Content area
Full Text
Millie and Christine McCoy were conjoined twins born in 1851 to parents who were slaves. They became world-famous as "The Two-Headed Nightingale" and "The Eighth Wonder of the World. " This poem is written in rondeau-redoublé.
I
Millie, the universal loneliness
of singletons, from womb to grave alone,
was not our fate, nor the brief happiness
of self-forgetting love which makes two one.
Our fate: surrender to the great unknown
creating power that created us
to be ourself, to do what must be done.
Now I face a universe of loneliness.
We've lived a unique double consciousness.
Black, female, freak, times two: all our life seen
by the objectifyingly perverse
gape of the "normal, ' who live and die alone.
Identical, inoperably conjoined,
we have shared one shadow. Yet behind your face,
familiar as my own, hide dreams and pain
I cannot know, and untold happiness.
You sleep and cough. Each breath may be your last.
And your death WUl be the herald of my own.
We're inescapable intimates, blessed and cursed
with each other, two souls merged into one.
We've amassed a trove of memory's gold coin:
fame, far-flung travels, purchasing Master's house
for our family, performing before the Queen. . .
Our fate was our fusion. Given the choice,
who would choose loneliness?
II
The Ancestors believed twins share one soul,
one boundaryless self-identity,
a paradox of each half's being the whole
undivided individuality.
With different temperaments from infancy,
I've always been duplex, always dual,
always both "I" and, at the same time, "we."
Which indicates that we're not one shared soul.
Touted as "The Eighth Wonder of the World,"
I learned to walk by learning to agree
where my four legs would go. I learned to yield
to boundaryless double identity.
Compromise begets camaraderie.
I played, as I was kidnapped, sold, re-sold,
exhibited, examined. On the sea
I pattycaked and prattled. We were a whole.
When Master brought Mama to Liverpool,
she fainted, seeing me. The court's decree
declared him owner of the double child
undivided...