The streets of Philadelphia were jam-packed with enthusiastic fair goers, modern streetcars, old-fashioned wagons, and loud peddlers galore. All were engulfed in a chaotic yet earnest display of civic pride that impressed Zoila. She followed Mrs. Uffner’s booming steps as they zigzagged through the masses. For a small woman, Mrs. Uffner’s footsteps resembled galloping hoofs at a racetrack. Zoila grappled with her heavy packages, perspiration streaming into her eyes. She blinked, unable to focus on anything beyond the tall fence surrounding the grounds of the Centennial Exhibition.

Zoila had read about the architectural gems that had been constructed on the festival grounds to impress international delegations. She had heard about the imposing dome of the Memorial Hall and its Beaux-Art style. She’d never laid eyes on such an architectural style back in Mexico and she couldn’t even fathom how a raised monorail could operate—but still, she couldn’t wait to ride in it. Zoila wanted to take-in all the hoopla of the exhibition, so she attempted to slow-down Mrs. Uffner by chatting her up.

“Will we be riding the monorail, Madam?”

Mrs. Uffner guffawed. Zoila decided she needed to butter her up.

“You Americans are the most industrious people on earth, Madam. Every day you seem to have so many inventions. The new monorail is supposed to run on a track high above the ground and there’s a double-decker—”

Mrs. Uffner paused long enough to give Zoila a contemptuous stare. “Does it look like I invented anything other than hell on earth with all you freaks eating me out of house and home? Would we be laden like pack mules right now if I had the coins to ride a whatchamacallit?”

“Perhaps I can sell some of Lucía’s photographs by that beautiful building with the wrought iron roof trusses over there?” Zoila suggested, pointing to the imposing main building. She knew that Mr. and Mrs. Uffner placed a premium on the importance of money, and she really wanted to enter the exhibition grounds.

“You may know about roof trusses and mono-whatevers, but you don’t know diddly about the people who are going to pay to see Lucía.” Mrs. Uffner stood still long enough to pile yet another of her heavy boxes on top of Zoila’s burdensome load. “You may know other languages but you ain’t here for any new inventions. You’s here to do what I tell you to do. Now shut up. We’s got many more blocks to walk.”

“But aren’t we here already, Madam? That sign says: Philadel—”

“I know how to read, imbecile. That sign is for them hoity-toity folks that can afford the Centennial Exhibition —and then there’s Dinkeytown. That’s for us. We ain’t in no frou-frou building, fool!”

“But we are in Philadelphia, no?”

“Moron. Yes, we is in Philadelphia but we’s going to the Shanty Town yonder there.” She pointed further down Elm Avenue.

“Ah, so we will celebrate the one-hundred-year anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence in a different location, no?”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about? We’s not celebratin’ nothin’. We got us some midgets and we’s gonna make some money off of them in Shanty Town!”

Zoila couldn’t comprehend the meaning of Shanty Town. She raised her neck above her packages and noticed flimsy, wooden structures with dangling signs for hotels and beer gardens. She looked left and right, nudging her boxes out of her way with her strong chin so she could see her surroundings. She saw filthy restaurants and sloppy ice cream parlors advertising exotic Mexican vanilla ice cream, and although her mouth watered at the memory, her nose could not detect the sweet scent of real vanilla. It should have permeated the fetid odor engulfing this quarter of the city, but it seemed as though everything in this Shanty Town was foul and fleeting.

“But surely we cannot bring Lucía to this quarter, Madam,” Zoila pressed. “She might get sick with all the miasm—”

“Shut up and walk,” Mrs. Uffner snapped. “Any Shanty Town is ugly, stinkin’, and crowded. You and your squirmin’ midget will feel right at home here.”

Had Zoila read the most recent newspapers she would have discovered that the civic leaders of Philadelphia were up in arms over the Shanty Town fungus, the spores of which had germinated viciously within weeks of the grand opening of the Centennial Exhibition. For miles around the proper exhibition grounds, sideshow spaces had popped-up in alleyways and dark streets. There, the exploitation of humans deemed exotic, disfigured, or non-Western had surged with absolution from the civic leaders.

Crowds had grown accustomed to being amused by deformities, and they rushed to the sideshows eager to be the first to get the wind knocked-out of them by the suffering human exhibits recoiling in the corners of their stages. Zoila heard the outrageous descriptions and temptations the barkers shouted at the crowds: the more unspeakable and degenerate, the more her heart ached.

Zoila stopped dead in her tracks. Her heart pounded louder than any of Felipe’s admonitions. Her brain throbbed with visions of Julia Pastrana’s joyful soul withering with every one of her hundreds of humiliating shows, her protruding mouth in a permanent, woefully wide smile that revealed her double row of teeth in order to satisfy the audiences that had paid to ogle and scream. Zoila concluded that these sideshows must be the beginning of the end for people like Lucía, Julia, Carolina and the hundreds whose photographs lined Eisenmann’s studio in New York. If this was indeed the fate of the “performers” at these sordid shows, then Zoila had to escape with Lucía.

Zoila caught up with Mrs. Uffner as she walked into a cavernous room with a wobbly, center stage.

“Hurry up and let’s set up Lucía’s parlor,” Mrs. Uffner ordered.

“But we cannot allow Lucía to be in a cage, Madam.”

“Does this look like a cage, fool?”

“But the men shouting their advertisements for the mysterious missing link and the snake boy said that even though he was locked in a cage his venom could reach—”

“By golly, you’re a total nincompoop!” Mrs. Uffner started setting down a tiny chair and a man’s tall hat on the stage. Under her breath, she added, “and Frank thinks you’re too clever and that we’s gotta keep an eye on you. Jeepers!”

“But the other man shouted that his ape man could crush—”

Mrs. Uffner raised her hand. “Enough with your questions!” she shouted. “Here’s how we do our shows—they’re called levées in show business. Business is the important word here. Frank and I are in this God-forsaken show business to make money, not to torture anyone. Got it?”

“Yes, thank you.” Zoila was unpersuaded. “But this is still no place for Lucía.”

“I says it is. She don’t gotta do nothin’ but be her cheerful, singin’, yappin’ self. She just goes around the stage and shows the audience her jewelry and then she sings a song and then she jumps inside this man’s tall hat and then she shakes hands with some folks who’ve already paid me a little extra so they can touch her. Then, for the next show we bring out General Mite and she coquettes with him. And on and on.”

“Excuse me, Madam, but what is ‘coquettes’?”

“As I just said, you’s plain stupid. Coquettes is when you smile and be chirpy-chirp with your sweetheart. But you wouldn’t know since you’ve never had a sweetheart, have you?”

Zoila clasped her chest, reaching for the outline of the vial of Felipe’s now dried blood. “I’m just worried about Lucía on this damp and uneven stage and…”

“And nothin’. In show business, midgets like Lucía are considered very special. She’s at the top of the freak food-chain. She’s got a perfect body and she’s real clever. Hell, she’s even learnin’ English real fast to latch-on to General Mite, ain’t she?”

“But she will get sick in this damp room,” Zoila persisted.

“Enough. I want to set up quickly so I can go and drink me some ale. You got nothin’ to worry about. Mr. Uffner will be talking to the audience about Lucía and all her antics, he’ll tell them how Dr. Mott and all them other doctors inspected her and they verified that she’s the weest little gal in the world. Then, we’ll sell lots of her photographs of her and then on to the next show and the next. Did you think that Frank was going to pay her without her putting in a full day and night of shows? We’re here for six weeks and we have ten shows a day. Get used to it.”

“But that is just too much for Lucía.”

“This is how we do it. Ask all them other midgets in our troupe. They’s been with us for years. Wait till you read what the newspapers say about Lucía. We got contacts. We’s legit, don’t you know!”

To Zoila’s astonishment, Lucía performed at the levées like a professional entertainer: cheerful, comical, and sweet. Her audiences loved her and, just as Mr. Uffner had predicted, the newspapers gushed about Lucía as well. On September 29, 1876, newspapers as far away as the The Emporia News in Kansas published effusive reviews of her debut nine days earlier in Philadelphia:

Fat women and boys, giants and living skeletons, have created their various sensations here, but are now entirely eclipsed by a wonderful little lady from Mexico. The smallest of all the Centennial visitors is little Lucía Zarate, twelve years old, twenty inches high, and weighing only five pounds. This little midget held a reception yesterday that was largely attended, and anything so perfectly comical has never been seen. She ran up and down the parlor screaming and chattering just like mammoth children her age, and coquetted with those who were trying to decoy her into their hands. The little lady was put in one of the gentlemen’s silk hats, and there she sat for about half a second, when she wriggled her way out, got onto a pet, stamped her feet, threw her microscopic rings and bracelets then ran off to swing on the lace window curtains. The sound of music set her to dancing all over, and every little curl on her head shook as she pounced the low window stool with her clenched hands and called for some one to hold her up to see the “musica.” With her little lace handkerchief, about the size of a postage stamp, she insisted upon rubbing the clothes and shoes of those present.

Frank Uffner read all the newspaper articles aloud to the entire troupe and scolded them for not applauding the uplifting coverage of Lucía’s significant debut. General Mite barely managed to utter one extended word—“Con-gra-tu-la-tions”—before he slouched into his familiar stupor. He was not alone. The fatigue of performing in show after show resulted in a collective malaise. All the performers were worn down by the attendance of massive crowd after massive crowd, shouting, clapping, and lurching out to touch the little people as if each one held a fortune. It seemed as if all the audiences who had stayed at home for the first few months of the Exhibition now wanted to spend their last days of Indian summer sauntering along the exhibits—and specially the sideshows. It didn’t matter if the civic leaders touted the formal exhibition’s intriguing machinery or the places of amusement they endorsed, people hankered to be awed by the odd.

The crowds imbibed on pitchers of cheap beer that reduced their inhibitions. They walked arm-in-arm into the sideshow parlors, paid a few cents at the entrance and released foul belches—or worse—into the distorted countenances of the forlorn performers. Frank Uffner knew how to control a ruffian crowd at the entry points to his levées, so at least the little people in his troupe didn’t suffer any obvious cruelty. Frank and his missus focused on creating a levée of gentility and mirth in order to maximize their percentage of the ticket and photograph sales. If this meant cutting down on the food they fed their performers or neglecting to keep to their contractual responsibilities with the little people—so be it. As Mrs. Uffner often asked rhetorically, “No one ever said life’s fair, did they?”