Fortune (American slave)
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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.
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 vertebra 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 bones 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-Americans 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.
