Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (8 page)

In addition, there were voices talking to her (once on Good Friday and again on Easter Sunday), telling her to go and pray with certain people. She did so, believing that her prayers would have healing power, and in each case they did. After Easter Sunday, though, the voices stopped and there were no visual hallucinations.

As for the stigmata itself, the inevitable question is whether or not it was really happening, and could “self-induced wounding [be] ruled out as the cause of these strange phenomena?”
²⁷

There have been a number of fraudulent stigmatics. The sixteenth-century nun Maria de la Visitacion was caught painting stigmata onto her skin (“Her physicians defended her, but the Inquisition's examiners scrubbed away her wounds to reveal unblemished skin”), as well as more complicated cases in which subjects were not consciously aware of wounding themselves.
²⁸

One of the most prominent modern stigmatics, Therese
Neumann (1898–1962) of Konnersreuth, Germany, experienced a wide variety of phenomena including spectacularly gruesome displays of bleeding. They went on for decades, but apparently no one ever actually saw the bleeding begin; moreover, in the years before the stigmata appeared, she suffered from convulsions during which “‘[t]he fingers trembled, and she dug them into her palms.'”
²⁹
Skepticism is inevitable in cases where the stigmatic must be alone, unobserved, or concealed in bedclothes for blood to start flowing, and had Cloretta's episodes always been preceded by a visit to the ladies' room, as happened at the Children's Hospital, it would have raised suspicions. Witnesses, however, saw the bleeding begin while she sat in class, or carefully inspected her hand as more blood appeared, without finding an opening in the skin.

During Cloretta's first trip to the hospital, Dr. Early attended to her hand in a way that suggested blood was passing through Cloretta's unbroken skin. The doctor told a reporter, “‘I have wrapped her hands thoroughly and the blood was there after 18 hours. There was no way she could have removed the bandages [and] then replaced them, or stuck an object beneath them to insert any blood.'”
³⁰
The formal account in “A Case of Stigmata” states that Cloretta's left hand was

bound thoroughly with an elastoplast boxing glove dressing. . . . She was returned to school and within
three hours, while in the classroom, bled spontaneously from her right palm. The bandage was removed by the school staff the following day so that she could play her clarinet and blood was reported in the dressing.”
³¹

Drs. Early and Lifschutz never saw Cloretta start bleeding; she claimed not to know when it was going to happen, yet good luck and insight into how the phenomenon might be triggered, allowed Dr. Early to see the stigmata occurring and examine the skin afterward.

The single most important factor in precipitating the phenomenon seems to have been Cloretta's “identification with the figure of Christ. She was also preoccupied with Christ's suffering . . .”
³²
When interviewed, she “denied any knowledge of the stigmata phenomenon prior to bleeding,” yet also “recognizes that her bleeding is connected with the death of Christ, celebrated nine days from now on Good Friday.”
³³
“It was only after the first week of bleeding that she learned of St. Francis of Assisi and later clearly identified with him.”
³⁴
So, on Cloretta's fifth visit to Dr. Early's office,

the physician suggested that she sit in the examination room next to her office and draw pictures of St. Francis of Assisi from a book she had brought with her. The patient was alone, nursing staff was on lunch break, and while copying pictures she noticed bleeding from her left palm. She immediately returned to the physician's office with
two to three drops of blood in the palm of her left hand. The physician observed the blood to increase in volume four fold, welling up from the center of the palm and spreading over the palmar creases. After wiping the wet blood away no lesions were present with the exception of a pea-sized bluish discoloration remaining in the palm of her left hand for approximately three minutes.”
³⁵

In 1975, Dr. Early described the phenomenon as “red blood cells . . . passing through the walls of tiny capillaries and through the skin.”
³⁶
(The blood was also analyzed.
³⁷
) As far as the reality of Cloretta's stigmata was concerned, the doctors noted that “[s]elf-induced trauma is almost humanly impossible to rule out absolutely in such cases; but we believe the likelihood of it to be almost nil in this case.” They continued, “One can no longer dispute the power of mental and emotional forces to control such physical phenomena. By analogy we need not doubt that profound, intense religious and emotional forces, conscious and unconscious, could cause stigmatic bleeding.”
³⁸

They were not a product of hysteria; Dr. Lifschutz described Cloretta as “a very well-adjusted, stable little girl.”
³⁹
Nor was it psychogenic purpura, which are very rare and seen in people that have “severe hysterical and masochistic traits . . . [whose] life stories were checkered with violence, sadism, and sexual trauma.”
⁴⁰
In short, “[t]he only significant
background for the stigmata was her religiosity”
⁴¹
and identification with Jesus's suffering.

As often happens with stigmata, the phenomenon reached its climax on Good Friday. Cloretta was staying at a friend's house that day and claimed that after waking up she bled from all six sites simultaneously for the first and only time (“there were [however] neither witnesses nor blood reported on the bed sheets”).
⁴²
After nineteen days, she felt “‘it was all over.'”
⁴³
But the doctors predicted that “the chances are better than even that she will again bleed at subsequent Easter seasons.”
⁴⁴

At church that day, members of the press almost outnumbered the small congregation. The Rev. Hester delivered a sermon about the crucifixion and talked about Cloretta, calling the phenomenon a “miracle” and saying that “We pray for Cloretta and her family that this bleeding will be with her throughout her life.” He told
Jet
that “[t]he Lord has prepared her for this,” and as the congregation filed out she “shyly offered her hand to those leaving,” for the Rev. Hester believed “‘that by touching her hand we'll all be blessed.'”
⁴⁵

—

Like so many cases involving unexplained phenomena, there is no satisfying resolution to Cloretta's story.

The stigmata did not return during Easter 1973, just a “completely unsubstantiated report of one observer who
claimed to have seen blood on one of her hands on one occasion . . .”
⁴⁶
The following year a church service was held in Cloretta's honor on Palm Sunday with a benefit to raise money for her college education; she might have had a brief episode of bleeding on Good Friday, but in 1975 the phenomenon returned with its former intensity.

Services were just beginning at New Light Baptist on March 16, 1975, when thirteen-year-old Cloretta walked down the aisle to show her hand to the Rev. Hester. He turned her bleeding palm toward the congregation, and “[t]hey were so stunned, the pastor said, that it took 15 minutes for the people to regain their composure, so he could continue with the service.”
⁴⁷

After three years, Alice Robertson seemed calmer about her daughter's peculiarity. Maybe she relaxed when the doctors decided it was not caused by a mental or physical illness, nor had it worsened. The stigmata were essentially a seasonal problem, something like hay fever, though there had reportedly been episodes during the summer as well (it would be interesting to know which books her daughter was reading, or what movies she saw, at the time). The press was invited to the Robertson home the next day (March 17), and when Cloretta's palm started bleeding at 11:20
A.M.
, they took pictures.

She appeared in the
Oakland Tribune
again on March 22, 1975, but this time it was on the page for church
advertisements. There, among announcements for the Salvation Army's Citadel Songsters, and a Drive-In Worship Center at the Appian 80 Shopping Center, is an ad for the “Youth Supernatural End-Time Revival” presented by the East Oakland Faith Deliverance Center and New Light Baptist Church; it is illustrated with a photograph of Cloretta displaying the palm of her left hand. The copy includes a brief history of her stigmata and promises:

Supernatural Happenings at East Oakland Deliverance Center

Mass miracle healing services nightly. Bring the sick, troubled, the dope addict and the possessed, and depressed. Come expecting a miracle, for God will be moving by His spirit.

Furthermore:

Cloretta Starks will be present in each service.

(Healing gets a passing mention from the doctors, but Cloretta and the Rev. Hester emphasize it.)

She reportedly bled from all six sites again on Good Friday, 1975, but by then reporting about her stigmata had become routine, and the Rev. Hester had more to say about
the revival, which reportedly attracted crowds of around 1,200. Cloretta bled during all but two of the meetings, and “miracle healings were claimed almost every night.”
⁴⁸

Though she now used the name
Starks
, being a headliner at religious revivals does not seem to have changed Cloretta any more than the media attention. She was an eighth-grader whose favorite subject was math, she enjoyed sports, and, as might be expected in someone who sees “her life as dedicated to relieving suffering in others,” she was planning to become a registered nurse.
⁴⁹

For the next two years, Cloretta appeared at the Youth Supernatural End-Time Revival and the stigmata returned at Easter time, usually during services at New Light Baptist Church. It might have become an annual event, but after 1977, when Mrs. Robertson told the
Oakland Tribune
that fifteen-year-old Cloretta's “health and spirits are good and that the girl has seen a doctor about the recurrence of the bleeding,” the stories seem to stop.
⁵⁰

This may be a failure of research, but the lack of follow-ups or “where are they now” articles has led to speculation about her subsequent life.

In Claudia Mair Burney's novel,
Wounded: A Love Story
, a priest tells the story of “Cloretta of Oakland, California” to
a twenty-four-year-old black woman with stigmata. The events of 1972 are recounted more or less accurately before considering what might have happened afterward.

The next Easter her family watched her carefully, but it never happened again. Or if it did, they didn't let on, and I can't blame them for that. She was a kid. You protect the defenseless.

Cloretta Robinson [
sic
] drifted into obscurity. Like the high school I wrote about years ago, few people cared about a black juvenile stigmatic. But sometimes I wonder what became of the little girl who was marked with the passion wounds of Christ one Eastertide. I imagine she wondered why she was chosen, questioned both her sanity and sanctity, and maybe when she was older, and those years were from her, she wondered if she made the whole thing up.

Then again, she could have died young, and her family let her rest in peace without the stain of stigmata to prick her eternal rest. Or perhaps she lived the rest of her life quietly healing the suffering and alleviating the pain of others through her prayers, knowing God so loved the ghetto, that he gave his only begotten Son, and left His mark on Cloretta to prove it.
⁵¹

In fact, she still lives near Oakland, but what Burney calls a drift into obscurity might be someone who successfully reclaimed her privacy.

Cloretta is an anomaly among stigmatics. Beyond its unexpected appearance on someone of her age, race, and religion, there is a gulf of normality separating her from other cases. While they lay in bed bleeding on the sheets and radiating sanctity, Cloretta played basketball. (In fact, some stigmatics are not holy invalids. Father James Bruse, pastor of St. Frances de Sales Church at Kilmarnock, Virginia, is an active clergyman who experienced bleeding from 1991 to 1993 along with a variety of other phenomena. He is also a three-time world record holder for marathon roller-coaster riding.
⁵²
)

What became of her? When considering Cloretta Starks, it may be best to look for ordinary motivations. The bleeding could have stopped, she may have fallen in love, or perhaps identifying with St. Francis of Assisi drew her toward the Roman Catholic Church; one can imagine how its saints, mystics, and martyrs would appeal to a religious adolescent with bleeding palms.

Perhaps she simply went back to being “Cocoa,” an unremarkable woman who goes to church with a layer of absorbent gauze under her immaculate white gloves. Just in case.

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

When Judge Braswell D. Deen Jr., retired head of the Georgia Court of Appeals, was young, he had a memorable face-to-face encounter with a wild man on the streets of Alma, Georgia.
¹

I was about twelve years old, working at Quality Cash Store, sometimes called Greenways Grocery Store, in Alma, Ga. The store was located on the main street, 12th St. It was in the middle 30s. I was inside the store when we heard a large noise and growl coming down the street.

We went outside and saw a pickup truck, which came by pulling a two-wheel cart containing a large cage containment with prisonlike bars; the wild man was inside roaring. As I remember, Albert Douglas, who was my boss, was laughing and said, there goes Dr. Dedge and his
wild man . . . I actually saw and witnessed this, which was scary at my young age.
²

Seeing a howling black man with two horns growing out of his head made an impression on Judge Deen, but who was Dr. Dedge, who was in the cage, and why were they driving around Georgia?

The answer involves economics, entertainment, folklore, science, and pseudoscience, all of which contributed to the creation of the “Okefenokee Wild Man.”

Human-animal hybrids have occupied an important place in our imaginations since at least the Paleolithic Age, when a deer-headed man with a rack of antlers and tail was painted on the walls of the cave of Trois Frères cave at Ariège, France. The figure, dubbed “
Le Sorcier
,” is first in a procession of extraordinary beings that continues today. Discoveries made on the island of Flores in 2003 prove that a “hybrid” of ape and human was not imaginary just eighteen thousand years ago, yet even without
Homo floresiensis
, every society has its beast-men and they serve a variety of purposes: gods (Pan), heroes (Enkidu), symbols of the wilderness (woodwoses), and uncataloged species of primates (Bigfoot), each of which reflects a somewhat different worldview.

Science, of course, has been shaping the Western outlook since the eighteenth century, and while cartographers stopped labeling unexplored sections of the map “here be monsters,” explorers and settlers kept encountering them. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced many reports of primitive, not quite human, beings, and these were incorporated into new intellectual frameworks such as medicine or anthropology.

Where a medieval traveler might have returned from Africa with tales of Ethiopian unicorn men, the Victorian Army surgeon wrote an article titled “Horned Men on Africa: Further Particulars of Their Existence” for the December 10, 1887, issue of the
British Medical Journal
, in which he describes three unrelated West Africans with the same remarkable “well-marked bony exostosis or knob-like growth of the infra-orbital ridges of the maxillary bones,” a kind of crossbeam between the nostrils and eyes.

Likewise, when Col. Percy Fawcett was passing through Brazil's Cordilheira dos Parecis in 1914, he encountered the Maricoxi, a tribe of “large, hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and with foreheads sloping back from pronounced eye ridges, men of a very primitive kind, in fact, and stark naked.” For naturalist Ivan Sanderson, the Maricoxi were not a mystery but living representatives of a “neanderthaloid-type Submen living in the Matto Grosso.”
³
Nor were beings like these restricted to distant and exotic places; American newspapers were once filled with accounts of “wild men.”

It was a catchall term applied to lunatics, hermits, and monsters, whether it was the 1883 sighting at Morganville, Georgia, of someone with “a sack round his head” who “has been seen to eat dead animals and wraps himself in horse hide” or the man captured swimming from island to island in Georgia's Ocheecee Swamp, “destitute of clothing, emaciated, and covered with a phenomenal growth of hair.”
⁴
There were also beings like the “wild man of Lookout Point,” which would now be called “Bigfoot.” The witness, a “reliable gentleman,” said it stood “about 7 or 7
¹
/
₂
feet high, hairy as an old bear, and would weigh, from his looks, 400 pounds; had a pole in one hand that looked to be about ten feet long, which he handles as easy as a stout healthy man would a pipestem. His name was asked, and the answer came in the shape of a large stone, which weighed at least 100 pounds.”
⁵

Wild men fascinated the public, and exhibitors from P. T. Barnum to the proprietor of the lowliest mud show, set out to satisfy that curiosity for the price of a ticket.

The sideshow's heyday lasted 110 years (1840–1950), and for ten of those eleven decades they were a staple of “dime museums, circuses, fairs, amusement parks, and carnivals.”
⁶
Wild people were usually “pitshows,” in which members of the audience:

entered a tent with an eight by ten foot diameter enclosure in the center in which they could walk around. Down in the pit would be the wild person, moaning and snarling at the spectators. If there were snakes in the pit, the wild person might poke at them to provoke hissing sounds.
⁷

Looking into the hole, visitors saw a dark-skinned and dirty savage with protruding fangs and long matted hair, dressed in rags, or an animal skin, with maybe some bone ornaments. Wild people ate raw meat or, in the lowest kinds of exhibits, bit the heads off live animals (“glomming geeks”), but most shows relied on the wild man's acting ability.

They were a popular, if modest, attraction that had little in common with the original sideshow wild men discovered:

In the Island of Borneo, beneath an Eastern sky

Just under the Equator, with mountains towering high,

Where roves the wild Ouran-Outang, Gorilla and Malay,

And beasts of fiercest nature are watching for their prey . . .
⁸

Like most wild people, they were captured by a group of armed men after a gory and dramatic struggle and then brought to civilization, where “Waino” and “Plutano,” the “Wild Men of Borneo,” first appeared on stage around 1850.

The pair stood three and a half feet tall and weighed forty-five pounds each (their tombstone at Mound View
Cemetery, Mt. Vernon, Ohio, reads “LITTLE MEN”), yet these “Modern Sampsons [
sic
]” lifted heavy weights and even members of the audience, spoke gibberish, and recited poetry to demonstrate how civilization had lifted them above their former barbarous condition.
⁹
They were, in fact, American brothers named Hiram (1825–1905) and Barney (1827–1912) Davis, whose size, strength, and goatlike, bearded faces suggested a blurring of boundaries between man and beast that became more pronounced in future wild men influenced by the popularity of Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
in 1859.

Darwin's book made concepts like evolution and natural selection part of Western thinking and added a scientific gloss to wild people. Someone like Krao Farini, a Thai woman with hypertrichosis (excessive growth of hair) was not just advertised as strange or exotic but as a scientifically important “missing link,” “Darwin's Human Monkey.”

Likewise, posters for the most famous wild man, “Zip the Pinhead” or the “What-Is-It?” called him the “connecting link between the WILD NATIVE AFRICAN AND THE ORANG OUTANG,” with handbills claiming that he was captured in Africa by “a party of adventurers . . . in search of the Gorilla” and his “natural position was ON ALL FOURS.”
¹⁰
Zip was William Henry Johnson of New Jersey and he had a strangely shaped head, but where the Wild Men of Borneo were fair complexioned, Johnson was black, and that agreed with the popular equating of dark skin with primitiveness.

The origin of Western racial attitudes are too complex for this short history, but it includes the belief that nonwhites were created before Adam (Pre-Adamites) and a belief in polygenism, which is the separate creation of each race in ways suitable for their own part of the world. Perhaps the most influential idea, however, was the Great Chain of Being.

Beginning with Aristotle, and elaborated by classical, medieval, and Renaissance philosophers, the Great Chain of Being is a concept of the universe that dominated European and American thought until the eighteenth century and remained influential for considerably longer. The Great Chain of Being conceives of everything in the universe, both spiritual and material, as “linked” to the Creator through intermediate forms.

God is at the top of a
scala naturae
(“ladder” or “stairway of nature”), followed in descending order by angels, humans, animals, plants, the four elements, and minerals; dust or sand is at the bottom, and then nothingness. Every position is filled and every being's place in the hierarchy immutably fixed by its ratio of spirit to matter; more spirit means a higher position closer to God, with greater abilities and intelligence, and wielding authority over those beneath them. Large categories like humankind contain numerous
subdivisions, so that kings and queens are superior to commoners, and the white race higher than blacks. Some argued that primitive groups like Bushmen, Hottentots (Khoikoin), and Australian Aboriginals were not even humble kinds of people, but higher forms of ape.

The persistence of these ideas is evident in books like Charles Carroll's
The Negro a Beast
(1900), in which Adam and Eve are progenitors of the white race “[i]n direct line of kinship with God” and scriptural arguments are used for expelling “the negro from his present unnatural position in the family of man, and the resumption of his proper place among the ape.”
¹¹
Like the Great Chain of Being, in which superiors rule over inferiors, the black man was “created with articulate speech and hands that he may be of service to his master—the White man,” but Carroll does not rely solely on religion and brings in the findings of “race science.”
¹²

Anthropology, taxonomy, and other disciplines had devised human pecking orders based on different aspects of anatomy, especially “facial angles” (i.e., prognathism) and cranial capacity: calculating intelligence by the size and shape of brains (measuring heads was considered so important that museums acquired enormous collections of skulls). The dimensions of different races' skulls were tabulated, and researchers created painstakingly detailed charts showing the similarities between blacks and apes. Scientific racism, like racism based on religion, was used to justify slavery, colonialism, and antimiscegenation laws, with eugenicists decrying
racial mixing and the resulting “feebleness and perishableness of the Mulatto.”
¹³
The idea that blacks were somewhere between human and animal is reflected in the race of most sideshow wild men, but there were other desirable qualities such as ugliness (notoriously unattractive Brooklyn mobster Louis “Pretty” Amberg bragged about being offered a job as a wild man) or physical peculiarities like claws, fur, or horns, that could be portrayed as nonhuman.

The ideal candidate was probably black, ugly, a reasonably good performer, and a freak of nature, but if someone like that could not be found, they could be
made
.

Much of this history takes place at, or around, the towns of Alma, Nicholls, and Waycross, Georgia. The area is north of Okefenokee Swamp, reputed home of several different monsters, including a thirteen-foot-tall “Man Mountain” who twisted the heads off five hunters before being gunned down in 1829, and “Pig Man,” a local version of Florida's Skunk Ape; the eccentric wild men mentioned earlier are from all over the state, but whether these stories influenced Dr. Dedge, or his creation of the Okefenokee Wild Man, is unknown.
¹⁴

The Dedge family came from France (D'Edge), and John R. Dedge was born at Baxley, Georgia, on March 11, 1865,
one month before Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He married in 1886 and graduated from the Southern Medical College in 1890 as a doctor of dental surgery.

Standing six feet, one inch tall, with a thin face, high forehead, fair complexion, black hair, and dark eyes, Dedge was an imposing, even intimidating, figure and not just when striding toward patients with a pair of pliers. Even a longtime friend like George D. Lowe, Dedge's physician, did not trifle with the dentist. After Lowe advised him to live at a higher altitude,

he solemnly petitioned the city fathers for permission to build a bungalow atop the city water tower and was very resentful when they turned him down. I thought it very funny and started to kid him about it, but he had a queer look in his eyes and I changed the subject.
¹⁵

Nevertheless, he was as “good a dentist as ever drilled a cavity or crowned a tooth” and did other kinds of work, like vaccinating the employees of a lumber company.
¹⁶
Dr. Dedge also owned a plantation (most likely pine trees for collecting resin) and a turpentine “place” (probably for distilling the resin), but his main interest was money. The dentist was willing to counterfeit coins, smuggle diamonds, or go into show business if it meant turning a profit, and his friend William T. “Doc” Brinson was an experienced exhibitor.

At six feet, four inches tall and weighing somewhere between six hundred and seven hundred pounds, Brinson
was even more impressive than Dedge. He rode about in a “buggy” that “resembles more nearly an army wagon,” used “an enormous rocking chair, of cantilever construction, which has to be moved about with a derrick,” and had reportedly done quite well displaying himself at fairs and sideshows as “the fattest man in the world.”
¹⁷
There is no knowing who originated the idea of showing a wild man, but Brinson's experience and Dr. Dedge's expertise and ruthlessness augured well for the undertaking.