Moss-Haired Girl by RH Slansky

Author:RH Slansky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Anvil Press
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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27 A fire destroyed Putnam’s museum in 1861. It was a total loss in terms of property and nearly all of the animals perished, but firemen went to heroic measures to rescue all the human inhabitants, even using a crane to free the resident fat lady, whose bulk could not fit through any usable exits.

28 If Zara’s father, as she claims earlier, was a physician in his homeland, why would he call one to care for his own wife? And if his previous profession was a fabrication, was it Zara’s? A story told to her by her mother? Or could her father also have had a bit of the humbug in him?

29 Sarah Selinsky would have been about twenty-one by this time.

30 Between the fire and the opening of Putnam’s new museum, eight months passed.

31 My sister, who ironed her hair throughout high school to make it look “normal,” joined the hippie movement in college. One of her early acts of social protest was to stop setting her hair, cut it short, and pick it into an Afro. Rereading Zara’s account of her transformation, I was reminded of how Leah had described similar feelings when talking about her own hair before and after she let it be what it was naturally. While trying to keep it under control, she saw the kinkiness as ugly and somehow exposing something hidden that she was ashamed of, but with her hair in its natural state, she felt powerful and beautiful.

32 This was the sideshow barker’s standard spiel about the Circassian Beauty. In point of fact, there are a Circassian people, known to each other as the Adyghe, and for centuries, the women of the Adyghe have indeed been prized for their beauty and gentility. This fact had made it to the U.S. by at least the early 18th century, when the images of Circassian women could be found on beauty products. The theory that the Circassians possessed a higher racial purity had been posited in the early 19th century by the same misguided scientist who had coined the term “Caucasian” to refer to the white race, naming it after the region where he believed the purest examples of the race could be found. In 1862, after years of conflict, the Circassians were displaced from their home in the Russian Conquest of the Caucasus Mountains, an event that was big news all over the world. H. R. Putnam saw an opportunity for the museum and, so the story goes, sent an agent to purchase a Circassian girl at a Turkish auction. When the agent returned empty-handed, Putnam found a curly-haired local girl who was willing to subject herself to a beer shampoo and a skimpy “Turkish” costume, and put her on display. The Circassian Beauty was a smash hit and became a mainstay in sideshows all over the country for the next thirty years.

33 Everything about the names that the Professor performed under indicated he was Welsh. If you’ve ever mistakenly called

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