Jenny and Barnum by Roderick Thorp

Author:Roderick Thorp
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497680920
Publisher: Open Road Media

11.

America! It wasn’t even America, but the United States of America, some thirty-odd tiny principalities mostly on the East Coast (one, California, faced the Pacific, which she found bizarre); the rest of the continent was Spanish-speaking, French-speaking, or in the hands of foul-smelling savages who wore skins and feathers. All of it was more or less free of responsibility to, and the influence of, Europe, and the pride with which the provincials pointed to that fact was almost as disturbing to her as their crude humor about the savages and the Negroes who were slaves—although many of the people she met were quick to say they were opposed to the institution of slavery.

Of course. Jenny was beginning to believe that she could expect anything of these people and dislike all of it. They were brash, loud specimens, Americans; most of them had English and Welsh names, but already they seemed a breed apart from those two. The Irish and Scots were looked down upon, the Germans another subject of ugly comment. All these groups only recently had begun to arrive in America in large numbers. These incredible hatreds were not directed only at outsiders. As she understood it, these were Northerners; Northerners hated Southerners because the Southerners owned the Negroes, who were slaves—never mind that the day’s festivities in New York were served almost entirely by people with skin as black as a reindeer’s nose. Nor was that the limit of the madness: apparently there were people called Yankees, and Barnum was one of them. In their presence, at least, Yankees were treated as relatively harmless blackguards, fair targets for casual guff. Barnum took it all blithely, exhibiting, not incidentally, a quality of personal conduct far above that of his countrymen.

They ate like pigs, shoving chicken and seared ribs into their mouths with bare, greasy hands. Their clothing was food-stained and they smelled as bad as any savage; crumbs were lodged in their beards and their necks were dirty. They were loud, the loudest people Jenny had ever met. They looked English, most of them, but their speech was so coarse and harsh that it made her think that the monkeys had been taught to speak.

New York looked like an English city, she thought, another Liverpool, but Barnum was quick to dispute that. In his lifetime New York had doubled in size, and the number of brick and stone buildings had multiplied ten times. Barnum was a storehouse of information about the city and the nation. She could see that he loved them both, which she found sweet, even if she did not share the sentiment.

He rescued her from the worst of the City Hall reception, deftly and quickly getting them away from an event that promised to continue for as long as the available alcohol would last. Tom Thumb, Otto Goldschmidt, and Signore Minelli stayed—now she could see Tom Thumb in all his glory, standing on a table to hold court for the press. On this side of the

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