Hottentot Venus (10 page)

Hendrick hated to admit the feeling of pleasure and excitement I had aroused in him. He had never been abroad—out of Africa. He was suddenly a different man. He was a man who was ten years younger. Visions of visiting Amsterdam and Rotterdam as well as London and Paris danced in his head. Heady meetings with famous doctors, newspaper interviews, introductions to society, all this I told him would be a natural consequence of our future voyage and our stupendous discovery. Hendrick wondered out loud why he hadn’t thought of it himself long ago.

I took the Hottentot to Cape Town to petition the governor of the colony for her passport to England. Whenever she ventured into Cape Town, she wore a
chapur
so that her Hottentot origins would not be recognized. We rode into town together on two of Hendrick’s best saddle horses. Saartjie rode silently beside me, looking like a child mounted on a huge black stallion. Yet she was calm. Grave. She controlled the animal, I noticed, surprisingly well.

The governor’s house was in the center of town, a massive yellow and black brick building with a classical porch of white columns. To one side of the building were the Government House and the Central Bank. To the other side was the long, hard, sinister expanse of the colony’s penitentiary, which looked like any other government building except that there were armed soldiers stationed every few yards, and a public whipping post.

A chain gang of slaves passed us as we dismounted. The men were dressed in striped cropped pantaloons. They were bare-chested and some carried the marks of terrible lashings on their backs, raised welts and crisscross scars that were sometimes white, sometimes dark brown or pomegranate red. Their heads were shaved and their gaunt, brutal faces were blank. Almost all were Hottentots. The chains sang, but the men didn’t. They all seemed drowned in a kind of interior silence, deeper than mere absence of sound, the silence of death, as they stood dejected in the shadow of the penitentiary walls. I glanced at Saartjie, who had hurried away from them towards the entrance to the building. Even in her disguise Saartjie walked swiftly as if she had a destination. A Hottentot loitering in Cape Town was liable to be arrested. A Hottentot had better run to wherever the hell she was going.

I was received by Lord Calledon himself. Since the Cape was once again an English colony, he had very little to do on any given day. Reading dispatches, receiving important foreign visitors and issuing passports were major activities. These coupled with building a new opera house, giving lavish dinner parties and suppressing all Hottentot resistance was what the governorship of the newest British conquest consisted of. For this he had paid the Crown the lordly sum of fifty thousand pounds. As the British government’s representative, he was not only responsible for suppressing the Hottentots, but was also appointed their official guardian, as they were considered too imbecilic to be allowed to look after themselves.

Lord Calledon and I held a fascinating conversation and spent an agreeable hour discussing everything from Monteverdi to James Madison before talk turned to the question of obtaining a passport for my partner, Hendrick Caesar, an Afrikaner, and the servant who would travel with us.

—And the name of his servant?

—Saartjie, that is, Sarah . . .

—Last name?

—Baartman. Sarah Baartman.

—She is appearing in person?

—Yes, she’s just outside in the anteroom . . . If you’d like . . .

—No, no, that’s not necessary. I need only to ascertain that she appeared in person to request her passport.

—Thank you.

—My pleasure, Dr. Dunlop. And have a safe passage home.

As we walked down the wide red-carpeted hall to the exit, I showed Saartjie her passport. She recognized the Crown’s seal and reveled in the incredible beauty of the document with its black letters running across the page like, as she put it, !Naeheta Magahâs’s painted bulls.

—It means you have free passage out of Africa.

—It means, said Saartjie, who was now Sarah, that I am free . . .

I felt a qualm but said only:

—Free as a bird.

—Can I keep it?

—Of course. A passport is personal property. Just don’t lose it.

We left the horses tethered and wandered down to the wharf to look at our ship in harbor. It was the
Exeter
and in a few weeks it would take us to England’s shores.

—I will call you Sarah from now on, I said, since that’s the name on your passport.

—I never liked Saartjie. My real name is Ssehura.

—Ssehura, very pretty.

—Sarah Baartman is pretty too. You know, I have a secret. One day, last year, I came down to the wharves to look at the boats and saw you for the first time. You were standing at the hull of a tall dark green schooner with indigo sails. You had on a red and blue uniform. Your hair was longer than it is now, and you had some kind of brass instrument attached to your wrist.

—That’s why I was so surprised to see you at the farm. It is as if all this is the rainmaker’s prediction . . . she continued excitedly.

—Who’s the rainmaker? I said. I knew what a rainmaker was.

—Why, !Naeheta Magahâs, the thing-that-should-never-have-been-born . . . It is like meeting the purple heron on the road, who looks after me . . . It’s fate.

—You
saw
me? A year ago? My God. I remember that day. The ship was the
Asia
out of Madagascar. The instrument I held was a new telescope I was trying out. Fate, I said, it must be.

—Yes,
wigchelvooden,
said Sarah in Dutch.

6

In one word, it is necessary that we not be blinded by a single species of living matter, but compare them all to each other and pursue the life and the phenomenon of which all beings that have been endowed with a portion are composed. It is only at that price that we can hope to lift the veil of mystery that conceals the essence.

—BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,
Thirty Lessons in Comparative Anatomy

Black moon, the English month of May, 1810. I found myself standing on the deck of the HMS
Exeter
with a new name and a new passport. Sarah Baartman. I whispered it to myself as I leaned against the rails and watched the fortress of Cape Town become smaller and smaller. The ocean beckoned and I succumbed to dream of discovering what a world that had abolished slavery would be like. I had no one to say goodbye to. Everyone was dead. I had no one to explain to why I was making this voyage. If I explained it to another Khoekhoe, I would have had to say that I was traveling to Bakuba, a faraway land in the sky from which no Khoekhoe had ever returned.

According to Master Dunlop, this ship was a schooner of three masts and six hundred tons. It carried merchandise from Ceylon, Java, Sumatra and Zanzibar. The passengers were lodged on the main deck, which was portioned off into cabins and common rooms. We were more than twenty.

The white passengers on the HMS
Exeter
were not happy that there was a Hottentot amongst them. They complained bitterly to the captain that I should be in steerage with the other servants and Africans. As usual, Master Dunlop had an answer. I was desperately ill, under his care, on my way to London to seek aid from a renowned specialist. When the passengers then complained of a “diseased Negro” on board who could contaminate everyone, Master Dunlop invented still another story: I was a princess worth my weight in gold, certainly not suffering from a contagious disease. As royalty, I could not mingle with common folk, and so a special dining room was set up in my stateroom and I took my meals alone. It was still not clear to me how I had come to be upon this sailing ship moving swiftly across the waters of the Atlantic to London. I hadn’t planned it this way. And Master Dunlop, had he paid my bride-price or had he not? Was I his wife or simply a kidnapped Khoekhoe, to be used to beget riches for two foolish white men? Whatever it was, I thought, it was
wigchelvooden.

The passengers continued to snub me and we kept to ourselves. From time to time, Master Dunlop descended into the belly of the ship to check on his animals, his giraffe skin, his skulls and fossils. There were, I realized, people down there as well: servants and slaves and captured Africans belonging to the white passengers on deck.

In the evening, when everyone else had retired for the night, I emerged from my cabin to roam the upper deck, my
chapur
hiding my race and my figure just as it had in Cape Town. But nothing would replace those nights under a canopy of blinking stars, surrounding a crescent moon. It was the Black moon month, or May, and the constellations would fix themselves once again in the heavens, and milk and honey would flow back at the Chamboos. I spent my lonely watch counting the flying fish and the shooting stars and opening my nose to the sea winds. The Cape moved further and further away until I could no longer smell land. The stars became brighter and brighter as the haze that land produced lifted and I could see them clearly in a sky that met only the perfect mirror of the ocean. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Master Hendrick would accompany Master Dunlop and me to London as partner to Dunlop and manager of my person. I began to wonder who was paying our passage and underwriting the bills, but I didn’t dare question either of them. I felt safe with Master Dunlop. He had promised. The gold coin in his palm was the guarantee.

The herd of white people who flocked on deck every morning dressed as if they were attending the governor’s new opera house in Cape Town, those who refused my presence amongst them were of all sorts: English immigrants and Dutch refugees, students returning to school, merchants transporting goods, army officers, soldiers of fortune, women heading towards marriages, or sons to attend funerals, a good crowd of twenty whites who strolled the deck, played whist, fished, read books or engaged in long conversations that sometimes included dark looks in my direction if I ventured on deck. Sometimes, I ignored them, needing the walk and fresh air. Sometimes I appeared with Master Dunlop and Master Hendrick, following slightly behind them in a servant’s mode. There were several black sailors on board with whom I passed the time, listening to their stories even though they were forbidden to mix with the passengers. Black servants didn’t count, however, and they assumed I was a maidservant traveling with my masters. They taught me much about the ship and took me down into its entrails, with its cranks and screws and chains and gears, its ropes and sailcloths, cannons and kitchens. They also taught me a lot about white people I didn’t know.

I took happily to the sea, found it thrilling and never experienced sea-sickness. I kept to my room, venturing into company only with my masters and once entertaining the passengers with a song on my guitar.

The days passed one after the other. We were more than ten days out of Cape Town when one evening, having slipped away from my cabin after my lonely supper, I met Master Dunlop.

—You like ships, I see, he said, catching me unawares.

—Yes, I like the closeness of the sky, I said. I like the speed, like riding on the back of a whale, slicing the waters that open up before it like grass. It’s those, I pointed upwards, indigo sails, that I have never seen spread like that, like the wings of a bird, like clouds . . . The Khoekhoe don’t have sails . . . We have only canoes for fishing.

—I know how you feel, I too love the sea, where everything is possible, where every path lies open before your very eyes, there . . . Just over the horizon, whatever your heart desires. The sea was made for dreamers. Or perhaps dreamers were made for the sea . . .

—Why doesn’t this ship get lost in all this? How does it know where it’s going? It follows the sun?

—It follows the stars and constellations.

—Which are always changing.

—No,
you
change, Sarah, the stars remain fixed.

—I would like to change.

—So would I.

Master Dunlop turned his back against the railings and leaned back, peering down at me. Stars, like the eyes of a staring crowd, surrounded him like a glittering curtain blinking as if alive, as mysterious as Master Dunlop’s soul.

—You look like a spirit, all covered up in that white
chapur.

—Perhaps I should go scare some of the other passengers . . . Booooooo, and I lifted my arms in the air.

—Do you know what an odyssey is?

—No.

—Well, an odyssey is a long voyage by sea in which you search for something, a person, a treasure, redemption, revenge . . . And along the way you suffer many trials and tribulations and dangers and you almost die and you fall ill, and you are rescued, and you fall in love and you do battle with monsters . . . And in the end . . .

—And in the end?

—In the end you return home, to the point of departure, and nothing is changed and no one even knows you’ve been gone because no one is waiting for you.

—No one waits for me. Does someone wait for you?

—No.

—That’s sad.

—It’s just a story a poet made up . . . The world’s first hero—or the world’s first fool, he said.

—The hero, what was his name?

—Ulysses.

—The Khoekhoe worship a hero like that, his name is Wounded Knee.

—Wounded Knee, he repeated.

After that, he left Master Hendrick and me to our own devices. He seemed more silent, thinner, more fragile than when he was on land, as if the sea brought out some inner anguish.

—Head winds day after day, he murmured. Won’t we ever get a decent slant on this passage?

As the days passed, an atmosphere of oppressive quietude settled upon the ship. Every passenger suddenly seemed to close himself up in a sullen cocoon. Very little was said. As if by common consent, human speech was abandoned to the greatness of the sea and each passenger was prisoner of his own private thoughts. For me, those thoughts were of a mysterious and unimagined future that lay just beyond the line of the horizon. The ship seemed to carry the burden of a million lives, it groaned, it creaked, it heaved, it rolled, it rumbled and breathed with the souls of past passengers. And shouldn’t it be so? The black sailors had told me that more than once in her long life, the HMS
Exeter
had been a ship fitted out for slaving along the Guinean coast. I had looked up at her masts towering towards the sky, immense and indestructible, her sails wrapped, sheltering splendid trangressions, skimming proudly over a graveyard of sins. We were approaching the Cape of Storms, famous for testing the greatest ships with its horror, and its bravest sailors with its terribleness. I turned and lifted my face. I smelled rain. Low and distant thunder carried itself on the air too, and we seemed to be traveling towards it.

A strong wind swept by and I felt the uneasiness of the ship beneath my feet. A single burst of lightning quivered in the sky as if it flashed into the vault of Magahâs’s cave, illuminating it. Then wind and rain came stampeding across the dark mass of the sea, chasing the ship like the thousand cattle of Magahâs’s secret chamber. Lightning now struck at will, as if it had especially chosen us for its target. The wind howled. Furious gales attacked the ship like personal enemies. Rain descended, beating like drums on the deck and rails, and the storm took us over one by one as if it wanted to rout out the screaming terrified infant in every one of us. Drenched on deck, I listened to the storm’s voice.

—Want to leave the Cape of Storms? it seemed to say.

—We’ll see about that. You would like your life back? You will have to get past me. For I rule here, not white men. The sea is mine and no man, white or black, can outrun me or outstare me . . . just try it . . .

The HMS
Exeter
seemed to stand at attention, magnificent and immobile on the waves, contemplating what the storm had just told her, then she dipped sickeningly deep into a tree-high wave that struck it like a palm striking a drum and made the old ship groan and cry out. There were faint cries also from the frightened passengers. We were alone in the immensity of the ocean. In the middle of nowhere. Ten days or more from the Cape. The birds had left. The swaying masts infested with squirming men riding up and down them, bent like reeds before the wind. The ship’s wake, long and white and straight, trailed to the west as if we were going backwards. The sun was gone like the birds, disappeared beneath the heavy rain clouds. The squall, coming from behind, finally caught the ship and dissolved itself in a deluge of hissing, drumming, stupendous rain. The heavens opened up its entrails and rained down all the piss of God. It left the deck glistening clean and the sails darkened. I shivered in delight. Was this happiness I asked myself? The ship began to race before the storm, trying to outrun the white-capped waves, urged on by the shouts and worried whispers of the sailors as they ran back and forth moving things and tying down ropes and affixing everything on deck. Then came the horror.

Master Dunlop came out on deck, calling me by name.

—Sarah, Sarah, for God’s sake! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Get into the common room with the others! This is a real hurricane!

The pale green eyes held fear. But I was happy. I was indifferent to the storm as if a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I had steeled myself against the worst and found my fate so fascinating that I felt an overwhelming dislike for Master Dunlop, who wanted to take me away.

I heard Master Dunlop crying into my ear, but the wind got between us, suddenly I was hanging on to him like the weight of a stone and the sides of our heads knocked together.

—Sarah, Sarah, you’re going to drown! Get in there!

But my heart had been corrupted by the storm and I rebelled against leaving it. I would not obey any order except the mysterious craving for its fury I had found in my soul.

Master Dunlop pulled and half dragged me below, bellowing orders to sailors at the same time that he shoved me into the crowded room. The white passengers looked up, cowering in various corners, some had slight wounds where they had bumped against the furniture or hit their head against a beam. There was not a greeting amongst them. They spoke not a word to me and moved away from my person. Many turned their backs, trying to look unconcerned; others, with averted eyes, sent half-reluctant glances out of the corners of their eyes. One or two stared at me frankly, but stupidly with their mouths open in indignation. They resembled thieves caught in the act. They didn’t want a Hottentot to share even their own destruction. They’d rather I be anywhere else, safe and dry, than amongst them partaking their fate. I, for one, was convinced we were all going to our watery graves together.