Two American Princes

R Us?

A few days ago (see "Fox-Flipping") I mentioned a long piece by John Jeremiah Sullivan, in the Spring, 2012, Paris Review, which introduced me to fox-flipping, the early-18th-Century sport. I didn't get into the core of this extraordinary piece of research and writing.

            Its title is"The Princes: A Reconstruction." It’s a story, all right, but one that transcends my gripes about the over-valued over-simplicities of "narrativization." (See "Story, Schmory")

            The reconstruction (irony of which term just hit me for some reason) begins with "QUESTION: How did two 'American Princes,' Oktscha Linscha and Tuski Stanaki, come to be baptized in 1725 in Dresden, Saxony, and what became of them?"

            Sullivan pursues that question with great comprehensive vigor, across Europe and what, in the early 1700's, was all of America. The princes, so-called, were what we would categorize today as "Indigenous People", or "Native Americans", or "American Indians." They were covered with tattoos, as if they wore illustrated body-stckings. They had been captured, perhaps by another tribe, and sold into slavery. A slave trader named Pecht, or more probably Pight, acquired them and trafficked them for profit. He charged admission for the curious, over a period of years, to view and to touch them -- not only their tats but their skin, their scars, their hair, but not their genitalia, to the disappointment of those who wondered whether the Princes' looked like Old World men's and whether they were circumsized. His big attempted grift, though, was pitching these princes to crowned heads for purchase.