath of commitment. This was the beginning of the revolution against French colonial rule. Details of Fatiman’s early life are limited. It is debated where she was born.

Some claim she was born in West Africa, but given her role and age, it is more likely she was born in Hispaniola. She was described as a tall woman with piercing green eyes and long, soft hair. She was probably born in 1771, making her only nineteen or twenty at the time of the ceremony. Her training as a mambo, a vodou priestess, began when she was still a teenager.

As a mambo, her duties included leading rituals, conducting initiation ceremonies, telling fortunes, interpreting dreams, casting spells, making potions, healing the sick, and serving as a vessel for possession by the religion’s spirits. Fatiman married Jean-Louis Pierrot, a man about ten years her senior who would later become a prominent military leader in the revolution. She was central to the beginning of one of the most significant events in the region’s history. Within a week of the ceremony, hundreds of French slave owners were killed across the island, and the enslaved had taken control of most of the plantations.

The revolution saw many turns over the next decade. Initial French support for the rebels ended when France abolished slavery, then Britain and Spain intervened, and finally, the rebels under Toussaint Louverture gained control. A new war led to Haiti’s independence, making it the first state in the Americas to throw off slavery. Fatiman’s role after the revolution is only partially visible.

She had two children with Pierrot. Her husband was made a prince of Haiti and later served briefly as president of the republic from 1845 to 1846, making Fatiman a first lady. They later divorced. Legend says she lived until 1883, dying at the age of 112, though this has not been confirmed.

Her legacy is widespread. Though peripheral to the more famous names of the revolution, she has gained increasing scholarly attention for what her role reveals about women’s participation. For over two centuries, she has occupied a prominent place in the vodou religion of Haiti. Joyce Heth was the subject of one of P.

T. Barnum’s earliest and most exploitative exhibitions. In the autumn and early winter of 1835, an old woman named Joyce Heth was the talk of New England and New York. Managed by a man in his mid-twenties named Phineas Taylor Barnum, the exhibition featured Heth as an extraordinarily old woman who claimed to have been George Washington’s nurse.

Those who visited her were fascinated by her stories of “little George” and how she had raised him in Virginia. Heth allegedly claimed to be 161 years old, which would have made her in her late fifties when she served as Washington’s wet nurse, an unlikely age for such a role. Heth died on February 19, 1836, after only a few months of Barnum’s exhibition. Rather than being ruined by her death, Barnum capitalized on the event.

He hired a doctor, David L. Rogers, to perform an autopsy to verify that she was over a century old. Instead, Rogers confirmed she was a woman in her late seventies or early eighties, not the extraordinary centenarian Barnum claimed. Barnum charged around 1,500 people half a dollar to attend the autopsy, and afterward, published strange stories claiming Rogers had autopsied a different person and that Heth was alive and well in Europe.

The public attention helped launch Barnum’s career. The truth was that Joyce Heth had been born sometime in the 1750s. Very little is known about her real life. She was likely from an enslaved family in the South, possibly Virginia, the Carolinas, or Georgia.

In early 1835, Barnum learned of her from a showman in Kentucky. He visited her and found a very old, completely blind woman with thick gray hair and a small build. She was chatty and loved entertaining visitors with tales of caring for her “dear little Georgia. ” Barnum quickly hired her, as it was illegal for him to buy an enslaved woman in the free northern states.

He forged an eighteenth-century bill of sale connecting her to the Washington family and set off for New York to exhibit her as “George Washington’s nurse. ”

Barnum’s treatment of Heth was cruel. During the peak of her fame, he exhibited this blind eighty-year-old woman for over twelve hours a day, six days a week. People could shake her hand, take her pulse, and touch her.

This continued for about seven or eight months, with Barnum collecting all the profits, believed to be over $1,500, a large sum at the time. It was rumored that Barnum made Heth drunk and knocked out her remaining teeth to make her look older. Whether true or not, the very existence of such a story indicates the manner of abuse. Many blame Barnum for her death, as she was weakened by her exhausting schedule.

Despite this cruelty, the Heth affair was the starting point of Barnum’s career. Shortly after the autopsy, he established his “Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical Theatre. ” After the Panic of 1837, he opened Scudder’s American Museum, where he exhibited all kinds of people considered to have physical “deformities,” including dwarfs, albinos, and giants. Barnum would go on to become known as the greatest showman on Earth, founder of Barnum and Bailey’s circus, making his fortune largely from exploiting people like Joyce Heth.

Alice of Dunk’s Ferry was an enslaved African American who reportedly lived to be 116 years old. Born in Philadelphia around 1686, just a few years after the city was founded, her parents were enslaved people brought to America from Barbados. Alice was among the relatively few enslaved people in Pennsylvania, a colony that did not rely heavily on slavery. Founded by William Penn as a refuge for religious groups like the Quakers, the spirit of tolerance also extended to the enslaved, and Pennsylvania had a relatively small enslaved population compared to the southern colonies.

When she was ten, Alice was taken from Philadelphia and sent to Dunk’s Ferry, a site along the Delaware River. There, she was enslaved by Samuel Carpenter and employed to collect tolls from those wishing to travel by ferry across the river. She spent the next forty years working there. Most of what is known about Alice comes from a book published in 1804 by Isaiah Thomas, founder of the American Antiquarian Society.

Thomas learned that Alice knew many of the key figures in early Pennsylvania history. She remembered William Penn, the founder of the colony, Thomas Story, and James Logan, who later became the mayor of Philadelphia. Alice was illiterate but possessed an excellent memory and a very sharp intelligence. Even in her old age, she could point out changes in the city of Philadelphia, showing people where churches and other buildings had stood nearly a century before.

After forty years at Dunk’s Ferry, Alice was relieved of her work, possibly meaning she gained her freedom or was simply allowed to retire. In 1780, Pennsylvania became the second part of the emerging United States to abolish slavery, so she died a free woman. She lived a long retirement, reaching an estimated age of 116. She spent her later life as an oral historian, and was also deeply religious, asking others to read the Bible to her and riding a horse to church into her nineties.

She was also a skilled angler, often rowing her boat into the middle of the Delaware River to fish, even in old age. Her health declined in the 1780s, and she eventually went blind. She lived her final years in Bristol, Pennsylvania, dying in 1802 at the estimated age of 116.

A plaque has been placed at Dunk’s Ferry in honor of the river crossing she served for over four decades.