by Ginny Rorby
A week later the report was better. After eating nothing but raisins and Cokes, which resulted in terrible diarrhea, she’d finally asked to go on the afternoon walk. After that she acted normal. She resumed eating, and playing with and grooming Noelle. With that news, Joey’s heart rested, but every day, when she was least prepared, some small scene from their past played out in her mind, like a special-delivery smile wrapped around a stone of longing.
EPILOGUE
FOUR YEARS LATER
AUGUST 29, 1997
Sukari died of liver cancer from the pesticide testing on August 29th. She was ten years old, less than a fifth of her way through her life span. During her last weeks, Joey, who’d taken time off from her biology studies at Gallaudet and preparations for applying to veterinary schools, moved her and Hidey into a small trailer that they’d rented and placed near the ficus tree. The trailer reminded her of life with her father, and she thought her own bad memories would meet her there but instead she felt cocooned. She read to Sukari and they talked about Turtle. Joey told her he’d been waiting and waiting for her and promised that she would see him soon.
WHERE TURTLE?
HIDING.
Sukari smiled.
On the last day of her life, she lay in bed and began to sign for things she wanted brought to her. It started with her stuffed turquoise Miami Dolphin, then her most recent issue of Esquire, then the doll Pam had given her—a Raggedy Ann with curly orange hair dyed auburn to match Joey’s. She shivered, so Joey covered her with a blanket. She slept then with Hidey beside her, his face buried against her neck.
Joey sat across the room watching Sukari’s thin chest rise and fall. “It’s time, Charlie,” she whispered up at the water-stained ceiling. “Come take your little girl.”
Later, when Hidey stood, stretched, and yawned, Joey got up to check on her. She was gone.
* * *
A few days later, they all flew back to California, Hidey in his carry-cage strapped into the seat next to Joey and Sukari’s ashes in a small oak box in Joey’s lap.
She sat by the window and stared out at the slow-moving landscape below. She had seen so much of it from buses, trains, and cars, where it looked either junky and littered, settled with neighborhoods, or wild and pristine. From the plane, she couldn’t see the trash, the community, or the beauty. Just squares of carved-up land, cities looking like bits of blown confetti, and highways, apparently empty, except for the occasional flash of light as if someone was signaling with a hand mirror to the sun.
Is this what God sees? she wondered. And if so, how will things ever change if what can be seen is either too much or too little?
She’d worn her new, small hearing aids to hear when her flight was called in the terminal and had numbly left them in, not sufficiently bothered by the discomfort of sound to seal herself back into a womb of silence. Throughout the flight, she was vaguely aware of the pilot’s announcements of points of interest as they flew over. Though, even with her hearing aids, she could catch only a word or two, she’d glance out anyway.
“Below ---------- left ----------,” the pilot said.
When she looked down, a chill swept over her, raising the hairs on her arms. Below them was the deceptively pure pallor of White Sands, New Mexico.
“---------- Home ---------- first ---------- bomb.”
The home of large- and small-scale destruction. Joey snatched her hearing aids out and jammed them into her pocket.
* * *
Roses were Sukari’s favorite flower, to smell and to eat, and red was her favorite color. Joey went to Heartwood Nursery and bought a red-rose bush. She planted it in the sunniest, warmest spot in the yard, and around the base she blended in half of Sukari’s ashes.
Her mother, Luke, and Ray came out for the planting. Ray had constructed a wire basket to surround the bush to keep the deer from eating the flowers, but Joey took it off. It looked too much like a cage. Besides, deer fascinated Sukari and the roses would lure them right to her.
A misty rain was falling the day Joey took the rest of her ashes down the back trail to the very largest, oldest, tallest redwood on their property. There was a bench nearby, built when the property was an old-folks home by someone who must have loved this ancient tree as much as she did. She sat there for a long time with the little box of ashes on her lap, watching the creek and remembering moments with Charlie and Sukari, sorting through them like snapshots.
After a while, when the rain became sincere, Joey got up and emptied the box at the base of the tree, then went back to sit on the bench. She watched as the ashes were washed from the surface and deeper into the duff. When they were gone, she lay back, looked up its two-hundred-foot height, and imagined Sukari being gathered by its roots. She watched her scamper to join the flow of water up the xylem, intent on going as high as she could go. Twice, from branches held out like arms, she turned and smiled down at Joey. I-SEE-YOU, J-Y.
“I see you, too, sugar-butt,” Joey whispered, then closed her eyes to watch the moment when Sukari’s spirit, in a molecule of oxygen, floated free at last.
AFTERWORD
Hurt Go Happy is dedicated to John Hopkins, Lucy, and a dead dog, three individuals who changed my life, and to Belinda, who just needs to be remembered.
At first, when I began to consider the genesis of this book, I didn’t go farther back than the 1988 Houston Chronicle story about Lucy, a sign-language-using chimpanzee. But the longer I thought about it, the clearer it became that it really started, emotionally, at least, in the summer of 1959, when I was fifteen. I had a fifty-cent-an-hour job working at the Winter Park Day Nursery. Belinda was three years old and a victim of abuse in a time when no one reported things like that. What parents did to their children was their business. From the moment her massively large mother delivered her every morning until she picked her up in the afternoon, Belinda clung to me. I never saw her play with the other children. I certainly never saw her laugh. She was tiny even for three and her bottom and the backs of her little legs were routinely marked with yellowing bruises and the fresh red welts made by the belt her mother used to beat her. So painful were they that I would cradle her when she had to use the bathroom, so her little bottom didn’t press against the toilet seat. I can’t bear to think about what became of that child, or that I grew up in a time when dirty looks and the hatred I still carry for that woman was all the power I had. I have often wondered if three short months of kindness made it worse for Belinda. My nightmares are still of what the rest of her life must have been like and of what she became.
The rest of the story starts in 1981. I was a Pan Am flight attendant, flying to London on weekends and going to school during the week, working on an undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Miami. While away one weekend, one of my best friends, Joanne Mansell, found a dog that had sought shelter in the doorway of the Catholic church in Coconut Grove. The dog had been abandoned and was starving. While I was gone, Joanne fed it, trying to gain its trust. Her plan was to drug the dog sufficiently to pick it up and take it to a vet. After I returned, we scraped together all the drugs we could find between us, mostly Dramamine for airsickness and a Valium or two, and blended them into her can of dog food.
I have never gotten the image of that dog out of my mind as she struggled to her feet and came down the sidewalk toward us, tail wagging. She was young, skin and bones, with no fur left on her body save for a single long patch down the back of her neck. Maggots lived in the open sores on her sides, her eyes were diseased and opaque, and her head and ears were bloody from her miserable digging at the fleas and the flies.
We did the kindest thing for that dog. We took her to the vet and had her put to sleep, but the horror of her existence and how long it might have been since her people abandoned her ate me up. For a week or more, it kept me awake nights until finally, on a layover in London, I got up and wrote her owners an angry letter describing her end. Of course, I had no one to send it to, so it stayed folded
in a pocket in my purse for over a year.
Let me say, to that point in my life I’d never written a single creative word. Not one. Being a writer was not a dream of mine; in fact it had never so much as crossed my mind. English was my worst subject in high school. I was good at math and science and had gone back to school with the intention of eventually becoming a vet.
In early August 1982, The Miami News, a now-defunct newspaper, was looking for pictures of the Everglade kite, an endangered South Florida hawk. I had some and took them to their offices. Only a couple of days earlier, I had been cleaning out that old purse and found the letter I had written. At the paper, I told the person who was reviewing my slides that if they could use the story, it might make people realize that animals treated like litter for someone else to pick up aren’t always taken in. I scrawled We Found Your Dog at the top of the page and handed it over.
On August 11, John Hopkins, an editor with the News, called me at home. I was out, but my husband wrote the message down—a single sentence that would eventually change my life: “Tell her,” John said, “if she can write like that, we’ll publish anything she writes.” I was pleased, of course, but my response was that I wasn’t a writer. Thanks for calling.
While going through the UM catalog of classes for the fall semester, I saw a creative-writing class listed. On a whim, but with John’s call in mind, I enrolled and learned in short order that I was a dismal failure as a writer—except when I was writing about children or animals, the powerless and dependent.
By acting on John’s phone call, the direction of my college career changed and for the next few years I plugged along, finally graduating in 1985 with a degree in biology and English, i.e., creative writing. By then, with the encouragement of Evelyn Wilde Mayerson and Lester Goran, and a pat or two on the head by Isaac Bashevis Singer and James Michener, I was actually working on a novel, which eventually became Dolphin Sky (Putnam, 1996).
In 1988, I was still a year and a half away from finishing my flying career and getting ready to enter graduate school at Florida International University in their brand-new creative writing program.
On January 4, 1988, I was on a layover in Houston, Texas, and picked up the morning paper. In it was an article about Jane Goodall, who has dedicated her life to studying and protecting wild chimpanzees. On the same page was another story by the same feature writer, Bob Tutt. It was about Lucy, a chimpanzee raised as if she were a human child—a story that has haunted me ever since.
Lucy is the real-life Sukari. What happens to Sukari happened to Lucy. So, although this is a work of fiction, little of it is untrue. All the chimpanzees that you see as cute babies in commercials, or in movies, or in circus acts end up grown and unwanted. If they were raised as Lucy was, loved and cared for, eating her meals at the same table as her “owners,” then the tragedy of being unwanted is compounded, more so because Lucy used sign language. She could communicate her feelings, her love, and her pain.
The kindest thing we can do for chimpanzees is to protect them in the wild, stop using them in senseless commercials and stupid movies, and stop locking them in small cages to use as hairy test tubes. Our DNA is 98.4 percent identical to that of chimpanzees. You can help by supporting the people who are working to protect our closest relatives:
Jane Goodall Institute
Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care (where the Coulston Foundation chimps ended up)
The Center for Great Apes
Friends of Washoe
The International Primate League
Or check the Internet for a sanctuary for chimpanzees near you.
The American Sign Language Alphabet
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research for this book began in 1988, so I’m afraid my memory of every helping hand is dim and I’m bound to have left someone out. To those people, I apologize. The first few years were spent trying to convince myself that I could pull off a project like this since I knew virtually nothing about chimpanzees and less about being deaf. I began by reading books by deaf writers and by authors with deaf parents. Between working full-time and graduate school, I managed sporadically to attend a few summer-session sign language classes and wish to start by thanking Vicky Yancy at College of the Redwoods for her guidance in understanding the deaf community.
About the same time, I began to make contact with people at the forefront of the efforts to save chimpanzees in the wild and to protect captive chimps, i.e., those in movies, circuses, TV commercials, and research labs, and with the saints operating facilities to house the discarded. In the first category, I wish to thank Jane Goodall for her encouragement, her kind notes, and a phone call that put me on top of the world. Also in that category is Shirley McGreal of the International Primate Protection League in Summerville, South Carolina, for guiding me through the maze of rehab facilities. I owe Rachel Weiss, formerly of Yerkes, who spent all the years since fighting for the lives of the chimps she grew to love, for sharing her grief with me. Thanks, also, to Wallace Swett, director of Primarily Primates in San Antonio, Texas, and to the volunteers and staff at Friends of Washoe, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, especially Mary Lee Jensvold, for her critique of a very needy early draft. But the two people who really made this book possible are Patti Ragan, director of the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, who gave me Chris’s and Noelle’s hands to hold and has supported me in this endeavor for nearly ten years; and Ron Henderson, who lost his job because he publicly questioned the treatment of the Coulston Foundation chimps. If the scene at the “Clarke Foundation” is chilling, it is because Ron cared enough to provide the astonishing, heartbreaking details.
I want to acknowledge Belinda, who was three years old in 1959 when her mother randomly and frequently beat her with a belt and sent her to the Winter Park Day Nursery covered in welts. I have remembered you all my life and Joey is my way of speaking out for you now because no one would listen then. I hope you are happy at last and have broken the pattern.
A special thanks goes to my greatly relieved writers group: Norma Watkins, Steve Sapontzis, Stephen Garber, Lee Nichols, Suzanne Byerley, Kate Erickson, and Estelle Frank, all of whom helped to drag this book out of me chapter by chapter. Without them, I would have given up. Thanks also to Tonya Stremlau of Gallaudet University for her careful and thoughtful reading of the manuscript. My undying gratitude to Kathy Dawson and Teresa Sholars, who remain in my corner, and to Bonnie Hearn Hill, a wonderful writer and generous friend. Without her this may have ended with a pile of paper gathering dust on the floor of my closet. And last, Laura Dail, an extraordinary agent, for believing in this book, and Susan Chang, my editor, for her gentle but persistent insistence that I get it as right as it could be.
TOR TEEN BOOKS
READING & ACTIVITY GUIDE TO
HURT GO HAPPY
BY GINNY RORBY
Ages 10 & up; Grades 5 & up.
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The Common Core State Standards–aligned questions and activities that follow are intended to enhance your reading of Hurt Go Happy. Please feel free to adapt this content to suit the needs and interests of your students or reading group participants.
BEFORE READING THE BOOK:
WRITING & DISCUSSION ACTIVITIES
The pre-reading writing and discussion activities below correlate to the following Common Core State Standards: (W.5-8.3, 9-10.3, 11-12.3); (SL.5-8.1, 9-10.1, 11-12.1)
1. Hurt Go Happy explores the lines of communication and affection between humans and chimpanzees. Ask students to consider their interactions with other animals, such as caring for a pet, an encounter with a primate at a zoo, an experience riding horseback, or perhaps working on a farm. Have each student write a short reflection on a moment when they felt a special connection with an animal and what they imagine the animal felt at the same time.
2. Ask each student to imagine he or she is deaf, or has another disability such as blindness or a lost limb. Write a journal-style essa
y describing an ordinary morning, paying particular attention to activities, such as hearing an alarm clock or getting down stairs, which would require new or different skills to perform with a disability. If students have disabled friends, classmates, or family members, they may choose to transcribe an interview with the disabled person about their strategies for starting each day.
3. Invite students to discuss their thoughts about testing medicines, chemicals, and other products on animals and/or their thoughts on the pros and cons of keeping animals confined in zoos. Have they read about these issues in the newspaper or online? Are they concerned about these, or related animal rights issues? Have these topics ever been discussed around their family table? Would they consider helping an organization dedicated to the protection of one or many animal species? Why or why not?
AFTER READING THE BOOK:
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
The post-reading writing and discussion activities below correlate to the following Common Core State Standards: (W.5-8.3, 9-10.3, 11-12.3); (SL.5-8.1, 9-10.1, 11-12.1)
1. How is Joey awakened in the opening lines of the novel? How does she make sense of this moment? With the ability to hear, how might you have experienced this moment differently than Joey?
2. Early in the story, Joey is frustrated by her thumb-sucking. Why do you think this young teen still sucks her thumb? What might this tell you about her character?
3. What moments in the story best help you to understand the isolation imposed by Joey’s disability? What type of language does the author use to convey Joey’s experience of deaf life to readers?
