B A C K T H E N
Zita and the Ladies of the Grange
Maine State Fair, Lewiston, early 1900s. Zita Estrado’s Genuine Nautch Dancing Girls shake a leg in an era when respectable fashion went to some length to obscure the fact that women were, in fact, bipeds. The dapper barker is taunting, “If you’re sixteen or younger, you won’t understand it! If you’re sixty or over, you won’t be able to stand it!,” or some chant of equal wit. He refers to the real show, which takes place in the tent behind. The “nautch” is defined as “a sinuous dance resembling the “cootch.” The “hootchie-cootchie,” not to be confused with the Middle Eastern belly dance, was the dance of Gypsy women, originating in India, but Zita’s girls are not Gypsies.
In 1892, State Fair midway attractions included The Monstrous Woolly Heifer, The One-Eyed Giant of Sinbad, The Double-Jointed Man, The Man Without Any Joints, The Living Skeleton, The Living Mermaid, The Learned Pig, and a man selling toy microscopes that made potato bugs look like turtles. For those seeking dental care, a long-haired pseudo-Indian “doctor,” wearing a sombrero, happily yanked teeth. Genuine Gypsy fortunetellers plied their shady trade in wooded encampments outside fair gates, while their men traded skinny, branded horses.
A reporter in 1910 noted that there were enough queens along the midway to rule half the countries of the world if they could but be “elevated to the thrones to which they doubtless are entitled.” True to its ancient origins, the midway mocked the pretensions of civilization, revealing the common man to be precisely that, at least briefly. Who really wouldn’t like to see The Living Mermaid?
Midway games included ten pins and “hit the nigger,” the latter a contest in which the player tried to hit the head of an agile Negro, which was stuck through a hole in a canvas. The prize was a musty cigar, and the back-slaps of your friends. In one sense, this grotesque spectacle was surely not unrelated to the horrifying lynchings occurring elsewhere in the country. On the other hand, the black man was presumably there of his own free will, and once, at Bangor, after a curve-ball pitcher viciously decked the “African dodger,” the enraged target gave chase to the fleeing white man.
Many Mainers had long shared the prevailing national prejudice against blacks. According to a description of Portland in the ‘30s, Munjoy Hill then had but few houses, those being of “a disreputable character, or occupied by a few despised negroes.” Many whites probably made exceptions for blacks they knew—certainly that is often yet the case. When Maine Central management refused to promote Charlie Freeman, an able Negro brakeman from Brunswick, the injustice did not go unnoticed by fellow railroaders. In the early 1900s, a black logger named Barnard was boss of a pulp operation in the Wassataquoik Valley.
The perennial debate over the proper mission of the agricultural fair—the contest, if you will, between Zita’s girls and the Ladies of the Grange—is as old as are Maine’s fairs. Horse racing was the usual bone of contention. “Girlie” shows finally ended in the 1980s after a Brunswick editor mounted a moral crusade against these traditional harvest celebrations.
Where Zita and her girls hailed from will probably never be known. It would be interesting to know what actually went on, or came off, in the tent. In the 1970s an elderly Waldo County reprobate (a former doper of racehorses) stated that girlie shows he attended in the early 1900s were no different from the one he had just enjoyed at the Skowhegan Fair. Given that the show at Skowhegan would have scandalized even a jaded Las Vegas lounge lizard, his testimony, if true—which we will never know—is of considerable socialogical interest. It would seem that the transitory nature of the fair, combined with the magical air of a late summer’s eve, resulted in community license for behavior which otherwise would have quickly landed the participants over the county line, or in the county jail.
The dancing girls, the Abbysinian Marvel, the teetering Joyland, the Temple of Mystery, Diamond Lew and his Wild West, the working world, the ossified man, the little horse, the perpendicular hen and the l,200-pound pig—they’ve all packed their duds, rolled their canvas and departed .... The joyous Midway is no more. Discolored patches on the grass mark the site of the temples of amusement. – Lewiston Evening Journal, Sept. 9, 1910.
Text by William H. Bunting from A Days Work, A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs, 1860–1920, Part II. Published by Tilbury House Publishers, 12 Starr St., Thomaston, Maine. 800-582-1899.