Hottentot Venus (22 page)

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 hung 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.

—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 could 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.