Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  People traveled from other countries to visit the museum. Barnum hit it big. People wanted oddity, and they wanted the bizarre. A good deal of life in the nineteenth century seemed to take place under a big top. After 1865, for instance, Barnum did not close down, he ratcheted up. By the 1870s, he had created a new and bigger and better attraction, the Greatest Show on Earth, and in 1874 he opened Barnum’s Great Roman Hippodrome, a ten-thousand-seat arena between 26th and 27th Streets, and Madison and Fourth Avenues, succeeded by the first incarnation of Madison Square Garden. There, Barnum introduced the world to his famous three-ring circus. And always, at the sideshows, P. T. Barnum reserved space for his African “specimens.”

  “Hottentots” became a particularly favorite attraction, both in America and in England, for they seemed to many social scientists of the period the most degraded and malformed freaks in all of nature. The renowned anthropologist Samuel Morton had a particular fascination for these people, whom he described, with the assured tone of a scientist, as “the nearest approximation to the lower animals . . . Their complexion is a yellowish brown, compared by travelers to the peculiar hue of Europeans in the last stage of jaundice. . . . The women are represented as even more repulsive in appearance than the men.”3

  Morton is just one of scores of social scientists in the nineteenth century who grounded his belief in black inferiority in the prevailing racist theories of the period, in Morton’s particular case in social Darwinism. The geologist Joseph Le Conte also condemned blacks in America to the cellar of humanity: “Laws determining the effects of contact of species, races, varieties, etc. among animals” also applied to “the races of men.” As a race, Negroes persisted as creatures “still in childhood that had not yet learned to walk alone in the paths of civilisation” and were destined, Le Conte went on, either to “extinction . . . [or] relegation to a subordinate place in the economy of nature.”4

  White people viewed Negroes, then, as just another sport of nature, freaks that helped satisfy their shaky belief in their own white correctness and, at the same time, helped to reinforce their own desire to appear totally normal. The more I can cast the other as aberrant and abnormal, the theory of exclusion goes, the more normal I look. England led the way in staging elaborate sideshows and freak shows. Colorful handbills, posters, and broadsheets advertised with great fanfare an assortment of human anomalies, like the pig-faced woman, or the sixty-pound fully grown man, or the giant Hungarian schoolboy. But, again, what really drew the crowds were the exhibits of bushmen and Zulus.

  For over sixty or seventy years, from the middle of the nineteenth century well into the twentieth century, crowds of people went to gawk at collections of African peoples, from the smallest Pygmies to the tallest Watusis. An 1847 newspaper account of a bushman display at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly reflected the public’s prevailing attitude toward almost every person of dark skin, from Filipinos to Africans: “In appearance they are little above the monkey tribe. They are continually crouching, warming themselves by the fire, chatting or growling. . . . They are sullen, silent and savage—mere animals in propensity, and worse than animals in appearance.” Samuel Morton, called Hottentots “the nearest approximation to the lower animals. . . . Their complexion is a yellowish brown, compared by travellers to the peculiar hue of Europeans in the last stage of jaundice. . . . The women are represented as even more repulsive in appearance than the men.”5 Decades after Morton’s comments, a Canadian entrepreneur named William Leonard Hunt, who adopted the exotic theatrical name Farini, made a fortune by exhibiting a family of Zulus in England and America from 1879 to the middle of the 1890s.

  Farini cashed in on the spirit expressed in the Wild West shows, of taming the savage—Indians, in the case of the Cody shows, but also savages no matter where we might encounter them, even in Africa. All sorts of people, from scientists to businesspeople, were intent on making white destiny very manifest indeed. If ordinary people could concoct their own personal myths—making themselves anew, adopting fabulous identities like Buffalo Bill or Annie Oakley—why not a national myth?

  People of all classes and levels of education came to gawk and marvel. The bush people exhibits constituted popular entertainment at its most grotesque: Come see the exotic and the marvelous for only one shilling admission, children under twelve half price. Although they look human, don’t fret; they belong in some other, related but not equal category. At one point, even the great reformer Charles Dickens confessed his repulsion at seeing a bunch of Zulus, at the Egyptian Hall in London. In 1853, in a magazine he had started himself called Household Words, he wrote an essay ironically titled “The Noble Savage,” a reference to the so-called primitive man uncontaminated by civilization. Without compunction or seeming embarrassment, Dickens confesses in his opening sentences, “I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition.” A progressive and an activist when it came to the plight of the poor and the exploitation of children in the workforce, Dickens, it appears, reserved his compassion for whites only. For on the subject of Africans, he went out of his way to find the most absolutely monstrous and vicious things to say, including his definition of a savage as “something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth.” Plain and simple, he would have preferred to see all people of Africa eradicated.

  In the rest of the essay, Dickens turns his attention to an exhibition of Zulu Kaffirs at St. George’s Gallery, in Hyde Park. Those warriors, in particular, he found “extremely ugly”; and when he tried to understand their behavior, he could only conclude:What a visitor left to his own interpretings and imaginings might suppose these noblemen to be about, when they give vent to that pantomimic expression which is quite settled to be the natural gift of the noble savage, I cannot possibly conceive; for it is so much too luminous for my personal civilisation that it conveys no idea to my mind beyond a general stamping, ramping, and raving, remarkable (as everything in savage life is) for its dire uniformity.

  Poor, benighted Charles Dickens, the man who could go on for pages about the smallest nuance of human behavior in novels like David Copperfield and Bleak House and Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities, just cannot figure out why those unschooled, frightened, and disoriented creatures, locked inside their six-by-nine-foot cages, act the way they do.

  His repulsion took him only so far: Dickens went to see every African at every display in London, many times over. Why did he keep going? Did he want to make certain that those savages truly repulsed him? Or was the fascination something entirely else? Perhaps those Africans were possessed of a power and strength that also fascinated him, or perhaps they made him realize what the world was actually losing—or, worse yet, had already lost.

  Perhaps the same kind of attraction and repulsion worked its way through the population at large, for England and America both offered plenty of exhibitions. Historians count as one of the most controversial of those exhibitions, however, not one of the minor events but the Africans on full display at one of the largest but temporary sites, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, in the city of Chicago. There, prompted by the likes of Barnum, promoters outdid themselves by building an entire village, and peopled it exclusively with women from Dahomey, now called Benin. Through them, we can get a glimpse, perhaps, of the desperate situation of all those people, everywhere—in small venues and in large—who were forced to parade themselves before hordes of curious and largely unsympathetic onlookers.

  During the performance of one of their chants, rather than praising America as they were supposed to do, the women from Dahomey were said, by one man who claimed to know a bit of the language, to utter something along the lines of the following: “We have come from a far country to a land where all men are white. If you will come to our country we will take pleasure in cutting your white throats.”6 Local newspapers carried the story, whereupon key civic leaders in Chicago demanded the show’s immediate closure. But the public uproar
for its continuation grew too loud and large. The public’s desire for spectacle won out over its demand for punishment. The show remained open and continued to draw large crowds of men, women, and children from around the country. Such was the drawing power of nineteenth-century entertainment, and the crushing virulence of nineteenth-century racism.

  Sarah Baartman arrived at Piccadilly Circus in London, in the latter part of the year 1810. Advertised in full-color drawings as the “Hottentot Venus,” she became an immediate success, appearing nude before sold-out audiences at the Egyptian Hall. Sharing top billing at various times with another favorite, the “African Hermaphrodite,” she paced in small circles inside her cage like some deranged animal. But no matter who appeared alongside her, Sarah took over, in the most perverse sense possible, as the star. According to one observer: “[O]n being ordered by her keeper, she came out. . . . The Hottentot was produced like a wild beast, and ordered to move backwards and forwards, and come out and go into her cage, more like a bear on a chain than a human being.”7

  After a degrading year in London of people gawking at her and prodding her, Peter Cezar took her, perhaps out of a sense of guilt, to Manchester and there, on December 7, 1811, had her undergo ritual baptism. During that time, members of the English Anti-Slavery Society sought to free Sarah Baartman by bringing her case to court. By this time, as evidence of her keen intelligence, Sarah had learned a bit of Dutch (as well as achieving fluency in both English and French) and told the judge that she was not telling her story under restraint. To no one’s surprise, Henrik Cezar testified that Sarah was nothing but a willing participant and was receiving her fair and handsome share of the profits of the sideshow. The court proceedings lasted only three hours. The judge dismissed the case. Sarah returned to work.

  No record of her surfaces until three years later, on December 12, 1814, when Cezar sells Sarah to an animal trainer in France. The Journal of Paris announced her arrival with great fanfare. She even attracted the famous French anatomist Georges Cuvier, who visited her often. She posed in the nude for scientific paintings at the Jardin du Roi. Cuvier observed her there, as well. A French journalist, who tried to render an accurate description of Sarah, must have been totally baffled by her presence, because he could only offer up a string of unrelated details: “Tears come from her eyes, complexion light green, she jumps, she sings and plays drums. Someone gives her sweets, around her neck she wore a tiny piece of turtle shell.”8 Barkers touted her as one of nature’s supreme oddities; popular writers dwelled on her bizarre habits and proclivities; spectators, including little kids, gawked and jeered, yelled obscenities, and tossed scraps of food at her through the bars of her cage. Doctors paid a premium for the privilege of probing and examining her in private.

  We get a glimpse of her true feelings, as we may have with the dancers from Dahomey, on only one reported occasion. At a ball one evening in Paris, where her keeper had taken her as part of the evening’s entertainment—what would the Hottentot Venus look like in a silk gown? How would high society handle a black person in their bright white midst?—she allegedly described herself to a Frenchman with a line so poignant we must seriously reconsider her testimony in court that she felt no constraint in her captivity: “My name is Sarah, very unhappy Sarah.”9

  And truly unhappy she must have been. For one day, not long after that ball, Sarah collapsed into the deepest depression. She lay on the floor of her cage in a fetal coil. Slowly, but with great determination, she ate and drank less and less. No one and nothing could force her to resume life again. She began to waste away and, finally, fell desperately ill with an undiagnosable inflammatory illness. On December 16, 1815, less than one year after being exiled to France, Sarah Baartman died. She was twenty-six years old. She lived only five years out of her native Africa, separated from her family and friends, to suffer the worst indignities—all for the entertainment of white audiences. But those five years, for all the pain and humiliation, must have seemed to her an eternity. She had no life out of Africa. From the vastness of the bush, she spent her days and nights in a six-by-nine-foot cell, a prisoner to Western fantasies of that faraway place called Africa, of black inferiority, of black women, and of depraved sexuality. We can safely count as her death date the moment that Henrik Cezar declared her, in the African veldt, an oddity with great commercial promise.

  The Academy conferred on Georges Cuvier the distinct honor of dissecting Sarah Baartman upon her death and, according to Stephen Jay Gould, “he went right to the genitals.”10 Cuvier published his findings in the Mémoires du Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in 1817. He might just as well have been dissecting any old primate: “I have never seen a human head more like an ape than that of this woman.” He next commented on Sarah’s tiny head—recall she was a small person, standing only four and a half feet tall—and dismissed any suggestion of intelligence because of “that cruel law, which seems to have condemned to an eternal inferiority those races with small and compressed skulls.” And then in case anyone should miss his true feelings about her, Cuvier made clear that Sarah Baartman, and all those like her, occupied only the lowest rung on what people mistook as the evolutionary ladder: “Her movements had something brusque and capricious about them, which recall those of monkeys. She had, above all, a way of pouting her lips, in the same manner as we have observed in orangutans.”

  Her death did not put an end to her humiliation. Cuvier presented Sarah’s dissected genitalia before the Académie Royale de Médecine, in order to allow his colleagues to observe, as Cuvier insisted, “the nature of the labia.”11 Cuvier and his contemporaries concluded that Baartman’s oversized and primitive genitalia offered physical proof of African women’s “primitive sexual appetite.” Cuvier preserved Baartman’s genitalia and brain in alcohol and placed them on display at the Musée de l’Homme, in Paris, the institution where he held an appointment. They remained prominently displayed on a shelf long after her death, until 1985, when a group of South African medical students demanded that the museum return them to her native country. Some medical historians insist that scientific racism was born on her body.

  THE OTHER SARAH, Sarah Bernhardt, became in the nineteenth century a symbol of sensual, even sexual presence and exotic allure. Newspapers dismissed Sarah Baartman as one of the true monstrosities of the world; they embraced Sarah Bernhardt as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Like Sarah Baartman, Sarah Bernhardt went on display in London and Paris, but on her own terms, performing roles as the leading lady before mostly upper-crust audiences in the grandest, most opulent theaters of England and Europe. Like some Renaissance aristocrat, she adopted a motto, quand même, “even though,” or “in spite of everything.” She cast herself as success and perseverance incarnate.

  Born to a Jewish mother (we know little about her father, who abandoned the family fairly early) on October 22, 1844, in Paris, as Henriette-Rosine Bernard, she was decidedly white, precocious, an inveterate liar, and somewhat privileged. Like the other Sarah, sexual provocation and even at times total nakedness also marked her life. But, again, those events took place through her own choosing: Clothing fell from her body of her own free will, when she wanted, and where she wanted. She, and not some anonymous collection of Dutch traders, deliberately changed the spelling of her name. (“Bernhardt,” for her, echoed the more mysterious and exotic-sounding “burning heart.”) She decided precisely when she would take the stage, and exactly when she would take her leave. She tantalized and titillated sold-out audiences in England, on the Continent, and in America, with her acting, dancing, and outrageous and opulent style of living.

  Contemporary writers enthroned her as the white, Western standard of nineteenth-century beauty. Even Freud, not given to outbursts of emotion in public, managed a most passionate description of Sarah Bernhardt. In 1885, Freud came to Paris to study hypnotism and, with the founder of neurology, the Frenchman Jean-Martin Charcot, to investigate both neuropathology and hysteria. One evening Charcot took Freud to see Bernhard
t in the lead role in the most sumptuously produced Théodora, by the playwright Victorien Sardou. Freud immediately and thoroughly fell under her spell. Freud had just turned twenty-nine, a young man setting out in the intellectual world of Vienna; Sarah Bernhardt was a woman of forty-one, and a fully accomplished actress. No doubt the elaborate production contributed greatly to the mood of seduction. Set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, Théodora explored the themes of sadism, lust, and revenge against the backdrop of lavishly painted sets. Playgoers were treated to a depiction of the Orient in its most romanticized, dreamlike form.

  For these and perhaps a score of other reasons, Freud fell hard:How that Sarah plays! After the first words of her lovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me; I believed at once everything she said. . . . I have never seen a more comical figure than Sarah in the second act, where she appears in a simple dress, and yet one soon stops laughing, for every inch of that little figure lives and bewitches. Then her flattering and imploring and embracing; it is incredible what postures she can assume and how every limb and joint acts with her. A curious being: I can imagine that she needn’t be any different in life than on the stage.12