by T Cooper
“Yes ma’am, Miss Bon Mambo, ma’am,” says I, for her greens were perfectly greasy and mighty tasty, and besides, I had no wish to be zombified. “Soon as I get me two dixies, I’m giving one of em to you.”
This was the rightest thing I coulda said, for she smiled real big and added some awfully good spoon-bread and syrup to my plate and I fell back to breaking my fast. Bon Mambo and I had ourselves an understanding.
“Don’t you be wasting all my profits on every rag-tail scallywag what sets down in this kitchen, Bon Mambo.” And with that, the beaded curtain swooshes open and in marches the Madame of the house, followed close on her heels by my quadroon angel. Where Miss Rosie is tall and thin and long of limb, Madame Violet is short and stout and about as stubby a woman as I ever seen.
“Stand up, boy, and let’s have a look at you,” says Madame Violet. So I do.
“Turn around.” I do that as well.
“Take off your shirt and trousers.” I don’t do that.
“Boy, this is not the sort of house to be shy in.”
I am at a loss for words, which as you know I am not often.
“Go ahead, Elexander,” says Miss Rosie, “we seen it all before.”
I finish chewin the bite of spoon-bread that’s in my mouth and look over to Bon Mambo, who gives me a wink and a nod. So I shrug my shoulders and in no time I’m standing in this kitchen in my underwears.
“See, what’d I tell you, Madame Vi? Jest what the Major’s been asking for: right size, right face, even the right hair. Ain’t he perfect?”
“I wouldn’t call him perfect,” says the Madame, “and it depends how good he’ll look in a dress.”
The power of speech having returned to me, I reply: “Madame Violet, I look durned fetchin in a dress, my hair cleans up real good, but I’m afraid nuthin can be done for this pug ugly face of mine.” All three women laugh out loud, and Madame Violet looks at me a lot closer then, pretty near to like a butcher who’s inspectin a not-too-rancid side of bacon.
“So you like to wear dresses,” she says, “but did you ever lay down with a man before?” Well, it all fell in place for me right then and there what they wanted from me and what I’d most likely be doing to earn myself that dixie or two.
“My pap brought me to his bed more than oncet or twice, ma’am,” I told her, “but layin there was all I did. Ef’n you mean did a man ever love me and did I ever love a man right back, then yes’m, I have and I find it to my likin. Might I put my shirt and trousers back on now?”
Did I ever tell you that about my pap, Tom? I don’t think I ever did. I don’t talk about those times all that much because when I do, I pretty near always start in cryin, which is what I started to do right there in the kitchen all over my greens. Miss Rosie leans down next to my chair and wraps her long arms around me and squeezes and squeezes. When she’d done with that, I get myself dressed and set back down to eatin and this Madame lays out exactly what I am to do, with whom I am to do it, and what words to say while I’m a’doin it. She has plenty of time to tell me all the details because I am eatin a great deal of Bon Mambo’s delicious greens and spoon-bread.
What followed then was pretty near a day full of bathin and dressin and girl lessons. Pretty near every one of the wild women in that house took a whack at gettin me ready. They fussed all over me like I was they little sister gettin ready for her debyootant ball, which in a way was what I was. One of em curled my hair all up, and I ain’t never felt anything softer against my neck, cept once I spent a night with a cranky old tom cat who liked to suck on my ear. One of em sprayed me in parfum all the way from France, every part of me except my feet and my toes, which they left all road-dusty and I’m sorry to say a bit ripe to the nose, but they explained that the Major perferred odoriferous feet. Next, a tall handsome nigger showed up. He is the piano player and barber of the house by the name of Perfesser, and he shaved me with a straight razor but he didn’t stop at my neck.
By this time, I am feeling mighty fine. I am surrounded on all sides by scanty-clad women and they are touching me, stroking me, poking me, and sponging me, and soon enough a part of me has come to attention. A skinny little thing named French Annie says: “Sugar-boy, you want me to take care of that little soldier of yours?”
“Miss French Annie,” I replied, “I would be most obliged.”
But instead of what I expected her to do, she flicks me across that very tender part of me with just one finger, and down I go to half-mast again, and they bust out laughin all over again.
“You remember that move,” says French Annie to me. “It may come in handy someday.”
They was pretty much all generous and good-natured like that. I was a bit embarrassed. Not shy, I wasn’t shy. I was embarrassed I couldn’t pay them for all the work they were doin makin me pretty and presentable. Madame Violet was givin me just one dixie for the whole night. Looked like Bon Mambo wasn’t that much of a fortune-teller, for with no second dixie I couldn’t pay her tribute. But ef’n I did good enough tonight, and this Major who was from Massychoosetts liked me and all, well, I could move into the house. I’d be a regular, and I could work there and get the same pay as the other girls. That’s what she said: “the other girls,” like I might could be one of em. I didn’t mind much the idea of lyin down with the Major. Boys and men can be just as lovely as the ladies ef’n you’re lyin in their arms.
By now we was getting down to the finishing touches. Little French Annie places her palms just over my nippies and pushes em one toward the other, giving me little boobies. And while she’s holding my new boobies in place like that, another of the girls applies a sticking plaster, and some minutes later I am the proud bearer of a fine set of womanly bosoms which shook like the real thing, especially when I laughed. But then they commenced to apply feminine underwear to me and this was truly torture. Tom, I have beared up with ticks and chiggers and fleas and skeeters. I have braved snakes and even once’t I faced down a mad fox was fixin to bite me. But I have never come to grips with anything so diabolical as the womanly torture of hooks and eyelets. Hunnerts of them on one little piece of skimpy underwear and they helped me hook each and every one of em. I always been most comfortable with niggers, and these girls were just another kind of nigger, so we all got along.
By now it is evenin time and all the girls and women are in their finest frippery, and Tom, I am one of them, waitin down in the parlor, flirting with all the gentlemen callers. Miss Rosie, my tall quadroon crooks her little finger at me and that is my signal to meet my Major in the parlor. He is the attashay to General Butler hisself! Takin the Major’s arm like I was teached, I wait while he counts out the cash into Madame Violet’s hands. Only then do I let him escort me up the stairs. “What’s your name, lovely lady?” he asks of me.
“Miss Sarah Elizabeth Amy Potterfield Grangerford, suh,” I reply, “of the Jackson, Mississippi Potterfields and Grangerfords, of course.”
“Do I detect a hint of Southern aristocracy, Miss Grangerford?”
And here I lifts my chin into the air and squints my eyes at him like he was a bug, just like Madame Violet teached me, and I say, “Major, suh, there is no Southern belle as aristocratic as I, and I will thank you to remember your place as the crude barbarian invader that you are.” The fine Massychoosetts Major writ them words, not me, and now he turns all red and commences to sweat like a plow horse. Did I mention the Major is easy on the eye? Well, he is. We reached the top of the stairs and we were standing in front of our room for the night, and the Major gives me a wink of his eye that makes me blush like a girl.
Inside the room, I remember the words I am spected to say, and I start saying them. I call him all sorts of worm and coward. “You ain’t even fit to lick my toes.”
“Oh, Mistress Grangerford, ma’am,” says he, “I am, I am fit to lick your toes.”
“Oh no you ain’t, you catawumptious weasel,” says I, just the way I been schooled.
“Oh yes I am. Allow me to prove it t
o you.”
“Oh no you ain’t, you gritless varmint, and if you push me one step further, I’m gonna whoop you with this here cowhide like the monkey you are.”
Now, I should tell you that women in Nawlins are not in any way permitted to call Union soldiers monkeys, nor are they to spit on em in the streets, much as they may want to, for otherwise they are to be taken as common whores and subject to their whims, and all this by the order of the boss general of my very own Major, General Butler hisself!
But here I am, calling this Yankee officer a monkey, and then I hawk a fine gob of spit right down into his face. Well, you woulda thought I’d fed the man a spoonful of sweet potato pie the way he slobbered it up. This was gettin to be fun. Then I whoop him. I whoop him really good, and once’t I done that, I tell him: “Now lick up my toes, you chatterin monkey. Clean up these here Southern belle toes of mine, you Yankee scum.” I made that one up myself, and he seemed to like it. “Go on, use that ill-bred tongue of yours.”
He goes down on his knees, and I’m afraid his smeller is gonna get more than he bargained for. But no sooner do I finish this thought when I feel that bristly moustache and that warm tongue of his workin their way over my toesies. He pauses right there and looks up at me, and I’m afraid he’s got hisself some misgivings.
“Miss Sarah Grangerford,” he gasps, “your feet are the most delicate flowers of the South,” and he falls to further lickings and suckings for the better part of half an hour. I have learned myself a good lesson, and that would be: Beauty is in the eye of the one payin for yer services.
Then, just like the Madame said he would, he starts workin on my ankles with that prickly, tickly moustache of his. I am biting my lip so as I dasn’t laugh, but then his moustache is ticklin the calf of my leg, and next the back of my knees. Seemed like I’d die if I couldn’t laugh, and all the time I’m tryin not to laugh, he’s shoutin things like, “Long Live King Cotton,” and, “Ulysses S. Grant is the Devil incarnate!” and, “I believe in states’ rights!” which is the signal for me to pull his head up between my legs and say, “Use that mouth of yours to show me how sorry you are for despoiling our gentile South with your oafish manners,” but as I’m pullin his head up, that troublesome moustache of his tickles me where I can’t stand it one moment longer and I bust out laughin. And he’s lookin up at me all astonished, and then he busts out laughin hisself! But he takes me into his mouth anyways and I didn’t know you could do that so good and be laughin at the same time, but that’s what he’s doin. He’s doin it so good that pretty soon I stop laughin and commence in gaspin. And then I’m not gaspin but I’m jest cryin out: “Oh, oh, oh! Oh! Oh! Ohhhhhh!” And without thinkin and without bein teached by Madame Violet, I ask him does he want me up between his legs with my mouth on him.
“Girl,” he says to me real soft like, “I can think of nothing I would cherish more.” No one ever talked to me like that before. He ackshully used the word cherish and it wasn’t till then I noticed what a nice smile the Major has. We spend the better part of the night wrapped up in each other’s arms and legs and tongues and other parts. The way he’s treatin me I think to myself maybe just tonight I am a little bit of a woman.
He has to get back to his barracks before the bugles blow revelly, so he gets outta bed just before dawn. I pretend to keep on sleepin, so’s I can enjoy watchin what he’s like when he’s not actin out the words he writ for us to use the night before. He gently tucks something in between my bosoms, which by now have come partly unstuck one from t’other, and then he walks out the door, pullin it closed real quiet behind him. I just watch the door through half-closed eyes fer maybe ten minutes. Then I remember to reach in between my bosoms to see what he left me. He had tipped me another dixie. Bon Mambo was gonna get her tribute after all.
Well, my Massychoosetts Major is uncommon fond of me, and I of him, so I been stayin here at Madame Violet’s since that night. A true adventuress, that’s me. The war is over and he has told me he is returning to Massychoosetts where he has a wife and four chilren, the oldest is my age near exactly. But the city has been fillin up with carpetbaggers and scallywags for some months now, and with the war over it is sure to fill up more. So there’s gonna be a whole new crop of men who are gonna want to buy themselves some evenings with girls like me. I got nowhere in particular to go, and besides, I sort of like it here.
Bon Mambo is ringin the dinner bell, and I am uncommon fond of her cooking so I’m gonna close up this letter now. Write me a letter when you have a chance to, will you? It would be so very good to hear how you’re gettin along. Or better yet, come to Nawlins and allow me to show off our lovely city to you. That would be ever so much better. Jest make your way to the frenchy quarter and remember if you please to not ask for Huckleberry Finn. You kin just ask any kind stranger where is Sassy Sarah, and they will lead you right to my door.
Fondly,
(your) Sassy
1884
THE WATERBURY
BY DAVID REES
1905
A TRUE AND FAITHFUL ACCOUNT OF MR. OTA BENGA THE PYGMY
WRITTEN BY M. BERMAN, ZOOKEEPER
BY ADAM MANSBACH
A TRUE AND FAITHFUL ACCOUNT OF MR. OTA BENGA THE PYGMY
WRITTEN BY M. BERMAN, ZOOKEEPER
I am Mordecai Berman, a zookeeper. Morty, they call me at the zoo. Also shit-shoveler. Of the two, shit-shoveler I prefer. Monkey shit is my specialty. I have been keeping clean the Primate House eight years now, and though I have no fancy education to prove it, I know more about the animals than probably anyone. Simply from spending time. What else I got to do? Sit in my cold-water flat, smelled up the same way every night from the wilted carrots and chicken fat of my neighbors? Chase after dames, on a crap-carrier’s salary? Maybe sit in synagogue? To this I say: Ha ha, good one, my friend.
I bought tonight this notebook, and in it will keep record of what is to begin tomorrow at the zoo: a very curious affair. Who knows, perhaps I sell my story, if I make one, to the New York Times. Probably not, I think—already I am babbling on like a babushka, saying nothing.
So: Tomorrow arrives at the Bronx Zoological Park Mr. Ota Benga the Pygmy, the great success (I wonder whether he would say so) of last year’s World’s Fair in St. Louis. He is brought by the great explorer Samuel Verner, the same man who took Mr. Benga from his home in the Belgian Congo, together with some others of the Pygmy’s tribe. As reported by the NYT—which is daffy for both Benga and Verner, so you see my plan is not entirely absurd—Mr. Benga returned from the successful hunting of an elephant to find his whole village destroyed, including, sad to say, his wife and child. Thus was he agreeable to Mr. Verner’s entreaties to board the great ship. Just how the village was destroyed, and what form of entreaty was employed by the Man of Science, the NYT leaves to the imagination of the reader.
In St. Louis, Mr. Benga was displayed in the Fair’s Anthropology Department, as part of the Exhibition of Savages. Those who believe like Mr. Darwin that we come of the monkeys have lately decided that the different races of man derive from different races of monkey. They hold the Negro to be of the Gorilla, an animal considered strong of body but weak of mind. The Oriental, they have paired with the Orangutan, and the White with the cleverest of apes, the Chimpanzee. They further believe that under Mr. Darwin’s idea of Evolution, man’s inferior species will die off, and in particular the Negro. When slavery ended, they were certain this would right away begin. I do not know how they square the fact that it has not with the continuation of the theory, but then true Men of Science are in many ways a mystery.
I will now put aside Mr. Benga for only a moment to record my own lowly opinion of these ideas: It is clear to me that the men behind them have never been to a zoo. If they had, they would not be so eager either to compare themselves to Chimps, or Negroes to Gorillas. The Gorilla, you see, is the most lovely of all Apes. He is quiet, thoughtful, he takes care of his babies and his fellows. His eyes, when you look into them, you see your
self there. The Gorilla knows sadness. He knows he is a prisoner, and yet does not hate his jailer. Perhaps you cannot know what I mean if you have only, like most people, been to the zoo for an afternoon’s fun with your girl or children.
The Chimpanzee, meanwhile, is by nature an asshole. He throws his feces by the handful—does not pluck them from the ground, mind you, but defecates directly into his palm for this purpose and no other. He attacks his cohort without reason, quarrels with him all the day. Alone among Apes, he has been known even to murder. Sometimes, it is true, he seems the most human to me, but only on days when my landlord has threatened to shut off my heat, or a pretty girl, when I smile at her on the subway, turns away, or prankster kids break into the zoo’s sanitation room and knock over my shitcans.
To resume: In St. Louis Mr. Benga was tested in his intelligence, to see how he rated against defective Whites. He was tested also for the speed of his reaction to pain, and for his athletic ability, which was found to be in severe lack. Of this last experiment I remember reading with some confusion, for the Pygmies were made to compete in games we here have made up: the shot-put, the javelin, and other such contests of track and field. How a man who has killed an elephant could be in so bad a shape, I cannot fathom. But I imagine Honus Wagner might fare just as badly if he were stripped naked, dropped into the middle of the jungle, and told to kill dinner for himself and his family.
When Mr. Benga was not being tested, he sat in a mud-field, outside a shack constructed for him. Occasionally the anthropologists arranged between the Pygmies a mud fight for the enjoyment of the public. Of this, the NYT gave a picture. Verner was quoted in the report that followed, wondering whether the Pygmy was highest ape or lowest man. He then suggested that the Bushmen of Africa be collected into reservations and the continent colonized and run by Whites, as the Bushmen have no religion, no tradition, and can neither remember the past nor contemplate the future. Verner was described in the report as an exceedingly Christian person, a lover of all creatures, and one of the few men who can accept the ideas of Mr. Darwin and of Scripture both, no problem. He will make a speech tomorrow, I am sure. A man like Verner, that is what he does. I expect I may meet him, as Mr. Benga is to make his home in the Primate House.
