Amelia raised the whip again. White paused, looking not at her but at the weapon in her hand. She felt that ugliness against her palm, the hate that White bore for anything he thought lesser than him, and how it had seeped into the whip. It made her want to throw it away and wash her hands until they were pink and clean and she was certain that none of his meanness had seeped inside and infected her.
“You are not to use this on that creature again,” Amelia said, holding on to the whip. She had to hold on so he would know she was a threat. He was the kind of man who only understood violence. “You are not to hit her, or pull her on a rope, or let her go hours without water or food. If you do any of those things I will see to it that you are not paid for your services here.”
“Mr. Barnum hired me, not you,” White said. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. You’re not even human.”
“And I am grateful for that, if you’re an example of humanity,” Amelia said. “I’d rather be a mermaid, or even an orangutan, than one of your tribe.”
“I’ll do what I please,” White spat. “It’s nothing but a dumb animal, and so are you.”
“You’ll do what you please elsewhere,” Amelia said. She was not surprised to discover that White thought this way. She imagined that many of the other laborers did as well. Barnum had said there was no difference between her and a tiger in a cage, and Amelia knew that most people thought the same. They didn’t think of her as one of them. “Take your things and leave.”
“I signed an agreement with Mr. Barnum,” White said. “I told you, you don’t get to tell me what to do or where to go or end that agreement.”
“But I do. I am the executor of that agreement,” Levi said from behind Amelia. “Mr. Barnum invested his authority in me, and I say you are no longer employed by this institution.”
White looked astonished. He had expected, Amelia thought, that Levi would support him if it came down to it—perhaps because Levi was also a man and Amelia only a woman with no power. “Because I only treated a dumb beast as it deserved to be treated?”
Levi looked at the man steadily. “You insulted my wife.”
“Your wife,” White spat. “Does she wrap you in her tail at night? Does she sleep in a tank? What kind of babies are you going to have with a fish, Levi Lyman? Your wife is an abomination. I can’t insult an abomination. They’re supposed to be destroyed.”
“If you don’t leave now I’ll call the local police and have you jailed,” Levi said. He didn’t physically threaten White, or tighten his hands into fists, or do anything besides let the other man see in his eyes that he meant it.
“What about my pay?” White said. “I earned money on this venture, and I want it.”
Levi crossed his arms and stared at the animal handler.
White swore and stormed off. Amelia lowered the whip to the ground, dropping it. She rubbed her palm with her other hand, trying to take off the taint of the weapon.
The other workers had gathered around to watch the exchange. When White left the spell was broken, and they all hastily rushed to their tasks before they, too, were summarily dismissed without pay.
Amelia walked slowly to the orangutan’s side. Her legs were shaking, but she thought nobody had noticed and if she moved carefully they wouldn’t.
There were stripes across the creature’s neck and shoulders, and she lay on one side with her eyes closed. Levi called two of the other workers to carry her inside the tent and give her food and water.
Amelia started after them, but Levi put his hand on her shoulder. “Let them be,” he said. “I’ll make certain that the animal isn’t mistreated.”
“What you mean,” Amelia said bitterly, “is that they won’t listen if I tell them what to do. Just as Mr. White wouldn’t leave until you said so.”
“Men generally don’t recognize the authority of women,” Levi said very gently. “It’s the way of the world, Amelia. I’m sorry it distresses you.”
“The world,” Amelia said, “is wrong about so many things.”
She couldn’t miss the sideways glances many of the workers gave her for the rest of the day, and for many days after. White had only said aloud something many of them thought—that she was unnatural, that she should not be.
That was the look that was in the eyes of many of the people in the audience as well, the elusive thing she hadn’t been able to pin down. Some of them thought she was a miracle, but a great many of them seemed horrified by her existence.
It is not a comforting thing to realize that many people think the world a better place without you in it, Amelia thought.
With each passing day she felt more restless, and more angry. She couldn’t explain exactly what had put her in that state. There were so many slights and discontents that added up to more than the sum of the whole.
Maybe it was the feeling that there was a wall between her and Levi, that there were more subjects on which they disagreed rather than agreed. He still loved her, and she him, but they turned away from each other in frustration as often as they fell into each other’s arms.
She hadn’t forgotten the way he’d walked away from their first disagreement about the island people he called savages, and they returned to the subject time and again to the benefit of neither. They could not agree, but Amelia continued to try to convince him.
He would not be convinced. Amelia finally realized it was because he himself did not understand what it meant to be different and to have people expect you to change for their sake. She realized that no man could understand this, really, though they expected their wives to do so every day.
After that she stopped pressing him on the subject, but the kernel of her disappointment lay inside her and festered until it was an eternal ache at the bottom of her stomach.
Perhaps her anger and restlessness was because of the exhaustion of touring or the horrible wagon she was supposed to confine herself in night after night. Perhaps it was because she was tired of being a creature with no voice, who was supposed to pretend to be unable to speak, and thus was not able to defend herself from the men who leered at her through the glass.
Perhaps it was because the more she saw of humanity, the less she liked it. She realized that even though the people of her village hadn’t always been the kindest or most welcoming, they did at least leave well enough alone. She rarely saw outright cruelty, and once you belonged to them, they would defend you as if you were their own child. She’d felt this, especially after Jack’s death.
Everywhere she traveled in the south she saw what the evil men did, an evil that had simply not been present in her hometown. They passed field after field of black men and women in chains, toiling for white men in shaded hats who sat on horses and bore whips like the one Amelia had used on Stephen White.
She could feel the hate that radiated from these men, the contempt, the smug superiority, and she never passed by one without wishing to knock him from the back of the horse and hope the animal kicked him to death.
When they went by these places she felt, very profoundly, her helplessness, her inability to free the people from their pain, the need to fix this and knowing she could not. She had not even been able to fire an animal handler who abused his animal without the authority of her husband. None of these men on horses would listen to her. They’d probably tell Levi to take her back inside where she belonged. That was what that sort of man did.
And maybe it was because inside her there was a little mermaid growing (Amelia could feel her daughter swimming in her belly, like little bubbles swirling under her skin) and she wanted, very badly, to return to the sea where her child belonged. She wanted her daughter to know the ocean, to know its dangers and its beauties.