Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis

by Max King Cap

“My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.” — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup, 1933

He had done it before. One can readily find the photographs of his handiwork; two human torsos, headless, the legs amputated just below the knee. Young and fit but unidentifiable, their fingertips rasped smooth. When first put on display, tens of thousands saw this pair of dismembered bodies and admiringly walked right by them.

Although Ota Benga, standing just fifty-nine inches tall, was cruelly kept with the monkeys in the Bronx Zoo after already having endured exhibition in a human zoo at the St. Louis World’s fair in 1904, things could have been worse back home in the Congo; at least he still had both of his hands. King Leopold II had concluded that his small cloudy country, aged just forty five years, could not be of international significance unless it possessed foreign territories that it could exploit. Belgium set to that task with a vengeance and claimed the so-called Congo Free State as the personal property of the King. He then proceeded to loot the country and terrorize its people. His Force Publique was responsible for cracking the whip, called a chicotte. Made of twisted and dried pachyderm hide, even a glancing blow from it could remove human flesh in thick bloody chunks. This occupying army of sadists was there to make certain that the rubber was…