Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  I bless my stars that I have done with Tuesday. But alas! Wednesday was likewise a day of great doings . . .

  Love to all.

  Yours affectionately,

  JANE

  Miss Austen, Edward Austen’s Esq.

  Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent

  I lifted my pen from the paper and thought about what John Kemble had said about our prejudices and our belief in our own superiority and our ravishment of the world because of it, of which this poor dislocated creature was a symbol. What had I really felt, standing there in the crowd with Mary, witnessing this cruel humiliation of one of my sex, but a secret, sniveling joy at my own safety and invulnerability . . . wasn’t that why I loved freak shows? She, the Venus, was the Other, I was me, Jane, safe within the confines of my privileged provincial white world. I could never be she. As long as I did nothing to trespass it.

  And that was the rub. Cowardness. The four feathers. My options, I thought wryly, were limited to this suspended pen I held in my hand whose ink bled onto the middle finger of my right hand. And no, I was not going to use this pen to denounce her suffering or what I had seen. Or to write about her or recognize her plight in any other way than in this letter to Cassandra . . . Forgive us, I thought, our trespasses, Lord, and deliver us, or at least, quarantine us, from evil . . .

  13

  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 . . .
r />   —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.

  And when the snow and rains came and the chill of the dull sooty English winter was at its worst, tiny Caroline fell ill. Her doctors bled, cupped, purged the miniature body to no avail. The fairy princess died in my arms of pleurisy.

  The death of Caroline brought back sharp memories of the day I had burned the body of !Kung on the beach. I kept the Sicilian fairy’s book of Grimm’s fairy tales as a memento, although I still couldn’t read it by myself. I also found a pair of her tiny doeskin gloves and added them to my extravagant collection. The Sicilian fairy’s keeper, a certain Dr. Gilligan, along with his wife and brother-in-law, an actor, had stolen her body away from their lodgings on Duke Street, St. James’s, in the dead of night. They had disappeared owing the landlord twenty-five pounds. Left behind were the fairy’s tiny cast-iron bed and all her costumes. But even worse, Dr. Gilligan had sold Caroline for five hundred pounds. She was bought to be dissected and used as an anatomy lesson for the Royal College of Surgeons. The other circus freaks claimed her death was never reported to the police and that another anatomist had offered Dr. Gilligan even more for her body. When Caroline’s father arrived from Dublin to claim her remains, her skeleton was already on display at the Royal College. Caroline’s tragic end frightened me into drinking even more. For I also realized that a fickle public was getting tired of the Hottentot Venus.

  Master Dunlop and Master Caesar began to have fewer receipts. The price of viewing went up to four shillings. My room was locked at night and the key hun
g around my master’s neck. I no longer cared. I was sick at heart. Master Dunlop decided that a tour of England would revive my spirits, and our popularity in London. They would miss us while we were gone. He made still another promise that at the end of the tour, we would go home to the Cape.

  —The working class and the country gentry deserve the shows of London. They are as curious to see the wonders of the world as the Londonians are . . .

  —Am I to exhibit myself once more, to prove that I am free? I asked.

  —You will recover your notoriety as well as add to the cashbox, replied my master. We have been in London more than two years and tens of thousands of people have seen you. It is time to move on.

  We soon had bookings for Bath, Maidstone, Dublin, Leicester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham and Manchester. To me, they were simply more English names to learn, points on a map. Except for Manchester. There, my beloved Reverend Freehouseland waited for me. I could at least stand and weep over his grave. My only solace now were the cut-glass tumblers of Booth’s gin I had lately acquired a craving for. The spirit shops on Bond Street all knew me now by name. I knew what to do in order not to be afraid anymore—not to feel the English contempt, their black laughter, their black looks, my black silence. I would drink.

  We left London towards the middle of June for Leicester. London had begun to stink as piles of refuse accumulated all over the city and rats and stray dogs and cats roamed the streets. I was glad to be leaving the city. In spite of myself I felt a dull expectation. Scores of white-clad ladies and gentlemen who had not yet fled nonchalantly picked their way across the rotting garbage on the streets to take tea. The carriage and the supply wagon rumbled down the cobbled avenue leading from St. James’s Square at great speed. It was the season of cholera, typhus and diphtheria in London. Since I had had none of these diseases, it was just as well to remove ourselves from the city and its filth, which putrefied under the June sun. Who knew but that I would find peace in the countryside? After all, I had Master Dunlop’s word that he was now divorced and that I would be married before the autumn was over. By dawn we had reached the outskirts of the mill town of Leicester. From a distance, Leicester resembled a shimmering storm of dust, soot and cotton lint. A cloud swirled around the entire city like a fog and rose up over it, blotting out the sun. From the haze and heat, a rainbow appeared for a brief moment in the gray sky. As we approached, the stench of dyes, caustics and ammonia assaulted our noses, and entering the city, we heard the thump of heavy machinery and the vibrating looms shaking the ground like drums.