by Jason Porath
• ART NOTES •
Here Mary Baker is placing a portrait of her history as “Princess Caraboo” on the mantelpiece of her host, covering up her history as Mary Baker—which is itself covering up numerous other potential histories.
The outfit she’s wearing is based on her descriptions of the “traditional dresses” of Javasu. Same with the depictions of her parents (seen in the Caraboo portrait).
Anita Garibaldi
(1821–1849, BRAZIL/URUGUAY/ITALY)
Heroine of Two Worlds
It is a rare woman who fights in a revolutionary war. Rarer still one who fights in two. Rarest of all is the woman who fights in three.
Meet Anita Garibaldi, who did just that. While pregnant.
Anita was born to a poor Brazilian family. At an early age, she began to delight her bold father and terrify her conservative mother by spending her time breaking wild horses instead of sewing and learning to cook. Her father died when she was young, but she soon proved that she carried on his fighting spirit: when a local boy tried to force himself on her, she whipped him in the face and sped off on her horse. He was scarred for life. Anita was just getting started.
It was to be a false start, though. At the outset of her adult life, she crippled her own freedoms with a terrible marriage in a big city. Her worrywart mother had spent years begging her to settle down, so Anita acquiesced and married a man who turned out to be an abusive drunk. She would regularly lock herself in her room to defend herself from his fits of alcoholic rage. She was 14.
At the same time Anita’s life was taking a turn for the worse, so was Brazil. It had recently become independent from Portugal, which seemed totally positive—until it fell into an endless series of internal conflicts, including the incongruously-yet-adorably-named Ragamuffin War, which pit scrappy rebels (yay) against the Brazilian monarchy (boo). For Anita, two good things came out of all this. Firstly, her crappy husband volunteered to join the establishment forces and left home. Secondly, and more importantly, her true love came to Brazil: Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Giuseppe was the definitive bad boy of 1830s Brazil. For him, the Brazilian conflicts were just a warm-up, a practice war. His long-term goal was to drive out foreign interests from his native Italy—then a collection of many smaller countries—and unify the country under a single flag. To gain experience (and soldiers), he had left Italy for Brazil and started running the Ragamuffin rebels’ navy. While his expertise and roguish good looks endeared him to Brazilian women nationwide, his “war, war, and more war” outlook on life understandably didn’t win him much love from the mothers of said women.
This didn’t much matter to Anita, who, against the wishes of her mother (and husband, and friends, and pretty much everyone—the pressure was intense), started an affair with Giuseppe. According to their memoirs, he fell for her at first sight, immediately blurting out “You must be mine” upon meeting her. Giuseppe Garibaldi: not the smoothest operator.
From this torrid start, their relationship took a turn into adult realms. They soon met clandestinely at an abandoned cabin late at night. With the lights low and a heap of straw waiting for them in the corner, they let their base urges take hold of them and gave in to their true desires. Which is to say, they started talking. Openly and frankly, they discussed their hopes, dreams, fears, and expectations, gaining a very clear understanding of what the other wanted. Didn’t sleep together or anything.
You know, adult realms.
Anita thereafter joined him on his ship and immediately subverted the sailors’ expectations by becoming an integral part of the crew. In no time, she learned the ins and outs of being a crew member, donned men’s clothes, and even created a first aid station.
She got her hands equally dirty in battle. She started by running through gun and cannon fire to treat the wounded. In a later battle, when the monarchy’s forces got the better of them, she manned the cannons herself, helped get the ship’s ammunition onto shore, then set the remainder of the ship on fire.
In the Battle of Curitibanos, she was captured by the Brazilian monarchists while leading the rear guard. She soon broke out of captivity, sneaking into the forest. Over the next several days, she evaded enemy soldiers, forded a river, traversed rain forest and scorching desert—all without food—until she found her way back to Giuseppe. Once they were reunited, she helped protect the unit’s horses from monarchist raiders, even besting a foe in hand-to-hand combat while they were both on horseback. She snatched his gun and threw him off his horse.
And she did all that while pregnant. (Guess they slept together eventually.)
From there, the couple moved on to Uruguay—partly because the Brazilian rebellions had devolved into political infighting in the new republic and further effort appeared useless, but mostly because Anita wanted a quieter life for their new child. Their baby had barely survived his first winter as the littlest guerrilla as they traveled through frozen wastes, with little to warm him but his father’s breath.
Unfortunately, her hoped-for “quiet life” only lasted a couple months, as Uruguay, too, plunged into rebellion and Giuseppe got sucked in to lead the rebel navy. Compared to Brazil, however, their time in Uruguay was paradise. Anita had three more children, when she wasn’t running the poorest section of the city of Montevideo. With the city under a prolonged siege from its enemies, Anita calmly organized its panicked residents, making the best of their skills and resources.
And in an ironic twist, Anita did indeed take up sewing, devoting huge amounts of time in Uruguay to the practice—but she was sewing rebel uniforms and flags. In fact, the outfit that gave Giuseppe’s infamous Red Shirt soldiers their name? Courtesy of Anita.
Gradually, the Uruguay conflicts died down, and with the various Italian nations primed for revolution, the Garibaldis moved to Europe. Their reputation preceded them, and they were greeted like royalty—some people would even smash open windows for a chance to get a clearer look at them. The leisurely life did not suit Anita, however, so she set herself to arranging field medics and first aid for the Red Shirts.
A combination of poor decisions and political infighting doomed the Italian rebellion shortly after it started. Soon Anita and Giuseppe left the kids with his mother and were on the run again. This time, though, they were up against an unimaginably strong enemy: at one point, the combined armies of four nations, totaling 65,000 soldiers, were chasing them. Time after time, they miraculously evaded their foes, but constant hunger and impending doom took its toll.
Compounding matters was the fact that Anita was pregnant with her fifth child, and on top of that, she had contracted malaria. Determined to continue fighting, she rode on through the fever, slashing at attacking soldiers from horseback. One later remarked, “Is that a woman or is it the devil?” The Garibaldis turned down offers of amnesty on principle and slogged from hut to hut, hoping to immigrate to the United States.
In the end, Anita could fight no longer, and she died in Giuseppe’s arms—seven months pregnant, a month shy of her 28th birthday. She was buried hurriedly, for lack of time.
Giuseppe went on to escape Italy, only to return 10 years later for a successful rebellion that saw the formation of modern-day Italy. Upon his return, he arranged for Anita’s body to be moved to Nice, to be given a proper funeral and interred with the rest of the Garibaldi family. There she rests still, an icon known in both South America and Italy as the Heroine of Two Worlds.
• ART NOTES •
The flag Anita is waving is that of the short-lived Riograndense Republic of Brazil, for which both she and Giuseppe fought during the Ragamuffin War.
Giuseppe’s flag is one he adopted to represent Italy in mourning. The volcano at its center was to symbolize its soldiers ready to erupt forth.
The size of the navy in the background is symbolic of the odds they faced.
Giuseppe’s outfit is the standard Red Shirts uniform, which Anita made.
Anita repeatedly made mention of Giuseppe’s
beautiful long hair. About the only fights they had were over her jealousy from the attention that other women would pay him. He once cut off all his hair so that she would feel better (which just made her feel worse).
For most of her life, Anita had but one dress, and it was incredibly shabby. Even her wedding ring was a cheap silver affair. Giuseppe was repeatedly offered tremendous riches in compensation for his various military successes, but to set an example for the troops, both he and Anita refused virtually all offers of aid.
Tomyris
(6TH CENTURY BCE, KAZAKHSTAN)
The Woman Who Headed Off the Most Powerful Man in the World
Tomyris was the widowed leader of the Massagetae, a semi-nomadic group living in Central Asia. Not much definitive is known about them (even their ethnicity is subject to debate), but a lot of the reported details (given by historians who are admittedly prone to hyperbole) are pretty colorful. In an awesome mashup of Logan’s Run and Soylent Green, they regularly sacrificed their elders when they got too old—presumably so the resulting geriatric meat would be well seasoned when they subsequently devoured it. But the Massagetae would only cannibalize the healthier seniors. Everyone knows that eating a sick old person is only a momentary pleasure and bound to give you indigestion.
But while the Massagetae were enjoying their wrinkly long pig steaks, their neighbor Cyrus the Great was making plans to conquer them. Cyrus had founded the Achaemenid Empire and built it, through relentless military conquests, into the largest empire the world had ever seen. Big as it was, though, apparently it was not big enough for Cyrus. And so Cyrus was looking to expand with another hostile takeover—in this case, the Massagetae.
Cyrus began his attempts on Tomyris’s holdings in the same manner as a Jane Austen villain: by proposing marriage. The widowed queen, however, was no blushing Regency ingenue and, seeing through his obvious scheme, laughed off his proposal. Cyrus took this jilting about as well as you’d expect from an all-powerful sovereign and went to plan B: declaring war and invading her country.
When word reached Tomyris that Cyrus was building a bridge across the river from her, she said, paraphrasing: “I’ll take you on, but not on some bridge. We can either do this in my backyard or yours. You let me know.”
Now, Cyrus was prepared to rumble on his side of the river, and he would have done so were it not for the terrible advice of one of his advisers, Croesus.* After all his other advisers had already settled on a plan, Croesus stood up with another idea. “If you lose ground to this chick, everyone is gonna mad disrespect you. Besides, you know what chicks are like. Let them in your house and soon they’re rearranging all your crap and getting their armies to take land for themselves. Bro up! Don’t even tell her you’re crossing the river to her side, dude!”
So Cyrus followed Croesus’s plan and began his invasion, using some underhanded tactics. Cyrus built a bridge, crossed the river, and sent in his worst soldiers with an unusual siege weapon: a massive banquet. Tomyris’s men soon found Cyrus’s poor soldiers-turned-sous-chefs and murdered them. Subsequently, the Massagetae helped themselves to the abandoned feast and got blitzed on the wine—an intoxicant to which they’d had little previous exposure. Once the Massagetae were falling-down drunk, Cyrus valiantly moved in, slaughtering and imprisoning a great many inebriated opponents. Tomyris’s son was one such prisoner.
As you might imagine, this displeased Tomyris. She wrote Cyrus again, calling him a bloodthirsty coward who let poison do his work. She ended her missive by commanding him to release her son and retreat. “Refuse,” she said, “and I swear by the sun, the sovereign lord of the Massagetae, bloodthirsty as you are, I will give you your fill of blood.”
From there things got worse: Cyrus ignored her message, Tomyris’s son committed suicide, and Tomyris went after Cyrus. At the end of the ensuing battle—described by the historian Herodotus as “more violent than any others fought between foreign nations”—Tomyris was victorious and Cyrus was dead.
Afterwards, Tomyris filled a wineskin with human blood and ordered Cyrus’s lifeless corpse brought to her. Cutting off his head and stuffing it into the wine sack, she proclaimed: “See now, I fulfill my threat; you have your fill of blood.”
• ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •
Tomyris’s outfit is based on depictions of the Scythians, of which the Massagetae were an offshoot. Fun fact: many of the Greek Amazon legends were based on the Scythians!
The background is the Araxes (Aras) River, the actual place where Cyrus crossed into Massagetae territory. You can see his bridge and towers burning on the right side of the image.
The cup Tomyris is holding is a skull cup—made from the top of an actual human skull. The peoples of her tribe regularly used the things. She was said to have made one from Cyrus’s head.
The helmet on the table is Cyrus’s helmet, as portrayed in almost every depiction of him.*
Emmeline Pankhurst
(1858–1929, ENGLAND)
The Most Dangerous Suffragette
I am what you might call a hooligan.”
So began Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1909 speech to a group of women agitating for the right to vote. They laughed, hooted, hollered, and applauded the sentiment.
Pankhurst wasn’t kidding. As the leading advocate for militant tactics in the British women’s suffrage movement, she oversaw and encouraged widespread acts of property destruction (notably and purposely leaving people out of it). She and her followers broke windows, bombed houses, burned a train station, threw acid into mailboxes, cut phone wires, slashed a priceless piece of art, threw rocks at the Crown Jewels, and even shoved a hatchet (bearing the message VOTES FOR WOMEN) into the prime minister’s carriage—all to get the vote. And they did so in proper British fashion: wearing pretty dresses and fancy hats.
Pankhurst was simultaneously an unlikely and inevitable leader for such a movement. She was born without much in the way of money or political connections and was borderline destitute for much of her adult life. However, politics and a fiery disposition were practically her genetic heritage.
Both her parents were activists, and her mother was from the ironically female-friendly Isle of Man: the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote. This, combined with her marriage to a scrappy young politician, pumped Pankhurst’s willfulness to levels to which Steve Jobs could only aspire.
How strong-willed was she? In the span of a year and a half, she was arrested 11 times, only to be released within a couple days on medical leave each time. Said medical leave was necessary because after each arrest she would go on a combination hunger, thirst, and sleep strike. She refused to so much as sit down in her cell, instead pacing around in circles endlessly. When that became too much, she propped her arm up over her head in order to keep herself awake. When released, despite often being too weak to lift her head or arms, she would skip town, going off to give speeches all across the UK (and sometimes other countries). She got around in a special ambulance that her political organization bought for just such occasions.
Mind you, she was in her mid-fifties at the time.
These extreme measures were not her initial methods. She spent years with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) campaigning peacefully. But the British establishment (chiefly Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and future would-be war hero Winston Churchill) was brutal in response, beating and locking up many of her compatriots. When her increasingly violent tactics were criticized, Pankhurst shot back:
Why should women go into Parliament Square and be battered about and be insulted, and, most important of all, produce less effect than when they use stones? We tried it long enough. We submitted for years patiently to insult and to assault. Women had their health injured. Women lost their lives. We should not have minded that if that had succeeded, but that did not succeed, and we have made more progress with less hurt to ourselves by breaking glass than we ever made when we allowed them to break our bodies.
One of the lost lives to
which she alluded was that of her sister, who had died of heart failure after a particularly harrowing stint in prison. In response to women going on hunger strikes, the British authorities instituted a program of force-feeding, forcing unsanitary tubes into their noses, mouths, and, on rare occasion, vaginas and rectums. While Pankhurst herself was never subjected to force-feeding, she regularly heard its effects during her stays in prison. The memory of her WSPU comrades’ screams, she said, never left her.
As the campaign for the vote became increasingly violent, the WSPU brought on a surprising corps of bodyguards—30 female jujitsu experts. They regularly used weaponry in fights with the police, notably inventing their own style of parasol-based self-defense in the process. They would hide their weapons, which included batons, billy clubs, and guns (loaded with blanks), under the mats of their secret martial arts schools.
At the height of her campaigning efforts, Pankhurst developed more and more creative tactics for fighting back. At one speech, delivered while a warrant was out for her arrest, Pankhurst stood on a stage decorated with flowers. When undercover police stormed the proceedings and climbed onto the platform, they found out the hard way that the flowers concealed a line of barbed wire.
At another speech, she strode out onto a balcony overlooking the street and announced to the crowd of onlookers, which included police: “I am coming out amongst you in a few minutes and I challenge the government to re-arrest me!” When the tiny woman walked out the door, pandemonium struck instantly. Police tried grabbing her, while the crowd of women pulled out Indian clubs (wooden bats shaped like bowling pins) from their dresses and began fighting the authorities. When the dust settled and the police had taken custody of the veiled woman, they realized that she was just a decoy: the real Pankhurst had slipped away during the fracas.
