Fortune (American slave)

Fortune (c. 1743 – 1798) was an enslaved African-American who achieved posthumous notability over the transfer of his remains from a museum storage room to a state funeral.

Headstone for The Man Fortune in Riverside Cemetery, Waterbury, Connecticut

Life

Under the laws of the 18th-century American colonial period, Fortune, his wife Dinah, and their four children, Africa, Jacob, Mira, and Roxa, were slaves of Preserved Porter, a physician in Waterbury, Connecticut. Fortune owned the house he and his family lived in, just outside the town center on the Porter property.^[1]

Fortune's Remains

Fortune died in 1798; a snapped vertebrae suggested death by a fall, though earlier historians had reported that he drowned in the Naugatuck River. After his death, Porter dissected Fortune's body and preserved his skeleton for anatomic study. The doctor then opened a "School for Anatomy," which used Fortune's bone as the source of study.^[1] The anatomically inscribed skeleton was found in 1910 in a boarded-up closet of the Porter house.^[2]

The Porter family held Fortune's remains before donating them in 1933 to the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, where they were displayed through the 1970s; after that, they were put in storage.^[3][4]

In 1999, the museum received national attention when media coverage highlighted the discovery of Fortune's remains. Although the skeleton was initially dubbed "Larry," as that name was written on its skull, a later investigation by the Fortune Project, part of the African-American Historic Project Committee, determined the skeleton belonged to Fortune.^[5]

Exhibit

The museum then created a special exhibit in honor of Fortune that detailed the lives of enslaved African-Аmericans in the early part of the 19th century,^[2] Fortune's Story: Larry's Legacy. Additionally, a poem by Marilyn Nelson, The Manumission Requiem, is displayed to honor Fortune.^[2] Fortune's bones were not shown in the exhibit out of respect for his life, but they were studied by scientists in an attempt to understand his life.

State burial

On September 12, 2013, Fortune's remains were transferred to the Connecticut State Capitol, where they lay in state before being escorted by state police to St. John's Episcopal Church on the Green, the Waterbury parish where Fortune was baptized in 1797, and a funeral at the city's Riverside Cemetery.^[3]

References

1. "Who Was Fortune?". www.fortunestory.org. Retrieved 2019-10-23.
2. "Hidden Museum Treasures: Fortune's Bones". NPR. September 16, 2003.
3. Boyette, Chris (September 12, 2013). "Connecticut slave gets funeral, burial, 215 years after his death". CNN. Retrieved September 13, 2013.
4. Dunne, Susan; Altimari, Daniela (September 12, 2013). . The Courant. Archived from the original on September 16, 2013. Retrieved September 13, 2013.
5. Dunne, Susan; Altimari, Daniela (September 19, 2013). "215 years later, slave gets funeral, burial: Connecticut skeleton used for anatomy, as museum display". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved December 23, 2023 – via ProQuest.