The Flamingo’s Smile (27 page)

But think of how many lower animals—insects in particular—bear dismemberment without an apparent whimper.

The third category includes bestial features possessed more strongly by whites than blacks, but even more intensely by lower animals—the most direct and evident exception to White’s preferred order. Whites, for example, have a fuller beard and more copious body hair than blacks, while most mammals are fully covered with a dense pelage. White wriggles out of this problem with a rhetorical device and a claim that the noblest of animals have flowing hair, like the copious locks of European whites!

In the final category, blacks possess more of apparently bestial features than whites, so all seems well—until we realize that beasts are the least endowed of all. Black males, for example, have larger penises than whites, while black females have larger breasts—sure signs of an indecent and unbridled sexuality. (White even reports that “the Hottentot women have long flabby breasts; and that they can suckle their children upon their backs by throwing the breasts over their shoulders.”) But apes have smaller penises and breasts than any group of humans. White found no adequate solution to this problem and simply made an end run around it, commenting in passing that at least black women and apes develop the largest nipples!

At this point, and after 100 pages of assiduous listing, White’s argument lies in a shambles—despite all his heroic efforts to patch it up, as documented in the foregoing discussion. Therefore, following all the old adages about putting the best face upon adversity, he ends with a rhetorical flourish and with a blatant appeal to that ultimate subjectivity—aesthetic criteria. After all, don’t we all know that white people are more attractive and pleasing to God and man—and that’s ultimately that. Thus, in a final roulade and in a famous paragraph often quoted for its unintended humorous effect, White ends his argument with the following paean to European beauty:

I don’t mean to diminish the posthumous humor of this passage—“snowy white hemispheres tipt with vermillion” as the ultimate mark of human perfection, indeed! White’s flowery style may render him more subject to ridicule than most of his contemporaries, but his argument is no worse or different from many of theirs. He was merely expressing a common opinion of his time in admittedly overblown rhetoric. The static chain of being, as Lovejoy argues, had formed a cornerstone of Western interpretations of nature for centuries, despite its evident difficulties in application to a recalcitrant world full of gaps and copious variation not easily ordered into single sequences.

So have a good chuckle at the appropriate parts, but then ponder the larger and serious issue for a moment. Evolution drove the static chain of being into obsolescence—therefore, we may easily, in retrospect, identify its evident flaws and analyze the falseness and inconsistency of argument used to defend it. But how many of our own cherished beliefs, the ones that we never doubt because we think that they map nature in an obvious way, will seem centuries hence just as foolish and ideologically bound as the static chain of being? Should we not examine the logic and verisimilitude of our own deepest convictions? At least we may avoid the ridicule of future generations by steering clear of sexual anatomy and leaving to the great biblical poets of the Song of Songs any metaphorical description of the human breast.

I HAD A LITTLE FRIEND
in nursery school. I don’t even remember her name. But I do recall some secret advice that I offered her one day at the playground. I told her that the enormous surrounding creatures known as adults always looked up when they walked, and that we little folk would therefore find all manner of valuable things on the ground if only we kept our gazes down. Were my paleontological predispositions already in evidence?

Carl Sagan and I both grew up in New York, both interested in biology and astronomy. Since Carl is tall and chose astronomy, while I’m short and chose paleontology, I always figured that he’d be looking up (as he did with some regularity in hosting his TV series
Cosmos
), while I’d be sticking to my old but good advice and staring at the ground. But I one-upped him (literally) last month in Paris.

A few years back, Yves Coppens, professor at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, took Carl on a tour of the museum’s innards. There, on a shelf in storage, they found the brain of Paul Broca floating in Formalin in a bell jar. Carl wrote a fine essay about this visit, the title piece of his book
Broca’s Brain
. A few months ago, Yves took me on a similar tour. I held the skull of Descartes and of our mutual ancestor, the old man of Cro-Magnon. I also found Broca’s brain, resting on its shelf and surrounded by other bell jars holding the brains of his illustrious scientific contemporaries—all white and all male. Yet I found the most interesting items on the shelf just above. Perhaps Carl never looked up.

This area of the museum’s “back wards” holds Broca’s collection of anatomical parts, including his own generous and posthumous contribution. Broca, a great medical anatomist and anthropologist, embodied the great nineteenth-century faith in quantification as a key to objective science. If he could collect enough human parts from enough human races, the resultant measurements would surely define the great scale of human progress, from chimp to Caucasian. Broca was not more virulently racist than his scientific contemporaries (nearly all successful white males, of course); he was simply more assiduous in accumulating irrelevant data, selectively presented to support an a priori viewpoint.

These shelves contain a ghoulish potpourri: severed heads from New Caledonia; an illustration of foot binding as practiced upon Chinese women—yes, a bound foot and lower leg, severed between knee and ankle. And, on a shelf just above the brains, I saw a little exhibit that provided an immediate and chilling insight into nineteenth-century
mentalité
and the history of racism: in three smaller jars, I saw the dissected genitalia of three Third-World women. I found no brains of women, and neither Broca’s penis nor any male genitalia grace the collection.

The three jars are labeled
une négresse, une péruvienne
, and
la Vénus Hottentotte
, or the Hottentot Venus. Georges Cuvier himself, France’s greatest anatomist, had dissected the Hottentot Venus upon her death in Paris late in 1815. He went right to the genitalia for a particular and interesting reason, to which I will return after recounting the tale of this unfortunate woman.

In an age before television and movies made virtually nothing on earth exotic, and when anthropological theory assessed as subhuman both malformed Caucasians and the normal representatives of other races, the exhibition of unusual humans became a profitable business both in upper-class salons and in street-side stalls (see Richard D. Altick’s
The Shows of London
, in the bibliography, or the book, stage, and screen treatments of the “Elephant Man”). Supposed savages from faraway lands were a mainstay of these exhibitions, and the Hottentot Venus surpassed them all in renown. (The Hottentots and Bushmen are closely related, small-statured people of southern Africa. Traditional Bushmen, when first encountered by Europeans, were hunter-gatherers, while Hottentots were pastoralists who raised cattle. Anthropologists now tend to forgo these European, somewhat derogatory terms and to designate both groups collectively as the Khoi-San peoples, a composite word constructed from each group’s own name for itself.) The Hottentot Venus was a servant of Dutch farmers near Capetown, and we do not know her actual group membership. She had a name, though her exploiters never used it. She was baptized Saartjie Baartman (Saartjie, or “little Sarah” in Afrikaans, is pronounced Sar-key).

Hendrick Cezar, brother of Saartjie’s “employer,” suggested a trip to England for exhibition and promised to make Saartjie a wealthy woman thereby. Lord Caledon, governor of the Cape, granted permission for the trip but later regretted his decision when he understood its purposes more fully. (Saartjie’s exhibition aroused much debate and she always had supporters, disgusted with the display of humans as animals; the show went on, but not to universal approbation.) She arrived in London in 1810 and immediately went on exhibition in Piccadilly, where she caused a sensation, for reasons soon to be discussed. A member of the African Association, a benevolent society that petitioned for her “release,” described the show. He first encountered Saartjie in a cage on a platform raised a few feet above the floor:

Yet Saartjie, interrogated in Dutch before a court, insisted that she was not under restraint and understood perfectly well that she had been guaranteed half the profits. The show went on.

After a long tour of the English provinces, Saartjie went to Paris where an animal trainer exhibited her for fifteen months, causing as great a sensation as in England. Cuvier and all the great naturalists of France visited her and she posed in the nude for scientific paintings at the Jardin du Roi. But she died of an inflammatory ailment on December 29, 1815, and ended up on Cuvier’s dissecting table, rather than wealthy in Capetown.

Why, in an age deluged with human exhibitions, was Saartjie such a sensation? We may offer two answers, each troubling and each associated with one of her official titles—Hottentot and Venus.

On the racist ladder of human progress, Bushmen and Hottentots vied with Australian aborigines for the lowest rung, just above chimps and orangs. (Some scholars have argued that the earliest designation applied by seventeenth-century Dutch settlers—
Bosmanneken
, or “Bushman”—was a literal translation of a Malay word well known to them—
Orang Outan
, or “man of the forest.”) In this system, Saartjie exerted a grim fascination, not as a missing link in a later evolutionary sense, but as a creature who straddled that dreaded boundary between human and animal and thereby taught us something about a self still present, although submerged, in “higher” creatures (see essays 17 and 18).

Contemporary commentators emphasized both the simian appearance and the brutal habits of Bushmen and Hottentots. In 1839, the leading American anthropologist S.G. Morton labeled Hottentots as “the nearest approximation to the lower animals…. Their complexion is a yellowish brown, compared by travellers to the peculiar hue of Europeans in the last stage of jaundice…. The women are represented as even more repulsive in appearance than the men.” Mathias Guenther (see bibliography) cites an 1847 newspaper account of a Bushman family displayed at the Egyptian Hall in London:

And the jaundiced account of a failed missionary in 1804:

Guenther reports that this equation of Bushman and animal became so ingrained that one party of Dutch settlers, out on a hunting expedition, shot and ate a Bushman, assuming that he was the African equivalent of the Malay orang.

Cuvier’s monograph of Saartjie’s dissection, published in the
Mémoires du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle
for 1817, followed this traditional view. After discussing and dismissing various ill-founded legends, Cuvier promised to present only “positive facts”—including this description of a Bushman’s life:

His description of Saartjie herself emphasizes all points of superficial similarity with any ape or monkey. (I need hardly mention that since people vary so much, each group must be closer than others to some feature of some other primate, without implying anything about genealogy or aptitude.) Cuvier, for example, discusses the flatness of Saartjie’s nasal bones: “In this respect, I have never seen a human head more similar to that of monkeys.” He emphasizes various proportions of the femur (upper leg bone) as embodying “characters of animality.” He speaks of Saartjie’s small skull (no surprise for a woman four and a half feet tall), and relegates her to stupidity according to “that cruel law, which seems to have condemned to an eternal inferiority those races with small and compressed skulls.” He even abstracted a set of supposedly simian responses from her behavior: “Her movements had something brusque and capricious about them, which recall those of monkeys. She had, above all, a way of pouting her lips, in the same manner as we have observed in orang utans.”

Yet a careful reading of the entire monograph belies these interpretations, since Cuvier states again and again (although he explicitly draws neither moral nor message) that Saartjie was an intelligent woman with general proportions that would not lead connoisseurs to frown. He mentions, in an offhand sort of way, that Saartjie possessed an excellent memory, spoke Dutch rather well, had some command of English, and was learning a bit of French when she died. (Not bad for a caged brute; I only wish that more Americans could do one-third so well in their command of languages.) He admitted that her shoulders, back, and chest “had grace” and with the gentilesse of his own race, spoke of
sa main charmante
(“her charming hand”).

Yet Saartjie’s hold over well-bred Europe did not arise from her racial status alone. She was not simply the Hottentot or the Hottentot woman, but the Hottentot
Venus
. Under all official words lay the great and largely unsaid reason for her popularity. Khoi-San women do exaggerate two features of their sexual anatomy (or at least of body parts that excite sexual feelings in most men). The Hottentot Venus won her fame as a sexual object, and her combination of supposed bestiality and lascivious fascination focused the attention of men who could thus obtain both vicarious pleasure and a smug reassurance of superiority.

Primarily—for, as they say, you can’t miss it—Saartjie was, in Altick’s words, “steatopygous to a fault.” Khoi-San women accumulate large amounts of fat in their buttocks, a condition called steatopygia. The buttocks protrude far back, often coming to a point at their upper extremity and sloping down toward the genitalia. Saartjie was especially well endowed, the probable cause of Cezar’s decision to convert her from servant to siren. Saartjie covered her genitalia during exhibitions, but her rear end
was
the show, and she submitted to endless gaze and poke for five long years. Since European women did not wear bustles at the time, but indicated by their clothing only what nature had provided, Saartjie seemed all the more incredible.

Cuvier well understood the mixed bestial and sexual nature of Saartjie’s fascination when he wrote that “everyone was able to see her during her eighteen-month stay in our capital, and to verify the enormous protrusion of her buttocks and the brutal appearance of her face.” In his dissection, Cuvier focused on an unsolved mystery surrounding each of her unusual features. Europeans had long wondered whether the large buttocks were fatty, muscular, or perhaps even supported by a previously unknown bone. The problem had already been solved—in favor of fat—by external observation, the primary reason for her disrobing before scientists at the Jardin du Roi. Still, Cuvier dissected her buttocks and reported:

But Saartjie’s second peculiarity provided even greater wonder and speculation among scientists; and Saartjie heightened the intrigue by keeping this feature scrupulously hidden, even refusing a display at the Jardin. Only after her death could the curiosity of science be slaked.

Reports had circulated for two centuries of a wondrous structure attached directly to the female genitalia of KhoiSan women and covering their private parts with a veil of skin, the so-called
sinus pudoris
, or “curtain of shame.” (If I may be permitted a short excursion into the realm of scholarly minutiae—the footnotes of more conventional academic publication—I would like to correct a standard mistranslation of Linnaeus, one that I have made myself. In his original description of
Homo sapiens
, Linnaeus provided a most unflattering account of African blacks, including the line:
feminae sinus pudoris
. This phrase has usually been translated, “women are without shame”—a slur quite consistent with Linnaeus’s general description. In Latin, “without shame” should be
sine pudore
, not
sinus pudoris
. But eighteenth-century scientific Latin was written so indifferently that misspellings and wrong cases are no bar to actual intent, and the reading “without shame” has held. But Linnaeus was only stating that African women have a genital flap, or
sinus pudoris
. He was also wrong, because only the Khoi-San and a few related peoples develop this feature.)