The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(57)
After a long, long stretch with nobody walking by our stage, a boy of about eleven or twelve is running past when his eye catches one of our banners. On it, a headless woman’s bloody neck is fitted with machinery. He stops running and assesses a few of the paintings.
Tommy asks, “Do you think you can be hypnotized by a snake?” The boy shakes his head no.
“Are these things real?” he says, pointing to the banners.
“Oh yes, those are a hundred percent authentic banners,” Tommy says with a grave nod.
“No,” the boy tsks, “the stuff inside. Is it real or not? This is a freak show, right?”
Tommy bends forward a little, bringing his face closer to the boy’s as if the midway were filled with marks who didn’t deserve to know the secret he was about to reveal.
“You be the judge,” he whispers.
*
The Laestrygonians are evil cannibalistic giants from Homer’s Odyssey. The Kappa is a Japanese water demon made up of the body of a tortoise, a beak, and the limbs of a frog. He eats disobedient children. Mermaids lure fishermen to drown. Monsters, giants, cyclops, centaurs, vampires, werewolves, griffins, minotaurs, sphinxes, satyrs. Many of our stories are made up of creatures who are partially human, who frighten us with what is both recognizably like us and different. They are us and not us.
We’ve changed our ideas about who, and what, makes a “freak.” The medieval and early modern idea that a nonnormative body was supernatural, some kind of omen or warning from God, has been gradually replaced by a belief that all bodies come from within the order of nature, but that natural order can be internally disrupted. The range of what occurs in nature both makes the idea of natural diversity more concrete and therefore wonderful, and seems to present an example of something that must be outside it. Deformito-Mania was the term coined by the magazine Punch in 1847 to describe the contemporary fascination with so-termed human curiosities.
Freak has been used for those who were born with, or who through an accident or illness acquired, a nonnormative body. Before adequate social services and advanced, widely available medicine, performing in a sideshow was one of the only ways for a “freak” to make a living. By contrast, a “geek,” or working act, was a person who, from a wider range of options, chose to manipulate his body to make it nonnormative. Because of medical advancements, increased services and financial support, and declining social acceptance of “freaks” within freak shows, most of the performers on the circuit today, and largely those with the World of Wonders, are geeks. But there is a real awe for traditional freaks within our show. Stories circulate about past performers who were the show’s brightest stars. There’s buzz about a performer who’d be joining us later this season.
The language used to describe people and things within a sideshow has continually shifted. In the Victorian era, the word was curiosity, used in Charles Dickens’s freak-obsessed work, The Old Curiosity Shop. P. T. Barnum, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, called the people who performed in his shows “curiosities,” the same name he used for taxidermied oddities on display in his museums. Around this time, too, the term freak of nature was commonly applied to something that had developed “abnormally.” It is from this term that the idea of the “freak” performer is derived, and the term, while not common anymore, is still used to describe nonnormative performers. Many performers on the sideshow circuit now embrace the term, for the same reason as some in the LGBTQ community have reclaimed the term queer—to take back the word’s power.
But freak has meant many different things in our last American century, as has other language used to describe those with different bodies. As early as 1908, freak applied to a person obsessed with something, originating with Kodak freak, a camera-obsessed person.
Monsters and monstrosities were the standard medical labels for people with physical differences until the early twentieth century.
In 1945, freak was used to mean “drug user.”
In the 1960s, freak was claimed by the socially dissident hippies, who chose to participate in activities like eating LSD, which made them “freak out.” This freakiness was self-proclaimed and self-made.
In 1990, Digital Underground released the song “Freaks of the Industry.” Here, the rappers call themselves freaks for their sexual prowess, and the women they’re with are freaks for the same reason, and together, they’re “freakin’,” meaning, having sex. As a strange counterpoint to all that, when I looked up the words to the Digital Underground song, they scrolled across the screen on top of a still image of Schlitzie, the pinhead from the 1932 movie Freaks. In Tod Browning’s pre-Code horror movie, deemed too shocking to be released, the characters in a freak show are played by real freak-show performers, though the true monsters of the film are their foes, the norms.
*
The mermaid can’t hack it.
I learn this on the toilet. Sunshine walks with me on the long trudge down the midway, up a hill, right beside the slushie truck, and down the next midway that runs along the goat barn, to the bathrooms. It has been a week since Steve went home, and we’re at another county fair in Illinois just a few hours from the last. Sunshine and I go inside separate bathroom stalls, and in the momentary silence, she says, “How would you like to become an inside performer?”
As we walked into the building, I’d glimpsed myself in the mirror and noticed that my skin had taken on a purple hue. Five weeks of twelve hours a day in the Midwest summer out in the direct sun meant my body was taking and taking in the heat, skin pulling in all the sun’s offerings, the hair I’d dyed dark brown before joining the show faded first to a mousy brown with blond streaks and then blond blond, and I loved it at first, felt like a solar panel, charging myself on the sun. But the heat built fast and woozy hour after hour, the sweat pooling in my corset, my vision getting blurry. And the color of my skin, which always gets to a dark olive tan in the sun, had gone beyond that into some sorts of navy and purple and was probably a dermatologist’s nightmare. And so, at the moment, this question sounded like a dream.