Heroda Kaiji, when he sensed that he was dying, asked his friends to take him from his rooming house apartment in Stuart to a shady hill beside the South Raccoon River near Dexter. He wanted to spend his final moments looking out across Dexfield Park, the amusement park where he had performed as a palmist and fortune teller for the previous two seasons.
The journey that had led “The Stuart Seer” to that hilltop in central Iowa during the summer of 1919 began, by his own account, in the Caucasus Mountains of the Russian Empire in 1872. Heroda recounted to newspapermen and to census takers that he had been born to a Turkish father and a Russian Jewish mother who raised him as a Muslim. He immigrated to the United States at the age of 12 and was taken in by “two kindly ladies of Boston” who educated but failed to Christianize him before he set out on a career in vaudeville.
No official documentation of Heroda’s early life seems to exist that might verify his origin story. Vaudeville performers in that era frequently incorporated many “Oriental” motifs into their stage acts and assumed identities, but Heroda’s contemporaries noted that he was “a natural linguist” familiar with several languages, including Bengali and a form of Aramaic spoken only by “scattered peoples from North of Damascus.” One Des Moines newspaper correspondent, in an otherwise warm profile, credits Heroda with “the rich imagination of the Oriental;” but the everyday Iowans who knew Heroda accepted him as a beloved member of their communities, one who was, according to newspaper accounts “a Turk by birth and a gentleman by instinct and training” who was “popular with the young people” — at least in part due to the assortment of pet monkeys that lived and traveled with him.
The most surprising aspect of the palmist and his welcome place in the community was that in both his professional and his everyday life, Heroda Kaiji presented as a woman. He wore “his hair long and coiled high in feminine fashion.” He preferred women’s Oxford shoes in a size five — the very size that Florenz Ziegfield preferred for his Follies showgirls. The Stuart Herald reported that “his mincing walk was the result of the long practice of an impersonator.” Even the most celebrated “female impersonator” of the era, Julian Eltinge — Broadway star and purveyor of feminine beauty products — was careful to cultivate a hyper-masculine persona when off-stage.
Press reports played up Eltinge’s manliest attributes — the weekends spent laboring on his farm and the time he was gored by a marlin while deep sea fishing. Heroda apparently felt no such need. He told a reporter for the Des Moines Tribune that “he doesn’t mind being gazed at as a curiosity,” despite occasionally being threatened with arrest for dressing as a woman in public.
By as early as 1901, when he was 29 years old, Heroda was working the Midwest vaudeville circuit, promoting himself as “the only Circassian gypsy in America.” He had teamed up with the “talented occultist” and the author of The Practice of Palmistry, who had co-opted the name of the 18th century French adventurer and alchemist, Comte C. de Saint-Germain. Their planned 1907 partnership in Marietta, Ohio, apparently didn’t last, since later that year, Heroda’s Temple of Palmistry opened “indefinite” solo engagements in Iowa — first in Albia and then in Mount Ayr. He performed in Leon, Tingley, and Grand River the following year, and Corning in 1909.
Heroda took a break from the circuit in 1913 and opened a restaurant in Westside. But as the Dennison Review explained, “Mr. Heroda enjoyed a profitable patronage at his restaurant here, but the ‘wonderlust’ again took possession of him.” Perhaps he was influenced by the appearance of a carnival that had passed through Arcadia a week earlier, or the local resident who had just returned from the Iowa State Fair, but after more engagements in Bondurant and Altoona, Heroda settled into a two-season residence at Des Moines’ Riverview Amusement Park.
While in Des Moines, Heroda — then billed as “the Persian seer” — was featured at the Women’s Club Good Fellowship Day event that raised money for the founding of the city’s art museum. He reportedly “seemed to give much satisfaction by his glowing predictions.” And Heroda’s customers received their life-affirming readings in an era when even The Billboard, a vaudeville trade paper, was warning its readers against “fakers” and “grafters,” quoting one allegedly Yale-educated fortune teller’s argot-rich diatribe: “The same old stock josh is given to every customer who pays the price …. When the palmist hits a 100-to-1 shot, the man or woman who helped to pay the faker’s house rent is tickled to death.”
Still, Heroda continued to garner flattering local news coverage. He paid a $5 reward to the sons of a Dennison city councilman who returned two diamond rings that Heroda had let slip from his pocket while out shopping on the day after Christmas in 1913. The boys had first verified the rings’ authenticity with a local jeweler, who determined their value at $90. When Margaret, one of Heroda’s pet monkeys, gave birth to a baby, the showman was exhibiting his animal act at the 1916 Fourth of July carnival in What Cheer. Instead of being able to claim that rare distinction for Heroda’s adopted hometown, the Stuart Herald lamented, the baby monkey would forever carry the name “Cheery” in honor of his birthplace.
And 1917, when a young man appeared at Heroda’s apartment with a vial of poison, threatening to take his own life, Heroda performed a reading, assuring the young man that within three months his world would be bright and full of promise. After securing the vial of poison, Heroda provided the young man with a meal and waived his usual fee — $1 for a palm reading, $2 to have a fortune told. Three weeks later, the young man received a letter from an attorney in Illinois, informing him of a $6,000 inheritance left to him by a recently deceased uncle — at least according to a profile written by Des Moines correspondent C.C. Pugh following Heroda’s death.
After spending his final night on the hilltop surrounded by friends, Heroda’s heart failed on Sunday, July 20, 1919, at the age of 47. His funeral was held later that week at Dexfield Park. His fellow park employees served as pallbearers, and a quartet of Dexter residents sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and “We Shall Meet Beyond the River.”
The amusement park’s owner, A.M. Tuttle, paid for the showman’s interment and for the modest headstone atop his grave at Stuart’s South Oak Grove Cemetery. Heroda willed his beloved pet monkeys to “an invalid boy at Valley Junction.” The strand of pearls that he wore around his turban while performing and an Indian arrowhead set in a gold stickpin he left to prominent local attorney Preston L. Sever, who conducted the funeral service.
At the close of his eulogy, Sever noted that, “This man died in a foreign land far from the place of his nativity with none of his own blood beside him. Who are we to decide what is in the heart or belief of another? And so, we remember the old injunction: nil nisi bonum” — nothing but good is to be said.
More than a century later, as Iowa Republicans accelerate their campaign to strip civil rights away from our neighbors and loved ones, we can remember and find courage in the lives of Heroda Kaiji and the Iowans who embraced and protected a gender nonconforming foreign-born Muslim. Those Iowans lived as they were taught, welcoming the traveler, the stranger in their midst. But as we look back over those intervening years, we have to ask, “What happened to that Iowa?”
Alec Binnie immigrated with his family to Iowa in a year closer to Heroda Kaiji’s time than to present day. He lives out of state but still thinks of Des Moines as home.
