We Love You, Charlie Freeman

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  “I don’t get it. It’s a still life, right?”

  I closed my eyes. “No.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “It’s . . .” I thought I couldn’t say it. “It’s backsides. This one”—I pointed to the one on the left—“is the backside of a woman. They just know her name is Nymphadora. That’s all they could find in the archives. And this”—I pointed to the other one—“is the backside of a chimpanzee. A girl chimpanzee.”

  Adia frowned. “Why?”

  “Because,” I said, “they’re comparing.”

  Adia was still looking at the drawings.

  “They did the same thing to men,” I continued. “Not pictures or anything, but they did, like, brain tests on the black men who lived in Spring City and messed up their brains and then compared them to chimp brains. And they forced this woman to pose, they forced her to do it and then they made up a name for her so we can never find her. They’re evil, Adia. They’re all racists.”

  She closed the book and I finally began to cry.

  Adia and her mother warned me for weeks that the world was like this. Here was proof that it was worse. I wanted her to save me, to explain, to wax sharp and go hard.

  I breathed in the balm of Adia and her mother and what I’d counted on as their superior knowledge. It smelled like flaking newspapers and the brown milky slip in its bucket.

  “Don’t do that.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Adia’s hands fluttering helplessly. “Please don’t do that.” She pushed on my arm and then she said, with uncharacteristic optimism, a terrible miscalculation, “Charlotte, maybe it’s not that bad.”

  I cried until I couldn’t breathe, could only choke out, “I don’t believe you.”

  Adia leaned across and kissed me on the cheek. She bent her head, kissed my dumb hands clenched into fists. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  IT WAS EARLY in the afternoon and we still hadn’t gone back to school. Beside the stereo system was a tall standing brass lamp with a piece of red gauze foolishly stretched close to the bulb. Adia and I sat in the dusty light, she was curled around my knees. I’d folded my hands, very primly, and set them on my lap and Adia rested her head on them. My fingers were beginning to go numb. Soon Adia would lift her head and my hands would feel weightless and light and electric again. She just had to lift her head. But she didn’t. Adia pulled at a bit of T-shirt wrenched up underneath her. Then she settled back down.

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes sense.” She was quiet again, but I could tell she was waiting. “Because,” she said carefully, “I’ve been thinking. And I think what you should do is, confront them. Confront them and shut it all down.”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  Adia finally lifted her head, shocked. “They’re terrible people.”

  “I have to tell my mother about it first.”

  Adia lay back down. “Don’t you think she already knows?” she said carefully.

  My mother had to know. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but I understood it now and felt sick. “No,” I said, “of course she doesn’t.”

  “So you give her the book and you show it to her and the two of you go out together and tell the Toneybee off. You stand up for what’s right. You stand up for your rights. You do it.”

  “I don’t know.” I knew my mother would never do that, but it hurt too much to admit that to Adia.

  Adia sat up. “How can you not know?”

  “I should go home.”

  She stretched.

  “Wait till I tell Marie about this.”

  WHEN MY MOTHER pulled up to Adia’s, she didn’t even park the car, just honked from the street. I’d waited for her outside the Breitlings’ front door. I didn’t trust Adia, was certain she would denounce my mother the moment she saw her face.

  I buckled my seat belt. My mother said, to the windshield, “What is the matter with you? You can’t be skipping school like this. We thought something terrible happened to you.”

  “Well, it didn’t.”

  “Honestly, Charlotte, that’s all you can say?”

  The whole car smelled like Charlie. His scent had become my mother’s: the whiff of animal, but something sharper as well, oniony and frantic, the stink of raw nerves.

  “Well, you’re not even going to apologize?” She pulled out into the road.

  I leaned over in the seat, unzipped my backpack and pulled out the book. I placed it on the dashboard between us.

  “Charlotte, take that off, it’s just going to slide around and fall off and hurt somebody.”

  I reached up and turned on the overhead light. She started to complain about the glare, but then she saw the book’s cover and she understood. She did not even glance in the rearview mirror—we were back on the turnpike by then—she simply swerved to the side of the road and turned off the car.

  The only sound was the engine cooling into pops and the wind in the trees. The overhead light was still on, so bright it made outside the car black, no woods, no turnpike, no nothing.

  My mother was calm. “Where did you get that?”

  “I found it.”

  “Where?”

  “Nowhere.”

  She tapped the cover of the book with her finger. She would not pick it up. She said very carefully, “How do you feel about it?”

  I didn’t trust myself to answer.

  “I bet you feel very angry with me right now,” she began. “And very confused. That’s right, isn’t it? You probably think you hate me and the Toneybee, and you’re confused.”

  “It’s all here in the book. The Toneybee Institute is racist and they’re evil.”

  “There’s a lot of things in that book that aren’t true.”

  “There are pictures—” She shook her head, one brisk no at the word pictures. “There’s proof. I saw it.”

  She was quiet for a minute. Then she began to argue with the glass in front of her again. “It was a long time ago, Charlotte. Over sixty years ago. A lot can change in sixty years.”

  “Not that much,” I said. “You don’t even care.”

  She turned to me, her eyes bright, her voice shaking. “You know what, Charlotte? You’re right. I don’t care. I don’t care what that book says. I don’t care about anything written in there.”

  She saw my face and her own softened. “Look,” she continued, a little more slowly. “Charlotte, I love you. I love you and I love your sister. And I love Charlie. I love this experiment. You’re right,” she said. “I don’t care about anything that book has to say. We”—she took her hands off the steering wheel, formed a fist, and moved it across her chest to the left, to rest right above her heart, signing the word—“we, Charlotte, we’re bigger than all of this. What we’re doing with Charlie now? What we get to do? It’s realer than any history and it’s better than anything written in that book. It’s realer than anything this book”—she tapped it again with her finger—“could ever imagine. But us, you and me and Dad and Callie and Charlie? We’re bigger than this, Charlotte. We’re bigger than history.”

  “So what are you saying? You’re telling me you knew about this all along?”

  My mother took a deep breath. “I don’t care why the Toneybee brought us here. Maybe they hired us because we’re black, or maybe they hired us because we can sign, or maybe they hired us because they liked us, or maybe they hired us because we’re the best, or maybe they hired us because they think they’re using us to make them look good. I’m telling you, Charlotte, honey, please believe me, it’s the best lesson you’ll ever learn: none of that matters. It doesn’t matter why they think we’re here. What matters is we’re here.”

  She reached up, turned off the overhead light. Without the glare, the woods came back, the fence for the turnpike, the soft street lamps of downtown Courtland behind us. She started the car now: she didn’t bother to take the book off the dashboard and neither
did I. It just sat there for the rest of the ride, sliding back and forth across the vinyl between us.

  When we got to the gates of the Toneybee she stopped the car and said, her voice low, “Just, please, don’t tell Callie.”

  I started to laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m serious, Charlotte. Don’t tell her. She’s not going to understand. You don’t understand, either, but Callie’s just a little girl.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “He knows,” she said quickly. “He already knows everything. He’s not happy about it, but he knows this is important. As should you.”

  “So,” I said, “I can’t talk about crazy racists and I can’t talk about you and Charlie, you know, Charlie feeding off of you. Is that it? Is that the whole list?”

  “We can tell Callie. Eventually. And we can tell them about Charlie nursing eventually. Just not now, when we’re doing so well. It could ruin everything. It’s not just you who’s affected, you know. It’s the whole experiment. They’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on us already. Do you know how much money that is?”

  “Sure. It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  “Don’t get smart with me. If that number doesn’t mean anything to you, then I’m raising you wrong. Things like this don’t happen every day. There’s actually something to lose here. There’s a lot to lose here. The woman who wrote this book? People like that don’t even understand the concept of having something to lose.”

  “Adia says we are all in this one struggle together. Her mother says that black people have to help one another and we start by knowing our history.”

  “That’s bullshit,” my mother said. She saw the look on my face. “You want the truth from me and I’ll give it. Listen very carefully. The woman who wrote this book and your friend, Adia? People like that just love the trouble. They live for the breaking down. They don’t know anything about the building up. They can’t even conceive of the building up. They just move on to the next breaking down. Your life isn’t like theirs, Charlotte. You and me and your father and Callie, we have a lot to lose if this goes wrong. You start in on this, you decide to make a statement and play the victim on this and it’s not just you who ends up hurt. You’re being selfish if you think it’s just you.”

  I was quiet for a long time. “Fine,” I said.

  “And you have to stop talking to Adia.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No. I’m not going to do that. If you make me stop seeing Adia, this is all off. This whole thing. I tell everyone, and tell Dr. Paulsen and Dad, and I’m selfish. If you stop me from seeing Adia, I’ll be selfish.”

  We were at the gates. We could see Lester Potter through the window of the guardhouse, peering at the car, curious about why we hadn’t moved. “Fine.” My mother flashed her lights at Lester, a signal that things were fine. “But not a word.”

  I nodded and then I swung the car door open and stepped out on to the gravel drive.

  “Charlotte,” my mother called, her voice finally panicked.

  “I just want to walk up the drive by myself.”

  I heard the passenger door slam and then the chug of the engine, the crunch of gravel as she maneuvered past me. In the dark, I walked up the drive and threw my head back. The elm trees scratched against the dark sky. It smelled like earth and trees and leaves somewhere, far away, burning.

  When I got to the grand steps of the Toneybee, I stepped off the gravel drive onto the cold lawn, toward the heavy double doors that were the staff entrance. I made it through, but then instead of walking up the stairs to our apartment, I stopped and stood in front of the picture of Julia Toneybee-Leroy and her monkey.

  I gazed up at her face, and at the bones beside her, shot through with sticks. I leaned close to the painting, pressed my nose against the canvas, kept my eyes wide open until the whole image dissolved, first into muddy colors, then into brushstrokes, into the pimpled skin of the canvas.

  I breathed in deep the old oil and dust and my own tears. I pressed my forehead deeper into the canvas, opened my eyes wide to stop crying, let the colors in front of me swim out of focus.

  “IN TIMES OF strife, revolutionaries must offer their homes to comrades in hiding,” Adia told me, days later, sitting on the floor of Marie’s studio.

  “You think so?”

  Adia looked at me gravely. “History is a weapon, Charlotte.”

  We were in from the cold, listening to Marie work the wheel at the end of the room. Adia had just finished reading to Marie from a copy of Man or Beast? My mother had made me give Max’s copy back to him, and Adia had first tried to order another for Marie to see, but both the Courtland County Library and the bookstore in town claimed that the book was unattainable. Courtland County Community College claimed the same. Marie had finally asked a friend in Boston to send one. Adia and I read the book together, and after every chapter we finished she wrote a letter to the editor of the Courtland County Mercury, but none of these were ever printed. She was convinced that we were being censored and blocked by the Toneybee Institute at every turn.

  Adia was winding herself up now. “We’re gonna fill you up with so much knowledge,” she told me, “so much consciousness, this experiment can’t bring you down. They wanna hide the truth from us? Well, you’re just going to stop participating. You’re going to disrupt the whole thing. But we need that book because you have to do it with knowledge and with style and with grace. Right, Marie? You’ve got to make a statement.”

  But Marie, serene behind her wheel, called to us, “You cannot do anything.”

  Adia turned to her, incredulous. “We have to do something.”

  Marie only sat back and lit another cigarette, smiling maddeningly. She inhaled and when she spoke her voice was beautiful and deep and grave, “Doing anything is impossible.”

  I felt my stomach dip. “But that’s the whole reason why I keep coming here,” I said.

  Something flashed across Adia’s face, but she lowered her eyes before I could make it out. When she raised them again, she was merely angry. Marie was sketching out her argument of inaction.

  “It’s not real. It’s psychological,” Marie went on. “That mess at the Toneybee, what your family is messed up in, that’s not a real problem. It’s the symptom of a larger metaphysical disease. It’s a metaphor, and as a metaphor it can only be fought metaphorically, not with actual actions.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Adia said, seething, and Marie laughed back at her.

  “Of course it doesn’t make any sense,” she told us. “Nothing about racism makes sense. If it made sense, it would mean it was real, it was the truth. It’s ironic,” Marie pronounced, savoring the word. Despite this, it still sounded wrong to me.

  “My family is real. I mean, I really live in the Toneybee and it’s really terrible.”

  Marie only shook her head sadly. “Your family, your parents and sister and that chimp, you’re just as unreal as all of it. That’s why it’s not possible to ‘do anything,’ as Adia puts it.” Marie sat back and stubbed out her cigarette in a bucket full of potsherds.

  Adia cried, “We need marches and signs and we need to write to the outside papers. We need to lie down in the street.”

  Marie was quizzical. “That book will so be out in the world. It will embarrass the Toneybee, and they will care. And maybe some people in Courtland County will care. But it won’t shift anything monumental in our collective consciousness. There’s nothing more we can do here, Adia. And I’m sorry to tell you this, Charlotte. But I don’t understand why you girls are getting so upset about this one thing. It’s clear that here in Courtland County you can’t get a fair shake. They’ll suppress the book and anyone who speaks out against it, so why even try? The world is so much bigger and so much worse than this. You throw yourself into Courtland County and you’re just working on Charlotte’s family. That’s only four people—”

  “Plus the chimp,” Adia added.

&nb
sp; “All right, yes, and him. Think of the larger picture, both of you. I know it’s hard on you, Charlotte. Please think of my home as a safe space. But agitating against this one thing when your energies can go to something so much bigger—you’re young. You can do better. The book is enough. Just let time take care of it.”

  Marie stood up from her stool, crossed over to the stereo, and put on a record. It was a song made up of just one creaking horn.

  At the sound of that horn Adia drew herself up, grabbed my hand, and took me upstairs to her room.

  My mother was right. These people were useless.

  ADIA RAGED AND cried, but she did not give up. A few weeks later, when I told her that Dr. Paulsen, excited by the progress of the experiment, had insisted on a Thanksgiving dinner with Julia Toneybee-Leroy herself, Adia became excited.

  I was more mystified. Adia and I had talked about Julia Toneybee-Leroy and underlined every mention of her in Man or Beast? But still, it had been easy to forget that she was a person and that she was alive. It was as if Dr. Paulsen had pulled a ten-dollar bill from her pocket and pointed to the engraving of President Jackson and said, “Make him up a plate.”

  Quick-thinking Adia coaxed me, “Now’s your chance. You get to look her in the face and confront her.”

  “I’m not doing that.”

  She moved away from me. We were in her room again, like always, lying side by side.

  I was scared of looking like a fool in front of my father’s family. Dr. Paulsen insisted that they be invited, too. I’d gotten excited at the thought of maybe embarrassing my mother for once, but my uncle Lyle and aunt Ginny would only see rudeness, not protest.

  Uncle Lyle and Aunt Ginny lived in a clapboard Victorian back in Cambridge, on one of the little streets that cramped up between Central Square and the banks of the Charles River.

  When we lived in Dorchester, every Sunday afternoon we drove across the bridge and ate dinner on Chalk Street. Every meal there ended with the same lament. Right around dessert, right before the men, Kool cigarettes tucked between their knuckles, disappeared out the back door into a cloud of mentholated smoke, Uncle Lyle would lean back in his chair and say, “Laurel’s got you beat, boy. Who ever heard of living in a building with strangers when you could live with family? You think you’re better than us.” As if our apartment in Dorchester was impossibly chic and not stained with watermarks and seeded with lead paint. It was always that way with them—my father and Uncle Lyle passing some unknown jealousy back and forth, as easily as they traded loose cigarettes from pocket to pocket.