The Circus in Winter (6 page)

But what Bascomb had no way of knowing was this: The circus proprietor, Clyde Hollenbach, needed to expand his sideshow displays from the Dark Continent. P. T. Barnum was at that time making a killing with a new curiosity—a pinhead named Zip, What-is-it? Supposedly, a party of big-game hunters had captured Zip while searching the river Gambia for gorillas. There, they found a new race, Darwin's missing link, naked people swinging from trees like monkeys. But Hollenbach knew it was all ballyhoo, just another one of Barnum's humbugs. He'd recently hired Barnum's disgruntled boss canvasman who'd told him the secret: Zip was actually a simpleminded Negro from New Jersey named Billy Jackson who was born with a small pointy head that—once shaved but for a topknot—appeared vaguely simian. The fellow earned about fifty a week, most of which was sent to his mother. Hollenbach marveled at the ingenuity of the gaff: take a Negro with a funny-shaped head, stick a spear in his hand, drape him in faux leopard skin, and voilà!

So he searched for his own Zip, What-is-it? and found a likely candidate touring with the Diamond Show, a Sioux billed as the Aztec Princess. Upon further examination, Hollenbach discovered the princess was actually a man, a fellow too feebleminded to unbuckle his belt or unbutton his trousers. The sideshow manager, sick of changing his charge's soiled pants, had taken away his underdrawers and fashioned a large skirt that could be easily lifted and lowered when nature called. The manager shook Hollenbach's hand and said, "The trouble with pinheads is most of them's retardates. If I was you, I'd just find a regular colored and shave their head and nobody'd know the difference anyway. It'd be a lot easier." Hollenbach agreed.

For weeks, he'd been trying to make a female Zip from materials at hand, namely his Zulu Queen, a black woman of enormous proportions named Pearly. Her "act" consisted of long periods of imperious sitting on a bamboo throne. Once a day, the sideshow lecturer announced:

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! AS THE SUN SETS, THE TIME HAS COME FOR AFRICAN ZULUS TO PRACTICE THEIR MOST ANCIENT RITUAL. GATHER ROUND AS OUR ZULU QUEEN PERFORMS THE FAMOUS FERTILITY DANCE!"

When a sizable crowd had gathered, Pearly would lumber down from her perch and initiate a series of jerking movements that quivered her loose folds of flesh. Despite her willingness to engage in this undignified display, Pearly would not consent to become a pinhead. "My contract say what I gotta do, and that's all I gotta do," she said. "I can read, you know."

On that August morning in Kentucky, Hollenbach was desperate for a pinhead and miserably hot. He walked heavily, like a man lumbering along chest deep in water. A handful of dark faces dotted the circus midway, but Bascomb's was the first he saw. Mopping his brow, Hollenbach walked right up and offered this perfect stranger a job.

Since his arrival on the lot, Bascomb had seen quite a few Negros. Roustabouts driving tent stakes to the beat of an old railroad worksong, slopping water into elephant drinking tubs. Down at the railroad siding, he'd even seen the circus version of himself, a young boy emptying the lavatory buckets from the Pullman sleeping cars. "No thank you, sir," Bascomb said to Hollenbach, bowing a little. "I've got me a job already."

Hollenbach explained he was looking for a star, not a roustabout. "I'll make you famous, boy. How do you pronounce your name?"

Bascomb hoped this wasn't some sick, cruel joke. "Bowles," he said. "Like this." He cupped his hands together.

Hollenbach took the cigar from his lips and stared into the air, talking to himself. "Bowles. Bowl-zuh. Bow-uhl. Boo-lah. Bol-lah." Hollenbach snapped his fingers. "I've got it." He raised his silver flask in a toast to himself, took a swig, then pointed at the sideshow banner line of canvas posters. "Ladies and Gentlemen! May I present—Boela Man, the African Pinhead!"

"Sir, I ain't from Africa." Bascomb paused. "I mean, I never been there." He didn't even want to ask what a pinhead was—it sounded painful.

Hollenbach clapped him on the back. "These rubes don't know Africa from Oregon," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. Three white men were gathered around a grifter's carny stand, losing money as fast as it appeared from their overall pockets. "All you gotta do is act like you're from the jungle. Growl at the white folks. Scare 'em a little."

Bascomb nodded. No one had ever given him permission to scare white folks before.

"I'll pay you ten dollars a week," Hollenbach said.

Ten dollars a week! And all he had to do was shave his head and wear funny clothes. Hollenbach said his services would be required in the sideshow tent—two shows a day—plus the occasional stint as a rigger during the big show. All circus personnel paraded through the tent for the opening spectacles, and he'd be especially needed during the Moorish Marauders of Hassam Ali and Down in Ole Virginny, whose themes required every dark face Hollenbach could muster. He'd have his own berth in the Pullman car for Negro employees—good accommodations, considering some roustabouts slept two to a bunk. Three squares a day in the cook tent. And he'd see the country, not just the same old river towns from a steamboat deck, but any town in that ever-growing web of railroad tracks. Bascomb didn't hesitate to sign the contract Hollenbach offered him—he put his
X
next to the
X
on the dotted line.

Pearly shaved his head, escorted him to the costume tent to be fitted for his African garb, and introduced him to the other sideshow performers, explaining the differences between them. Raju the Sword Swallower and the contortionist Mr. Rubber were working acts. Slappy the Seal Boy was a genuine freak, born with flipperish arms and legs. Koko the Tattooed Lady was a made freak, a woman with a map of the world etched on every inch of her skin. Ching the Human Pincushion wasn't a freak at all, Pearly explained, just a practitioner of an ancient healing technique. Satan's Child was a fake freak, a mummified baby with goat hooves sewed onto its hands, lying in a black coffin. "This is the Pickled Punk," Pearly said, leading him to a glass jar. A two-headed fetus floated in amber fluid, two sets of arms locked in permanent embrace.

Bascomb touched his topknot, which stuck out like a stumpy tail. "Where will I be?" he asked, scanning the raised platform inside the sideshow tent.

"Oh probably right next to me so I can keep an eye on you." She squeezed his arm. "I've been fooling these people a long, long time, honey. It ain't hard. Just act like a monkey that fell out the tree, and white people'll eat it up for sure." Pearly chuckled, a wry snort. "Way I see it, a nickel's a nickel. Dollar's a dollar. I'd be a blue bug if that's what they wanted to see, stupid fools."

That night, Pearly shared all she had with Bascomb. They told each other how they'd gotten from where they started (cotton fields, both of them) to where they were, drinking rum from tin cups, staring into a warm fire with money in their pockets and the world to see. When they retired to her tent, Pearly shared her cot, drawing him into her voluminous softness. It seemed a small price to pay—a shaved head and a few moments of benign humiliation each day—for this new life he'd been blessed enough to walk into, and he rejoiced to think he might never empty another honey bucket in his life, nor would his children, if he played his cards right. As he lay next to his Zulu Queen, the Boela Man listened to the night, sounds he knew by heart—bugs and birds and dogs—followed by the call of elephants and lions. Together, they made a music that stirred him, and Bascomb wondered if he'd unlocked a dimly remembered past deep inside.

Bascomb married Pearly within the year, and Hollenbach rejoiced: Circus marriages were a great boon for business, and this one, like the union of Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren, was voluntary. The Boela Man and the Zulu Queen were married over a hundred times: the first time in a small church, and then again and again and again during the big show. The bride and groom entered the hippodrome astride elephants, attended by Bengal tigers—a magnificent opening spectacle with fifty native dancing girls and fifty jungle drummers in bone necklaces. Problem was, Hollenbach didn't employ a hundred Negros. Some colored roustabouts were called in from driving tent poles for the spec, but the rest were white circus people in blackface.

They waited for children. Bascomb joked with Pearly, suggesting that perhaps her makeshift Fertility Dance was actually the opposite, an accidental Curse of Barrenness. Finally, in the thirteenth year of their marriage, Pearly bore a son they named Gordon, royal prince of the Boela Tribe of African Pinheads.

How Gordon Bowles Game to Know More
Than He Ever Wanted to Know about Elephants

 

GORDON LOVED
elephants. From his voracious reading, from pestering elephant handlers, he knew that the African elephant has bigger ears, more toenails, and a different trunk tip than the Asian elephant. He knew female elephants spent two years pregnant, and that their nipples were between their front legs. He knew they ate 150 pounds of hay a day, plus an occasional watermelon for dessert. Walking trunk to tail, they had his mother's brand of lumbering grace, a proud and floating fatness. He admired the dexterity of the elephant's trunk—part nose, part hand—a versatile appendage which could also be (depending on the circumstances) cowboy lariat, swath-cutting scythe, water bucket, showman's hook, lightning bolt, mother's hand, flyswatter, trumpet, crane, or exclamation point. Sometimes, a trunk could be a billy club, a loosely held weapon capable of knocking the wind—even the life—out of a man.

He favored an Asian elephant, a bull named Caesar with gold balls on the tips of its tusks. Caesar's trunk, Gordon believed, was a third and more powerful eye, a cable that closed the incredible distance between its head and the earth under its feet. On the road, troublemaking boys often threw handfuls of whatnot into the elephant stalls: peanuts mixed with coins and bottle caps. Caesar could sift and sort with its trunk—suck up the peanuts, deposit the money into the pockets of the keepers, and blow the bottle caps back in the boys' startled faces.

Gordon grew up in Pullman cars and the sideshow tent, but he spent each winter in a kind of normalcy, rising from a trundle bed each morning in a bunkhouse. His parents, Bascomb and Pearly, nursed coffee at the kitchen table, flames licking logs in the fireplace. Some mornings, he pretended this was a different life—a cold winter morning in Kentucky or Ohio or Pennsylvania, perhaps—the life he might have lived if his father had only turned Hollenbach down that day in Paducah. But then the chow bell would ring, calling them to the cookhouse for breakfast, and in the distance, he'd hear a lion roar good morning. Elephants ambled by on their way to the river for a bath, and so Gordon knew he'd risen at the winter quarters of the Great Porter Circus, which had purchased the Hollenbach menagerie and properties not long before he was born. This was Lima, Indiana, hometown of proprietor Wallace Porter, who had a sweet spot for children and allowed Gordon unlimited access to his private library and elephant barn. All summer, Gordon longed for November, the time when his family let their hair grow (Pearly had finally consented to shaving her head for the sake of family solidarity) and packed away their leopard-skin robes. In the winter, he could talk to his parents without having to grunt, amuse himself without having to throw sawdust. He longed for cold and snow the way schoolboys long for summer—winter freed him from the circus.

 

BE WARNED
. This isn't a pretty story.

In the spring of 1901, an outbreak of influenza hit Lima and the winter quarters, sending many to their beds, including Gordon. In a fevered haze, he heard the commotion of April 25—the arrival of wagons, men yelling, horses galloping, guns firing. A knock on the door. Voices whispering in the kitchen. His mother stroking his arm, telling him not to worry. There'd been an accident. In the afternoon, Gordon awoke from a nap and heard his mother in the next room saying, "What will become of Nettie? Poor woman with a brand-new baby."
They're talking about Hans Hofstadter,
he thought, the ill-tempered elephant trainer who sometimes shooed him out of the animal barns with a pitchfork. He had a wife, Nettie, and a newborn son, Ollie.

"Porter will keep her on somehow, I'm sure," Gordon heard his father say. "Can't say as much for that elephant." They rehashed what they'd heard: Hans Hofstadter was dead, beaten and drowned in the river by a bull with gold-tipped tusks. His assistant, Elephant Jack, had arrived in the midst of it, a helpless witness to Hofstadter's attempts to escape. To atone for his tardiness, he'd taken the first shots at the offending elephant—Caesar. Out of ammunition, Elephant Jack had called for reinforcements; they were out there now, putting the elephant down.

At suppertime, Gordon pretended to be asleep when his parents checked on him. As soon as they left for dinner at the cookhouse, Gordon dressed quickly and snuck outside, following the sound of gunfire he'd heard in the distance. Caesar's path was easy to follow—a broken fence in the camel lot, enormous footprints heading toward a stand of trees. The toppled elephant lay on its side in a fallow field surrounded by a posse of men holding lanterns, guns, and rope. (Gordon wondered why they'd brought rope—to catch it? To hang it?) They stood shifting on their feet, crunching the frozen earth beneath them. Elephant Jack was recounting what he'd seen at the river. Hofstadter tossed ten feet in the air, his slow swim back to shore, and Caesar's final trick—holding the struggling keeper underwater. Gordon peered around the men's legs and saw Caesar, head and body bullet riddled, eyes shot out and crying blood.

Gordon recognized some of the men from the winter quarters, but some were unfamiliar, local farmers who'd volunteered, he thought, not so much to protect their homes, families, and livestock from a rampaging animal, as to have the opportunity to act like big-game hunters. Now that it was done, the hunters stood contemplating their kill, discussing, estimating, speculating: the number of shots fired ("somewheres around two hundred," a man said); the amount of strychnine ingested, concealed in three cored apples ("enough to kill five or six horses," said another); the length of the unsheathed penis lying like a dead snake on the ground ("Three feet," Elephant Jack said, slicing it off with his knife. "Good leather for tanning"); and the value of Caesar's sawed-off tusks ("five thousand bucks, give or take a few hundred"). Gordon tasted bile in his mouth and swallowed hard.