The Foursome: A Guest Post by Christina Baker Kline

 

Christina Baker Kline reimagines the true story of Eng and Chang Bunker, conjoined twins living in North Carolina on the cusp of the Civil War, and the two sisters who helped shape their journey. Read on for an exclusive essay from Christina on writing The Foursome.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline comes a boldly original reimagining of the astonishing true story of two sisters in nineteenth—century North Carolina — Kline’s own distant relatives — who married world—famous conjoined twins from Siam.

Every family has its lore. In mine, there’s a story so strange it sounds invented: I am distantly related to Sarah and Adelaide Yates, the sisters in 1840s North Carolina who married Chang and Eng Bunker, the world-famous conjoined twins. Together, the couples raised twenty-one children and formed one of the most unconventional families in American history.

I first learned about this connection decades ago from my cousin Lesley Looper, a former Duke librarian who spent years tracing our family genealogy. For a long time, the story stayed in the background of my imagination: fascinating, unsettling, and too thorny to approach. But as I wrote The Exiles, which takes place in the same era, something started to shift. Then Lesley came to me after a Bunker family reunion and said what I’d been avoiding: “These women are our ancestors. If you don’t tell their story, who will?”

Chang and Eng were exhibited, examined, and written about endlessly. But the lives of the sisters who married them went largely unrecorded. They appear in glimpses: a marriage record, a census entry, a name in a Bible. What drew me in was the absence. I wanted to imagine what it was like for these women to build households and raise children, navigating desire, duty, ambition, and resentment inside an arrangement the rest of the world treated as spectacle.

My research took me deep into the American South. I walked the land the Bunkers farmed in Surry County, North Carolina; toured historic sites and museums; paged through court records, newspapers, and ledgers; and read biographies and histories that helped me reconstruct the world they inhabited. I also spoke with Bunker descendants, whose openness and perspective gave the novel its grounding.

In the course of that research, I found a detail that wouldn’t let me go. Sarah is not buried in the family graveyard alongside her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law. She was laid to rest on family land, in a plot she shared with the four daughters she had lost, and people the family had enslaved. No one knows why. But in that solitary grave I sensed a woman who had arrived, over a lifetime, at an understanding the people around her may not have shared. That mystery became the spine of the novel.

I worked on The Foursome for six years, with a long pause in the middle to sit with the questions it raised about race and complicity, exposure and notoriety, and what people choose to remember. When I returned to it, I did so with clearer eyes. This is the first time since Orphan Train that I’ve drawn on my own family history. It’s the most personal novel I’ve ever written.

The Foursome traces the intimate bargains of an impossible arrangement: four people bound by love and necessity, ambition and obligation, while the country fractured around them. I hope it does justice to the lives at its center, especially the two women the record nearly lost.