The woman on stage looked nearly naked. It was only because we were sitting close that I could see the barely-there seams of her body stocking. Around her shoulders was a fuzzy, off-white animal skin. Around her neck was a pendant in the shape of a small tortoise. She wiggled her bare toes.
She stared out into the audience, mostly over my head.
‘My name is Saartjie Baartman. I was born in colonial South Africa in the late eighteenth century. In the 1810s, I was brought to Europe to be displayed for white audiences.’
The woman looked around the room, her eyes accusing. This was a largely white audience in Europe. We had come to see this display of Saartjie Baartman, albeit more than two hundred years after the first tour. We could tell ourselves we had not come to look at her body – at the actress playing Saartjie’s body – but we were looking at it, weren’t we? We were looking at a nearly naked woman in a dimly lit London room.
Saartjie continued: ‘I was under the management of two exploiters: Hendrik Cesars and Alexander Dunlop. They kept me pliant with alcohol, a substance I would become dependent upon.’
She picked up a bottle from the back of the stage and took a swig of clear liquid. I guessed it was really water, but she drank it as if it were gin.
Her gaze caught mine. I was probably one of the few in the audience she could actually see. My stomach knotted. My feet pressed down hard against the floor. I wanted Saartjie to stop looking at me. I wanted this feeling to evaporate.
There was no understanding in her gaze. No secret connection. She looked at me with utter professional indifference when I wanted her to wink at me. I wanted her to reveal to the crowd that I was not like the others. That my Blackness saved me from being like them. I was like them. No different.
I looked over to Ezinne in the seat next to mine, to see if she was enjoying the show. I caught her gaze. She raised her fine eyebrows.
Ezinne reached over and covered my hand with hers. Her hand was cool and dry. I felt hot and sticky by comparison. My heart thudded in my chest. Ezinne had all my attention. For the first time, I wished I was still immersed in the show.
The actress playing Saartjie was singing now and strumming an instrument that looked almost like a ukulele. This was so close to what the nineteenth-century audience experienced, only they wouldn’t have been listening to a satirical song about sexism and racism. Saartjie smiled as she sang. It was an infectious smile even though the joke was on us, the audience. I found myself grinning so hard my cheeks hurt.
The song was good. And when Saartjie threw herself forward into a bow, I clapped and whooped. The lights came up for intermission and Saartjie retreated. I looked at the seat next to mine.
‘What do you think?’
Ezinne smiled. ‘I think these white people don’t know she’s making fun of them. She’s brilliant, isn’t she?’
‘Yeah, she is.’
‘Do you want to risk going to the bar for a beer?’
‘I don’t know. It’s going to be packed upstairs.’
So we sat there in our red velvet seats, talking about the show. Ezinne did not feel the deep pit of guilt I felt.
‘My ancestors didn’t do Empire to her ancestors,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Yours probably did though.’
‘Maybe.’
Maybe that was why I felt guilty. I didn’t know where the white part of my ancestry came from. They might have been English. In fact, they probably were. They no doubt profited off the existence of a vast empire and the exploitation of indigenous people like Saartjie Baartman. Was that how it worked? Was I feeling the guilt my ancestors should have felt all the way down the generations?
I thought about Rose back at home. This was probably the first time I felt meaningfully separate from her. In terms of my identity, I mean. Until now, sitting in this theatre, it hadn’t mattered at all that she was white and I was mixed race. I’d felt with absolute certainty that we were made of the same stuff. The same starry, mystical material. Now, for the first time, Rose felt different than me. I wondered if she ever felt guilty. I wondered if she ever thought about race at all.