All about Skin (35 page)

We-Chrissie is an all-star bally, has always been. She preened and flaunted in her story too, playing our difference up and down like a yo-yo tossed to thrill a child. First it was a “malformation,” then it was a “joy.” Our join was a curse we were proud of, she said, painting on our minds the paradox of our body. And she refused to let them think for a second that the slightest drip of difference ran between we-two. “We are, indeed, a strange people,” she began her story, and it continued on like that—“a people,” two, but one. She refused to tell anyone it was she alone who had written the story, without letting We-Millie so much as touch the pen or smell the ink when the manuscript was done. We-Chrissie wrote then, and will tell anyone who asks now, that there is only one heart in the body. We-Millie sits silent when she says this, and lets her go ahead with her show. We-Millie knows, though, that our hearts are separate. Our wombs, our backs, our hot puddles and buttons come in and out of each other like corset laces; We-Chrissie feels We-Millie's itches and We-Millie rubs on We-Chrissie's aches, but for We-Millie, our hearts are separate things, different as the sun and the moon pinning down the ends of a long day's sky.

It is obvious to everyone that We-Chrissie is the charming one. She is the one the newspapers talk about when they say we are beautiful, alluring, delightful. We-Millie is the one that scares people, we think. She is quiet and unsure, and if we were not us, if we were norms, or nigger girls at least, We-Millie would never find herself within a stone's throw of a stage. We-Millie speaks German and Spanish better than We-Chrissie, better than Mrs. Susan, who taught us. But she stays quiet, the small, silent half. We-Chrissie is stronger; We-Millie is frail. We-Chrissie is pretty; We-Millie is darker and with a gnarling nose. While We-Chrissie smiles at the doctors and invites them to probe the body, We-Millie plays along and feels her heart burn in its cage. It is her feebler puddle, her crookeder pit in which they will splash and plunge to their hearts' content.

While We-Chrissie talks to reporters, doctors, midway norms, We-Millie moves her mouth and smiles along, but sends her mind inside. Both of we-two make up stories. We-Chrissie likes to say hers, shout them out from the stage, read them in the papers, write them down in books. We-Millie keeps her stories to herself.

When Mrs. Susan heard about We-Chrissie's story, she smiled, her soft pink cheeks glowing like the virgin's as she chuckled. “I know I tried with you-all, but you couldn't have convinced me that that one ever learned to read. Least not by my hand. Don't know what you-all picked up on the road, I suppose.” We-Chrissie has never been bothered by Mrs. Susan's comments. We-Millie gulps down Mrs. Susan's words like iced tea. We-Chrissie always took Mrs. Susan in sips, swishing her around in slow judgment whenever the woman was around, sometimes spitting her out when it was just we-two alone.

The biggest fight we-two ever had happened the morning of Master John's funeral. We-Chrissie wanted to wear our star-spangled taffeta costume to the service. She said we'd be the blow-off, the grand finale of Master John's long-lived show. To her, he was a freak on his own, and a gaff at that. She said he passed for a kind master, an innocent roped into managing us like a child lured to the midway with candy and fairy tales, but that he was really a mastermind who had plotted our course from the time of our birth, calculating our lifetime's revenue by the time we were two months old. We-Millie liked her skepticism, but got hot at the thought of disrespecting Mrs. Susan by wearing the dress. We-Millie has loved Mrs. Susan forever, in the way that norm women, she thinks, love the people who take care of them, make them feel like the secret of life lives between their two limbs.

We-Chrissie loved our midway life, and We-Millie liked it well enough too. Although it was clotted with people and noise, We-Millie enjoyed the camaraderie that came with a traveling pack of freaks. Zip Johnson, the What-Is-It?, adopted us as his niece, visiting our tent in costume after his “missing link” show, spinning us around in pirouettes and sharing some of the bananas he was paid to hurl at his audiences. Bearded and fat ladies of all heights and temperaments mothered us, pressing our hair and teaching us how to send our minds away from the body when norm men came to us with their pointing parts and probing smiles. For We-Millie, Miss Ella Ewing, the Missouri Giantess, was heaven itself, and the nook between her chest and her yardstick arm was a personal paradise. Miss Ella had traveled with Buffalo Bill's show, and it had filled her with stories we-two drank like raindrops. We-Chrissie loved to hear about the high, steady pay she received, and the handsome Indian men she performed with. We-Millie simply liked the sad, deep moan of the giantess's voice. She dragged the body to her every chance she got, just to curl her into that nook and hear her thunderstorm breath and earthquake heartbeat.

We-Chrissie has always insisted that we have no real family, though she didn't write that in her book. We-Millie sees it differently. For her, the midway freaks and the circus staff, the managers' wives and children, and sometimes men like Barnum himself make a collage of a family portrait we can hang proudly enough on the wall of our life. We-Chrissie's face sours when We-Millie says these kinds of things, and she spits. “You also insist on thinking that the man who sold us to the stage loves you.” We-Millie thinks Yes, I have to think that, and I have to think he loves you too. But she doesn't need to say it, of course, because We-Chrissie knows.

Mrs. Susan and Master John hold our story together like bookends—we both agree on that. They were there just as life set us whirling about like a spinning top, and here they are again—the lady, the ghost—now that things are starting to slow down. Master John was still living when he and Mrs. Susan came to England to get us from Lars Rachman, the most recent man to have crept into a tent and taken us in the middle of the night. Master John was brusque as usual, but kind enough, returning We-Chrissie's buttermilk smile as he ushered us out of the Liverpool courtroom. Mrs. Susan was slower, warmer, as was her way. She rose at us like a pan of biscuits, pulling the body toward her with her scent and her feel and her promise of home.

We were too young to know then that home doesn't exist unless it's far from you, that either it or you must disappear the moment you return. North Carolina after the Civil War was like a rabbit shank after a wolf attack, and Master John's house was no more a home than a floor tile was a blacktop. We-Millie will swear it was the shock of our return, and the swelling presence of Mrs. Susan's misery, that first brought the fever and the cough to her side of the body. We-Chrissie has always laughed those claims off, not so much to dismiss her as to keep her focused on the tasks at hand. Master John died of gout before We-Millie had a chance to feel all of her pain, and our status as breadwinners for his family and for ourselves became official.

We-Chrissie became our manager, making contacts with the North Carolina showmen we'd known before we left, dazzling them all with her smile and laugh, running her bally to keep them interested. Her act was tight and she always got her ding, as circus folks say, the clink of whatever capital she sought against whatever pot she passed around. We needed money, of course, but We-Chrissie was smart. She knew that a few dollars weekly from a traveling sideshow gig was alright for a pair of young nigger-girl freaks without the need or right to do for themselves, but we were grown, almost old, and as free as we would ever be. We needed money, We-Chrissie knew, but it was information that would make us. She enlisted the help of Ron Samuel, Master John's old stableman, and set the body flitting about the marshlands of Columbus County with her ear to the tracks of the circus world, dropping Master John's good name like maple sugar candies whenever we needed white norm protection.

It was in a saloon near Soule's Swamp that we heard the news We-Chrissie thought would change our life. The barmaid was a woman who had ballyhooed for P.T. Barnum's show years before, when we were being billed as the “Two-Headed Cherub Monstrosity.” She was a kind woman with a ruddy face and a mess of wheat-colored hair piled up on her head. She always liked Master John and Mrs. Susan, and We-Millie thought she was nice enough to us, though We-Chrissie insisted she was simply trying to get on Master John's good side, which for her meant the inside of his pants. Still, she smiled when we shuffled sideways through the door, and offered us a glass of lemonade, which We-Millie decided we would drink.

“You girls know 'bout the nigger show?” she asked, watching We-Chrissie's face for evidence that she felt or tasted the lemonade. We-two shook our heads.

“Man behind Buffalo Bill—not Cody, but the money man, a Yankee. He's doing a big show about niggers. You-all'd be perfect for it.”

We-Millie could feel We-Chrissie's smile spread on the skin. We-Chrissie thanked the woman and yanked the body toward the door so quickly We-Millie had to pinch the spine to slow us down so she could pay. The woman smiled, and We-Millie felt her eyes on the body as we ambled out the door, We-Millie glad to be heading home as always, We-Chrissie dreaming of New York City, plotting the course of our life anew.

The first thing Nate Salsbury saw as he stepped toward his office door, a hot mug of coffee in his hand, was the shadow of what looked like a lightning-struck bonsai tree hovering on his wall. The dark shape startled him, then drew him in. He paused at the doorway and gripped his mug, hoping to keep from dropping it or spilling the coffee, as he'd felt scattered and off-kilter since his morning meeting. But as the shadow begin to twirl along the wall, he decided to sip for a moment and watch it move. A perfect bonsai, he decided: mangled even in its symmetry, purely exotic, fine and lovely, but no less than grotesque. As the shadow rose and began to twist, he moved with it, slowly catching its rhythm, hurriedly catching his breath.

“I heard you were a dancer,” he said, setting the mug beside his leather blotter. “But I could never have dreamed a figure of such brilliant grace.”

The creature smiled with its slightly prettier head and halted, one half dipping into a curtsy that the other half mirrored perfectly.

“How can we respond to a compliment from a man so discerning and worldly as yourself ?” the fairer head said. “We can only invite you to examine us as long and as fully as your least whim would have.”

Salsbury smiled, taken aback by the pointedness of the creature's charm. This head was clearly the showman, he concluded, and the businessman as well. The other head was engaged, nodding and smiling throughout, but it seemed to maintain a certain distance, watching the scene as though through a cloud.

He had heard about this creature, touted as a Negress version of the two-headed Oriental that had made such a splash on the circuit some years ago. The comparison was logical, of course, but seeing this creature before him, he saw that that description missed much. The fairer head in particular had a clawing spunk that even the more animated half of the Oriental could never have aspired to. Some things about her he had seen in Negro women, performers and not, before. She had the bite of a Negro woman made tough and mannish by years of work, yet too smart to relinquish the last dregs of her girlish charm. Other things, though, he had never seen in a Negro, or an Indian, or talent of any kind before. This creature seemed to see itself just as a showman would see it, locating the lair of its dark allure and subduing its other parts to keep all eyes on the money spot. The creature bent its hind legs leisurely and fanned a smile, awaiting his response.

“Well, Miss McKoy, I am obviously honored by your offer,” he said, settling in behind his desk. “But of course you'd want to know your talents were fully appreciated before having them committed to the whim, as you say, of a stranger. I hear that among your many gifts is a literary talent. Is that right?”

The creature nodded its heads, and the sullen face seemed to brighten up.

“Oh yes,” the fair head said eagerly. “We know the best parts of Spenser, and many of the sonnets, as well as the major works of Molinet, and du Mans, as well as all of the Lay of Hildebrand, each in the original language, and in translation, of course.”

“And,” the plain head interrupted dryly, “we compose our own poetry as well.”

“Yes,” he sighed, leaning back. “I'd be delighted to hear an original composition from the very four lips of the poetess.”

The creature opened its mouths, offering for the first time a taste of their vocal harmony. Salsbury had expected, at first, some tonal dissonances, as one often heard in the first few seconds of group auditions. The creature made no false starts, though. It launched flawlessly into a compelling rhyming bit about its life, its two voices perfectly pitched and ringing clearly as a single bell.

As the creature spoke, Salsbury felt his mind skip like a phonograph back on its track to the morning's meeting. He had had in this same office what initially impressed as an unremarkable group, also auditioning for his new Negro show. He had put word out weeks before among colleagues and busybodies that he was putting together history's largest Negro performance, to match dollar for dollar and ticket for ticket his success with Buffalo Bill, and to exceed that show in quality as well as moral heft. This exhibition, he had told them all, would showcase the finer qualities of the Negro. It would bring to the fore the darker race's evolution from African jungle savagery to New York civilization, and would recall all the delights of his character at each stage. The advertisements would mention the Negro's darker days, but would also herald his resurrection. Audiences the world over would be thrilled by all parts of the spectacle. They would cull joy from the Negro's triumph, and be relieved from their own pains by the utterly black drama unfolding on stage.

He had to acknowledge that it was a brilliant idea each time he thought about it. It was going swimmingly, and after only two months of planning, the first performance was nearly cast. The best minstrel actors had been recruited from the length of the eastern seaboard, and New York's highest-grossing stage writers were at work on scripts that would bring the high drama of the Negro's history to the stage. He was now in the more relaxed stage of booking specialty acts. As well as things had gone up to this point, the moment in which he found himself now was strange. Here he was, requiring himself to choose between this Negress freak, an embodiment of error, and the ostensibly unremarkable group he had seen this morning. And even as the cloven creature sparkled eerily before him, reading what was turning out to be a shockingly competent poem, he found himself pulled toward this morning's less-than-spectacle, a group called “That So Different Four.”