The Carolina twins had two strikes against them from the start.
Born in 1851, Millie and Christine McKoy were joined at the lower spine, and their parents were slaves.
Yet their life turned out to be an astonishing victory over adversity.
The twins' early years were a travesty of childhood. They were wrenched from their mother at age 2; sold three or four times; stolen, retrieved and stolen again; put on public display at fairs and freak shows from New Orleans to Montreal; then spirited across the ocean to Britain.
At each new venue, impresarios called in physicians for exhaustive medical probes to appease scientific curiosity and prove to skeptics that the "two-headed girl" was no fraud. It took three years for a private detective, hired by the McKoy family's last "rightful" owner, Joseph Pearson Smith, to track the twins down in Birmingham, England.
By the time they returned to Smith and their family in North Carolina, they were almost 6.
The sisters' motto was "As God decreed, we agreed," and they strove to turn impediments into assets.
As toddlers, they were clumsy and fell down frequently. Before long, though, they developed a graceful sideways walk -- and a crowd-pleasing dance style.
They mastered keyboard duets. Endowed with one soprano and one alto voice, they learned to harmonize.
Martell cites a raft of medical reports noting the twins' above-average intelligence.
Once the 6-year-olds returned to North Carolina in 1857, Smith and his wife undertook to educate them as well as manage their budding career as performers.
Martell marshals strong evidence that the Smiths were slaveholders who treated Millie and Christine as family.
Certainly, Mary Smith broke the law by teaching slaves to read and write, and, as Millie-Christine's chosen managers after slavery ended, the couple arranged their own lives around the twins' career.
In the course of a seven-year European tour in the 1870s, Millie-Christine became fluent in German, Italian, Spanish and French. Gushed a New York Times reviewer: ". . . she is a perfect little gem or gems, or a gem and a half, we don't know which.
Great care and attention must have been bestowed upon her education."
credit goes to the respective owners S
Phot credits remain with the owner
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