Peter Sewally - Mary Jones, June 11, 1836

The "Man Monster"

Adapted, with permission, from Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality.

The Pick-Up

About ten o’clock on the night of Tuesday, June 11, 1836, in New York City, a master mason named Robert Haslem, a white man was walking home after a liaison with a woman he had picked up earlier that evening, as the New York Herald later reported.

On Bleecker Street, Haslem met a black woman, Mary Jones, dressed "elegantly and in perfect style," with white earrings and a gilt comb in her hair.<N18> The Herald's rival, the New York Sun, added that Mary Jones also went by the names "Miss Ophelia:' "Miss June:' and "Eliza Smith."

Haslem or Jones initiated a conversation-the newspapers differed. Haslem then asked Jones, "Where are you going my pretty maid?" and volunteered to go with her.

Before they set off "on this tour of pleasure," said the Herald, she "lovingly threw her arms around him and strained him to her heart." Then, "these delicate preludes having ended, they proceeded onwards, until they arrived at an alley in Greene Street [known then as a site of prostitution], which having entered *****" Here, a se-ries of asterisks in the Herald's report suggest, as clearly as the missing words, a sexual act.

Haslem and Jones "had some further conversation" in an alley, said the more reticent Sun, "where the prisoner again had his arms about complainant."<N19> Afterward, on his way home, according to the papers, Haslem discovered that his wallet and ninety-nine dollars were missing. In their place he unaccountably found the wallet of a man he did not know, with a bank order for the then large sum of $200.

Haslem sought out the man who, at first, denied ownership of the wallet, but then admitted he had had his pocket picked the previous evening, under the same circumstances as Haslem. He had been "too wise," how-ever, "to expose himself" by reporting the theft to the police.

Next morning the determined Haslem confessed his story to a Constable Bowyer who, that evening, set out to find Mary Jones. Around midnight, on the Bowery, Bowyer passed a black woman and, according to the Herald, "thinking that this might be the one he sought" (and assuming the right to his gaze), looked at her face and "made up his mind that he was right."

"Where are you going at this time of night?" he asked. "I am going home, will you go too?" she answered. He agreed, and "she conducted him to her house in Greene Street, and invited him in."

He declined, "with great regret," but later walked her to an alley where she asked him, as the Herald put it, "to reenact the scene of the previous evening" with Haslem. She then "proceeded to be very affectionate:' and Bowyer arrested her.

"A tussle ensued:' the Sun reported, during which the prisoner allegedly took two wallets from her bosom and threw them away. One turned out to be Haslem's. On the way to the watch house, Jones allegedly tried to ditch another wallet but was caught. With Jones locked up, the constable took her key, searched her apartment, and found, allegedly, a number of other wallets.

A Discovery

Constable Bowyer then searched Mary Jones and, said the Sun, "for the first time discovered that he [Jones] was a man." Until that time, said the paper, Bowyer had had no doubts about Jones's sex.

The papers suggested that the complainant, Haslem, had not reported, or had not known that Jones was a man.<NOTE 20> Can we believe this? Might Haslem have recognized a cross-dressing prostitute but not cared about his sex? Or, could Haslem have sought sex with a cross-dressed woman-man? The known documents do not tell us.

"Bowyer also discovered," said the Sun,', that the prisoner, "to sustain his pretension, and impose upon men"-- here seventeen words in clumsy Latin complete the sentence. Translated, the phrase says that the woman impersonator "had been fitted with a piece of cow [leather?] pierced and opened like a woman's womb ["vagina" is the intended word], held up by a girdle."<NOTE 21> Educated, Latin-reading, upper-class men could apparently contemplate such details without harm; women and lower-class persons of either sex could not.

The Trial

On June 16, five days after Haslem's fateful meeting with Jones, the prisoner, charged with grand larceny, was tried for stealing Haslem's wallet and money. He was not prosecuted for "sodomy," apparently because he had not participated in anal intercourse.

The accused appeared in court, the Sun reported, "neatly dressed in female attire, and his head covered with a female wig," seemingly his outfit when arrested. Did the prisoner choose to be tried in female clothes? Or was this the court's doing? We do not know.

The spectacle of a cross-dressed black man, and of the victimized Haslem, the Herald reported, provided "the greatest merriment in the court, and his Honor the Recorder, the sedate grave Recorder laughed till he cried."

During the trial, the Sun reported, someone in the audience, "seated behind the prisoner's box, snatched the flowing wig from the head of the prisoner." This "excited a tremendous roar of laughter throughout the room." Do not we sense here a note of hysteria, suggesting submerged anxieties about sexuality, gender, and race, each highly charged emotionally and politically?

Sewally's Testimony

A legal transcript of the prisoner's examination recorded the words he uttered in his own defense; a brief, rare, first-person voice from America's sexual past. Certainly, though, the situation of his interrogation skewed his words.<NOTE 22>>

Asked his age, place of birth, business, and residence, he answered: "I will be thirty three Years of age on the 12th day of December next, was born in this City, and get a living by Cooking, Waiting &c and live No. 108 Greene St."

"What is your right name?" he was asked. "Peter Sewally-1 am a man;' he answered.

Asked "What induced you to dress yourself in Women's Clothes?" he answered: "I have been in the practice of waiting upon Girls of ill fame and made up their Beds and received the Company at the door and received the money for Rooms &c and they induced me to dress in Women's Clothes, saying I looked so much better in them and I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in this way - and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way -- ."

He added: "I have been in the State service" - his military duty was offered, apparently, as plea for the jury's forbearance.

Asked if he had stolen Mr. Haslem's wallet and money, Sewally answered: "No Sir and I never saw the Gentleman nor laid eyes upon him. I threw no Pocket Book from me last night, and had none to throwaway, and the Pocket Books now Shown me I never Saw before --." Not know-ing how to write, Sewally signed his statement with the letter X.

The Press Reports

The following day, June 17, the Herald and Sun both carried detailed stories of the case. The Herald was fairly open about the sexual activity associated with the prisoner's cross-dressing and pickpocketing: "Sewally has for a long time past been doing a fair business, both in money making, and practical amalgamation, under the cognomen of Mary Jones." The word "amalgamation" was used often in the nineteenth-century United States to refer to sexual contacts between different races.

During the daytime, added the Sun, Sewally "generally promenades the street, dressed in a dashing suit of male apparel, and at night prowls about the five points and other similar [poor, disreputable] parts of the city, in the disguise of a female, for the purpose of enticing men into the dens of prostitution, where he picks their pockets if practicable, an art in which he is a great adept."

Combining a daytime career as a dashing man and nighttime work as a cross-dressed woman was certainly unusual in the paper's view. But it made no overt link between Sewally's cross-dressing and his erotic intercourse with men. He was presented as an eccentric, not a "sodomite." nor was he identified by any other such label.

"Numerous complaints of robberies so perpetrated by him had been END 83