"Honey-bucket boy" is a sickly sweet euphemism for the men (mostly Negro) whose job it was to clean the pots into which steamboat passengers (mostly white) pissed and shit. Bascomb Bowles was such a boy. Born on a Georgia cotton plantation to a slave woman (father unknown), he and his mother moved to the promised land of Paducah, Kentucky, after the War. Having attained her long-cherished freedom, Bascomb's mother promptly died, leaving her fifteen-year-old son to find his own way in the world. He found a job cleaning honey buckets aboard the Bayou Queen, a steamboat paddling up and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. He performed his duties faithfully and well until a steamy August morning in 1875. The Bayou Queen safely in port, Bascomb donned his Sunday best and walked into Paducah to see his first circus, a three-ringer making a two night stand. The name of the circus was The Hollenbach Menagerie & Highway Hidalgos. In his pocket, Bascomb carried a sandwich wrapped in paper; he didn't know for sure, but he figured the candy butchers and concession stands served only whites. He was right about that.
But what Bascomb had no way of knowing was this: the circus proprietor, Clyde Hollenbach, needed to expand his sideshow displays from the Dark Continent. P.T. Barnum was at that time making a killing with a new curiosity--a pinhead named Zip, What-is-it? Supposedly, a party of big game hunters had captured Zip while searching the river Gambia for gorillas. There, they found a new race, Darwin's missing link, naked people swinging from trees like monkeys. But Hollenbach knew it was all ballyhoo, just another one of Barnum's humbugs. He'd recently hired Barnum's disgruntled boss canvasman who'd told him the secret: Zip was actually a simple-minded Negro from New Jersey named Billy Jackson who was born with a small, pointy head that--once shaved but for a top knot--appeared vaguely simian. The fellow earned about fifty a week, most of which was sent to his mother. Hollenbach marveled at the ingenuity of the gaff: take a Negro with a funny-shaped head, stick a spear in his hand, drape him in faux leopard skin, and voila!
So he searched for his own Zip, What-is-It? and found a likely candidate touring with The Diamond Show, a Sioux billed as the Aztec Princess. Upon further examination, Hollenbach discovered the princess was actually a man, a fellow too feeble minded to unbuckle his belt or unbutton his trousers. The sideshow manager, sick of changing his charge's soiled pants, had taken away his underdrawers and fashioned a large skirt that could be easily lifted and lowered when nature called. The manager shook Hollenbach's hand and said, "The trouble with pinheads is most of them's retardates. If I was you, I'd just find a regular colored and shave their head and nobody'd know the difference anyway. It'd be a lot easier." Hollenbach agreed.
For weeks, he'd been trying to make a female Zip from materials at hand, namely his Zulu Queen, a black woman of enormous proportions named Pearly. Her "act" consisted of long periods of imperious sitting in a bamboo throne. Once a day, the sideshow lecturer announced, "Ladies and gentlemen! As the sun sets, the time has come for African Zulus to practice their most ancient ritual. Gather round as our Zulu Queen performs the famous FERTILITY DANCE!" When a sizable crowd had gathered, Pearly would lumber down from her perch and initiate a series of jerking movements which quivered her loose folds of flesh. Despite her willingness to engage in this undignified display, Pearly would not consent to become a pinhead. "My contract say what I gotta do, and that's all I gotta do," she said. "I can read, you know."
On that August morning in Kentucky, Hollenbach was desperate for a pinhead and miserably hot. He walked heavily, like a man lumbering along chest deep in water. A handful of dark faces dotted the circus midway, but Bascomb's was the first he saw. Mopping his brow, Hollenbach walked
