Hottentot Venus : A Novel

SIRE,

The natural history of living beings poses, above all, complications the mind has no conjectures on which to base a previous state. Nothing explains the origin and the genesis, which is ever a mystery by which all human efforts have not achieved anything plausible.
--Baron Georges Leopold Cuvier, Letter to the Emperor Napoleon on the progress of science since 1789

Great Eland, the English month of January, 1816. There was no freak show today because it was New Year's Day, and it was my birthday. It was the coldest Paris winter anyone could remember and the city was blanketed in snow, ice creaked on the Seine and hundreds of skaters glided over its surface. The bells of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame tolled to celebrate King Louis's gift of three hundred and twenty francs to feed the freezing and starving poor of the city. I imagined my friends, other freaks of nature, other things-that-should-never-have-been-born, gathering on the cobblestone courtyard of 188 rue St. Honore getting ready to make their way to Warren's Nest Tavern to celebrate the day. Miss Ridsdal, thirty inches tall and thirty-five years old, Miss Harvey with her perfectly white knee-length silken hair and pink eyes, Mr. Lambert, a twelve-foot giant, Count Boruweaski, a two-foot midget, and Miss Duclos, the lovely bearded lady.

As for myself, I was much too sick to join them. My master, Sieur Reaux, had left early to celebrate with the other circus managers at a large dinner, but I was too ill and too ill used even to care. I burned with fever and my chest seemed clogged with a mysterious mass that all the coughing in the world could not relieve. I had felt this way for months. The spasms would seize me and choke me like a murderer. My chest would burst with pain so that I held on to whatever I could find to cling to, a table, an armchair, the doorframe, to keep from falling. The large white handkerchief I always carried clutched in my hand these past weeks would come away spotted with blood. The Khoekhoe had no word for what was wrong with me, but the English did. Alice Unicorn, my servant whom I had found in a Manchester mill two years ago, explained it to me. After five years, I was used to the snow, I knew how it felt against my skin, could taste its cold wetness when it fell against my lips, knew its special chill in my bones. I needed to return to a warm, dry climate she said, or I would die. In other words, I needed to return home to the Cape of Good Hope where I had been born and where my brothers and sisters were. I wondered if I could ever do that.

If it hadn't been this day, I would have been on display in the animal circus of my master, exhibited in an eight-by-twelve-foot bamboo cage just high enough for me to stand and almost naked, shivering in my apron of pearls and feathers, my leggings of dried entrails, my painted face, my leather mask, my dyed and braided hair, my doeskin red gloves, my sheepskin lappa slung over one shoulder, my necklace of shimmering glass and shells, my crown of feathers, my cowrie seed earrings, able to stagger only a few paces, or crouch over my brick kiln for warmth, or obey the shouts of my keeper, who amused and harangued the crowd with his barking soliloquy. Surrounding me would be scores, sometimes hundreds, of white faces, all peering up at me, a sheen of horror, pity or terror occupying their faces, or perhaps a smirk of amusement, contempt or nervous excitement; eyes gleamed, lips pursed, skin transpired. Cries, insults, shouts and laughter would at times overwhelm me as if the waves of the ocean engulfed me except it was not salt they deposited but liquid hatred, which beat upon my naked skin, my bare feet, my burning face and scorched brain. I had learned over the years to divorce myself from the crowd, to hover just above it like a purple heron in flight. I learned to feel not, to listen not, to think not. I decided to understand no language, not even that of pity or compassion, for this too was part of their game; to pity the monster, the animal, the dis-human, the ugly, the heathen, the Hottentot.

I was the black Moor, evil encased in black skin, a warning and a symbol to all those upturned faces and jammed-together bodies that God could punish them as he had punished me with expulsion not only from Eden but from the human race. I was a thing-that-should-never-have-been-born, a creature made in Eve's image yet, unlike her, not part of mankind. I was a female who was the missing link between beast and man, a wonder of nature created only for the delectation of discovery by hordes of paying Parisian customers, who for three francs could, from a distance, contemplate the form and color of monstrosity.

Sometimes, I would growl or spit, scream or hiss insanely. Sometimes, I could laugh and dance, sing and play my guitar. Sometimes, I would play the clown by rolling my eyes, sticking out my lips, shaking my backside, but sometimes my feet won't move, my hands won't pluck at my guitar, my knees won't bend. Sometimes, I am too cold or too sick or too full of morphine to move. Then, there are loud protests from the stinking, hawking, spitting, tobacco-chewing, foul-breathed audience that they are not getting their money's worth. They did not want a statue of Venus, but a heaving, stomping, undulating, living Venus, with beastly breasts, beastly hips, beastly eyes and above all a beastly face that held no beauty for them. I was the glue of common contempt and rejection that held them all together.