Hottentot Venus (24 page)

I said nothing. Perhaps this was what Magahâs meant. Eternal wandering amongst whites without ever reaching a destination. I had walked from home to Cape Town on a road that had no turnoffs, no crossroads; it simply had gone on, mile after mile, in a straight line. I would never see the Cape again, I thought. I would never retrieve my ten pounds. I would never ever hear another Cape lion roar. The Reverend Freehouseland had guided me to this end-of-the-world.

—The Lord be praised, said Father Joshua, for bringing me one of his lost sheep.

—Lost sheep? I am a shepherdess.

—The Lord is our shepherd, child, but it certainly doesn’t hurt that you are one too. I’m expecting your visit soon, Sarah.

I nodded and took Alice’s arm. It seemed to me that my salvation was a huge and ominous undertaking. It was more, I thought, than just a ritual passage from childhood to adulthood. It was a passage from Africa to England.

—I have my own way of illustrating truths, the reverend began on my first visit. I preach the love of Christ, the need of regeneration and the judgment to come. I regard a Christian as a fully developed man or woman and as a creature that has not only civil, domestic and social duties but a body, a brain and a soul to be cared for. You understand?

Slowly, he led me through simple passages he called the word of God. He would hold forth on a subject passionately, then pause and say, “Let’s hear what the Savior says,” and seek a passage in the New Testament. Then, he would make a bold, striking comment. Sometimes funny, sometimes referring to my own life or to the circus, although he had never come to see the spectacle. The idea that God was speaking directly to me began to take root in my thoughts. I never for a moment doubted that he, the preacher, believed he was reading the words of God. Many times the word “shepherd” would appear in the text
—The Lord is my shepherd—
and he would laugh and point to me and speak of my father’s flocks. And a long, pent-up sigh or a smile or a tear would escape me, I could never predict which. I was completely in his hands.

He was a better actor than Master Taylor. He could imitate a drunken man before a judge, an angel announcing the end of the world, a glass-blower making a vase or a carpenter building a house. He would imitate a man cutting down a tree, pulling in a fishing net, a swallow rising on its wings, a turkey strutting, a dog barking, a wolf howling at the moon. He had a particular shrug of his shoulders, and if he spoke of hypocrites, he would draw his face down and make himself so funny, so pompous, that I had to laugh. I was never bored or afraid. He kept me breathless and awake with his parables, as he called them, from his life, from his journeys, his cold nights, his warm seasons, his travels in China, his struggles with sin and the lightninglike power of evil.

—Some men like their bread cold, some like it hot. I like mine hot, he would say.

He gave me a prayer book and said that when I could read aloud the passages he chose, he would baptize me. To do so, Father Joshua had to ask permission from the Bishop of Chester, a formidable man who lived in Wedgewood. After that, we met in the Sunday school room, full of pictures and flowers, an organ and a melodeon. It smelled of beeswax and chalk, of wild ferns and the good odor of children. It made me think of painted caves, rough mountains, calm sea and !Kung. I learned from Father Joshua that Father Freehouseland had suffered greatly in Africa from a host of disappointments, illnesses and solitude. He had missed his wife after she had returned to England.

—I do believe he bought you to free you, Father Joshua said one day. I can’t believe he was a slave owner.

—Oh, he bought only children, I said, or very young people, and always in the name of the Lord. He bought us to save us . . .

On the day Father Joshua announced to me that I was ready for baptism, he already had the bishop’s permission. I was overjoyed. It took place the following evening at vespers. The church was almost full. The sound of people finding the hymn was like the rustling of peacock feathers. They all stood, all sang, all welcomed me into their Kingdom. Alice stood as my godmother and Victor as my godfather. All my Christian masters were there: Master Taylor, the saint; Master Dunlop, the knight; and Master Caesar, the patriarch.

As the chalice of water trickled over my head, I closed my eyes and the image of the one-legged purple heron came to me, just as if I were standing alone, deep in the African forest.

December 1, Register of the Collegiate and Sarah Baartman, a female Hottentot from the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, born in the borders of Caffravia, baptized this day by permission of the Lord Bishop of Chester sent by letter from his Lordship to Jos. Brooks, Chaplain.

Witness, Joshua Brooks

We all gathered around the headstone of Cecil James Freehouseland. I wore a new hooded cloak, made of the finest double-milled wool and of such an intense scarlet that it threw a glimmer whenever it moved. It was long and full with large folds like the closed wings of a flamingo. The white men had won in the end. I was a Christian. I had a Christian name, Sarah, and I had a Christian country, the Kingdom of God. I was safe from damnation as a heathen.

—Can I be married in a church now that I am baptized?

—I have a better idea, replied Master Dunlop like a bolt of lightning.

—Why don’t we return to the church with Father Joshua this very moment so that he can marry us tonight? We can use this, he said. He took a brass ring off his little finger.

And so, that same evening, Alice and Victor were again witnesses. My master was now my husband, my keeper was also my bridegroom. The Reverend Brooks was happy to forgo the publication of the marriage banns. I had time only to lay my bride’s bouquet of mistletoe on the grave of my late master before the circus left for Bath. I whispered my news to him, thinking it would please him to know I had finally come into his Kingdom of Christ.

—If he wanted to keep you from ever running away from him, the best way to do so was to have married you, complained Alice. If you ran away as a slave, you could go for help to the African Institution and the Reverend Wedderburn. If you run away from Dunlop now, as his wife, he can send the constables after you to bring you back as his property and no one will lift a finger. No one will help you because you are legally his. He can shut you up in his house and throw away the key. He can starve you or beat you or rape you and no policeman or magistrate can touch him. He can shut you up in an asylum forever and no doctor will contradict him. As your husband, he now possesses
all
your money. Your dowry, your earnings, your capital are his to do with as he pleases. He’s recovered three-quarters of you without spending a shilling!

That which the husband hath is his own.
That which the wife hath is the husband’s.

—He at least had to pay you as his servant, and as his slave you could claim your freedom on English soil. As his wife, you are nothing except his property. He doesn’t have to pay a wife. He has only to feed you and clothe you and provide a roof over your head. As your legal husband, all your money is now his. So is your body. That’s the law. You have given up liberty, estate and authority to a man. And on top of that, Sarah, would you ever dishonor yourself by running away from your husband in the eyes of God? No! Well, I think it’s all Hendrick Caesar’s idea. This way he can return to the Cape of Good Hope with his money and his conscience clear. And now Dunlop has you back even though he sold you to Henry Taylor. You’re his property again. Just as before. This time he’s gotten you back without paying . . . Don’t you see?

But I didn’t see.

15

Understand that the word “species” means the individuals who descend from one another or from common parents and those who resemble them as much as they resemble each other. Thus, we call varieties of a species only those races more or less different which can arise from it by reproduction. Our observations on the differences amongst the ancestors and the descendants are therefore for us the only reasonable rule, because all others would take us back to hypotheses without proofs.

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

Black moon, the English month of May, 1812. Despite all of my husband’s promises to return to Africa, our life of touring England lasted for two more years. Master Hendrick did indeed decide he wanted to return to the Cape with his share of the profits. With him went the last of my past, the last of my Africa. I would not miss him. I didn’t love him, and as a master, he had been neither kind nor honorable. As a matter of fact, I probably hated him, although this sentiment never came to the surface of my thoughts. In all, I was happy to be rid of him. The idea of never seeing him again filled me with joy. I never saw or heard from him again. His face faded into forgetfulness and became only a blur in the long procession of men to whom I had belonged. He would return to his family with my riches. Some other servant would wash his feet while he discussed the triumph of his Hottentot Venus in faraway London. He left at the end of 1812 on the same ship on which we had all arrived, the
Exeter.
Master Dunlop took the rest of the money as my dowry and the last expenses left our cashbox empty. The tour of England and Ireland became a necessity instead of a choice. During those years of 1812 and 1813, we crisscrossed the Midlands, the northern counties of Lancaster, Cumberland and Yorkshire, and Northern Ireland. We traveled by caravan, covered wagon and coach. Our painted canvas posters advertising the Hottentot Venus were always hung on the sides of our carriage along with the advertisements for Henry Taylor’s theater. Along the way, actors, clowns, freaks, animal trainers, musicians and magicians joined or left our little troupe, falling off or climbing on at will, in the backwater villages, country fairs and itinerant markets selling everything from cattle to cotton. Many of the vagabond performers disappeared as quickly as they came, leaving nothing behind, not even a memory. Like Master Caesar. I was now divided between my husband, Master Dunlop, and the actor Master Taylor. Just as I forgot Master Caesar, I forgot the countless cities and towns, castles and manor houses, villages and fairs in which we performed.

My attachment to Alice Unicorn grew. When we could, we would close ourselves up in the caravan and read the Collects, the Bible, the
Times Almanac
and
Reading Made Easy.
Master Taylor had lent us his copy of
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Victor as the turtle-boy was a sensation and grew into a popular attraction. Our “made” freak earned money both for himself and for his sister.

—Since men’s minds are haunted by the desire to change nature’s smallest quirk into truth based on their own fantasies, then let us oblige them with our turtle-boy, Master Taylor would say as he stuffed Victor’s head down into his papier-mâché neck.

Victor’s “neck” was a cardboard collar covered with snakeskin, wide enough to poke his head in and out of. Strapped to the hump on his back was a giant turtleshell that Master Taylor had bought from another circus man in Liverpool. The transformation was amazing and terrifying. Each day Victor the turtle-boy was born out of snakeskin and a lie. His rebirth into a thing-that-should-never-have-been-born was only so that Englishmen could marvel at the wonders of nature and cross themselves that there but for the grace of God went they. They cheered and clapped and whistled and laughed as if the very meaning of their lives depended upon his deformity and his sorrow.

Whenever we appeared in a new town, our masters would go off to find some game of chance where they might win something to supplement our meager earnings and fill our purse until the next town: craps, poker,
trente-et-un,
anything that might keep us until the box office opened. We left a string of bad debts behind us: unpaid hotel rooms and angry gamblers we had fleeced. Even though he was my husband, my master rarely slept in the same room with me, and when he did, it was usually to sleep off the effects of a night of drinking and gambling. I was grateful for his neglect. Although I had been happy with Kx’au, I had never understood the fascination connected with the performance of sex. I had never been transported by the ecstasy that was supposed to accompany it.

We appeared in the large cities of Northampton, Nottingham, Wake-field and Leeds. We had become true vagabonds by now. There was little pretense of an acting troupe. We were a circus and freak show of chattering monkeys, a turtle-boy, some acrobats, a giant named Captain Battery and a Hottentot called Venus. We traveled in our ragtag caravan while the poor—the workers, the herders, the shepherds and peasants—for whom threepence was too high a price to pay for amusements, rebelled against their rich landlords and owners, for which they were named the Luddites. Like the Khoekhoe
,
once they rose they were quickly put down by the police and constables hired by the factory owners.

The revolt spread and seemed to follow our route, arriving just after we had left, or just before we reached, a new city. Workers convicted of machine breaking were sentenced to death under the Frame Breaking Act of Parliament. After one attack in Yorkshire which left a mill owner dead, over one hundred workers were rounded up, seventeen of whom were hanged. Alice almost left the circus to return home to join the rebels when a mill in Manchester was set on fire and thirty-seven weavers were charged with sedition. When we did return, eight men had been sentenced to death and thirteen transported to Australia. We didn’t stay long. We were suspected not only of harboring criminals but also, because of Alice, of spreading sedition.

We traveled further north to Ireland. The revolts lasted for two more years. Several times we hid Luddites and escaping clothworkers. For a short while, we believed the Luddites might start what Alice called a revolution. But eventually most of them were caught, and the last of their heroes, James Towle, executed.

Time passed, and whatever else I did in those years of roaming through the countryside, I saw into the very heart of the mighty. How many Englishmen had stood before my body in awe, mirth or contempt? Alice guessed a thousand days of a thousand people. A million souls. Could this have been possible? I could not conceive of such a number until she said:

—All the migrating birds of the Camboos River in the sky at the same time.

In Pale moon, the English month of June, 1814, everything changed. We arrived in Bath, where Master Taylor’s players were to perform for the Earl of Bath and his friend and guest the Earl of Bedford. Bath was a spa built around warm springs, a tawdry place where gentlemen came to dance in top boots, wore swords and smoked in the presence of ladies. Soldiers, adventurers, rogues and gamblers abounded. Lodgings were so expensive we lived in the covered wagons of the caravan. Sedan-chair men were rude and quarrelsome and duels were as common as drunkenness. The whole city was taken up with having a good time. In the morning ladies were fetched in a closed palankeen and transported to the baths, already dressed in their bathing clothes. While music played, white women’s bodies were tended and flattered. A little wooden dish floating in the pool held their handkerchief or nosegay or snuffbox. Men were on one side, ladies on the other, but often the sexes mixed, conversed, made vows or appointments for later and sometimes made love. Then they would all return to their lodgings for an evening of theater and amusement.

It was in Bath that a Frenchman named Réaux, who owned a dancing bear, joined the players. I took him for the devil. First he had appeared out of nowhere. Then, there was his dancing bear, Adolph, a huge red-eyed beast hung with rattling brass chains that followed him everywhere. Alice told me he was a Breton and played the French bagpipe, to which his bear danced. But it was his appearance that struck me, for he resembled his bear. His face was covered with a thick black beard and mustache, so that his mouth was invisible. His nose resembled a snout with its large wide nostrils. He had the small yellow eyes of a bear and from sideburns to eyebrows his oversized head was covered with thick bristly hair, which stood up in tufts as if raised by the wind whether there was any wind or not. To press it down, he wore a wide black felt hat with a deep brim. The hat seemed to be part of his head. He also had the paws of a bear, huge, hairy wide hands with short fingers and long nails. His body was bearlike with thick rounded shoulders and a wide, muscly, hairy chest. It seemed he was the closest to an ape a man could be without being one. Yet he was a polite, practical man, a renegade noble turned republican on the run since the Revolution, in which he had lost everything. We exchanged few words and tried to avoid each other. I could not imagine what I could have to say to Master Réaux. Sometimes he danced all alone with his bear, the two of them locked in a strange war dance of stamping and turns that was both mysterious and ridiculous. The lone Réaux would dance, oblivious of everything and everyone, and the bear would circle him, imitating each movement, while the morose strains of bagpipes surrounded the two animals with sound. But he was a white man, I thought, and so his strange looks were deemed acceptable if ugly. But to me he was a monster.

For their performance before the Earl of Bath, Master Taylor chose a comedy by William Shakespeare called
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
It was my favorite play because it began in a wood in a faraway land that could have been the Cape. And it was about things-that-should-never-have-been-born, animals that I knew by name, and fairies that reminded me of my beloved Caroline. They had names that I recognized: Pease-blossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed. And there was an African lion that roared. Alice also loved this play, and she read it over and over to me, because in it there was a weaver, Bottom, and a clothworker, Starveling, and there was a love story between Lysander and Hermia. There were songs about spotted snakes, thorny hedgehogs, bears with bristled hair, and spells and charms that Magahâs might have possessed. Then, at the end, when the lion roars and the couples mate and the things-that-should-never-have-been-born promise that
the blots of Nature’s hand/Shall
not in their issue stand;/Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar, /Nor mark prodigious,
such as are/Despised in nativity, we freaks cheered and I cried as the fairies blessed us with sweet peace and safety and rest. I clung to Alice and wept in longing for that same sweet safety and rest. I was twenty-five years old and as tired as a field slave of sixty. I had learned to drink and I had learned to read, and I had learned to curse my keepers in their own language.

—Now, now, Sarah, said Master Taylor, I know it’s a beautiful play and it reminds you of home, but if you boo-hoo like that much longer, we’ll all start to cry. Look, he said, tears rolling down his face, I’m crying already.

—You cry on cue, Master Taylor.

—Not always, Sarah, not always. Life as I’ve known it is a crying matter . . . a crying game . . . Roulette perhaps or strip poker, I can’t figure out which—

—You are like Puck. You can fly away.

—And you cannot?

—My contract, Master Taylor. Have you forgotten?

—I might own you, Sarah, but you don’t belong to me—there’s a difference. I, for example, belong to the theater. I belong to the characters I play—rather badly.

—Like Mr. Kemble, the actor?

—Well, hardly. I’m just a poor journeyman. He’s a true genius.

—I met him once. He came to see me. He cried. He wrote a letter to the African Institution about me, which is why we had to go through the trial.

Master Taylor was silent. Perhaps he was speechless for the first time in his life. Or merely searching for something, some role, some quotation.

Then, he said:

—John Kemble’s tears were probably genuine . . . Sarah.

—And yours?

—Mine, he said coolly, are those of a professional . . . mourner. People like you and me are born to mourn and weep . . .

Halifax was the next town. Its blazoned wooden signpost will always remain in my mind’s eye for it was the turning point in our wanderings in England and it marked my life forever. It was Chewing Wood moon, July, 1814, the wars of Napoleon were over, and what was left of the circus limped into Halifax, where we were to perform for five days. My master planned to stay for the rest of the summer. The pretty city was built around a marketplace, which opened at seven twice a week. As soon as the bell rang, hundreds of merchants, factors and buyers appeared, walking down row after row, inspecting each specialty: wool, worsted, cotton, silk. Some of them would have their order books, with which they matched colors, holding them up to compare with the cloth. When they saw something that suited them, they reached over to the clothier and in a moment a deal was made or not. In little more than an hour, all the business was done, and in the half hour that followed, the cloths would all disappear as if by magic, carried off to the merchant’s house, to a warehouse or to a ship anchored on the river.