Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

—Saartjie, do this for me . . .

  I tried to uncover her face. She resisted. I let her go then, stepping back a little.

  —I’ve already spoken to Hendrick. He’ll sell you to me.

  —I’m not his slave.

  —He can sell you as an indentured servant. Think on it.

  She nodded quickly, shamefaced, trembling with emotion. She bowed her head.

  —Oh, go away, she murmured. Please, please, go away. There will be only trouble. You bring only trouble.

  —Riches and perhaps trouble, I said, you females always give me trouble, I whispered softly. Never fear. I’ve never forgotten any of you.

  I held out my hand and in the dim light Saartjie stared at the coin lying in my palm. It was a gold napoleon, more money than she had ever seen.

  —You can’t buy me. I’m not a slave.

  —Who said anything about slavery? I’m talking about bride-price— that’s a lot of cattle. I laughed. Since you say you are an orphan, to whom do I pay the bride-price?

  —My father’s sister.

  —And where is she?

  —In Namagua, I think.

  —And how would I get this gold napoleon to her?

  —I don’t know, Master.

  —Well then, I’ll just have to keep it in the bank until we return, won’t I? I smiled and winked at her as I dropped the coin back into my purse. Or shall I give it to you?

  Saartjie shook her head dejectedly.

  —I cannot sell myself . . . You can’t buy me. I’m not for sale.

  The next moment, I swept the Hottentot up in a powerful embrace. I kissed her face with an overmastering ardor as if to bury the very soul I claimed she didn’t have. The kisses broke into the citadel of her loneliness. Her eyes were closed. She was mine. I turned and left her, abandoning my conquest. She gathered up her skirts and ran after me.

  —Stop, she shouted. I’ll go. I’ll go.

  I continued walking away from her, my fateful tread echoed malevolently upon the stones. Presently her voice grew fainter as though she, too, were turning into stone. I could feel the desperation that took hold of her at that moment. I was going, never to return! I would leave without her, forever. Leaving her to die in this godforsaken place. As if she were struggling in a dream, Saartjie called out my name in a final appeal.

  —Master Dunlop! I’ll go. I’ll go . . . I promise, I follow.

  The echo of my footsteps joined the faint sound of my triumphant laughter, mixed with the night sounds and the voices of restless crickets and wolves. There was no hint of human life in the desolate landscape. The Hottentot and I were totally alone in the world, solitary, lost in this fiendish, hopeless country where she possessed not even a footprint. And she was totally mine.

  Inside the main house, Hendrick must have heard my laughter or her frightened cry. A window opened and into the silence her master spoke to her, over my head, high up in the black air.

  —Saartjie, Saartjie, you come on in here and wash our feet. Tonight, be a good girl, we’re taking you to London!

  Hendrick couldn’t believe how perfectly everything was turning out. I had solved all his problems. He would lease his preserve out for two years. His wife and children would come to live with his brother. He and I would take Saartjie to London, present her to the scientific world as the first female Hottentot ever to set foot in Great Britain. We would make a fortune off Saartjie’s monstrous shape, which would be immortalized for all time . . .

  Hendrick hated to admit the feeling of pleasure and excitement I had aroused in him. He had never been abroad—out of Africa. He was suddenly a different man. He was a man who was ten years younger. Visions of visiting Amsterdam and Rotterdam as well as London and Paris danced in his head. Heady meetings with famous doctors, newspaper interviews, introductions to society, all this I told him would be a natural consequence of our future voyage and our stupendous discovery. Hendrick wondered out loud why he hadn’t thought of it himself long ago.

  I took the Hottentot to Cape Town to petition the governor of the colony for her passport to England. Whenever she ventured into Cape Town, she wore a chapur so that her Hottentot origins would not be recognized. We rode into town together on two of Hendrick’s best saddle horses. Saartjie rode silently beside me, looking like a child mounted on a huge black stallion. Yet she was calm. Grave. She controlled the animal, I noticed, surprisingly well.

  The governor’s house was in the center of town, a massive yellow and black brick building with a classical porch of white columns. To one side of the building were the Government House and the Central Bank. To the other side was the long, hard, sinister expanse of the colony’s penitentiary, which looked like any other government building except that there were armed soldiers stationed every few yards, and a public whipping post.

  A chain gang of slaves passed us as we dismounted. The men were dressed in striped cropped pantaloons. They were bare-chested and some carried the marks of terrible lashings on their backs, raised welts and crisscross scars that were sometimes white, sometimes dark brown or pomegranate red. Their heads were shaved and their gaunt, brutal faces were blank. Almost all were Hottentots. The chains sang, but the men didn’t. They all seemed drowned in a kind of interior silence, deeper than mere absence of sound, the silence of death, as they stood dejected in the shadow of the penitentiary walls. I glanced at Saartjie, who had hurried away from them towards the entrance to the building. Even in her disguise Saartjie walked swiftly as if she had a destination. A Hottentot loitering in Cape Town was liable to be arrested. A Hottentot had better run to wherever the hell she was going.

  I was received by Lord Calledon himself. Since the Cape was once again an English colony, he had very little to do on any given day. Reading dispatches, receiving important foreign visitors and issuing passports were major activities. These coupled with building a new opera house, giving lavish dinner parties and suppressing all Hottentot resistance was what the governorship of the newest British conquest consisted of. For this he had paid the Crown the lordly sum of fifty thousand pounds. As the British government’s representative, he was not only responsible for suppressing the Hottentots, but was also appointed their official guardian, as they were considered too imbecilic to be allowed to look after themselves.

  Lord Calledon and I held a fascinating conversation and spent an agreeable hour discussing everything from Monteverdi to James Madison before talk turned to the question of obtaining a passport for my partner, Hendrick Caesar, an Afrikaner, and the servant who would travel with us.

  —And the name of his servant?

  —Saartjie, that is, Sarah . . .

  —Last name?

  —Baartman. Sarah Baartman.

  —She is appearing in person?

  —Yes, she’s just outside in the anteroom . . . If you’d like . . .

  —No, no, that’s not necessary. I need only to ascertain that she appeared in person to request her passport.

  —Thank you.

  —My pleasure, Dr. Dunlop. And have a safe passage home.

  As we walked down the wide red-carpeted hall to the exit, I showed Saartjie her passport. She recognized the Crown’s seal and reveled in the incredible beauty of the document with its black letters running across the page like, as she put it, !Naeheta Magahâs’s painted bulls.

  —It means you have free passage out of Africa.

  —It means, said Saartjie, who was now Sarah, that I am free . . .

  I felt a qualm but said only:

  —Free as a bird.

  —Can I keep it?

  —Of course. A passport is personal property. Just don’t lose it.

  We left the horses tethered and wandered down to the wharf to look at our ship in harbor. It was the Exeter and in a few weeks it would take us to England’s shores.

  —I will call you Sarah from now on, I said, since that’s the name on your passport.

  —I never liked Saartjie. My real name is Ssehura.

  —Ssehura, very p
retty.

  —Sarah Baartman is pretty too. You know, I have a secret. One day, last year, I came down to the wharves to look at the boats and saw you for the first time. You were standing at the hull of a tall dark green schooner with indigo sails. You had on a red and blue uniform. Your hair was longer than it is now, and you had some kind of brass instrument attached to your wrist.

  —That’s why I was so surprised to see you at the farm. It is as if all this is the rainmaker’s prediction . . . she continued excitedly.

  —Who’s the rainmaker? I said. I knew what a rainmaker was.

  —Why, !Naeheta Magahâs, the thing-that-should-never-have-been-born . . . It is like meeting the purple heron on the road, who looks after me . . . It’s fate.

  —You saw me? A year ago? My God. I remember that day. The ship was the Asia out of Madagascar. The instrument I held was a new telescope I was trying out. Fate, I said, it must be.

  —Yes, wigchelvooden, said Sarah in Dutch.

  6

  In one word, it is necessary that we not be blinded by a single species of living matter, but compare them all to each other and pursue the life and the phenomenon of which all beings that have been endowed with a portion are composed. It is only at that price that we can hope to lift the veil of mystery that conceals the essence.

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Thirty Lessons in Comparative Anatomy

  Black moon, the English month of May, 1810. I found myself standing on the deck of the HMS Exeter with a new name and a new passport. Sarah Baartman. I whispered it to myself as I leaned against the rails and watched the fortress of Cape Town become smaller and smaller. The ocean beckoned and I succumbed to dream of discovering what a world that had abolished slavery would be like. I had no one to say goodbye to. Everyone was dead. I had no one to explain to why I was making this voyage. If I explained it to another Khoekhoe, I would have had to say that I was traveling to Bakuba, a faraway land in the sky from which no Khoekhoe had ever returned.

  According to Master Dunlop, this ship was a schooner of three masts and six hundred tons. It carried merchandise from Ceylon, Java, Sumatra and Zanzibar. The passengers were lodged on the main deck, which was portioned off into cabins and common rooms. We were more than twenty.

  The white passengers on the HMS Exeter were not happy that there was a Hottentot amongst them. They complained bitterly to the captain that I should be in steerage with the other servants and Africans. As usual, Master Dunlop had an answer. I was desperately ill, under his care, on my way to London to seek aid from a renowned specialist. When the passengers then complained of a “diseased Negro” on board who could contaminate everyone, Master Dunlop invented still another story: I was a princess worth my weight in gold, certainly not suffering from a contagious disease. As royalty, I could not mingle with common folk, and so a special dining room was set up in my stateroom and I took my meals alone. It was still not clear to me how I had come to be upon this sailing ship moving swiftly across the waters of the Atlantic to London. I hadn’t planned it this way. And Master Dunlop, had he paid my bride-price or had he not? Was I his wife or simply a kidnapped Khoekhoe, to be used to beget riches for two foolish white men? Whatever it was, I thought, it was wigchelvooden.

  The passengers continued to snub me and we kept to ourselves. From time to time, Master Dunlop descended into the belly of the ship to check on his animals, his giraffe skin, his skulls and fossils. There were, I realized, people down there as well: servants and slaves and captured Africans belonging to the white passengers on deck.

  In the evening, when everyone else had retired for the night, I emerged from my cabin to roam the upper deck, my chapur hiding my race and my figure just as it had in Cape Town. But nothing would replace those nights under a canopy of blinking stars, surrounding a crescent moon. It was the Black moon month, or May, and the constellations would fix themselves once again in the heavens, and milk and honey would flow back at the Chamboos. I spent my lonely watch counting the flying fish and the shooting stars and opening my nose to the sea winds. The Cape moved further and further away until I could no longer smell land. The stars became brighter and brighter as the haze that land produced lifted and I could see them clearly in a sky that met only the perfect mirror of the ocean. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Master Hendrick would accompany Master Dunlop and me to London as partner to Dunlop and manager of my person. I began to wonder who was paying our passage and underwriting the bills, but I didn’t dare question either of them. I felt safe with Master Dunlop. He had promised. The gold coin in his palm was the guarantee.

  The herd of white people who flocked on deck every morning dressed as if they were attending the governor’s new opera house in Cape Town, those who refused my presence amongst them were of all sorts: English immigrants and Dutch refugees, students returning to school, merchants transporting goods, army officers, soldiers of fortune, women heading towards marriages, or sons to attend funerals, a good crowd of twenty whites who strolled the deck, played whist, fished, read books or engaged in long conversations that sometimes included dark looks in my direction if I ventured on deck. Sometimes, I ignored them, needing the walk and fresh air. Sometimes I appeared with Master Dunlop and Master Hendrick, following slightly behind them in a servant’s mode. There were several black sailors on board with whom I passed the time, listening to their stories even though they were forbidden to mix with the passengers. Black servants didn’t count, however, and they assumed I was a maidservant traveling with my masters. They taught me much about the ship and took me down into its entrails, with its cranks and screws and chains and gears, its ropes and sailcloths, cannons and kitchens. They also taught me a lot about white people I didn’t know.

  I took happily to the sea, found it thrilling and never experienced sea-sickness. I kept to my room, venturing into company only with my masters and once entertaining the passengers with a song on my guitar.

  The days passed one after the other. We were more than ten days out of Cape Town when one evening, having slipped away from my cabin after my lonely supper, I met Master Dunlop.

  —You like ships, I see, he said, catching me unawares.

  —Yes, I like the closeness of the sky, I said. I like the speed, like riding on the back of a whale, slicing the waters that open up before it like grass. It’s those, I pointed upwards, indigo sails, that I have never seen spread like that, like the wings of a bird, like clouds . . . The Khoekhoe don’t have sails . . . We have only canoes for fishing.

  —I know how you feel, I too love the sea, where everything is possible, where every path lies open before your very eyes, there . . . Just over the horizon, whatever your heart desires. The sea was made for dreamers. Or perhaps dreamers were made for the sea . . .

  —Why doesn’t this ship get lost in all this? How does it know where it’s going? It follows the sun?

  —It follows the stars and constellations.

  —Which are always changing.

  —No, you change, Sarah, the stars remain fixed.

  —I would like to change.

  —So would I.

  Master Dunlop turned his back against the railings and leaned back, peering down at me. Stars, like the eyes of a staring crowd, surrounded him like a glittering curtain blinking as if alive, as mysterious as Master Dunlop’s soul.

  —You look like a spirit, all covered up in that white chapur.

  —Perhaps I should go scare some of the other passengers . . . Booooooo, and I lifted my arms in the air.

  —Do you know what an odyssey is?

  —No.

  —Well, an odyssey is a long voyage by sea in which you search for something, a person, a treasure, redemption, revenge . . . And along the way you suffer many trials and tribulations and dangers and you almost die and you fall ill, and you are rescued, and you fall in love and you do battle with monsters . . . And in the end . . .

  —And in the end?

  —In the end you return home, to the po
int of departure, and nothing is changed and no one even knows you’ve been gone because no one is waiting for you.

  —No one waits for me. Does someone wait for you?

  —No.

  —That’s sad.

  —It’s just a story a poet made up . . . The world’s first hero—or the world’s first fool, he said.

  —The hero, what was his name?

  —Ulysses.

  —The Khoekhoe worship a hero like that, his name is Wounded Knee.

  —Wounded Knee, he repeated.

  After that, he left Master Hendrick and me to our own devices. He seemed more silent, thinner, more fragile than when he was on land, as if the sea brought out some inner anguish.

  —Head winds day after day, he murmured. Won’t we ever get a decent slant on this passage?

  As the days passed, an atmosphere of oppressive quietude settled upon the ship. Every passenger suddenly seemed to close himself up in a sullen cocoon. Very little was said. As if by common consent, human speech was abandoned to the greatness of the sea and each passenger was prisoner of his own private thoughts. For me, those thoughts were of a mysterious and unimagined future that lay just beyond the line of the horizon. The ship seemed to carry the burden of a million lives, it groaned, it creaked, it heaved, it rolled, it rumbled and breathed with the souls of past passengers. And shouldn’t it be so? The black sailors had told me that more than once in her long life, the HMS Exeter had been a ship fitted out for slaving along the Guinean coast. I had looked up at her masts towering towards the sky, immense and indestructible, her sails wrapped, sheltering splendid trangressions, skimming proudly over a graveyard of sins. We were approaching the Cape of Storms, famous for testing the greatest ships with its horror, and its bravest sailors with its terribleness. I turned and lifted my face. I smelled rain. Low and distant thunder carried itself on the air too, and we seemed to be traveling towards it.

  A strong wind swept by and I felt the uneasiness of the ship beneath my feet. A single burst of lightning quivered in the sky as if it flashed into the vault of Magahâs’s cave, illuminating it. Then wind and rain came stampeding across the dark mass of the sea, chasing the ship like the thousand cattle of Magahâs’s secret chamber. Lightning now struck at will, as if it had especially chosen us for its target. The wind howled. Furious gales attacked the ship like personal enemies. Rain descended, beating like drums on the deck and rails, and the storm took us over one by one as if it wanted to rout out the screaming terrified infant in every one of us. Drenched on deck, I listened to the storm’s voice.