Read Online Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud - Free Book Online Page B

had charge of his three precious babes. Then his gaze closed, as did all white people’s on second glance. His winter-sky-snake-eyes returned to the same blank stare I always saw in whites’ eyes when they looked at me. Or rather through me. As if, after twenty years of daily observance, they couldn’t for the life of them remember my name.
    As I left, Mistress Van Loott whispered,
    —He won’t bother you . . .
    I bit my lip to keep from laughing. She really believed that. I wondered how she explained all the colored orphans at her mission.
    That evening, the wheels of the long wagon train groaned as the lead wagon turned on itself out of the corral. It stretched a half mile across the plain like a huge pink seashell: longhorn cattle, bulls, bullocks, mares, calves, fanned out from the spine of wagons loaded and ready to move. The blue light struck the dark shiny coats and white jutting horns of the herd and their odor rose from their own dust. I could barely make out the herders and cowboys or the black silhouettes of the San and Xhosa shepherds gliding silently amongst them. Like a lazy animal stretching, the train began to creep forward slowly, moonlight outlining the braying, snorting, crying, creaking mass. We passed an encampment of Khoekhoe, miserable blank-eyed, filthy, weaponless people huddled around camp-fires, for the night was cold. Wolves and coyotes howled in the valley. The blurred, dark shadows of the herders moved amongst the animals. The torches of Cape Town burned bright in the distance until they disappeared behind the hills, leaving only the oil lamps swinging on the wagon posts like fireflies as guiding lights. They and shooting stars lit the way, for it was now Star Death moon.

4

    I am a monogenist, all humans come from a single creation divided into three races: Caucasians, Ethiopians or Negroes, and Mongolians. It is not a coincidence that the Caucasian race has gained dominion over the world while Negroes are still sunken in slavery and the pleasures of the senses and the Chinese lost in the obscurities of a hieroglyphic language . . .
    —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,
Thirty Lessons in Comparative Anatomy
    Star Death, the English month of February, 1806. The Caesar farm stood low on the slopes of Table Mountain Ridge, part of a valley that sang with wild animals, savage birds, wolves, jackals and Cape lions. The wide square house stood surrounded by great shade trees, groves of fruit trees, mango arbors and vineyards. For me, the house was another coffin. White with square black pillars and a veranda on all sides, it seemed to have descended from on high, pushing aside the tall pale grass to settle its backside into the landscape like a brood hen. There was no courtyard; instead the henhouse looked outwards in all directions so that I saw only horizon, filled with grasslands and wheat fields that led softly to the next ridge. There was always a fresh wind blowing and the wood and brick house, built in the Dutch manner, was situated to catch the slightest breeze. The polished plank floors were always cool under my bare feet and thick walls kept the African heat out.
    There were no other Hottentot servants. All the others were Xhosa or Bantu and they looked down on me. Several were Muslim, two were Christian and the others, like me, believed that no one god or gods had the answer to the mysteries of life and so stuck to believing in rocks and rivers, the sun and wind, trees and earth, and listening to them and speaking to them, following the old ways.
    The Caesar family was a typical Boer family, consisting of father, mother and three children. Added to this core were four dogs, a cat, a parrot and sixteen servants. Peter Caesar, for that was my master’s given name, was a Dutch Afrikaner, although it was rumored that he had some Khoekhoe blood in him as well as Irish. This was servants’ gossip. I never found out any more about him except that his grandfather had come to the Cape from the