If you are just joining this series, in chapter two I was recovering from a surgery after a tumor had been removed from my leg. Turns out the tumor was actually a bone my body decided to grow in some scar tissue. Sometimes the body does that, grows bone, in tissue that has been compromised by burns or incisions. This is certainly poetic, but it was also a relief to find out that I didn’t have some sort of cancer and wouldn’t need ongoing treatment.
I returned to work, though I was still feeling fatigued and sick for no reason I could tell. One day at lunch, I had hermited myself away in a storage room. I was barely able to keep up with my daily life and mustering up enough energy to concentrate on research was nearing impossible. But a book about Black history on the Great Plains I found at a used book store had revitalized my interest. Sitting on the floor, hidden away from the world, with a bowl of leftover spaghetti, I began flipping through the pages.
Not too far in, the words “brittle bone disease” caught my eye. My gaze settled on a small picture of Eliza Suggs at the corner. The caption said she was the daughter of former slaves who had come to live in Nebraska and that she had brittle bone disease. The caption included the dates of her life: 1876-1908. I quickly calculated that she would have been 31 or 32 at the time of her death. I started reading but the text in the book offered only a small amount of information: her family had lived in Illinois, then Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. Her father, James Suggs, was a preacher. Eliza was the youngest of 8 siblings. Eliza wrote a biography of her father that also included personal sketches of her mother and herself. The book, entitled Shadow and Sunshine, was published in 1906.
I had been combing the newspapers when I had the time and energy, but I had not discovered anything new as far as Nebraska disability history since Lizzie, and was beginning to feel discouraged. But here in my trembling hands was evidence that my project was only just beginning.
I pulled out my phone.
I knew that an internet search would not produce anything of use regarding most of the people I would be researching for my project. But since I had found Eliza in a book and not the graveled text of a local paper, I figured that there might be more information available about her online. I typed her name into Google.
But I didn’t click search. My enthusiasm froze.
What if Eliza’s story ended up being like Lizzie’s? Though I had been grateful to discover Lizzie, and devoted myself to finding as much about her life as I could, the only information I had found out about her had pertained to her death. Was I going to find that Eliza’s story would be more about death than life? My whole mission was to show how disabled people lived before they died, but history didn’t seem to be on my side. Fear crept in, but I drove the feeling down and pressed search.
Immediately the search results appeared and a new phrase flashed before my eyes:
Eliza Suggs: American Author
Eliza Suggs.
American author.
I held my phone to my chest and cried.
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Please note that what follows is not original research, rather compiling what information about Eliza is available online. See links at the end of the chapter for sources!
/&
Eliza was born in Illinois on December 11th, 1876. She was the youngest of eight children born to her parents. Though all survived infanthood, three of those siblings died before Eliza, at various ages. Her parents had been born into slavery, and their stories are complex and moving. I’m going to focus on Eliza here, but the text of the book she wrote about her parents is available to read online, and I encourage you to do so. (It is linked at the end!) Eliza also wrote about herself in the book, so I am going to quote from it heavily here (italicized quotes are from her book, Shadow and Sunshine).
When Eliza was born she seemed to be a “healthy baby” but it was soon discovered that her bones would easily and frequently break. “My bones being very soft and tender, just the least thing would cause them to break. One day my little sister Lenora, two years older, was showing me how some people shook hands at meeting. As she shook my hand to show me, my arm broke.“
Though doctors attended her, there was no diagnoses or treatment. She wrote, “The doctors in those days did not seem to understand my case. But the doctors now say it was an extreme case of the rickets, such as they have read about but have very rarely seen.“
No one thought she would live. “My burial clothes were made, and everybody expected that they would shortly be needed.“
Eliza credits God with the fact that she survived her childhood. At the time she wrote her book when she was 28 years old, she reported her height as 33 inches and her weight as 50 pounds. “I ride in a baby carriage or go-cart, and am often taken for a baby and spoken to as such.” She comments about strangers mistaking her for a baby, saying that they mostly amuse her. She also says she explains her situation to people who ask rude questions though they are sometimes “taken quite aback.”
Eliza valued her relationship with God and says the Lord came to her when she was a child. Her love of the Lord and prayer were central to her life and much of her writing. It was also entwined with her experience of disability. “If I had been strong and healthy like other children and young people, perhaps I should not have known the Lord. I might now have been running after the pleasures of the world.”
In 1885 the family moved to Kansas. Eliza would have been 9 at the time and she recounts that she started going to school at this time. This was because one of her sisters taught school from their house, since there were no schoolhouses in the area and their home had a large room to accommodate students. Thus Eliza could sit in on lessons with other children.
In 1886 the family moved to Orleans, Nebraska in Harlan county so the sisters could attend a seminary school. Since there were plenty of pastors in the area, James Suggs went on the road, preaching in Kansas while his family stayed in Nebraska.
At first, Eliza did not attend school, but that changed. “We settled close to the seminary to be handy to school and church; but still no one thought it possible for me to attend school, until in 1889, when my dear friend, Emma H. Hillmon, now Mrs. Emma H. Haviland, was Principal of the Seminary. God put it into her heart to give me a chance to go to school. She came to see my mother and offered to give me free tuition in the seminary, and urged mother to send me. So every day I was wheeled to school in my invalid chair, which friends on the Sappa* had kindly donated me; and was carried up the steps to the school room by mother or Katie, and placed at my desk, where I sat until lessons were over and they came for me at noon and night. My bones did not break any more. I was comparatively healthy, and nothing prevented my attending school.” (*An internet search shows that Sappa was a township in Harlan county.)
1889 was the year her father died, though it seems that her mother and sisters supported each other and had a secure place in the community. Eliza writes of her mother: “Mother in her declining years has a comfortable home, free from debt, near the church, where she delights to attend. She is always found in her place in the house of God unless prevented by illness. And although getting along in years, she is seldom ill. She gets a pension and with this gets along nicely.“
It was at the seminary school that Eliza began to find a passion for the topic of temperance. “While in school at Orleans several young people were carefully trained by Sister Emma Hillmon on the Demorest Medal temperance recitations. These were spoken from time to time in the Seminary chapel before large audiences. Judges were appointed who were to observe critically every word and gesture and award the medal to the best speaker. It was in one of these contests that I won the silver medal which I have on in my picture, shown on another page. This medal I could never wear for pride or show, but only on special occasions to show my interest in the temperance cause and my relation to it.“
Eliza also writes about an interest to do missionary work and laments that she cannot go to other countries, but is esteemed to pray for and support those who do.
At this point Eliza wrote that throughout her life, people outside of her family encouraged her to make money by joining a sideshow or a museum of oddities. On this matter Eliza is quite clear: “But, dear reader, God did not create me for this purpose. He created me for His glory, and if I can be a help to any one, and if God can get glory to His name out of my life, amen! To this end shall I live. It has never been a temptation to me to want to go with a show or to be in a museum for money making purposes. I once went to a museum in Chicago just to see and learn. I was asked by one there why I did not speak to the manager and get a place in the museum, and make lots of money. Oh, no! Such places are not for me. God wants me to live for Him, and I could not do it there.“
While many people think of sideshow “freaks” or performers as part of a traveling act like a carnival or circus, stationary oddity museums that featured people were also a big draw. P.T. Barnum opened an oddity museum in New York in 1842, dubbed “The American Museum,” filled with oddities that included things like fossils and taxidermy exhibits, but also live exotic animals and living oddities (humans who, most often than not, had birth defects.) “America loved the American Museum as much as Barnum did, and it became the most visited place in the entire country. Dime museums sprouted across the land, featuring oddities of all kinds, with the living ones as the star attractions” (Pg. 3, American Sideshow by Marc Hartzman).
Certainly, there was money to be made at the museums, but it wasn’t always being made by the disabled people who were the “star attractions.” (But more on that in a later chapter.)
While there were many traveling acts that included bawdy humor or even sexualized exhibitions (though you had to pay more to see those), not all traveling acts were lewd or shocking. By the 1900’s, traveling entertainments like vaudeville shows and carnivals knew they would make more money if they were mindful of the local sentiments. I’ve read in local papers around this time of towns bringing back the same vaudeville acts or working with the same carnival managers because they provided wholesome, family-friendly entertainment and didn’t encourage and/or allow drinking.
Still, even under “respectable” management, the only way these museums or traveling acts made money was if customers continued to pay the entrance fee. To keep this up, disabled people were given false, sensationalized background stories, and at times forced into being parts of acts they did not want to participate in. Disabled people of color were exploited and exoticized even further in this regard. Though the experience of sideshow and museum performers is an important part of disability history, they exist within a textured and multilayered context. I think it’s safe to say that Eliza would have found herself, at least, in unsatisfying and vulnerable situations had she pursued the museum avenue presented to her by others.
The avenue she pursued to be in front of an audience as a temperance speaker, or in the writing she did both in her book and serving as secretary for various religious organizations surely brought her connection to others in the time and place in which she lived. She participated in church services, camp meetings, and temperance rallies. Within her home community she seems to have felt a sense of belonging as she wrote, “I am blessed in having a host of friends. Every one is so good to me, and seeks to make my life pleasant and cheerful. I have many pleasant hours with the teachers and students of the Orleans Seminary. I can never forget them. They have been such a help to me.“
She also worked to earn a little money by making things to sell, and paid a tithe to her church:
“I have good use of my hands and can work and earn a little. And of the little I earn, the Lord gets the tenth. That is His. I am so thankful that the Lord enables me to work in this way. For if I could not use my hands, or if I could not read, time would drag heavily, and life would become very monotonous. The work I do is knitting, crocheting, fancy work, and making horse hair watch chains. The Lord always provides a way for His children.“
Rather than speculate, we can allow Eliza to speak for herself as to how she perceived herself and her life: “Some wonder how I can be happy in my condition. It is the sunlight of God in my soul that makes me happy. It would be hard to live without the Lord. I get much pleasure from the reading of good books. I enjoy looking at the beautiful things in nature and in art. I love to listen to the singing of the birds and to sweet music. In fact many pleasures come to me through the five senses, of which I have full use.“
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Unlike Lizzie Imig, since the most information that exists about Eliza Suggs is in her own writing, the aspect of her story that I have the least information about is Eliza’s death. She died on January 29th, 1908 at the age of 31 at Orleans, Nebraska. I don’t know if her death was related to her disability or was brought about by some other cause. If the listing on Find A Grave is correct, she is buried on a family plot in Orleans cemetery. (Though, her headstone says she was born in 1877, but she wrote in her book that she was born in 1876.)
A gift, perhaps, that at this time I am not left with an obituary written by another person, but rather the stanzas of a poem that Eliza wrote herself, and that she lived long enough to see published:
Tick tock, tick tock, soon time will be no more
Tick tock, tick tock, then all will be o’er
Let us labor hard this year
Working for the Lord with fear
Eternity is drawing near,
Tick tock, tick tock.
Chapter links:
Shadow and Sunshine by Eliza Suggs courtesy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Book | In Their Own Image: Artifacts from the Great Plains Black History Museum
Great Plains Black History Museum
Eliza Suggs entry on Disability History Snapshots
Book | American Sideshow by Marc Hartzman
Continue to Chapter 04. Angelo
