Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  —You can be sure, said my master, that this town has never seen anything like you.

  The heavily laden covered wagons in which we also slept and that carried all we possessed—our luggage, the tents, the sets for the exhibit, even the plants and painted posters—rumbled into town. We would stay only a week or so in each town, and searching for new lodgings in each city would waste too much time. Only in the large towns like Manchester, where we were to meet Master Taylor, would we seek out separate lodgings. I was used to traveling from place to place, I had spent my childhood in a tent that could be pitched in less than an hour by a woman as we moved from grazing land to grazing land, following the seasons, living off the land. Now I had returned to that life as we moved through the English countryside.

  It was filled with greenery and majestic woods. Every acre was cultivated and sculpted by man’s hand, not like the wild and savage landscapes of the Cape. Here all was neatly trimmed, walled in, planned and tended. Nothing was left to chance, to the winds and rains, to the devices of Mother Nature.

  Leicester was a mill town of thirty thousand, where fifteen thousand workers were employed to print calico. It was a neat solid town, and every day, new inventions doubled the output of weavers even as they learned to use the flying shuttle and the power loom. Women and children worked beside men just as they did in the coal mines, the brick kilns, the porcelain kilns and the salt quarries. As our carriage entered the city, a whistle blew, signaling the end of the working day, and factory workers aged from five to sixty swarmed out of the crowded sheds and brick and wooden buildings and onto the narrow winding streets heading towards their low, thatch-roofed cottages. They looked as poor as Hottentots, I thought, as if poverty knew no frontier and no race. It was said that the world could not subsist without the poor, for if all were rich, none would submit to the demands of another. It was, then, God’s own will, that some were rich and most poor.

  We raised the tent just outside of town, in a field of clover. The next day, I stood on its stage in my cage and my silk sheath, glaring down at the pallid, dirty, red-eyed audience, who silently gazed back at me in awe. I was indeed a female the likes of which they had never seen. I wore and did the same things I had done in London, but I felt in less danger with these country folk even though their faces and their jokes were just as cruel. They brought their animals, dogs, goats, chickens, and their children, who either stared amazed or burst into tears. Many women came, their hands bright blue from the indigo dyes. We had hired a swordswallower and a fire-eater, Mr. Henry and Mr. Lockwood, to open the show. They performed their act to polite applause. Then, I appeared. To one side stood the gentry and the mill owners, to the other stood the mill workers, the farmworkers and scattered policemen to make sure there was no disorder. The best part was the fireworks we set off in the meadow.

  We made our way from town to town with our penny playbills and makeshift tent. From the looms of Birmingham to the chalk quarries of Liverpool to the steelworks of Leeds, the potteries of north Staffordshire, the foundries of Sheffield, the mines around Newcastle, the glassworks and distilleries of Bristol, the naval dockyards at Chatham and silk looms of Spitalfields. Everywhere there were poor, everywhere there were people willing to spend a shilling (for our price had gone down) for a lottery, a pint of beer or a ticket to see the Hottentot Venus. Despite our dismal living conditions, we kept going where there were tickets to be sold. Once, in Bensham, hundreds of men with red eyes and green hair came from the brass works and frightened me more than I amazed them. The men arrived at work at five o’clock in the morning and left it at eight o’clock at night, so we gave our performance at ten.

  All over the Midlands, we encountered riots, strikes and lockouts because of the Luddites and the trade unions, who were trying to organize the guilds and mill workers. More than once, we were barred from a town because of police curfews, or an ordinance against any assembly of more than three people. Towards the end of September, we approached Manchester to meet up with Henry Taylor’s Touring Shakespeare Company. He would, Master Dunlop assured me, take over our itinerary, which he had organized and paid for in advance. I was curious to see to whom I had been sold.

  Manchester was a town of red brick or brick that would have been red if the smoke from the kilns, the brass works, the pottery works, the steelworks had allowed it to be. As it was, it was a red town painted black in strange and ominous designs, like Magahâs’s face. There were tall chimneys out of which serpents of smoke trailed on forever and ever, coiling and uncoiling into a snake pit of dark clouds. It had a canal with black water and a river that was purple. There was rattling and trembling from the ironworks and foundries which sounded like the screams of mad elephants. There were several large streets and numerous small alleys and courts around which the laborers’ hovels and common latrines were built. Thousands of cottages were built back to back with privies in front and open ashpits in the streets, with a cellar for coal and food and one small room in which to do all the cooking, washing, eating and another in which to sleep. Heaps of refuse and dirt spilled out onto the lanes and alleys. Dark faces peeped out from creaked doors and open windows, watching the circus wagon make its way towards the town square by way of the quay. We gradually moved away from the wretched hovels to a more affluent area, with tall, imposing public buildings: the town hall, the prison, the hospital, the government offices, warehouses, hotels and theaters. Even more than in London, prisons looked like castles, banks like Roman temples, theaters like Egyptian tombs.

  —Manchester, said Master Dunlop, is a textile town, Sarah, and don’t ever forget it. As a surgeon, I can say without exaggeration that there is more filth, worse physical suffering and moral disorder in the basement population of Manchester than in the worst prisons in Europe. Almost half of all children born into the working class in Manchester die before they reach five years of age.

  Was this, I thought, the heavenly Manchester of the Reverend Freehouseland? Was this where all his sweetness and kindness had been born and was buried?

  We had almost reached our destination when a filthy woman in rags, whose age you could not tell, suddenly appeared beside the coach, running as fast as the horses, grasping the door handle of the carriage:

  —You, you people the circus? she panted. You need a freak boy? Seven years old. Born with a humpback and a curved spine. I’m selling him cheap for a good home. He sings sweetly and doesn’t eat much. My little brother . . .

  She raced along beside us, crying out to us without running out of breath for about two hundred paces, and then she dropped back, unable to keep up with our horses. We left her standing in the middle of the lane, one hand on her hip, the other on her head, holding her head rag in place and trying to catch her breath. As I looked back, I had the sense that I had already lived this scene long, long ago; the frozen body of the woman, with the sun behind her casting a long navy shadow, was so familiar to me—it seemed like a lost melody.

  —Wait, I said, clutching Master Dunlop. I know that woman, slow down.

  —The hell you know her, Sarah, that’s impossible. You’ve never been in Manchester before; how could you know some Manchester working girl?

  —But the boy, the humpback.

  —We don’t need any more freaks or any more mouths to feed. He’d probably die on us anyway.

  —But you’re a doctor . . .

  —Was a doctor—not anymore. Look, we’ve arrived.

  By the time we had unloaded our luggage and given the horses to the stableboy, the woman had caught up with us again. She kept her distance, simply squatting in her filthy skirts, pleading with her eyes. Despite the restraining hand of my master, I went over to her. She started with surprise when she saw my face, but quickly recovered.

  —Who are you? I said, as if in a dream.

  —M’name’s Alice Unicorn . . . ma’am, at your service.

  —We can’t help your little brother, but I need someone to help me undress . . .

  Before I co
uld get the words out, she had sprung at my trunk, picking it up and curtsying at the same time, a mean trick.

  —Come, I said, we’ll get you something to eat. You look like you’re starving to death.

  —Ain’t ate in four days, ma’am. Lost my job at the mill, couldn’t feed my brother.

  —Come on, Sarah, my master called from the steps. And don’t pick up that beggar!

  —She’s not begging, I said, it is I who am asking. I nodded and Alice Unicorn followed me into the inn. Henry Taylor was nowhere to be seen, so I sent Alice to the kitchen to be fed and climbed the stairs to my room.

  Suddenly I knew what the forlorn, ragged girl reminded me of. Running alongside the carriage with her elbows flapping, her neck outstretched and despair in her eyes, she made me think of my mother trying to escape the guns of the Boer patrols. Except for the dirt and grime which made her as black as I was, she looked like a female Reverend Freehouseland—same heavy, dark eyebrows, same-color eyes, same straight nose, same mouth. She could have been his daughter.

  By the time the roving actor’s troupe arrived the next day with its owner, Henry Taylor, Alice had already unpacked my clothes, prepared my bath, washed my linen and taken Caroline’s little dog out.

  —You saved my life, ma’am. I was going to drown myself and Victor in the river last night.

  She said it so matter-of-factly that I knew she was telling the truth, that last night she would have died if it hadn’t been for me. Alice firmly believed this and I believed her. It became a kind of emblem between us. Her life was mine because I had rescued it.

  —Shabby as we are, said Master Taylor, his bright eyes blinking, we contrive to make a good show when we enter a town. There are handbills and drums and maybe a piper. We lodge in inns or the houses of trades-men, use barns to store our properties and put on our costumes. We raise a tent with banners in a meadow or a marketplace if there is no theater or town hall. Or we have even taken a large room in an inn and turned it into a players’ house by suspending green draperies from the ceiling (the color of players’ curtains must be green). Hard as this life is, I’d have no other . . . If I have money, he laughed, I lend it. If I have none, I do without. We players are a set of merry undone dogs, he laughed again, and though we often want the means of life, we are seldom without the means of mirth. We play the country fairs and the houses of country squires alongside the acrobats, freaks, musicians and singers, ropedancers, fortune-tellers and keepers of strange animals such as bears and Hottentots . . .

  14

  Why would the actual races not be modifications of those ancient races that are found amongst fossils, modifications which would have been shown by local circumstances and the change of climate, and explained by the long succession of years?

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals

  on the Surface of the Globe

  Crooked Fire, the English month of April, 1812. So this was the man who now owned one fourth of me, I thought. He was short and stocky without being fat, although he had a potbelly and his legs were bowed. But his face was the handsomest I had ever seen, even more beautiful than John Kemble’s, and his eyes were an unearthly green, as green as African orchids. His eyes as well as his mouth never stopped laughing, and despite myself, I was caught up in his mirth and could not resist his good humor. He was also, as we all would find out, a softhearted crook, ready with any scheme to fleece the public or cheat at cards, for which he had an uncontrollable passion. Except when he was in costume, he always wore a green scarf wrapped around his neck, a gold earring and, on his left little finger, a signet ring bearing a coat of arms he claimed was his. He was, he told us one night, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Carnarvon and had been born at Highclere—then he changed it to the Earl of Moira of Donington Park in Leicestershire. No one believed him, but we all loved listening to his extravagant lies.

  After Alice became my temporary servant, she and Master Taylor would try to outdo one another with outrageous tales of their hardships and childhood. This is how I learned that Alice was only a few years older than me, although she looked twenty years more. She was perhaps five feet five and had sloping shoulders, wide hips and ample breasts that she bound in linen. A year before, her father had died a violent death, crushed under an avalanche of tons of clay slush that had gushed from the brick factory kiln near Bridestone, where he worked. Her younger sister, who had worked in the Wedgwood porcelain factory, had died of lead poisoning and her older brothers and sisters all worked in the kilns or coal mines of Manchester. Alice had been taken out of the nail factory, where she had been put to work at seven years old, and allowed to attend school until she was twelve. She had learned to read and write and count in the hope that she might enter the convent of St. Jeremy just outside of the town as a servant girl and perhaps even a novice. But, she explained, her religious education had taken a bad turn because her natural skepticism and rebellious nature were not the clay to make a nun. She had resisted religion in her nunnery just as I had resisted reading in my orphanage. Yet we both agreed the nunnery and the orphanage had been the only safety we had ever known in life. When it was decided she was not fit for a nunnery, Alice was sent into service in the manor house of the Duke of Chester. There she began her life of service as a weeder in the vast Italian-style gardens of the park, then she worked as a scullery maid, a kitchen maid, a laundry maid and finally as a dairy maid. The duke employed forty-six servants, sixteen of whom were upper servants divided into many grades and ranks. Thus she had learned the workings of a great house from top to bottom, just as I had learned to keep Mistress Alya’s mansion.

  —There were special china cloths and dusters for housemaids, she explained, glass cloths for the butler, pocket cloths for the footman, lamp cloths for the porter, horn cloths for the servants’ hall boy. The dustpans were all numbered; each housemaid had her own and had to learn how to hold it together with a candle in one hand so that she could use the brush with the other. Alice also had to learn to polish the metal fittings on furniture with fine sand, how to polish paintwork with cream dressing, how to sweep carpets with damp tea leaves, how to remove old polish with vinegar, mix new beeswax with turpentine; how to wash high ceilings with soda and water while standing on a stepladder nine feet high; how to dust brocaded walls and rub them down with tissue paper and silk dusters; how to unstring and scrub venetian blinds; how to take up and beat carpets; how to whiten corridors with pipe clay and spread French chalk on hardwood floors before a ball; how to make a bed, how to lay a tea table, remember at what time sunlight came into the various rooms so that the blinds could be drawn to protect the furniture or that windows could be opened to air the room . . .

  —I could tell you a thing or two about cleaning a house . . . Ever have to tie up a heifer’s tail to keep her rump clean?

  —You’re joking, laughed Alice.

  —My brush is my sword; my broom, my weapon/Sleep I know not, nor any repose . . .

  —And for that I earned five pounds a year as an under-housemaid, laughed Alice. But I was on my way to being an upstairs maid when one of the duke’s sons caught me under the stairs, raped me and got me with child. I was dismissed as soon as the steward found out about my pregnancy and thrown out without a reference. Without a reference there was no hope of finding another job in service. After the baby came, I found work as a wet nurse and had to leave my child in the care of my mother. I named him Eric. When he was eighteen months old, he died during the week of Lent. I couldn’t get home to give him a proper funeral for a month because my mistress had guests. I never went back. I got a job in a textile factory working the loom, quite a step down from service in a great house. I found a hovel to rent and moved out of my mother’s shack in the brickfields where she worked. My mother had given birth to twelve children, five of which survived until adulthood. Just after my father died, she told me she was pregnant again and could no longer keep my little brother Victor at home. Wh
at was I to do? I told her I would take him in. But I lost my job at the mill after an accident damaged my loom. The superintendent fired me without pay and once again without a reference. I was out on the street. I’d been looking for work for months. I’d put Victor out to beg, that’s when I saw your circus caravan arriving.

  Alice had had a life more wretched than a Hottentot’s. She had lost her baby. She too was an orphan. She was my sister under the skin. I vowed to keep her close to me and find a solution for Victor.

  —But if you come with us, what will happen to Victor?

  —But he can come too! He doesn’t eat much and he can be a freak! He has a big hump and spindly legs, we can make him into something. He can sleep under my bed. I will take care of him, I promise.

  Master Taylor had the answer.