Histories of emancipation find ballast in the moments we memorialize: Haiti's war for freedom (begun in 1791, ended in1804), the US and British Acts to end the transatlantic slave trade (passed in 1807), emancipation throughout the British empire (1 August 1834), Lincoln's proclamation and the 13th Amendment (1863, 1865), the legal end of chattel slavery in Cuba and Brazil (1886, 1888).Footnote ¹ Yet marking the dates of such passings can mask the long and complicated processes that lead up to – and often away from – the emancipatory meanings attributed to them. Stressing the plural and continuous contests and processes of chattel claims and emancipations in regional, national, and global locales and circuits has allowed a generation of scholars to examine freedom as an ongoing, shifting, and interlocking set of struggles.Footnote ²

In the US, contests over emancipatory states and acts began when enslaved Africans first reached North American shores; they intensified in reaction to the French, US and Haitian revolutions and found new fervor in the years that led to the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.Footnote ³ Though abolition in the US is understood to have followed the war between southern slave states and the “free” North, this piece tracks continuous possessive investments and emancipatory challenges with origins in eighteenth-century New England. In the face of Connecticut's 1784 gradual manumission Act, as slavery's end approached, the largest slaveholders in a New England town protected their family's interests by transforming their human property into intellectual property which they then passed on from generation to generation. In 1798 an enslaved man named Fortune was, I argue, dissected after his death by his owner, Dr. Preserved Porter, so that the skeleton could be exhibited as a symbol of medical and social capital. Renamed Larry as one generation of doctors passed his human remains on to the next, the bones paid professional dividends for more than a century after slavery in the North had formally ended. Blanched of the violence of their beginnings, the chattel remains of “Larry” were likewise repurposed to accrue philanthropic interest when a Porter descendant donated them to the museum in the town in which she, her father, her great grandfather, and her great-great-grandfather, Preserved Porter – doctors all – were born. The human remains of “Larry” were rearticulated in 1930s Europe before becoming the most popular exhibit, for decades, at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut.Footnote ⁴

This article aims to flesh out the skeletal and buried histories of dis(re)membered black subjects by examining white ownership and display of black bodies after death, even though death is often understood in African diasporic cosmologies of New World survival as a final, inevitable, moment of triumphal emancipation. By unearthing the relationship between medical knowledge generation and white uses of black bodies and by mapping long-standing northern roots and routes of white professional reputation, status and capital production, I illustrate how white knowledge and status is indebted not only to black labor in life but also to the work that black bodies continued to do, without their consent, in the name of medical “progress” that rarely benefited either them or members of their community. Informed by post-mortuary studies, a growing interdisciplinary field that encompasses cultural anthropology, history, and literary and religious studies, as well as theories of grief and trauma that address the ongoing values and uses of – and literal and cosmological contests over – bodies, this essay interrogates the politics of black death and dissection and the contemporary complexities of historical recovery and resuscitation.

In September 1932, Mrs. Alexius McGlannan, an eighth-generation descendent of Connecticut's first bonesetter and “chirurgeon,” wrote excitedly to the director of Waterbury's Mattatuck Museum, Mr. Rawson Haddon.Footnote ⁵ She had something much more interesting than the family papers or oil portraits, old daguerreotypes and decorative art pieces that many donors gave, though she promised these too. “Something I feel you ought to have is the old skeleton ‘Larry,’” she announced; “his bones are still here from the time of Dr. Preserved Porter and the old Brook that ran through the farm. Dr. McGlannan,” she says, referring to her husband, “is so anxious to find that brook! The story is that ‘Larry’ was an old slave and very old and feeble and slipped off a plank and was drowned in the brook” in the late 1700s, she narrated in a neat hand. “Skeletons being difficult to get in those days, the old doctors prepared this one for teaching medical students[;] a few bones are lost but it was used many years. I played with it as a child.” Linking her ancestors' time to her own, she discloses,

Thus began an exchange that would last at least five years as McGlannan first sent the “old skeleton” and then box after box of additional “Porter treasures” to the town where so many of the doctors in her family were born.Footnote ⁷

The accession letters which cement “Larry's” move from private possession (and childhood plaything) to public exhibit reveal convergent interests in recasting local medical history in terms that paint as picturesque the violence and dispossession of slavery in life, and in this case in death. “Larry arrived in good structural condition,” Haddon assures McGlannan in another letter;

Both donor and director choose to memorialize Preserved Porter's medical acumen, while they both note and also occlude, one might say drown out, their ongoing possessive investments in the slave's own history and in the town's own history of slavery.

McGlannan embeds “Larry's” post-mortuary disposition – the fact that he was not returned to his family to be buried – in the language of medical progress. Her narrative advances by way of explanation: skeletons were “difficult to get in those days,” so “the old doctors prepared this one for teaching medical students.”Footnote ⁹ Her gesture of subtle justification points to the fact that something atypical occurred while it simultaneously contains the more explosive suggestion that donating the human remains of a man who was owned in death as in life presents (ahem) an ethical dilemma. Her delicate phrasing converges with Haddon's excitement about acquiring something whose exceptionality and rareness both point to, and also hide in plain sight, the history of traumatic dispossession one confronts if the emphasis shifts from the Porter's to the enslaved man's own family and medical history.

The town's accounts mirror McGlannan's: the stock picturesque, the promise of rediscovery (“Dr. McGlannan is so anxious to find that brook!”) mixed in with an ostensibly fortuitous death. Indeed, Haddon points to Joseph Anderson's multivolume History of Waterbury to confirm the ongoing importance of “Larry” to the town's medical history, transcribing it into his missive at great length. “On the west side of the river,” he shares with his donor,

“I am planning to get a photograph of the place,” Haddon goes on. “The last sentence of [Anderson's] article gives us a complete and definite reason for putting Larry on display.”Footnote ¹¹ These exchanges reproduce just the sort of New England accounts written in the 1880s and 1890s that make contemporary historians of race in the North deeply suspicious. As Joanne Pope Melish puts it, the hundreds of volumes such as Anderson's “offer a rich variety of anecdotal information about the institution of slavery in New England and also about individual slaves and free people of color”; yet she remains wary of their rather “uniformly ‘fond’ reconstructions of relations between slaves and slaveholders.”Footnote ¹² For Anderson, as for McGlannan and Haddon, such relations are presented to supplement the foregrounding of place, an interest Haddon and McGlannan wish to capture through experience or photography. As Anderson narrates the town history, he also acts as a guide to the scenic roads and brooks meant to please readers that he situates as viewers.Footnote ¹³ On this tour of local interest, those who are enslaved, like the Indians Anderson uses to open the section, are absorbed into the landscape as aesthetic and na(rra)tive enhancements, part of the picturesque that might draw visitors such as Dr. McGlannan back to places of local interest or to the cultural institutions that curate and display artifacts that illustrate such pastoral scenes.

By citing the passage directly in the curatorial materials that accompany the skeleton of “Larry,” early exhibits reproduced and invited a visual theater in which the violence of Connecticut slavery and the Porter saga take place just offstage and only for those who can peer behind the curtains:

In one of the two currently extant photographs of the exhibit, captions and staging converge to create yet another benign tableau. In the exhibit signage's language, “Larry's” demise is sandwiched between descriptions of his postmortem medical repurposing. Interestingly, Dr. Porter is grammatically and narratively absent at the moment of death, which is portrayed as self-generated – occurring because some unexplained “pique” caused “Larry” to jump or an accident caused him to slip. Left offstage is also the scene that precipitated such a jump. Indeed, Dr. Porter is presented as being both absent in the river/tableau and also, taking an unexplained narrative leap, fortuitously present to take best advantage of his chattel's drowning. The disruptive potential of death is redirected by a cultural grammar that stresses what readers/viewers should find most important, that Porter's (cultural) economy and instincts, “his professional” acumen, contributed to the town's early development. Haddon's curatorial transmogrification of “Larry [into] Waterbury's First Medical Museum” and the iterative and chremamorphic description of his skeleton as a “School of Anatomy” scrubs the historical data from the scene of production in order to create a narrative frame capable of producing a museum-worthy artifact. Describing an enslaved man (whose body was probably dissected and was certainly dismembered, reconstructed, privately owned and displayed as it was bequeathed to subsequent generations) as a local, historical, “medical museum” while his skeleton is exhibited in a museum of regional history is an example of the diegetic mirroring that “museum culture” in this instance enables.Footnote ¹⁵

For the Porters and for Fortune's family, mortuary politics, to invoke Vincent Brown, intersect with anatomical entrepreneurialism, as Michael Sappol might put it, to produce human remains used as artifacts that serve to amass cultural, medical, and economic capital that could be passed on through multigenerational professional standing. That Connecticut owners (re)named the captive Africans they held in such terms as “Fortune” and “Venture” points to how explicitly they (pro)claimed their chattel interests in economic gain.Footnote ¹⁶ As the largest slaveholders in their New England town in the late 1700s, the Porters were clear-eyed about slavery's monetary advantages. As emancipation approached, the Porters managed to hold on to valuable property. In Preserved Porter's estate records, for example, Fortune's living wife Dinah was valued at less than her husband's skeleton.Footnote ¹⁷ Displayed as a symbol of his owners' – and then their descendants' – medical acumen and status, Fortune added to their social and economic capital immediately.

From Preserved Porter's associations and practices in the eighteenth century through his great-great-grand-daughter's professional training at the turn of the next century, the Porters' generation of medical knowledge associated them with ongoing racialized practices enacted in the country's medical centers. “I rather believe,” wrote a New York proponent of anatomy in 1788, “that the only subjects procured for dissection are the productions of Africa or their descendants … and if those characters are the only subjects of dissection, surely no person can object.”Footnote ¹⁸ Likewise, in 1933, as McGlannan and Haddon were corresponding, Dr. Montague Cobb, the well-respected black professor of anatomy, published the results of a comprehensive survey that showed that a good number of “southern medical schools had for years taught their students the fundamentals of human anatomy as demonstrated exclusively by Negro cadavera.”Footnote ¹⁹ As a long-standing family of New England doctors, the Porters not only passed on the remains of a man they claimed for more than a century after Connecticut emancipation, but they also passed down a racial politics as stubbornly embedded as it was elided in American medical history, North and South.

Preserved Porter had every reason to model the philanthropic tradition his great-great-granddaughter would carry on in the Porter name by offering others in his community the most exceptional and rare of opportunities – the chance to dissect an anatomical specimen. To study in Europe offered instruction that could include “a prodigious amount of dissection,” but this called for prodigious monetary outputs, sometimes several thousands of dollars; that is, a significant portion of the seven thousand dollars at which Porter's estate was valued when he died in 1803.Footnote ²⁰ Study in Philadelphia, Boston, or New York at any of the new US medical schools offered varying possibilities for students to get their hands wet, as it were; getting firsthand anatomical experience was contingent upon students' economic and scholastic capacities as well as the availability of bodies (and pupils' willingness to put in late night hours to resurrect such prospects). Students could always study “with local physicians … but this offered far fewer opportunities for dissection.”Footnote ²¹ Deciding to dissect Fortune, then, would not have been simply a medical or intellectual decision; it would have been an economic one.

Though no extant source exists to prove definitively that Porter dissected the man he claimed as his property, the archival, physical, and circumstantial evidence works together to make such an assertion conceivable, if not all but incontrovertible.Footnote ²² By inviting a collective dissection of his slave and by preserving Fortune's bones, Dr. Porter would have quite literally exhibited the “true professional instinct and economy” by which he was remembered centuries later. By the late eighteenth century, when Fortune's transformation from human subject to material object occurred, it was no longer “sufficient for medical students merely to attend lectures and witness dissections” in order to gain entry to a medical field increasingly governed by professionalizing practices; actual practice was essential, even imperative, for those with ambition.Footnote ²³ Considering the racialized political history of dissection, it is illogical that Porter, his colleagues, and his physician scions would have passed up an opportunity to dissect an enslaved man he had committed to skeletonizing. There was nothing to be gained by such a decision and everything to be lost.

Nor was the collective dissection of a black man in that era and region an anomaly. In his address to the New Hampshire Medical Society, Dartmouth Professor Dr. Asa Crosby's recollections of the late 1700s directly echo – and importantly depart from – the scenes described in Waterbury: “The first execution for a capital offence in my own country took place at Haverhill,” Crosby shared,

In contrast, Waterbury's “old doctors” avoided the reputational harm that a public staging might bring, instead transforming what is here described as a crude and public “sacrilege” performed by “pseudo-anatomists” into a private act that results in Dr. Porter being memorialized in town histories. Such volumes likewise report that Dr. Nathan McKinstry, who presided over the dissection described above (as well as over other public executions that led to such possibilities), created professional capital that would live beyond him in the process: his headstone reads, “In-urned beneath lies no poor, worthless quack / but the dear ashes of good Dr. Mc.”Footnote ²⁵ Like “Dr. Mc.,” by seizing the postmortem opportunity to use his chattel property as a medical subject, Porter helped to separate himself from the “Quack or Empirical Pretender”; that is, from the provincial, parochial doctoring of the past.Footnote ²⁶

Early anatomical professionals (and those who followed them) were involved in racialized mortuary circuits and commerce that both tapped and created multigenerational, social, professional, and political networks of possession, exchange, and private and civic belonging. In 1784, New Haven County (which includes Waterbury) organized its first medical society. Its minutes display that it intended to connect to state, national, and international societies and anatomical leaders; its first committee, the May minutes of 1784 report, is given the power to “adopt any other measures for a more regular Practice of physic and Surgery in this state.”Footnote ²⁷ Preserved Porter's signature is the last of almost fifty names included in the founding group. By 1822, of the six members from Waterbury in the increasingly robust roll of members, half are Porters; and descendants continue to be represented until at least 1866. Inheritance under systems of slavery, as Vincent Brown points out, entailed “more than a simple transfer of property[;] it was a means of affirming familial bonds and expressing expectations for the future.”Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, the “dead, through their bequests, expected to wield continued influence in the society they left behind.”Footnote ²⁹ In the society and networks that the Porters traded and traveled in, direct anatomical experience and symbols of status helped guarantee professional acceptance well past slavery's end in New England, indeed past its formal demise in the United States itself.

The New Haven Medical Society's first reported case study involved Polydore, “the negro Servant of Capt. Trowbridge of this city.”Footnote ³⁰ The detailed report – addressed quite explicitly to medical peers – details doctors' observations and treatments during visits to the sick man, and then how the body was dissected in order to understand the symptoms and causes of death. What is notable in this case is not only the detail and precision of the account but also that not just the reporting doctor but two others who would emerge as organizational leaders are present at the autosopy/dissection and that their access to the body in death may have quite a lot to do with Polydore's status as their colleague's “negro servant.”

The Porters likely had the resources to host a professional dissection, and the preparation of Fortune's bones was also likely a collective affair In addition to his short-lived but significant membership in the New Haven County Medical Society, there is evidence that Preserved Porter passed down a small, handwritten notebook titled “Anatomy/the art of Dissecting the parts of the human body” (1780). Although it is unattributed in the Mattutuck Museum's archival collection, it probably arrived with the boxes of “Porter treasure” that McGlannan donated. When letters, numbers, and flourishes are carefully compared to a 1789 receipt for services signed by Preserved Porter himself, the match is apparent.Footnote ³¹ This document provides a concrete link between the material evidence – Fortune's skeleton – and the process that Dr. Porter and his colleagues likely used to produce it; that is, between Porter's strong interest not only in bones, but also in dissection itself.

Later sources posit that Dr. Porter acted with others. In recounting her family history, we will recall, McGlannan writes that “skeletons being difficult to get in those days, the old doctors prepared this one for teaching medical students”;Footnote ³² a hundred years after Fortune's death, the newspaper clipping that reports on the rediscovery of the Porters' skeleton declares that “the master, desiring for some unknown reason to retain the bones of the slave, accompanied by a number of friends,” stripped the body and boiled it before piecing the bones together and exhibiting the skeleton for some time.Footnote ³³ Details about the “meadows which were covered with snow to the Naugatuck River” during that cold winter pepper local lore – and though the cause of death by drowning has been dismissed by recent forensic studies, accounts suggest that Fortune may have died in winter when bodies decomposed at a slower rate and dissectors were less likely to be overcome by the stench of a body's rapid putrification; the doctors, then, may well have found ideal circumstances under which to indulge their anatomical interests.

The bones themselves bear witness to the fact that they were professionally prepared and “expertly preserved,” that they were drilled and marked with the master's tools of the trade. The “small even saw marks on [the] jaw bone at each side corner,” as well as the “drill holes in [the] skull” and elsewhere, made to “drain sinuses and bones of fluids and soft tissue,” reveal that those who took their instruments to Fortune's body knew what they were doing.Footnote ³⁴ Forensic anthropologists report that the

“Preparing” Fortune's skeleton was a time-consuming and physical affair; it included transporting, dismembering, and boiling his body; gathering the instruments to do so; and cleaning bloody tools, clothes, and the “dissection room” itself. One wonders who was asked to clean up these scenes, these clothes. With his sons, extended family, and professional colleagues at the ready, there is no reason why Dr. Porter would, or could, have executed it alone.

The availability and presence of Fortune's bones for Waterbury's white medical circles signaled a material absence of his body for the town's black community. In asserting his continued rights as a property owner and member of the town's medical elite, Dr. Porter deprived Dinah and Fortune's children of the ability to perform the most basic rites of passage. Burials served as “the most important of all African ceremonies,” as Sterling Stuckey argues in Slave Culture;Footnote ³⁶ for Africans in the Americas, they shaped the social order. Burial and death rituals helped to preserve and hold together fractured communities that were left behind.Footnote ³⁷ “At each stage in a customary sequence: determining the cause of death, preparing the body for burial” (a personal duty widows performed in an era before undertakers), “accompanying the corpse to the grave site, eulogizing and sermonizing, celebrating life, mourning loss, and consigning the departed to the spirit world – last rites for the dead help individuals and groups confront death as universal and final,” as Vincent Brown explains.Footnote ³⁸ Denied a funeral and instead faced with the haunting presence of a newly arrived skeleton as a material reminder of their loss, death's finality must have morphed into something quite different for those whom Fortune left behind – Dinah, his wife; Africa, who at about twenty-six was Fortune's eldest; Jacob, their son, who was no more than thirteen; Mira, who was ten or so; and six-year old Roxa, the youngest – than it was for the white family that continued to own them, and him.Footnote ³⁹

For enslaved and free communities in New England, in environs where the black community was particularly small, the opportunity to grieve with others in one's racial community was particularly important, for, as Eddie Glaude puts it, “moral identity constituted under conditions of violence, suffering, and death differentiate [sic] in real terms, despite the [seeming] sameness of the rhetorical [or cultural] form, black America and white America.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Being denied such rites was often interpreted as sacred and social banishment. Burying the dead and honoring them is acknowledged as a fundamental human obligation spanning time and place. In this period, as in others, enslaved family members often spent their modest and precious resources on interments; one of the first thing free communities did was procure burial grounds which bound black families and communities, free and enslaved, together. As a man with a wife and four children (one of whom was in his twenties), Fortune likely would have been buried with dignity. Indeed, excavations of the New York African Burial Ground in which colonial and post-Revolutionary black people were interred show that the community “buried their loved ones carefully and with generosity”; research shows that “the bodies were wrapped in linen shrouds with care and methodically positioned in well-built cedar or pine coffins.”Footnote ⁴¹ Land records show that Fortune may have owned his own home, which was legally possible for those enslaved in Connecticut.Footnote ⁴² This suggests that Dinah, Fortune and Africa may have been allowed to hire out their time or cultivate goods that may have given them access to funds that impoverished family after family expended in ritual farewells that provided them with an outlet and opportunity for collective mourning. As Vincent Brown's work displays, enslaved Africans shared “basic practices having to do with relations between the living and the dead,” and with the dead “they maintained active relations.”Footnote ⁴³ Though a parallel black genealogical reality seems not to dawn on later Porter descendants – who found it hard to part with the bones they inherited because, as McGlannan put it, “I have always kept the skeleton with me” – that possessive appropriation could not have evaded the Porters of Fortune's time; their house was just five hundred feet west of the one that their slave family occupied.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, the Porters' was a bold, bald, and quite personal claim to continuing postmortem power.

The collective dispossession that Fortune's family and their community experienced was accompanied by manifold acts of negation, including his absence in historical death registers. Though that date is documented for so many other blacks in his time and region, the exact date of Fortune's death is not listed in the town's Record of Mortality. Frederick Douglass famously laments the ontological pall that accompanies his not knowing his birthday. That empty space is for him a haunting absence, a void filled with historical loss. For Fortune, that absence is recorded on both sides of the dash that represents a life. In local records, even those whose names are missing – like the “Negress belonging to Joseph Garnsey who passed on Feb. 15, 1775,” or the three infants that Pomp Freeman loses before any one of them turns three – have their death dates documented as a historical sign of their presence.Footnote ⁴⁵ Though, as Lois Brown has suggested, “some of the earliest American narratives to record the lives of Africans in America were prompted by the deaths of those early subjects,”Footnote ⁴⁶ Fortune's “death story” is not found in conventional documents.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the obituary of his New England contemporary, the poet Lucy Terry (1724–1821), Vermont Gazette readers are told to “Go to the tomb where lies their matron's dust, / And read the marble, faithful to its trust.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Though, like Fortune, Terry was once enslaved in New England, her obituary imagines and inscribes her in ways that stress investments in literary and mortuary culture that she and the paper's readers ostensibly share. That readers can point to both her birth and death dates, the very markers they are directed to “read [on] the marble” when visiting her tomb, signals the chasm between Fortune's post-mortuary articulation and black deaths that allow “subjects, silenced by mortality,” to nonetheless “achieve a voice, articulate their own histories, and attempt to acquire ownership of their own stories,” to quote Lois Brown.Footnote ⁴⁹ Denied the rites of final passage and a recorded date of death, Dinah and Fortune's four children were only left with Fortune's unburied bones.

When the director of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia's Mütter Museum, reputed to be “America's finest museum of medical history,”Footnote ⁵⁰ mused in a 2002 report that “Fortune might have been delighted and amazed that he, a simple slave, might be of interest to learned physicians of his own time and, through the preservation of his skeleton, that he would become a living presence to people two hundred years after his death,” she muted the historical record with revisionist assertions aligning the interests of the “learned physicians” of Fortune's time with the interests of (and assumptions that undergird) a museum ethos built on the theft and appropriation of the artifacts, cultural production, and bodies of the historically disenfranchised.Footnote ⁵¹ Without accounting for her sources, Ms. Worden went on to contend that “Dr. Porter, by all accounts, did not mistreat his slaves, and they seemed to have lived a good life by the standards of the time.”Footnote ⁵² Perhaps she did not know that after Dr. Porter's death, Dinah was sold from her three young children though the estate was not under financial pressure. Perhaps Worden was not privy to (and could not imagine that?) forensic reports that the Mattatuck commissioned would show that Fortune's “bones showed ‘enthesopathies,’ small depressions left where muscle ligament has ripped away.” They result, as medical anthropologist Dr. Warren Perry reports, “from labor that is too much for the body to bear.”Footnote ⁵³ During his life, Fortune also suffered from a broken lower back, hand, and foot. Though these are not unusual injuries “for agricultural workers at the time,” as the Mattutuck's well-documented Web exhibit suggests, Fortune was an enslaved laborer;Footnote ⁵⁴ his injuries – as well as the treatment and period he was granted to heal – largely occurred under the regulatory gaze and authority of those who claimed his time and body. As historian Sharla Fett has shown, slave-owners defined slave health almost solely in terms of “soundness for labor”; that is, in terms of their own property interests; while enslaved communities' healing cultures were relational, collective, and bridged the worlds of the ancestors to that of living generations.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even in the colonial and post-Revolution North, where black populations were much smaller than they were in the antebellum South that is Fett's focus, black cosmologies of well-being diverged sharply from those of whites. They provided a formidable weapon against the objectification of slave health and, we might add, challenged definitions of what white elites and those who protected their interests (now as then) might consider to be “good” treatment or mistreatment.Footnote ⁵⁶

When the Mütter director insists that “we can't know for certain [Porter's] motivation in preparing Fortune's skeleton, but I think it would be wrong to suggest that he did it out of malice or disrespect for the body,” she ignores that in the world that Porter, his scions, and Fortune's family shared, African descendants and poor whites voiced their lack of consent in vociferously, and oftentimes violently, clear terms. Whereas the value of dissection in (post-)Revolutionary America might have been readily apparent to the medical establishment, by the end of the eighteenth century there could be no misunderstanding that the communities used to supply bodies certainly associated such activities with malice and disrespect. Doctors knew that “the unearthing and dissection of bodies was seen as an assault upon the dead and an affront to family and community honor.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Dissection culture – and the grave robbing that fed it – aroused righteous or riotous anger depending on one's point of view. The 1788 anti-dissection riots in Baltimore, New York, and Boston were serious and very widely reported. The multi-day “Doctor's mob” was one of New York City's – some say post-Revolutionary America's – “most serious outbursts.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Nearly a decade later, Governor John Jay sent in the militia to quell marches protesting the death (and dissection) sentence of a man who killed a deputy trying to take him to debtor's prison. And this happened in 1797, the year before Fortune's dismemberment.Footnote ⁵⁹ With the Porter's professional ties and multiple links to medical communities, it is impossible to imagine that they were unaware of such demonstrations. Though Worden may argue that it “would be wrong to suggest that” Porter acted “out of malice or disrespect,” by the time Fortune met with the doctors' scalpels, medical elites and those who wished to join them knew that their anatomical activities were reviled; they just chose to override those concerns.

After the deaths, after the burials (of slavery in the Americas), the stories of the labor and lives of stolen Africans that have been transformed into, and passed on as, white wealth and white-owned artifacts have been bleached of their force and violence because they remain so familiar and so continuous.Footnote ⁶⁰ How medical elites built reputations, institutions, and in some cases fortunes by continuing to use black bodies not only in life but also in death is less known (though now better known thanks to a generation of scholars and writers who have resurrected these buried histories).Footnote ⁶¹ As with so many subjects spawned across time in slavery's postmortem outposts, the stories of the Porter descendants, the Mattatuck Museum, and Fortune's family and community illustrate the continuous contests over chattel claims and emancipations in regional, national, and global locales and circuits. The social, economic, and philanthropic interest, capital, and prestige accrued and passed down from one generation to the next mask the coercive force that adheres to the privileges and power of historically denuded knowledge production and, in this case, medical progress. These are the emancipatory states and acts we have inherited; these are history's blanched and unburied bones.