Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  —Huh, she’s got dozens of songs and rhymes and cartoons about her circulating in London and all of England and Ireland, complained Peter Van Wageninge, laughing in spite of himself.

  —We have to get to Sarah Baartman, I concluded. We have all the evidence we need: witnesses, letters to the editors, newspaper articles and advertisements and our own two eyes. I insist we take Caesar and Dunlop to court for keeping the Hottentot Venus in involuntary servitude.

  —Robert always comes up with the most radical and violent solution to any problem, interjected Van Wageninge.

  It’s in my blood, I thought, contemplating the pale whiteness of Van Wageninge. I am a mulatto street boy, the bastard of a Scottish nobleman who sold his mother when she was five months pregnant with him. I came to be a Christian late in life. I am both radical and violent. I was brought up by my grandmother, a poor black slave on the island of Jamaica, and witnessed her brutal flogging by orders of her master, my own father, a white man and a Christian, when I was eight years old. My grandmother was accused of witchcraft. The terror visited upon my mother and grandmother marked me, I thought, for the rest of my life, which began in 1761. At seventeen, I joined the Royal Navy during the American Revolution. I took part in the Gordon Riots of 1780, led by the American Negroes Benjamin Bowsey and John Glover. I am a self-taught historian, a self-taught theologian, a self-taught preacher and orator, who has tried to synthesize radical Christianity and the republicanism of Thomas Paine. I continue in spite of persecution and blacklisting and prison to preach proletarian abolitionism. By force of obstruction, persecution and censorship, the Crown hopes to crush me, and prevent me from preaching freely, but it has only turned me into an author, dragging me from obscurity to fame. My writings have turned me into a brilliant and dangerous intellectual. Something I had not been until now. My sermons attract a multitude of listeners in my little church, my Horrors of Slavery has sold thirty thousand copies. My aristocratic father never did anything for me. The closest I ever came to receiving help from my Scottish family was a cracked sixpence and some beer given me by a servant at a time when I and my pregnant wife were close to starvation. That at a time when my father’s estates, Mint, Paradise, Retreat, Endeavor, Inverness, Spring Garden, Moreland and Mount Edgecombe were worth precisely thirty million pounds . . .

  —Robert, said Macauley to Van Wageninge, has done time in Cold Bath Fields penitentiary, Dorchester prison and Gillspur jail for everything from theft (guilty) to keeping a bawdy house (not proven). He is at this moment under indictment for using blasphemous, profane, scurrilous, gross and violent discourse against the Church of England. That is why he must stay out of this Venus case and out of the courtroom. If he even opens his mouth in front of a judge, we are done for.

  —In other words, a damn good man.

  —My half brother James is the solicitor general for Scotland. Needless to say, my activities are very embarrassing to him and the family, I said dryly, amused at Van Wageninge’s shocked face.

  We spent the next weeks in the library of the institution planning our suit. Macauley, a redoubtable barrister, felt we had a strong case, but I knew we would have to produce a writ of habeas corpus in order to get the Venus away from Dunlop and Caesar. That meant we had to convince Baartman to bear witness and sign an affidavit against her keepers.

  I knew I couldn’t stay away from the King’s Court. Zachary Macauley proposed a compromise. I could attend the hearing but I was prohibited from all speech, on pain of being ejected from the proceedings by my own lawyers. I was not to sit at their table, but in the public gallery on the upper floor. I agreed to everything, I was so anxious to witness the King versus Alexander Dunlop and his demise as the Venus’s keeper.

  I knew I had to get over my obsession with the Venus. But her face and figure haunted me. Flashes of the sufferings of my mother and grandmother assaulted me. I had only to set eyes on Sarah Baartman and she, and she alone, could evoke the hole dug in the dirt floor to accommodate my mother’s womb swollen with myself while she was being flogged by my father. There was the vicious torture of my grandmother, Talkee Amy, accused of witchcraft and burned to death. I had never been to Africa like Macauley, but I knew the horrors of slavery: the plantation, the floggings, the neck-collaring, the padlocking, the chains, the ship holes, rape, sodomy, forced feedings, cauterizing, branding, executions. I had experienced firsthand the slave system of the West Indies thanks to my own father. The Venus had not suffered these things. No, she was more like a dark-skinned Eve who had wandered out of her African Garden of Eden into the Inferno of the ignorant, prejudiced, immoral and self-satisfied British Empire; bloodsuckers feeding on the cadaver of its brown colonials, its greedy industries, the docility of its proletarian class. Sarah’s exploitation was, I thought, commercial, spiritual, hypocritical, lascivious and pornographic. It was the murder of the human spirit that Thomas Paine so adored. The Venus might think she was a free agent, but I knew better. She was being used and misused as a freakish other, a subhuman symbol of sex and degradation. Venus was only a dirty limerick, a filthy eye-rolling voyeuristic joke. She was unimportant to the abolitionist movement, to civil rights and to human rights. She was nothing political. Despite the fact that I had triumphed over the British Empire and the King, I could not convince one lone peasant girl to give up her delusions . . . and reclaim her dignity. Why then couldn’t I get this simpleminded shepherdess out of my mind? Why was it impossible to forget her?

  I reviewed my stormy interviews with her. Every time I had taken her small perfect hand, always clothed in red leather or silk, and gazed into her eyes, she had become as immaterial as a ghost. Her eyes had become restless globes. Her high cheekbones had glowed, her forehead had wrinkled, her face had gone all hollow and fleshless, all the sweetness gone. She had been terrified of me—me, a black man.

  —Just because I consent to this life doesn’t mean I choose it, she had said in Dutch.

  —I beg your pardon?

  —Just because I consent to this life doesn’t mean I choose it, she had repeated in her broken English.

  The eternal pout of her lips had taken on an impertinent mournfulness. The Venus had been trying to figure out the meaning of a black man who was white, a black man who was free, a black man who spoke to books. I had frightened her, sitting there, glowering and motionless, bullying her, willing her to understand, amazed to see my deformity in any creature other than myself.

  10

  The Caucasian race, to which we ourselves belong, is chiefly distinguished by the beautiful form of the head . . . Second comes the Mongolian, and then the poor last: the Negro race is confined to the south of Mount Atlas. Its characteristics are black complexion, woolly hair, compressed cranium and flattish nose. In the prominence of the lower part of the face and the thickness of the lips, it manifestly approaches the monkey tribe.

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Thirty Lessons in Comparative Anatomy

  Eland’s moon, the English month of November 1810. A month later, Reverend Wedderburn sued Master Hendrick for sequestration and kidnapping, dealing in contraband, affront to public decency, and assault and battery, in the King’s Court of Chancery according to my master’s curses and swearing. Master Dunlop was also cited for the same crimes. His Majesty’s prosecutors came to my rooms in St. James’s Square with the King’s warrant to question me. What else could I have done? It was the King’s command. I begged that Master Dunlop be present but the solicitor general, a man called James Temple, would not allow it. Only the solicitor general, the coroner, Master Dunlop’s lawyer and the African Association lawyers were allowed present. All the time they were there, my thoughts were only of Master Dunlop, listening to his every command. It was habit since his sudden and unexpected return, only days before the trial was to begin.

  —Why did you come back? I blurted out.

  —Because I said I was coming back. Because I promised.

  —I believed you were gone forever, that
you were never coming back!

  —How could you think that, Sarah! When I was working my head off settling my affairs to get back to you.

  —You are married.

  —Not anymore. I’m divorced now.

  —Why didn’t you tell me?

  —And have you throw me out? I had no choice! Would you have left the Cape with me? I’m sorry I deceived you. I’m sorry.

  —You could have told me in your letters.

  —Letters?

  —The letters you wrote to me while you were away.

  —I wrote to you? Huh. Yes. Well . . . Of course I couldn’t tell you by post! I had to wait until I could speak to you face-to-face! Let me see . . . these letters, will you?

  I handed over the three sheets and the three envelopes with my name written on them. Master Dunlop unfolded the sheets and frowned at them for a very long time.

  —Who read you these letters? You can’t read.

  —Master Hendrick.

  Master Dunlop’s hand was shaking as he handed back the sheets of paper.

  —Here’re your letters, Sarah.

  —What’s wrong? I asked.

  —Nothing. Nothing, he replied turning away, cursing. I told you everything. Hendrick didn’t read everything. He . . . left out parts. He didn’t read you everything I wrote . . .

  —Why would he do that? I asked.

  —How would I know, you stupid cow? How would I know? Because he hates me . . . because he hates you—because you’re nothing but money to him.

  —And to you?

  —Now what made you ask me that?

  He had disappeared for six months and was now back as if he had just gone for a stroll around St. James’s Park, reclaiming my dowry and once more promising marriage.

  —When?

  —As soon as we’re rid of the abolitionists, he repeated, especially that bastard Wedderburn.

  —And why should you be in charge of anything, grumbled Master Hendrick, you sold your shares of Saartjie to that actor Henry Taylor!

  —Only half of my shares! I know the English well enough to know that a foreigner like you hasn’t a chance in an English court of law! A colonial to boot! English xenophobia would work against any foreigner, but especially against a just-conquered colonial importing slavery, which the motherland only abolished three years ago . . . the Crown will listen to English radicals like Wedderburn, that reverend bastard—and Macauley, that effete aristocrat . . .

  —They’ve presented a complaint, whined Master Hendrick.

  —You’ve nothing to worry about, Hendrick, now that I’m back—I’m a Scot in my own country, and a surgeon in His Majesty’s navy.

  —They claim I’m free, I interjected meekly.

  —And so you are, Sarah—who’s talking about slavery except them? You are perfectly free—free to become a ward of the state! Free to be put in the workhouse, the poorhouse, the whorehouse, the jailhouse or the damned fuckin’ crazy house! Is that what you want, Miss Baartman? Which do you prefer? Ha—none of them? Well, this country, this lovely England, has lots of them for the likes of you—and they love to stick people, including your precious Mr. Wedderburn, in them!

  Dunlop paced up and down, pointing first at Hendrick and then at me.

  —I’d just like to see you, Sarah, when your African Institution friends, after gaining as much publicity as they can off of you for their radical causes, put you in a charity ward! Then you’ll be all alone in England, without me, with no friends, no protection, no money, no husband . . . Without me! Do you hear?

  I collapsed at Master Dunlop’s warnings. Whom could I trust? These strange white men? The white black man? Or Master Dunlop, who had returned? Was he my only chance? I loved him. I would stick with what I knew. I had no other choice.

  The lawyer that my masters had hired for the trial was as smooth as ivory, hard as a diamond barrister named Sir Stephen Geelesee. We were to reply in the King’s Court to the accusations of Master Macauley and Master Robert Wedderburn. Master Alexander and Master Hendrick would have to produce proof that they had not brought me into England without my consent or as contraband.

  —The allegations are, said the lawyer, that you smuggled the Venus out of the Cape without the knowledge of the governor, Lord Calledon, and that she was kept under duress and publicly exhibited against her will. You must prove she gave her consent before leaving Cape Town. Can you produce a contract between you and her, in which there is remuneration and a share of the profits, concerning the exhibition?

  —Of course not. Saartjie can’t even read, let alone have the slightest idea of what a contract is.

  —When did you leave the Cape?

  —In May.

  —And when did you arrive in England?

  —In September.

  —I’ll have a notary public draw you up a contract in Dutch, dated October twenty-ninth, 1810, between you and the Venus certifying your relationship as one of employer-domestic servant. We’ll have to have someone read it to her in Dutch and swear she understands it, and then, have her sign it with her mark. It would run from March 1810, before you sailed from the Cape, for six years, to March 1816.

  —Will you sign it? sighed Dunlop. You’ve been so strange lately . . .

  —What is a contract?

  —Exactly like a Hottentot marriage contract: a solemn promise to abide by your word of honor.

  —This is the marriage contract according to the English? I asked.

  —Like a marriage contract . . . not . . . His voice trailed off.

  —Well, we will have to make it worth her while. What did you promise her in the marriage contract, Mr. Dunlop?

  —Fortune and fame, replied my master, leaving out “marriage.”

  —A little more concrete than that.

  —Well, that Sarah would exhibit herself just as she was. That we would conquer London and share the box office receipts in two equal parts.

  —I will not wash anybody’s feet, I said. And no housework, I said importantly.

  The lawyer and Master Dunlop looked at each other, smiling.

  —You will even receive a salary, Saartjie.

  —How much?

  —Twelve guineas a year . . . for six years, that’s seventy-two guineas in all . . .

  I thought it over.

  —That’s more than ten pounds, isn’t it?

  —Indeed.

  The notary public, whose name was Arend Jacob Guitard of Sweeting’s Alley, read the contract aloud in Dutch, asked me if I understood it, then I had to sign another affidavit swearing that I understood what he had read to me. This would be the defense of my keepers before the King.

  —Twelve guineas per year, for domestic duties, repeated Master Guitard, the Dutch interpreter. You will also allow yourself to be viewed by the public of England and Ireland just as you are. All your expenses including room and board are to be paid by Mr. Dunlop. He accepts responsibility for your transportation from and to South Africa, in case of illness he will pay all medicines, doctor’s fees. If you want to return to South Africa, Mr. Dunlop will defray the cost of repatriating you.

  I was astonished. This was more than he had promised at the Cape.

  —And the receipts, I said.

  —He will hold your share of the profits until the end of the contract, which runs from March tenth, 1810, to March tenth, 1816. When you return to the Cape, you will be not only famous but rich.

  —What are you going to do about the men from the institution? I finally asked him. I knew these men were coming back.

  —Nothing. We’re covered by the contract . . . our contract . . . Let them rant and rave. They can do nothing. We have a valid contract unless you repudiate it.

  —What she does beyond that is no one’s affair, insisted Master Dunlop to the African Institution men. This show is a private arrangement between our maid, myself and Colonel Caesar which is perfectly legal. Our private arrangements are not subject to any interference from you or from English law. As I hav
e repeated, this woman, a member of the Khoekhoe tribe, also known as a Hottentot, is under the direct protection of Lord Calledon, the governor of Cape Colony. I received permission from him to remove Saartjie from the colony and have a passport signed by his lordship.

  —And are you prepared to produce these documents?

  —In court. Not to you, sir, and not to a bunch of lawyers, abolitionists and radicals who think nothing of depriving this poor female of her livelihood under the pretense of indecency and morality and Mr. Wilberforce!

  —You will certainly have to answer in court to our allegations, as we have no intention of retracting them, warned the Dutchman.

  —And leaving this woman a beggar on the streets of London by your actions or obliging her to accept transport back to Africa, like a convict, is, I suppose, only your right!

  —We are a beneficent association for the civilization of Africans . . .

  —And you want Sarah here to become dependent on the charity of a beneficent association for slaves, paupers and morons, shouted Master Dunlop. Is that what you want, Sarah? he said, turning to me.

  —I don’t want no charity. I don’t want be shut up in a refuge for ex-slaves. I don’t want be shipped back to Jamaica or Sierra Leone! (All this had been carefully explained to me.) What did these men want with me I thought? Was I not unhappy enough as it was? True, my master had returned. But all I had in the world was my contract with him.

  —We consider Baartman here your prisoner.

  —You, said Master Hendrick, are the ones who want to make Miss Baartman a prisoner . . . for your own political ends . . . and those of your Liberal friends in Parliament. Miss Baartman and Lord Grenville are a little too popular these days . . . and have gotten a little too much publicity . . .

  This time, there were even more men. Some were those who’d been present before: an older, stout man from the African Institution, the solicitor general, the Dutch gentleman, who had spoken to me in Dutch; but with them was a mob big enough to hang me. There were King’s men, the African Association men, Dutch men who translated for me and wrote down everything I said. The black man who was white had returned but did not speak. It was the Dutch gentleman, Master Van Wageninge who asked me most of the questions. But the white black man kept whispering in his ear, his eyes never leaving mine.