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By Todd Morehead

In 1906 a Batwa tribesman from the Congo named Ota Benga was put in a cage and exhibited alongside an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo. The tribesman first arrived in the United States two years earlier in the care of a South Carolina anthropologist named Samuel Phillips Verner, who had been hired by the St. Louis World’s Fair to bring specimens of authentic African “pygmies” for display there. Ota Benga—whose wife and children had been lost during the Belgian government’s brutal rule in the Congo—remained with Verner until the anthropologist went bankrupt and decided to leave him in the care of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

By some accounts, Verner worked as a ticket taker in the IRT subway while trying to find financiers for his next expedition to Africa. Meanwhile, the director of the museum turned Ota Benga over to the Bronx Zoo, where he helped care for the animals and was later exhibited alongside them. Civil rights activists, outraged by the exhibit, helped have Ota Benga moved to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn before he was later relocated to Lynchburg, Va. where he attended classes at the Virginia Theological Seminary and was tutored in English by Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer. His teeth, filed to sharp points by tribal custom, were capped and his traditional garb was replaced with Western clothing.

Ota Benga was a beloved member of the Lynchburg community and made many friends, though he seemed happiest, according to those who knew him, in the forest outside of town. As the years passed he expressed a growing desire to return to his home in Africa and began to suffer long, despondent bouts of homesickness. Late in the afternoon on March 20, 1916, the day of the vernal equinox, folks watched with curiosity as Ota Benga built a ceremonial fire on the edge of town and started to dance. Later in the night, as the townsfolk slept, he chipped the caps off his teeth, stripped off his shirt, walked into the darkness and shot himself in the heart with a pistol.

During his time in Lynchburg, Ota Benga stayed as a guest in the childhood home of Columbia-based author, Carrie Allen McCray, who was only three years old at the time. McCray, 94, is perhaps best known for her book, Freedom’s Child: The Life of a Confederate General’s Black Daughter, which detailed the extraordinary life of her mother, Mary. Her new book Ota’s Epic, still in pre-publication, is a memoir written in verse, a tribute to the Batwa man who made such an impression on her family and the world.

The epic opens with rich descriptions of the land Ota Benga so often reminisced about with her family and McCray says, more than anything, she hoped to capture the idyllic culture of the Congo prior to the Belgian occupation.

“They were pacifists, egalitarians and they were environmentalists,” McCray told City Paper over lunch at her Irmo home, “and we’re struggling to be all three of those today.” There was a general reliance upon cooperation among the community and women had important roles in society that were “more than just cooking dinner,” McCray says, smiling and pointing her finger at we men seated at her table.

“When I was reading about it I got so caught up in it. I couldn’t stop reading,” she says of that culture. “No society is perfect, but that was the most perfect society that I had read about. The main thing they had to watch out for was the animals, not man so much. …Until red rubber.”

Between 1885 and 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium privately held what was then called the Congo Free State. The region operated as a corporate state; essentially a large, unregulated rubber plantation, until international outcry over the king’s brutal exploitation of the indigenous people forced Leopold to annex the region into Belgium proper. Many slaves working in the rubber trade under Leopold had their hands cut off if they didn’t meet certain quotas. As soldiers and overseers received bonuses for delivering the hands of slaves, severed human hands became a quasi form of currency and their harvesting, often from women and children, made the overseers more money than tending the rubber crop. It has been estimated that millions of people were killed during Leopold’s reign and Ota Benga’s culture was all but destroyed.

Still, what McCray and her family seem to marvel at most about Ota Benga was not necessarily the hardship he endured—on both sides of the Atlantic—but how he came out of it: he was kind and gentle and when they remember him, it is for his stories and songs and dancing.

“Oh, they danced and sang all the time,” McCray says. “When they got up in the morning they would dance. In the evening, they would dance. Singing and dancing was a big part of their culture.”

For a man who had music and dance at the center of his culture and life, what better way to tell his story than in verse? And though McCray’s epic is full of the music of Ota’s culture, it is also, at times, a hard-hitting criticism of the Western mindset that led to the injustices inflicted upon his people.

“Some of the anthropologists at the time—I don’t know what was wrong with the anthropologists, back then—used to ask, ‘Can the darker races discern the color blue?’” she laughs. “When I read that I was so carried away, I thought, ‘Well let me let a blues man answer that question.’”

So she wrote “Blues Man Answers the Anthropologists,” a poem that describes the “silver blue” of the Kasai, the deep blue of the ocean being crossed in slave ships, the blue of night and the blues in music. In “The Birth of Anthropology,” McCray describes how the organs of third world women were displayed in pickling jars at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, “their spirit voices crying out against this horror, this inhumanity.”

While Ota’s story certainly couldn’t be told without facing the harsh realities of the time Ota’s Epic, at its core, it is a celebration of family friend. And in many ways, Ota’s stories have become intertwined with McCray’s own family stories and continue to be passed down through the generations.

McCray’s brother, Hunter, she says, formed the strongest bond with Ota. “Ota had lost his young son and Hunter had lost his father. So Hunter, in many ways, became like a son to him. Ota taught Hunter, just as he would his son, how to make fishing rods, hunting spears and took him out hunting.” Often Ota would build a fire, sit with Hunter and tell stories about his family back in the Congo and of their lives in the forest.

“I believe that Ota helped to shape Hunter’s character,” McCray says. As a father figure, she believes, Ota taught him lessons about community and family that he took into adulthood.

Hunter was also the most affected by Ota’s death.

“Ota always seemed so happy. Well, that’s just the way they were,” McCray says. “But, inside he probably was not as happy as he appeared. I wonder how he expressed his want to go back. It seems to me that if he wanted to go back as much as we know now, that somebody would have picked up on that. But maybe there was no way. The seminary certainly wasn’t a school of money.”

“I sit now in a different time, a different place, wondering.” she writes in “Strings V.” “Just now I am understanding the depth of his pain.”

To many, Ota Benga has come to represent the absolute depths of racism to which even modern America is capable of sinking. But to others, like McCray, Ota and his culture represent the heights to which man can soar when guided with simple principles of brotherhood and community and healthy respect for nature and the wild.

McCray, a featured speaker at a conference on Ota Benga at Lynchburg College back in October, and her literary agent are currently shopping Ota’s Epic to publishers. She says what she hopes people get from the book, more than anything, is an appreciation of Ota’s culture and, she says, “how far removed we are from that culture today.”

“There is no way for us to be like that today. Not with our current system. But, it says to me what man can be like.”