Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  —There is nothing so unnatural as the status quo, said Master Darwin. In this aspect, man resembles those forms naturalists call protean or polymorphic. Man is so indiscriminate, variable and indifferent that he can turn himself into almost anything—having escaped the rules of natural selection.

  —Is Cuvier not the greatest poet of the century? He calls forth destruction, death becomes alive; in a kind of retrospective apocalypse, we experience the terrifying resurrection of dead worlds—and the little scrap of life vouchsafed us in the nameless eternity of time, can no longer inspire anything but compassion, as another writer, Balzac, has said . . .

  —Certainly no fact is so startling in the long history of the world as the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants, sir.

  —It is incredible how those men of the Enlightenment tended to denounce the fables of their predecessors, continued Master Darwin. Philosophy accepts only what it has fabricated itself.

  —The philosopher only accepts it as long as it gives him, in turn, an argument to plead the noble savage’s cause: innocent victim in revolt against monsters from Europe. Truth prevails, in the end, only as a variation on the fable of dark, unfathomable Africa.

  —So science is a fable for believers? Like religion?

  —I didn’t say that.

  —Didn’t Voltaire say that history was only fictions of various degrees of probability? continued Master Nicolas.

  —Isn’t science the same? What do we really know about man that God hasn’t already shown us?

  —I know that man, all men, evolved from One—within that One is God or evolution or godly evolution . . . replied Master Darwin.

  —You’ve never said that . . .

  —Perhaps, but I believe it. There are prudences to observe because of the ferociousness of some of my colleagues on the matter of race and color . . . Did you ever see her after that day?

  —I saw her dead. I saw her dissected, her body parts passed around like cotton candy at a county fair . . . (Softly) I see her now . . . I see Cuvier washing his hands of her in his silver basin . . .

  —I heard Cuvier once arranged for Napoleon to view her privately . . . It is only a legend I suppose, said Master Darwin.

  —Why is it, Doctor, continued Master Tiedeman, that white freaks are always exhibited as oddities, the exception that proves the rule, while black freaks, on the contrary, are exhibited as typical of their race? With no distinction between them, when they are as different from one another as we are . . .

  The doctor didn’t answer. He was staring at my skeleton, who was listening to him. For a long time, the sculptor and the doctor stood shoulder to shoulder contemplating my bones, bleached, scraped, polished, assembled and mounted as carefully as a church altar. My skeleton was not covered by glass as my effigy was. I hung loose and free, slightly swaying, comic in my magnificence.

  —At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries, Master Darwin continued, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphic apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The gap between man and his nearest relations will grow wider, for man will be more civilized. Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do that much by artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may have occurred in the long course of time through nature’s power of selection, that is by the survival of the fittest . . .

  Master Tiedeman was no longer listening. He was contemplating my skull, which he had once stolen, long ago. Then he examined the delicate bones of my left hand. Silent, I turned golden, then red in the reflection of the low sun’s sinking. There was a mutable silence as I swayed, and my skeleton invaded the rectangle of winter sunlight coming from the gardens outside.

  The glass cases with their inhabitants receded into the deepening shadows, leaving only the luminous outline of Master Darwin’s brutish head. The silence overwhelmed us all, the sculptor and the genius and myself, all valedictorian before the legend of the Hottentot Venus. The two men’s heads bowed as one to that legend and to that illusion before them. Then, as one, they replaced their top hats. The bells of St. Bernard sounded the hour that tolled six, the closing time of the museum.

  They left me as one.

  Part IV

  CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, 2002

  To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. It is to show its vibration, its color, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its color, reveal the substance of its truth—disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment.

  —JOSEPH CONRAD, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus

  Sir,

  They want to sculpt my bust. But I do not want them to. My nigger ugliness in all its lifeless immobility would pass into immortality . . .

  —ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN, Correspondence

  Epilogue

  The circumstances in which we put one species or family before another does not entail that we consider it more perfect or superior to others in the system of nature. Only someone who thinks he can arrange all organisms into one long series can entertain such pretensions. The further I have progressed in the study of nature, the more convinced I have become that this is the most untruthful concept ever introduced into natural history.

  —BARON GEORGES CUVIER,

  Lectures in Comparative Anatomy

  Broad Green, the English month of August, 2002. That was a hundred and forty-two years ago. Master Tiedeman and Master Darwin both lived long lives. Master Darwin lived to be seventy-three. He died rich and famous, elegized by Master Tennyson and buried next to Master Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. Master Tiedeman died in 1879 at the age of ninety, poor and forgotten as he had always lived, in the shadow of the great David. Both Master Darwin and Master Tiedeman had fine Christian burials. I, of course, have never been buried. Neither my baptism in Manchester nor my marriage gave me a passport to any sanctified ground. I never ascended to the paradise of my three reverends; neither the fragrant Garden of Eden of the Reverend Freehouseland, nor the green pastures of the Reverend Brooks, nor the great Hall of Justice of the Reverend Wedderburn. I remained imprisoned in my glass cage looking out at the world, as it changed with each dawn, from my transparent window, wiped clear by a cleaning lady into whose unseeing eyes I stared each day, war or peace. At first, I was upset about that, until I realized this oversight gave me the power to haunt the Museum of Natural History, its gardens and laboratories, and to displace myself in time and space as I chose, for eternity or until my soul finally came to rest. This idea of haunting, which the Khoekhoe call “fawn feet,” and which I continued to practice at the Museum of Man, more than compensated for never sleeping, never dying and never growing old. In Khoe there is a tree called kanniedood,which means “never die”; I became that plant, drawing on its powers invisible to humanity. There were other “fawn feet” in the museum, including Ramses VII’s mummy, but that is another story.

  The first thing that happened occurred about a year after my dissection. Nicolas Tiedeman stole my skull to measure and create an effigy. I haunted him until, quite spooked, he returned it to my skeleton. So frenzied was he, he almost committed suicide by trying to jump off the Concord bridge. I pulled him back. He did not, after all, deserve death just because of a little thievery. I knew he loved me in his way, and so I exemptedhim. But others I intended to haunt to their deaths or at least accelerate their demises with, if possible, a maximum of torment; the former Masters Caesar, Dunlop, Taylor, Réaux, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and of course the eminent Georges Léopold Cuvier, known also as the baron. Alice Unicorn I will come to later.

  The baron proved to be the most difficult. He was arrogant, bold,
this “Napoleon of Intelligence,” but like the Emperor he could be brought down by the weight of his own lust for power. After the Museum of Natural History, he became director of the College of France, then secretary of the Academy of Sciences. Napoleon, who loved him to the end, covered him with honors, including that of grand officer of the Legion of Honor. Louis XVIII had already made him a baron; Louis Philippe named him a peer of France. All this made it easier for me to do my mischief. Such an illustrious and proud personage would never believe he was being haunted by the “fawn foot” of his Vénus Hottentote.

  I discovered the Baron’s weakness. He lied, he cheated on his research. He systematically burned, destroyed or ground up fossils and bones that would have falsified or contradicted his findings. I made sure his enemies learned of this and exposed him. I made sure his secret research fell into the hands of his competitors. He had a daughter. I haunted her to death. He had a golden retriever whose severed head he found in his soup one night. I burned down the Academy of Sciences and started another blaze in the nave of the Protestant church he attended. A priest perished. I made sure he died in the cholera epidemic of 1832. All his children died before him. As a species, as he called people like me, he was extinct. His brain was dissected on the same table as mine and preserved in one of his own bell jars. It was, as to weight and size, not that much larger than mine.

  Alexander Dunlop, who had sworn he would never go back to sea, accepted a post as ship’s doctor on the Dutch pirate slaver the Brigade, which sank with all aboard just off the coast of Guinea in 1818 as a result of a slave revolt of a hundred and two of the seven hundred bondsmen.

  Hendrick Caesar returned to the Cape and his family in 1814 with the money he had earned by selling me to Henry Taylor. He invested it all in shorthorn cattle. He was soon penniless as drought made his lands worthless for grazing and foot-and-mouth disease destroyed his herds. Yellow fever took his wife and children. For several years he drank and gambled. He lost his preserve in a craps shoot and went to work for his brother Peter. He was massacred in a Zulu uprising in 1827, the same year as the great fire at the Academy of Sciences in Paris.

  The Zulu uprising, which destroyed his crops and killed his brother, made Peter Caesar pack his family up, sell his farm and immigrate to the United States. There, en route to Fort Apache, renegades from the same tribe attacked his wagon train of three hundred and fifty-five souls on a wild and lonely plain in the New Mexico territory. His youngest child, Clara, escaped death and was adopted by her Indian captors, who raised her as a squaw. She married a brave, named Elk Heart, who was killed in the Battle of Date Creek in 1832.

  Henry Taylor remained in England, returning to Halifax and marrying an Englishwoman named Nellie Bookenshire. Her dowry helped him set up his own theater in which he produced Shakespeare’s plays. The theater burned to the ground with them in it in 1833. In his will, he left a thousand pounds to the Orphans Fund for Actors and Musicians.

  Sieur Réaux was murdered by persons unknown outside the Pied de Porc café on the night of January 17, 1816. He was found half devoured in the cage of his dancing bear, Adolph, in the early hours of the morning by his servant, Alice Unicorn, who had gone to feed the animal. Réaux’s safe had been emptied and he was buried as a pauper in a common grave at the cemetery of St. Clément without the benefit of rites. It appeared to be an underworld vendetta, as his testicles had been cut off and stuffed into his mouth.

  Alice Unicorn returned shortly thereafter to London, where she bought a town house, and brought Victor back home to live. She opened a wool and leather shop in St. James’s, which made her a fortune. She married a clergy-man in 1819 and had a large family. She never set foot in France again.

  William Bullock took one of his most successful spectacles of freaks on tour to the American West. He enjoyed great success for many years. After lucrative runs in Chicago, Minneapolis and Austin, he reached St. Louis, where he was gunned down in a saloon following an argument over one of his actresses. His body, which was to be repatriated to London, was lost when the Confederate ship transporting it was sunk in 1863 by a Union gunship, the Calledon, which patroled the Mississippi River.

  Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who had survived the Revolution, the reign of terror, Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the second restoration and the cholera epidemic that killed the Baron Cuvier, published his Philosophie Anatomique in 1818, in which he stated that, philosophically speaking, there was only one species of animal. In 1819, he published his Natural History of Mammals with Baron Cuvier, which was a great success and made him famous. In 1830, he and the baron argued their theories in the most famous debate in the history of biology, which went on nonstop for five whole days. Two years later, Baron Cuvier was dead. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire survived him by twelve years.

  The Reverend Wedderburn, whose hand I should have taken, returned to Jamaica after doing time in Cold Bath Fields and Giltspur prisons on trumped-up charges of sedition for his ideas about slavery, abolition and workers’ unions. He saw many of his comrades hanged and he himself said he existed for the rest of his life “as though a halter be around my neck.” Just like me. He was arrested for running a bawdy house (false) and distributing the first revolutionary tracts to the West Indies (true). For that, he was accused of “blasphemous libel” by the Crown. He defended his own self before the Court and was sentenced to two years’ hard labor in Carlisle jail. His final prison terms resulted in his autobiography, The Horrors of Slavery, a great success. He died in 1838, after several other brushes with the law, sick, forgotten and penniless in the West Indies, the first advocate of black power.

  Napoleon Bonaparte died of arsenic poisoning on the former Khoekhoe island of St. Helena, alone, suffering from a rare illness that slowly changed him into a woman with small breasts and a penis only half an inch long . . . In other words, in the end, he turned into a thing-that-should-never-have-been-born, resembling the Venus he despised.

  Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War in America. He defeated the Confederacy, freed the slaves by proclamation and saved the Union. This cost him one dead soldier for every freed slave. But he lost his young son, his wife went crazy and he was assassinated before the end of his presidency. After he signed the Emancipation Proclamation he said, But for your race among us, there would be no war, although many men engaged on eitherside do not care for you one way or the other. He added, I could conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the Negro into our social and political life as our equal. We can never attain the ideal union our fathers dreamed of with millions of an alien, inferior race among us.

  Other things happened. I found myself included in the Great Paris Centennial of 1889. A great new edifice was built at the Trocadéro and I was moved with great care from the Jardin des Plantes to what was to become known as the Museum of Man. It rose in the shade of the great tower constructed by Gustave Eiffel that year. Paris was illuminated, electrical impulses were sent across the ocean. Surely my glass case deserved a new label. But my label remained the same:

  Statue in colored plaster

  Of the Venus Hottentot, Bushwoman (twenty-seven years)

  Deceased in Paris, January 1, 1816

  Molded from nature following death

  Skeleton of the Venus Hottentot;

  Oil painting of the Venus Hottentot;

  Brain conserved in bell jar of Sarah Baartman;

  The genital organs of the Hottentot Venus;

  A wax model of the genital organs of

  Sarah Baartman.

  I became a spectator to the twentieth century’s dance of death, Europe twice, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Africa, China, India, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, Palestine, Israel. From the unexplored, uncharted mystery of Africa, I became the body politic of Africa’s intercourse with Europe, which consisted of discovery, exploitation, war, extermination and silence.

  At night, I roamed the halls of the museum, playing tricks on the night watchman, opening doors, turning on lights, blasting
the radio, rattling locks, cutting off the heat, running water for my bath, stealing doughnuts from the cafeteria, preening in front of the mirror in the ladies’ lavatory, banging doors, opening windows, extinguishing lights. Over the years I read every daily paper, book, treaty and report in the museum library. They all spoke to me at last. You get to know a place well when you’re on display there . . . At night, the trophies raised hell. Hideous ghosts, leathery mummies, severed heads, body parts, Broca’s brain, skeletons and fetuses, embryos and elephants, genitals and zebra skins, buffalo bones and jellyfish, it’s hard to describe this purgatory of skulls and bones that danced till dawn. Finally, in 1974, they moved me out of sight downstairs where I was put in the neon-lit, gray-walled, second parking lot, level C. No one passed during the day, except a couple of janitors or a government employee now and again. Then, in 1994, they brought me out again, this time to the Quai d’Orsay Museum. I’ve spent two hundred years hanging from my steel hook, watching history being made by the masters of the universe; what a freak show, it has been . . . Time is no longer measured as it was before; it flows or stands still by new rules and theories. That’s why I am not sure of today’s date. Which moon is it? Is it a violet day or is it green?