Hottentot Venus (21 page)

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But the empire of man alters this order. It develops all the variations to which the type of each species is susceptible and derives from them products that the species, left to themselves, would never have produced. Here the degree of variation is still proportional to the intensity of its cause, which is slavery.

—BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,
Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals
on the Surface of the Globe

Crooked Fire, the English month of April, 1811. The trial had made me even more famous, having heightened the public’s curiosity about me. Long lines of people still formed outside number 225 to gawk at the Venus. Even Lord Grenville showed up to thank me for having given him so much publicity. His party had won the elections by what the scandal sheets called a
split bottom.
My notoriety was now nationwide. Even in the provinces, newspapers reported on the London trial.

The bawdy song was on everyone’s lips just as my shape and color was in everyone’s eye, and on everything a merchant could sell. I was recognized in the street if I ever dared venture outside Duke Street, and sometimes pursued. Master Hendrick and Master Dunlop were now richer than ever. They moved my exhibit into a separate exhibition hall at 53 Piccadilly Street. During his disappearance, Master Dunlop had sold half his quarter share of me to another Englishman from the north of the British Isles, Henry Taylor, the roving Shakespearean actor who had accompanied Master Kimble to my dressing room more than a year ago. He said he planned a tour of the rest of England and Ireland for us. This was to be our farewell tour.

I clung to my clan of things-that-should-never-have-been-born, who lived in the jungle of 225 Piccadilly. At times it was as if I had fallen back into the wild forest of home and my childhood and all these creatures that roamed around me were only Magahâs’s magic. Not real at all. I gave them all names so I could recognize them—lion, flamingo, giraffe, elephant, zebra, jackal—but I learned they all had real names like mine: Caroline Camancini, the thirty-inch fairy, Anna Swann, the albino, John Randian, the human torso, Lorenzo Dunnett, the man with the revolving head, Sigmund Sully, the skeleton man, Paul Desmule, the armless man who hurled knives at human targets, Grace McDaniels, the mule-faced woman, Dolly Dimples, the fat lady, Joseph/Josephine Herring, the double-sexed man. They had all added noble or military titles to their names: Caroline was princess, Adolph was captain, Paul was marquis, Sigmund was lord, the dwarfs were all generals. There was Baron Little Fingers, Prince Ludwig, Duchess Leona, Baroness Anna. Everyone had three names: a Khoekhoe name, an English name and a fake title. Just like me . . .

We freaks gathered every day after our performances to talk and drink, eat and laugh, play cards, try on costumes, converse about all the things ordinary people spoke of: what we ate or drank, how we slept, whom we loved. We spoke of what we despised, what the weather would be the next day, the latest fashion, what we had bought in the shops on Bond Street— hats, gloves, jewelry, sweets, beer, gin, chocolates; we spoke of famous people, the theater, music, even future dreams, like weddings or children. We gathered in taverns and inns. We would crowd into these dark spaces and talk all night. By necessity, we were night people. At dusk, we scurried like mice out into the half-light and blue-dyed shadows with torches, oil lamps and candles, avoiding the eyes of normal people. Like ghosts, we escaped our stage sets, the huts, cabins, tombs, shacks, platforms, happy to be free of the oppression of unwanted attention. A passerby might start, but we managed to avoid at night what we sought by day— the public.

Of all of the extraordinary people, I had come to love the thirty-inch fairy, Caroline, best. She was a perfect miniature person, who had entered the world of the circus as a small child and was still only twelve years old. She had been stolen, given away or sold by her family. Others like Caroline, JoJo, the dog-faced boy, Percilla, the monkey-girl, Emmett, the alligator-skinned boy, John, the elephant-boy, had all been abandoned by their parents or were orphans. They had all lost their dead or living mothers. We were all exiles: blacks in the kingdom of whites.

I saw in Caroline the child I had lost. I was black in a world full of white people. She was thirty inches tall in a world of people who were five and three quarters feet high. Many times I would pick her up and carry her into places built too high for her and sometimes she would lead me into places colored persons were not allowed to on their own. And so we became a couple. More than friends. A mother-daughter mutual assistance society. One day, Caroline asked me:

—Is that your real name, Hottentot Venus?

—No. It’s a make-believe name.

—What’s your real name?

—Sarah . . .

—And what does Hottentot Venus mean?

—Well, you know what Venus means.

—She’s a goddess, said Caroline. And a planet.

—Well, Hottentot is a Dutch word, which means “to stutter.” It is an insult given to my people by the Dutch, who couldn’t learn our language. It’s an ugly word. My tribe is called Khoekhoe.

—Say something in your own language.

—Ssehura ke ti !naetseetsana/onsa.

—Which means . . .

—The name Ssehura is my birthday name.

—Caroline Camancini’s not my real name either.

—Oh no?

—Well, Caroline is. But I’m not Sicilian. I’m from Dublin. Princess Camancini is my stage name.

—What’s a stage name?

—Well, like Venus or Princess. It makes you more mysterious, more real to the audience. Would you read me a story?

—I don’t know how to read.

—Why don’t you? Everybody knows how to read!

—Because books don’t talk to black people, only to white people like you.

—You’re wrong, Sarah. Books speak to everyone regardless of what color you are. That’s the whole
idea
of a book. A book is a whole country. A book gets you out of the prison of your mind. And to read is to write. And to write is to own yourself . . .

—Can you write too?

—Of course. I keep a diary . . .

I studied Caroline. If my son had lived, I thought, he would be five years old and twice the size of Caroline. Caroline was sitting on my lap, cuddled against my breast. I hadn’t held a child in my arms since Cape Town, now almost a year gone.

—Then I’ll read
you
a story.

She jumped down.

—I’ll get my book. It’s called
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
You know, the Irish really believe in fairies. My mother believes in fairies, my papa too. The book is all about fairies . . .

—You are not an orphan?

—No, my parents are alive . . .

—I had a little child, but he’s dead . . . My voice trailed off.

—Once upon a time . . .

—The book is almost as big as you are!

The story she read was about a toad and a prince and a princess, a witch and a forest.

—We have almost the same story.

—You should learn to read, Sarah, I can teach you.

—Then could I learn to write . . . letters?

—Reading and writing go together, you can’t do one without doing the other . . .

—Would you read some writing for me? Writing that came in a letter?

—A letter sent to you?

—Yes. Some time ago.

I pulled out the letters I had received from Dunlop while he was gone, which Master Hendrick had read to me, and set them on Caroline’s miniature lap. She unfolded them slowly and studied them carefully.

—Why, this isn’t real writing at all, these are only pages of X’s, XXXXXXX, it means nothing. It is just scribbling . . .

—There are no words that say “Dear Sarah”?

—No.

—There are no words that speak of a voyage, and a ship, and returning to London?

—None.

—What?

—No, none of that. It is as if the pages were blank with no writing at all because there are no words . . . Only these crosses.

—No words?

—No, there are no real words, just a lot of X’s, it’s gibberish—like Hottentot, smiled Caroline.

—And there’s no name . . . Nowhere where it says Alexander Dunlop?

—Someone’s played a joke on you, Sarah.

There was nothing to do except face up to my master.

—There was nothing on those sheets of paper Master Hendricks read to me except X’s ...

—Who told you that?

—A fairy.

—I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sarah.

—You tricked me!

He paused for a moment.

—It was Hendrick, not me.

I hated him more at that moment than the white men who had killed my father.

—You never wrote to me!

—Don’t be stupid.

—I’m not stupid! I shouted.

—No, said my master slowly, just stupid enough to believe a fairy freak . . . all those so-called X’s—why that’s your own language, Sarah. I wrote to you in Khoe. Hendrick can read Khoe. You can’t.

—
Khoekhoe don’t write.

—How do you know, woman?

I was taken aback, but I held my ground.

—
Khoekhoe write only in the sand, I replied.

—That’s because you are too stupid to invent paper! How could I send you a message in sand?

I fingered my lores, uncertain. Could the curse of !Naeheta Magahâs, the-thing-that-should-never-have-been-born, be written? A dull confusion settled over me and everything around me. It pounded in my temples, going round and round in my head. Was this another of their tricks? Was my master lying to me? Was everyone in the entire world lying to me? Or was it just my own Hottentot stupidity? My head throbbed and my vision blurred. I could hardly see at all. To stop the pain, I began to drink in the afternoons or indulge in pipes of
dagga
or morphine. I began to take sips of brandy or gin at night to sleep. But the more I drank and smoked, the more lonely and disgusted with myself I became.

I began to prefer English gin to brandy or the
dappa
of home. Only the cut-glass decanter of colorless firewater produced in me that level of inebriation that erased the humiliation, ridicule and insults heaped upon me every day. To be, as the English called it, in my cups, or, as the Dutch said,
enn borreltje,
was to ever tap my head against the iris-blue sky—I could fly, I could dance, laugh, sing, something gin made you do, not
dappa.
One evening in a restaurant in Bond Street after a bottle of gin, I danced on the table to the music of the twelve-piece orchestra. The next day, there was a cartoon in the London
Times.

I could never understand how people saw me not as I was but as what they, in their mind, imagined me to be. For example, I was only four feet seven inches tall and my skin was yellow. Yet the English caricaturists always painted me as huge as a whale, weighing a ton and black. I was pictured as being as tall as a white man like Lord Grenville, who was five feet eleven, or Thomas Pelham, who was six feet tall. My bottom, as the English called my buttocks, was equal to the prime minister’s bottom although I was half his size, and to that of the foreign secretary, who was three times my size. How to explain it? My masters tripled the advertisements and printed five hundred more engravings.

I wondered if gin was the medicine the rainmaker said she didn’t have. This magic that allowed me to survive? I began to crave the contents of my crystal flagons more than anything else. At night, in my room, I would quietly drink myself to sleep either from the amber bottle (brandy) or the colorless bottle (gin); somehow I preferred the colorless bottle, but it depended on my mood. If I was mad, it was gin. If I was sad, it was brandy. I began imbibing my precious tumblers earlier and earlier in the day, until I approached the five o’clock teatime. Alone in my dressing room, between shows, I drank to forget Master Dunlop. I drank to forget Master Caesar. I drank to forget the massacres. I drank to forget what the rainmaker had said. I drank to forget the trial. I drank to while away the time. I drank because I was ashamed; I drank because I needed to drink. I thought no one noticed, but Caroline did.

When I wasn’t working at number 53, I visited her at number 225. Late in the evening, I would trudge down Piccadilly Street, which was really a roundabout, to see her. Caroline seemed to me more frail than ever, her eyes larger than her tiny hands, her skin white and clammy. She received more than two hundred visitors a day and was kept on exhibit twelve or thirteen hours each day.

—Sarah, you have got to stop. You are drinking much too much gin. I grinned.

—Not too much, Caroline, just enough, just enough.

—Bad for you.

—It helps me sleep.

—Then why do you drink at five?

—I never drink at five. I have tea at five. I love tea . . .

—Dr. Gilligan says . . .

—Little children yes. But I am a full-grown woman.

I needed
vaderlantje,
needed it in my bones, my sinews, my soul. I was in terrible anguish if I found myself out of sight of my bottle of brandy or my carafe of gin. Then, there came that time when I realized I could not live without drinking. This was the winter of 1811.