from Hottentot Venus

The Heroine's Note

Once upon a time, there was a Khoekhoe nation called the People of the People, who inhabited the eastern coast of South Africa. In 1619, we were discovered by the Portuguese, who, besides civilization, brought us syphilis, smallpox and slavery. They were followed by the Dutch, who gave us our name, Hottentot, which means "stutterer" in Dutch, because of the way our language sounded to them, and who introduced us to private property, land theft and fences. They were succeeded by the English, who organized us all into castes and categories and who called themselves and others like them white, and us, Hottentots, Bushmen, and Negroes, black, although, to my knowledge, none of us ever chose that name. And so to tell this, my true story, I was stuck with a name we didn't choose but must use so that those who gave us these names may listen. And, although Hottentot is an insult equivalent to nigger, I used it in this, my story, just as Negroes use that word they do not recognize themselves by with whites, who gave them that name to begin with. I am sure that God doesn't call me Hottentot any more than He calls them white.

S.B.

Chapter 1

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 Léopold 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. Honoré 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, Court 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 Réaux, 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 door frame, 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...