Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  I turned to leave, glancing over my shoulder at the man who was now my master. He was dressed like all the planters of the region, in a white felt three-cornered hat and a long dustcoat split up the back for riding. His sleeves were turned back to reveal hairy forearms. He had on breeches which covered his legs to the knees and soft short camel-skin boots tied crisscross halfway up his calf, the rest being bare. His shirt was open at the neck and little hairs peeked out. His long waistcoat almost swept his knees and was of white linen with bone buttons. His curly red hair was tied back with a green ribbon and he carried a long rifle and a hunting knife. There was nothing extraordinary about him except his height and the color of his eyes, which were a pale gray, like a winter sky, under those red eyebrows and red lashes. He smelled too. But then, all white people smelled. Only white babies smelled good.

  I lingered one moment more, thinking I should remember something about my new patron—some little tic, some special attribute, so I could give him a name in Khoekhoe and not think of him only as master. I decided his gray eyes were like a winter sky. Sao/homaib . . . Then I thought, No, Sao/homaib/ao-mûs/gam, winter-sky-snake-eyes. That’s what he would be from now on. Then I smiled. He was in fact Sao/homaib/aomûs/gam-kharara, winter-sky-snake-eyes-two-testicles . . .

  The colonel glanced at me in what he took to be a friendly way—as if I were actually a human and not an animal, who could talk and feel and now had charge of his three precious babes. Then his gaze closed, as did all white people’s on second glance. His winter-sky-snake-eyes returned to the same blank stare I always saw in whites’ eyes when they looked at me. Or rather through me. As if, after twenty years of daily observance, they couldn’t for the life of them remember my name.

  As I left, Mistress Van Loott whispered,

  —He won’t bother you . . .

  I bit my lip to keep from laughing. She really believed that. I wondered how she explained all the colored orphans at her mission.

  That evening, the wheels of the long wagon train groaned as the lead wagon turned on itself out of the corral. It stretched a half mile across the plain like a huge pink seashell: longhorn cattle, bulls, bullocks, mares, calves, fanned out from the spine of wagons loaded and ready to move. The blue light struck the dark shiny coats and white jutting horns of the herd and their odor rose from their own dust. I could barely make out the herders and cowboys or the black silhouettes of the San and Xhosa shepherds gliding silently amongst them. Like a lazy animal stretching, the train began to creep forward slowly, moonlight outlining the braying, snorting, crying, creaking mass. We passed an encampment of Khoekhoe, miserable blank-eyed, filthy, weaponless people huddled around camp-fires, for the night was cold. Wolves and coyotes howled in the valley. The blurred, dark shadows of the herders moved amongst the animals. The torches of Cape Town burned bright in the distance until they disappeared behind the hills, leaving only the oil lamps swinging on the wagon posts like fireflies as guiding lights. They and shooting stars lit the way, for it was now Star Death moon.

  4

  I am a monogenist, all humans come from a single creation divided into three races: Caucasians, Ethiopians or Negroes, and Mongolians. It is not a coincidence that the Caucasian race has gained dominion over the world while Negroes are still sunken in slavery and the pleasures of the senses and the Chinese lost in the obscurities of a hieroglyphic language . . .

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Thirty Lessons in Comparative Anatomy

  Star Death, the English month of February, 1806. The Caesar farm stood low on the slopes of Table Mountain Ridge, part of a valley that sang with wild animals, savage birds, wolves, jackals and Cape lions. The wide square house stood surrounded by great shade trees, groves of fruit trees, mango arbors and vineyards. For me, the house was another coffin. White with square black pillars and a veranda on all sides, it seemed to have descended from on high, pushing aside the tall pale grass to settle its backside into the landscape like a brood hen. There was no courtyard; instead the henhouse looked outwards in all directions so that I saw only horizon, filled with grasslands and wheat fields that led softly to the next ridge. There was always a fresh wind blowing and the wood and brick house, built in the Dutch manner, was situated to catch the slightest breeze. The polished plank floors were always cool under my bare feet and thick walls kept the African heat out.

  There were no other Hottentot servants. All the others were Xhosa or Bantu and they looked down on me. Several were Muslim, two were Christian and the others, like me, believed that no one god or gods had the answer to the mysteries of life and so stuck to believing in rocks and rivers, the sun and wind, trees and earth, and listening to them and speaking to them, following the old ways.

  The Caesar family was a typical Boer family, consisting of father, mother and three children. Added to this core were four dogs, a cat, a parrot and sixteen servants. Peter Caesar, for that was my master’s given name, was a Dutch Afrikaner, although it was rumored that he had some Khoekhoe blood in him as well as Irish. This was servants’ gossip. I never found out any more about him except that his grandfather had come to the Cape from the town of Dokkum in the Netherlands some sixty years previously and had worked as a shipping clerk for the Dutch East India Company. He had made war on the Hottentots, searched for gold and homesteaded, that is, stole, a tract of Hottentot land that had been almost thirteen square miles, and began to raise cattle and wheat. Caesar’s father lost much of this land in the panic of 1742, when he had invested all he had in the Dutch East India Company and the English had won the war. So Peter Caesar was not a rich man. He had a brother, Hendrick, who lived about a week’s trek away in another valley nearer Cape Town, who also raised cattle and who also was not a rich man.

  My master was well known as a good, strict, Calvinist white African, fair and God-fearing. So, despite what had happened, Master Peter became the voice of authority in my new life. He never again touched me once I was under his roof, and for that I was grateful. I was grateful, quick, docile, affectionate and trusting. Just like the other animals that belonged to the family: four dogs, one cat and a parrot. The four dogs, all basset hounds, were named after cities in Holland: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haarlem and Monnikendam, which had been long ago shortened to Amst, Rott, Haar and Monni. The cat’s name was Simplicity and the parrot was named The Hague. Master Peter was so tall, almost six feet two, that my head hardly reached his diaphragm and my neck hurt when I had to look up at him. For that and another reason, I kept my distance. I usually stood a good ten feet away from him whenever I had to speak. He seemed to like this: “Little People,” he called me, and I learned from him the reason the Khoekhoe were called Hottentot. It was because of our strange way of speaking with click sounds and expulsions, which white people were incapable of mastering and which sounded to their ears like stuttering. The Dutch word for stutterer was Hottentot. It was not a pretty word, he said, and it’s an insult too. Which, I asked, is worse?

  —Oh, about the same, he said, there’s little difference at all . . .

  His wife, Alya, also had her ideas about how far away from her I should stand. All her servants were ordered to keep their distance of ten feet. She didn’t want to smell them or touch them and she didn’t want them breathing on her person. This was one of the many ways she fought Dirt.

  —What is life, she would say, but stink and shit? Dirt, Dirt, Dirt.

  Her only reason for living was to rid the earth of it and protect her family from it. So we would stand ten feet away from her, raising our voices as if we were about to decapitate her to inform her that dinner was ready, or the cat had disappeared, or that the rain had stopped. I would hold the youngest of her children, Clare, in my arms, with little Karl clunging to my skirts and Erasmus, the oldest, hung on my neck, while avoiding breathing upon her. I was paid a salary of one Dutch shilling a month, and meals. I slept in a little lean-to cabin at the back of the kitchen. Sometimes I accompanied the family to Cape Town to buy supplies,
pick up shipments from Holland, visit the bank and call on their friends who had children of the same age, so that they could play with Clare, Erasmus and Karl. I would sit with the other mammies, nannies, obeahs, ayahs, wet nurses, dry nurses and governesses and gossip about the masters. My mistress was known by all as Frau Von Shit and she would die with that same epithet.

  The trips to Cape Town gave me a chance to explore the city. I now remembered where the governor’s house was, the penitentiary, the cathedral, the High Court. I learned what a bank was, a market, a blacksmith and a stable. I admired the beautiful horses, equipages and riding saddles. I began to recognize what the various painted signs and advertisements said but I still refused to talk to books. I quickly learned the names for everything beautiful and luxurious in Cape Town: dresses, hats, shoes, gloves, necklaces, earrings, rings, petticoats, corsets, lace, ostrich feathers, handkerchiefs. I gazed at boots, swords, pistols, top hats, bonnets, eau-de-vie, silver mirrors and dreamed of far-off places. Manchester, for example, where the Reverend Freehouseland had been born and was now buried. I decided England must be the heaven he had told me about, where everything was milk and honey. And so that faraway island became the motherland that I had lost. I dreamed of it as I stood listening to the cries of seagulls and hawks in my very favorite place: the wharves, watching the tall ships leave and enter the harbor, admiring these great canoes with their branchless trees furled in sails of scarlet, blue or white. These were my happiest moments.

  The day that I speak of, a great ship had come in. The dockers were unloading her and the sailors were running here and there furling sails, hauling in ropes, fixing the ship tight to its moorings. From the hold of the ship emerged a single line of chained black men, blinking in the sharp reflection of the sun. They limped down the runway naked, their heads shaved, silence in their very limbs, while other black workers looked the other way.

  On the top deck stood a lone figure, perhaps the captain, in a splendid uniform of scarlet and blue, his tunic draped with gold cord and braids, his buttons flashing in the sun. He was very dark and his blue-black hair escaped in the wind and made a collar of fur around his head like a great noose. A long polished instrument the thickness of a bamboo rod was strapped to his left wrist and hung at his thigh. The sun burned his silhouette against the indigo sails. A great nostalgia came over me, a sense of loneliness. Even though he was white, he reminded me so much of Kx’au I almost cried out; he had the same wide shoulders, was the same height, the same weight, had the same stance, even the collar of fur.

  Just then, a band of roving white boys, Boers from their looks, turned the corner of First Street, yelling and playing catch, searching for mischief. They had spied me, a Hottentot, and were heading my way. I pulled my chapur around me and over my head. The fact that I had a pass, a patron and a fixed address would make no difference to them. They were out for fun and adventure. They could beat me, rape me, torment me or murder me for amusement. I hurried away, down the next alley, leaving the beautiful ship and its mysterious master, stubbing my toe on the cobblestones as I hobbled away.

  The loneliness remained with me as we traveled back to the farm days later. The lead wagon, followed by the supply wagon and Master Peter riding point on his favorite horse, Sphere, followed the seacoast for almost a day as it meandered through the marshes and savannas and salt lands surrounding Cape Town. Finally we turned eastwards into the silence of the vineyards and wheat fields that marched up the ridge. The African light died on our eyelids and our lips, it painted the hides of the horses and oxen indigo, it swept across the cliffs, painting them scarlet and purple with its fingers. The night sounds closed in and the fireflies awoke. One even had the illusion of real peace, although in this wilderness, with the eyes of roving wolves upon us, with the wars of nature all around us, there was no peace.

  That night, my master stood at the head of his table and bowed his head.

  —O God, merciful and full of grace, our heavenly Father, it is only by thy majesty and divine love that we are called on to conduct the affairs of this colony so that justice be maintained amongst these savage and brutal men and that your true and reformed doctrine shall be propagated and spread for the honor and the glory of your sacred name, we pray and implore you to enlighten our hearts with your heavenly wisdom and grace so that this colony, this family, this factory will serve to magnify and honor your name, and in your name we bless this food. Amen.

  Mistress Alya’s head bobbed up and down in unison and grave agreement with her husband’s prayer. Her hands twisted under the perfection of her white apron (she always wore a fresh clean one for dinner). The table, laden with food, sparkling with silver, brilliant with dazzlingly laundered linen, dressed with starched and embroidered napkins shaped like boats anchored with tiny silver clips, decorated with flowers and candles, was always a beautiful sight to see. I stood with my tray of food, barefoot in blue and white starched smock and apron, a white starched turban hiding my braids. A barefoot footman in Indian tunic, pantaloons and fez stood at attention behind the chair of Master Caesar. A tall Bantu butler who took every occasion to slap me for my errors and inexperience served the meal.

  It had taken me a while to get used to Mistress Alya.

  —Souls should shine with cleanliness, repeated Mistess Alya. The impure heart can never be freed from dirt . . . The polluters, she continued, come in two guises, internal and external: evil thoughts and alien cultures.

  Mistress Alya had a cleaning regimen that illustrated this commandment and she followed it with military precision: the steps, porch and path leading to the house and the front hall were to be washed every day early in the morning. On Wednesdays, the entire house was cleaned, on Monday and Tuesday afternoons the reception rooms were dusted and the furniture polished. Thursdays were scrubbing and scouring days, and on Fridays the kitchen and cellar were cleaned. Dishes had to be perfectly washed after every meal. Laundry was done every day. When sheets were folded, the end used for the feet could never accidentally be turned so that it could be used for the head. Pillows were plumped up each day so feathers could breathe, as were the down-filled coverlets. Chairs and tables were cleaned, cobwebs removed, anti-insect measures taken, using lye on the floor and chalk and turpentine on the walls. Moths were repelled by camphor, flies and wasps caught in strips covered with honey. Shoes were removed on entering the house and slippers provided. The feet of the whole family were to be washed every evening.

  The cows and their stalls were washed every day. The tails of the oxen and cows were tied to pillars so that their urine and dung would not soil them. And in the kitchen hung a flat-ironed starched towel embroidered with the motto:

  My brush is my sword; my broom, my weapon Sleep I know not, nor any repose No labor is too heavy; no care too great To make everything shine and spotlessly neat I scrape and scour, I polish and I scrub And suffer no one to take away my tub.

  Mistress Alya suffered from insomnia. She could be seen in the early hours of the morning like a haunt or what we called a “fawn foot” flitting from room to room with a dust rag.

  —Cleanliness is godliness, she would whisper over and over, wringing her just-washed hands.

  As I understood it, to be clean was an affirmation of independence. What was cleansed was the dirt of the world: pollution and injustice. Dirt disguised violence and torture. It prevented self-knowledge. Cleaning made everything distinct and clear like the African dawn. To keep oneself clean was to set oneself apart in a world of confusion and foreigners. Dirt was vagabond. Dirt was the appetite of the flesh. Dirt was folly, disorder and sex.

  The Hottentots, she would say, were not only dirty, they were filthy. They smeared their bodies with butter and dung. They wore entrails around their necks. They painted their faces. They spat and urinated on brides and grooms. And when there was nothing to eat, they ate dirt rather than starve. I began to bathe myself twice a day, rising at dawn to wade in the river that ran through the farm or filling a wooden trough wit
h hot water from the kitchen and letting the waters close over my head.

  One of the things it fell to my lot to do was to wash the feet of the family gathered in the large sitting room or the screened veranda every night. I would bring in a steaming basin of water, kneel before each family member or guest, remove their shoes and stockings and carefully wash their feet. I would repeat this ritual as many times as there were white people present. Sometimes it was only Master Caesar and his wife. Sometimes the master’s father-in-law, Donald Van Wagenaar, a retired army colonel, would be present. Sometimes a maiden aunt, Mistress Agnes. And sometimes there would be the master’s brother, Master Hendrick, or other guests. My washing of their feet seemed to be a ritual that soothed and reassured them in their superiority. They would smoke their pipes, drink their gin, discuss Afrikaner affairs as freely as if I were a piece of furniture. For indeed, I did not exist as a person any more than Rott or Amst or Haar. And so, in this way, I learned a lot about the world as they saw it, as it really was and how it would be in the future. I learned of events far away from Cape Town, in places like London, Amsterdam, New Delhi and Malay. I listened as I cut toenails, massaged the feet of Mistress Alya, whose only vice that I could see was the voluptuous wiggling of her toes. Her feet were long and narrow with little balls of flesh at the tip of each toe. As I washed the feet of more and more people, I realized each foot told a story. Each foot had a private life, a temperament, an occupation, a sex, which might or might not be the sex of the person to whom the foot belonged. There were farmer’s feet and hunter’s feet, soldier’s feet and gentleman’s feet. There were cowboy’s feet, and herder’s feet, cook’s feet and aristocrat’s feet. There were honest feet, sick feet, noble feet and vulgar feet, beautiful feet and feet that lied.

  The latter was the case of Master Hendrick, who had long handsome feet that lied. Sometimes his visits would last for months, although he had a wife and several small children. But his wife, Mistress Lilly, never came. The two Caesar women didn’t get along. When Master Hendrick came, he hunted mostly wild boars and lions. He left his family for months at a time. Perhaps he saw them thirty days out of the year: at Christmas, Easter, All Saints’ and what the Dutch called the wijn oogst.