There are dystrophic disturbances in the nails. The scalp hair is sparse and of a fine soft texture. The cheek bones are high and wide, whereas the lower half of the face is narrow. The supraorbital ridges are prominent; the nasal bridge is depressed, forming a ‘saddle-back nose’. The tip of the nose is small and upturned, while the nostrils are large and conspicuous. The eyebrows are scanty, none being present on the outer two thirds. The eyes slant upwards, producing a Mongolian facies. At the buccal commissures radiating furrows, ‘pseudorhagades’, are present, and on the cheeks there are telangiectases and small papules simulating milium and adenoma sebaceum. The lips are thickened, the upper one being particularly protrusive.
The patient studied by Dr MacKee and myself never sweated. He was uncomfortable during hot weather due to elevation of body temperature and was unable to play baseball and running games with other boys of his age, because of great fatigue induced by such exertions. These symptoms resemble those in other cases reported in the literature, and not uncommonly the subjects find it necessary during the summer to have pails of water thrown over them if they are to keep comfortable.
The affection is familial, generally affecting males, and seems to be due to an injury during the third month of uterine life. Some of these patients are mentally deficient, but the majority of them have normal mentality because the anlage of the nervous system is distinct from the cutaneous ectoderm long before the injury occurs. MacKay and Davidson report 4 cases occurring respectively in a woman, aged thirty-four years, and her two sons and one daughter, aged six, eleven, and thirteen years. A comprehensive article with good references on this subject has been written by Gordon and Jamieson.
I was now in a position to review the story from the beginning. In 1919, I had been neurotic, as a result of having spent thirteen months in the trenches under continuous bombardment, and had begun to ‘see things’ in France even before a fragment of eight-inch shell went clean through my right lung and knocked me out. Limerick was a dead-alive city haunted by family ghosts, and the glass picture focused my morbid fears of the past and future – yes, it must have been the portrait of a turtle-man brought back to Ireland from the Southern States.
Julia and I: because of the unusually close rapport between us, partly explained by her Irish blood, it was not surprising that we should be scared by the same sort of face. Will had testified that the original was highly terrifying to any but a physician who could look coldly at it and characterize it as a facies. (‘When am a face not a face, Massa Bones?’ ‘When it’s a facies.’) And why should Julia’s mother not have stumbled across the same old house in New Orleans, and seen the same turtle-man peering through the attic window twelve years previously?
Hank: no natural sympathy existed between him and me, or between him and Julia. But he did have a remarkable receptivity for the emotions of people at a distance, and the trick of converting them into waking visions of his own. Clearly, he had subjectivized the fright which Julia and I conveyed to each other into something horrible that he had himself seen at Sóller. I need hardly add that Señor Bennasar keeps no tank in his patio for dunking turtle-folk in.
Will Price: he had a keen dramatic sense, but I found him far more accurate than most of my friends about names, dates and facts, and could not disbelieve his story. That is to say, I could accept what he saw with his own eyes. And what Mr Lemnowitz told him about George Whitaker and the Lafitte brothers was, Will himself confessed, ‘shrouded in local myth’. On principle I suspect any legend about the Lafittes, as I do any legend about Paul Revere, Paul Jones, or Paul Bunyan. Besides, what connection could there be between the Whitaker Negroes and the white Turtle Folk who occur spasmodically on the Lower Mississippi? Nobody had suggested that sophisticated white women of Natchez, Vicksburg, Vardaman, Baton Rouge, Yazoo City and New Orleans ever paid clandestine visits to Pond in search of a new sexual frisson. It therefore seems probable that if the Lafittes did indeed smuggle a shipload of Negroes to Pond, these were healthy enough when they arrived, but proved susceptible to the turtle-disease, which is endemic to the Mississippi; and because of inbreeding it became hereditary among them. The families affected were disowned by their masters but permitted to camp on the swampy fringes of the Whitaker estate, after George dragged his wife with him into the River – which he probably did, if at all, for some simple, domestic reason. And because high cheek-bones and a weak growth of hair are characteristic of the turtle-folk facies – which resembles that of the congenital syphilitic – there seems to be no reason for bringing the pox-stricken Choctaws and Chickasaws into the story either.
But what about the numerous coincidences which hold the story together? Julia, her mother, Will, Hank, and myself had all been frightened, directly or indirectly, by the same rare phenomenon; and we met accidentally in Deyá, a village of four hundred inhabitants commendably unknown to history, which lies three or four thousand miles away from Pond, an even smaller place, to the geographical existence of which only Will among us could testify. Moreover, Tom Matthews who clarified the phenomenon (scientifically at least) for all of us – both Julia and her mother were immensely relieved to know that it was a real face after all – had also been living at Deyá when the Time article appeared. But these coincidences do not amount to much, perhaps, and would never have come to light had not the Whitaker facies been so unforgettably frightening. (It occurs to me as I write that the real explanation of the Glamis Monster – the reputedly ‘Undying Thing’ which used to peer out from one of the attic windows at Glamis Castle – may have been hereditary ectodermal dysplasia in the Bowes-Lyon family, hushed up because one of its victims was heir to the earldom.) Finally, I suspect myself of having exaggerated the telepathic sympathy between Julia and myself. Did the face she described so vividly superimpose itself, perhaps, on the fading memory of the one I had seen in Mr Reilly’s antique shop? My imagination is not that of a natural liar, because my Protestant conscience restrains me from inventing complete fictions; but I am Irishman enough to coax stories into a better shape than I found them.
This is not yet all. In 1954, I broadcast a short summary of the foregoing story for the B.B.C. As a result, a doctor wrote to tell me that he once had under observation, in a Liverpool hospital, a white child suffering from this rare disease; but that occasional sponging was sufficient relief for its discomfort, except in unusually hot weather. Another letter came from Mrs Otto Lobstein, an Englishwoman who was going off some months later with her husband for a tour of the Southern States, and proposed to check up on the Whitaker Negroes. ‘Where did you say that they lived?’ she wrote.
I provided the necessary map-references, not really expecting to hear from Mrs Lobstein again; but in due process of time she sent me a letter and a photograph. The photograph showed a Mississippi finger-post pointing south to Woodville, north to Pinckneyville, east to Pond and Fort Adams; and the fine condition of the three roads suggested that prosperity had returned to the neighbourhood since Will Price’s visit there more than twenty years previously. This was the letter, which I have been kindly allowed to print here.
New Orleans,
February 1st, 1955.
DEAR ROBERT GRAVES,
We spent an interesting day tracking down the Whitaker-negroes, after camping for a night in the Mississippi woods – a wretched night because this was the hardest frost of the winter. But the early morning sun was startlingly warm and the fields beautiful; no wind blew and thin, erect strings of smoke came from the small shacks along the road.
Pond is not on the map, so we took the road to Fort Adams until we came to a very lovely old plantation home, where one Rip White directed us to the Whitaker plantation. But he was far more anxious to tell us about his own house, which ‘had been granted to Henry Stewart, son of Mary Queen of Scots about 180 years ago’. Henry was ‘a contender to the Throne’, so they shipped him off to America, where he was given this plantation of 2,200 acres to keep him quiet and occupied. The house did have a royal air
, but I was a little troubled by the discrepancy in date between Mary Queen of Scots and King George III, and between the names Stewart and Stuart!
When we reached the plantation, we met Mr Whitaker, the owner, who was going somewhere in a hurry, but told us that the old mansion some way back in the fields had been demolished a few years before. (Its place was now taken by a large, hard-looking, unromantic modern bungalow.) He also told us that the land had been split up at the same time between the various Whitaker sons – which didn’t seem to coincide with Will Price’s story that the land had been deeded to the State, unless perhaps a brother of the man who committed suicide had contested the deed of gift and won it back. Anyhow, Mr Whitaker advised us to ask Mrs Ray about the story; she had raised all the Whitaker whites for two or three generations.
Dear old Mrs Ray gave us interesting recollections of what her mother and father had told her as a child: how, when the overseer had whipped a slave over a log for not picking enough cotton, the rest would creep out of the plantation after dark and go into a ‘holler’ – bending their heads low down so as not to be heard, they would sing and pray for freedom. But she had no stories about Whitaker-negroes.
At Woodville, a small town on the way to Pond, we visited the Court House to look for records of the original George Whitaker. There we found an intelligent official, Mr Leek, who had actually met some of the Whitaker-negroes, when he helped them to fill up questionnaires during the Second World War. He told us that they were dying out fast. In winter, he said, they wore ordinary clothes; in summer, heavy underclothes soaked in water. The Court House records, however, did not show that any Whitaker land had been deeded to the State since 1804, when they began. Mr Leek’s explanation of why the Whitaker-negroes were so called was that the first sufferer had ‘Whitaker’ as his Christian name.
At last we reached Pond. Pond Post Office is a big, barn-like structure which, as in the days of trading-posts, carries everything and deals in sacks of flour and rolls of cotton; the large, serene pond mentioned by Will Price lay at the foot of the hill. Mr Carroll Smith, the postmaster in succession to Mr Lemnowitz, sold us some safety-pins. He was small and silver-haired, with sensitive brown eyes. At first he showed a certain reticence when we questioned him, but gradually shed it. He confirmed that very few Whitaker-negroes are left, and said that they lived on the plantations, not in the swamps. Nowadays, only one member of a family of five or six children would inherit the disease. Occasionally a Whitaker-negro visited the Post Office, which was always an unpleasant experience, because the glandular excretions emitted through his mouth conveyed an appalling odour of decay. Mr Smith had never heard the story of George Whitaker’s suicide and believed, with Mr Leek, that the original sufferer was an immigrant negro from Virginia. He suggested that we should visit a Mr McGeehee in Pinckneyville, the nearest village, who had a couple of Whitaker-negroes working for him. He would say no more on the subject, after that, though we talked for some time about share-cropping. So we drove on.
Mr McGeehee’s plantation was very English, with a tree-lined driveway running through park-like meadows (where Herefords and Red Devons grazed) to a big, unpretentious house. Mr McGeehee himself was most hospitable; so was his mother, a gentle old lady, looking like a pressed flower. We chatted politely in the spacious drawing-room about farming and children and plantation houses; but both the McGeehees remained emphatic that we must not meet the two Whitaker-negroes working for them. Mr McGeehee, very rightly, felt responsible for his employees and said that too many sightseers had come to stare at the pair recently, which made them sensitive. So my husband and I did not press the point; and, in any case, we felt the point slipping away from us. A group of people with a strange history, living in odd conditions and with a bizarre inheritance, are one thing; and a few sufferers from skin disease, who happen to have been born into normal families, are quite another.
In the 1930s, apparently, Will Price found them living in a group, and this was natural because they are not popular with the other negroes, for obvious reasons; and he must have gone there in the summer, when their distinctive habits were more conspicuous. As for the story of their origin, it seems probable that Mr Lemnowitz heard it from some source, now lost, which was as untrustworthy as that of Rip White’s legend about ‘Henry Stewart, the Contender to the Throne’.
A novel feature of the countryside which may interest you is that plantation owners have begun to import Brahmini cattle – instead of orchids – from the Far East. These withstand heat and drought better than other breeds, and make good store cattle; I saw many of them grazing in the fields – silky-grey in colour, with huge horned heads. The bulls were humped like camels, and added a richness to the Pond landscape.
Yours sincerely,
Anna Lobstein.
This calm and practical travelogue has dispelled my haunting nightmare for ever. Terror gives way to pity; the pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte, together with the rogue Choctaws and Chickasaws, are banished to the realms of macabre legend. Only the hospitable Mr McGeehee and his gentle old mother, who resembles a pressed flower, are left on the stage; in charge of two sensitive sufferers from hereditary ectodermal dysplasia of the anhydrotic type, whose principal purpose in life is to herd silky-grey Brahmini cattle in lush parkland – a far more agreeable example of symbiosis than the one reported by Will Price.
Trín-Trín-Trín
– TRíN-TRíN-TRíN!
– Speak to me!
– Is that the house of Gravés? Can one talk with Don Roberto?
– At the apparatus! On behalf of whom?
– I am Don Blas Mas y Mas. -
– A thousand pardons, Don Blas. In consequence of the bad telephone connection I did not fix in my mind that it was you.
– How do you find yourself, Don Roberto?
– Very rickety well, thanks be to God!
– I celebrate it. And your graceful spouse?
– Regrettably she is a trifle catarrhed.
– I much lament it. And the four beautiful children?
– For the present, thanks be to the saints, well enough. I feel overwhelmed by your amicable inquiries. But you, Don Blas? How goes it with you?
– A stupidity has occurred to me. I am speaking from my uncle’s private clinic, having broken my arm in various places.
– Ai, Ai, Ai! I feel it painfully… What a most disgraceful event! I wager that it somehow had relations with motor-bicycles.
– Mathematically correct, Don Roberto!
– Does the arm molest you so much as to prevent you from recounting me the accident?
– Confiding it to so formal and sympathetic a friend as Don Roberto would be an alleviation, although truly the wound is painful enough. Well, it began on San Antonio’s festival when I was strolling along the Borne with that shameless robber Francisco Ferragut.
– The celebrated racing cyclist who finished first of his class during the Tour of Majorca?
– The identical one. As you know, Francisco is a formidable jokester and said to me there on the Borne: ‘Come to watch me eat pastries!’ I answered: ‘Is that such a rare thing?’ He explained that it was not the technique of eating that would be of interest, so much as the technique of eating without payment. Nothing! We went across the street and there he gazed into the display window of a travel agency. I asked: ‘Are we obliged to fly to Sweden for your pastries?’ ‘Patience!’ he answered. ‘All fishermen have first to wait for a bite.’ Presently a servant girl passed with a tray and entered the Widow Dot’s pastry shop. Francisco said: ‘There’s a fish under that rock !’
PAUSE
– Are you listening, Don Roberto?
– Attentively. Continue, please!
– And you remember what day that was?
– You mentioned San Antonio, if I do not deceive myself.
– Exact! Well, when the girl comes out, carrying her tray heaped with exquisite pastries, he stops her and says: ‘Pretty girl, I recognize you, surely? You
work in the house of Don Antonio… ? Don Antonio…? Caramba! What has happened to my memory today?’ The girl murmurs helpfully: ‘He calls himself Don Antonio Amaro,’ and Francisco exclaims: ‘What a fool I am! Of course: Don Antonio Amaro! Now, child, I have a most important message for Don Antonio – please pay attention! Say that Doctor Eusebio Busquets after all regrets with much pain his inability to obsequiate Don Antonio on his name day according to the kind invitation handed him yesterday – Doctor Eusebio Busquets, understand? – but he is obliged to perform a critical throat operation at the precise hour named for the feast. Nevertheless, assure him that I have now taken the liberty of eating his health with one of these delicious pastries.’ Then he seizes the largest and creamiest of the confections on the tray, crams it into his mouth, and says thickly: ‘Now, don’t forget the name, please – Doctor Eusebio Busquets!’
– I am a stupid Englishman, I do not see how your accident is related…
– We are coming to that. Being ashamed to stand and watch Francisco play the same trick on two dozen or so innocent servant girls, who would be coming with trays from all the big houses of the vicinity to collect pastries each for her own Don Antonio, I called a taxi and went after the girl…
– Who was very pretty, a real salad? They always are in your histories.