Can I See Your I. D.? (6 page)

Late in the evening, Elizabeth Worrall, the wife of the town clerk, arranged for you to have a private room and a meal at a local inn. On a wall there you saw a picture of a pineapple, and you indicated that it grew in your homeland. The innkeeper made you some tea, and before you drank it you covered your eyes and uttered something that sounded like a prayer. When the cup was refilled, you refused to drink from it until you had washed the cup yourself and repeated the prayer ritual.

They were captivated. You were just getting started.

Hoping to divine your origins, the next morning the vicar brought books with geographic prints and engravings. You couldn't read English—or so he believed—but he thought you might see something you recognized. For you, this was on-the-spot research into the role you were playing. You pointed out prints of China, indicating that you had been brought from there on a ship.

Mrs. Worrall took you home with her. Whatever language she thought you might be speaking, she was determined to break through to you. She wrote her own name, spoke it, repeated it, and handed you her pen. You shook your head and pointed at yourself. “Caraboo,” you said. “Caraboo.”

“Caraboo?” Well, why not?

Mrs. Worrall took you on a tour of the house, and when you saw Chinese figures on the furniture, you reacted as if they were familiar to you. You began piling quirk on top of quirk. At dinner, you appeared disgusted by the notion of eating meat, and you refused all beverages other than water. Never mind the rum and steak you'd shared just two days earlier with that dull young fellow you'd met while traveling (and gladly ditched soon after).

You attracted plenty of visitors who tried to figure out who you were and where you came from—but who evidently gave no thought to what a person from Asia might actually look like. One of them pretended to understand your language—a mixture of dialects from the Sumatran coast and nearby islands, he explained. Through that “understanding,” he came away with the story that you were an important person on your island home, one who had been kidnapped and then somehow became free in England.

Sumatra? A person of importance? Kidnapped? A houseguest that intriguing could expect to stay on the Worrall estate for a while.

And so you did—and what a show you put on! You would kneel by the pond, pray in the bushes, wear flowers and feathers in your hair, and beat a gong and tambourine in the garden. You climbed trees, swam naked, shot arrows while running about, and rowed Mrs. Worrall around the pond.

Mrs. Worrall's friends, enchanted, came with objects for you to examine and secondhand stories of Asia to share with each other. Before them, you mugged, danced, gesticulated—and
paid attention
. Once they accepted that you could not speak English, they would say anything in front of you, all the time feeding you the material you needed to further your masquerade.

That dagger, for example. One dedicated visitor brought an Asian dagger, explaining to the other visitors how the natives used poison on the tip. Soon after, you just happened to demonstrate, rubbing juice from the leaves of a houseplant onto the blade, poking yourself with the tip, and then pretending to faint from the toxins.

And all those books—what would you have done without them? Those the vicar had brought were just the beginning. No one suspected that you could actually make sense of the words while you perused the pictures.

One guest brought a big book about Java, and your response was clear. This, you wanted them to understand, was your home.

When another book included examples of Sumatran dialects, you seized on them—these, you wanted them to know, formed the tongue you spoke. And with a little inspiration from a volume depicting written languages from around the globe—Arabic and Persic, Sanskrit and Greek, Chinese and Malay—you produced spirals and loops and diamonds and dots from your own language.

You took apart the information provided by those visitors, and then you put it back together in a way different enough and sufficiently exotic for your listeners to accept as the way things were in your homeland.

What's more, you were consistent. “Lazor” always meant “ladies,” “manjintoo” always meant “gentlemen,” “rampue” always meant “pigeon,” and so forth. You always greeted visitors with the palm of your hand placed against your temple—on the left for women, on the right for men. And after you got such a reaction with a morning escapade to the rooftop—where you chanted to “Alla Tallah,” the name for God that you spotted on page 316 of
Pantographia
—you made sure you returned to the roof each Tuesday.

Above all, you flattered those who came to gawk at you. Or, rather, you gave them the opportunity to flatter themselves by showing how much they knew (or imagined they did) about exotic topics and showing how cultured the titles on their bookshelves were. They may have been making fools of themselves, but they sure
felt
smarter.

 

At last, this Sunday morning in Bath, you have arrived at the Circus, this great circular plaza in the middle of town. For now, you're alone, but can Dr. Wilkinson be far behind? As you stroll about, never far from your mind is the story you concocted with the unwitting collaboration of the Worralls' bluestocking guests—the story of how Princess Caraboo got to England in the first place.

It involved not only a kidnapping but also deadly hand-to-hand combat. And two sets of pirates. And surgery performed on the back of your neck before you finally jumped overboard and swam onto the shores of England.

You do have a scar at the base of your skull. And in fact, you did obtain that scar in the midst of an ordeal. It's just that your actual ordeal did not resemble in the slightest the one that you shared with the folks in Almondsbury.

 

You were born Mary Ann Willcocks twenty-six years ago in Witheridge, Devonshire. A cobbler's daughter, you were poor, and poorly educated. After a falling-out with your family, you left home without a penny or a change of clothes.

Eventually, as you neared London, begging along the way and sleeping in haylofts when you had to, you got sick and were admitted to a hospital. You were there for months, feverish and delirious. To try to set you right, they made an incision on the back of your neck, covering it with a warm cup to draw out your bad blood.

When they released you, you stayed in London, working for the Matthews family and caring for their children. Mrs. Matthews and her daughter gave you informal lessons in writing and reading. You also gained some attention from the Matthewses by making the extraordinary claim—inspired by the fasting of the Jewish man next door?—that you sometimes went several days without eating.

For six months after that, you lived at the Magdalen Hospital, a home for repentant prostitutes. You made up a background for yourself in order to get in, starting with the claim that you were an orphan whose father died when you were a newborn.

A year later, in a London bookstore, you met a man called Baker. But after traveling around together for a few months—long enough for you to get pregnant—he gave you the slip. You told different people different made-up stories about who the father was.

While pregnant, you worked at the Crab Tree pub. During your six months there, you called yourself Hannah, said your husband was dead, and told stories so outrageous that they delighted many a soul but fooled none of them. You gave birth to a son last year and left him at the foundling hospital—though you lived nearby and visited your baby each Monday.

You became a servant for the Starling family—alternately entertaining and scaring the daylights out of their children with your stories—near the end of October. Right around that time, your son died. The next month, the Starlings dismissed you for setting fire to two beds in one week.

It was five months later that Princess Caraboo appeared in Bristol. You had picked back up on your old pastime of begging, and doing so in a made-up tongue. You also found a begging partner—your roommate at a boarding house—and together you came up with the idea to make yourself more intriguing by wearing your black shawl as a turban.

Combined with your lingo, it did the trick, and you decided to try your luck alone in the countryside around Bristol. You could don and shed your exotic-foreigner persona at will—but that was about to change. You were about to take up that role around the clock before an endless audience of visitor after visitor.

Among them has been Dr. Wilkinson. He examined your scar and confirmed that it certainly had not been made by any Englishman or European. In the first days of June, his accounts of his meeting with you began to be published in newspapers all over England, complete with a gushing and detailed description of you:

You were flattered, of course. But it's one thing to fool a family or a single community, and quite another to be put on stage before an entire nation. With that mounting, suffocating pressure, is it any wonder that you bolted to Bath? You left behind all the trinkets and objects you'd been given to examine, no matter their worth. You covered the two dozen miles by foot and by cart, and here you are.

And there he is. Dr. Wilkinson has caught up with you here at the Circus. Like a persistent hound—a puppy, really—he's following you as you stroll around the railed garden in the middle.

Well, he's not following
you
—he's following Princess Caraboo.

It's the next morning, and you're back at the Worralls'.

After Dr. Wilkinson accompanied you back to the gathering crowd at the Pack Horse, two women suggested to him that their home would offer you more privacy. Your new hosts had you carried there in a sedan chair. When Mrs. Worrall caught up with you—Dr. Wilkinson must have sent word to her—you were entertaining a more reasonably sized crowd in their drawing room.

As you wordlessly discoursed in all things Caraboo, these people knelt before you, wanted to touch you, drove you dangerously close to a fit of laughter that would have given yourself away. At the sight of Mrs. Worrall, however, you were the one falling to your knees, begging forgiveness for running away.

She forgave you. You managed to keep up the charade for another day. But as your fame spreads, in person and through the newspapers, how much longer can it be before someone pieces “Princess Caraboo” together with the person you were before the day you wandered into Almondsbury? For all the kindness she has shown, doesn't Mrs. Worrall deserve to be the first to know the truth?

You approach Mrs. Worrall's dressing room. She invites you in, and you lock the door behind you. And you tell her...

Nothing.

You just can't.

Not while you still have a choice.

At twenty-two, you cannot read or write.

A week ago in Macon, Georgia, before this plan came into the heads of you and your husband and consumed you like fever, that did not matter. Of course you couldn't read or write, Ellen—no matter how lightskinned, you were a slave. Anyone who taught you to put pen to paper or make out the words on a page would have been breaking the law. Ellen Craft could not read or write, and that was that. The same went for your William.

But here near the wharf in Charleston, your illiteracy is another matter entirely. What is expected of you could not be more different than it was a week ago. In the eyes of those around you, you are not a seamstress or a slave. You are not even a Negro, not even a woman at all.

You are “Mr. Johnson”—a Southern gentleman. Which is to say, a
white
Southern gentleman. And a white Southern gentleman who cannot read or write would stick out like a field slave who cannot find the opening of a cotton sack.

Needless to say, you and your accompanying “slave”—William—do not wish to stick out. At least, not in that way. That's why the plan the two of you cooked up includes a thorough disguise. Along with your trousers, top hat, green spectacles, and handkerchief tied beneath your apparently aching jaw, you're sporting a sling for your poor, rheumatic writing arm.