In short: I am rich and my father was rich and so was my mother. The Toneybees are a very old New England family and the Leroys are an even older French family from Dominica. The Toneybees did not come over on the Mayflower, but they hurried along shortly thereafter. My father’s family has been making themselves and, in turn, this nation, rich since the 1700s. We started out with a general store: from there we became involved in imports and exports. My grandfather built one of the first modern factories: a shoe plant on the Lowell River. My father did something special with rubber and developed one of the earliest prototypes for the athletic sneaker. My father cornered the early market on sports supplies. This made him rich enough to afford a wife with plantations in Dominica. They were both proud people and so gave me both their names to carry on. The Toneybee-Leroy family line is rich, but it is not fruitful. I am the sole inheritor of both their fortunes. This Institute is my heir and its scientific discoveries about great apes and language will bear the Toneybee-Leroy name into the future.
So, You can see, as the crimes of the Toneybee Institute become known, it changes how and when and where my family name will enter history. It is a question of whether the Toneybee name will be spat upon and sneered at and pushed down to the bottom or revered and lifted up and allowed to rise to where it should be, which is the top.
Now You, African American people, are wise enough to know that in the great, vast history of this world, of the world that You and I make together, in this sad and wondrous world, not a single person anywhere at any time has ever been able to undo the past. This is the fundamental inaccuracy that that book and its author Professor Gorey bring to me. That book talks about the past and injustice and crimes as if any of it can be undone. And it cannot be undone at all. As if I could somehow do something to take it all back. As if the past has anything to do with You and me.
So You see, African American people, I would never ask of you the impossible. I would never ask you to believe that what’s been done can be undone. We understand each other. And from this understanding grows a kind of trust. And so I tell You, African American people, You can trust me to tell the true story.
Right here, right now, I promise You, African American people; I would not, could not, and will not ever, ever, lie to You.
The book that makes my heart hurt is by a history professor named Francine Gorey. She came here, to the Institute, three years ago, to interview me for her project, and though she claims, in writing, to have confronted me with my Institute’s worst crimes, I swear to you, African American people, I cannot remember that part of our conversation. And I don’t remember doing anything the book says I did. But we will come to that later.
Professor Francine Gorey came to my library and she sat across from me in a leather club chair. She is a little brown woman. Her feet did not reach the ground, and she is so sweetly plump that she could not cross her legs. Instead, she crossed them at the ankles and swung them back and forth, charmingly, just above the carpet, while we spoke.
She told me she was writing a history of scientific institutions. She told me she admired my work. She asked me why I began this place. I trusted her, and here, African American people, I am sorry to admit that I trusted her because I underestimated her. Francine Gorey looked harmless. As I said, she was little and plump and she wore oversized glasses that kept slipping down her nose and her panty hose were an odd, bright tan, too light for her color and riddled with runs. Her voice was very high and when she spoke, her whole soft, inviting face wobbled with enthusiasm, and I found myself instantly at ease. Her face was at once familiar. You see, African American people, I find myself at ease with You more often than not.
Francine Gorey mispronounced frugivorus. She said, instead, “forgive-or-us.” When I corrected her, she did not become defensive but instead smiled back.
She laughed. “Forgive me. I’m a historian. I’m not a trained biologist.”
“Good for you, my dear,” I said.
Professor Gorey reported this exchange in her book and wrote about it: “Julia Toneybee-Leroy was driven to found the Institute by a zealous and ingrained belief in upper-middle class European American hegemony and supremacy, so ingrained in her she does not even know it.”
Now, when I first read that sentence, I did not know exactly what it meant, but I could tell it was not kind. Max, our research assistant, explained it to me. I was horrified. That is not me. And though I know, because of what Dr. Gardner did, You, African American people, are, of course, forever in the right—that what Francine Gorey says my Institute did is unforgivable—I have to object and say that I told her why I founded this place and why I wanted it to be. But she did not include that in her book.
That day, Professor Gorey settled back in her chair and swung her ankles and said, “Miss Toneybee-Leroy, can you tell me why you care so much about chimps learning to use language?”
And I said, “Of course, it’s true, anyone knows. I started this place because of my love of chimpanzees.”
“But why?” Professor Gorey said. “Why do you love them?”
This is the part she left out of the book. This is the part I remember. So I will retell it now in the name of seeking amends. I will tell You, African Americans, the rest of the story.
I started this Institute and I gave it its mandate because in 1927 I stood in the Congo and I shot down a chimpanzee from a tree, and right before she died, she spoke to me.
My parents died when I was young. I did not know them well, only knew the longing for them, sounding deep inside me like an echo. I have always been alone, but I’ve never liked it. I inherited everything, of course, but it came to me slowly. The first thing I got was the music conservatory—gifted to me when I was eighteen, a present meant to teach me responsibility. I walked through its halls, I listened to tens of violins and horns and cellos sound out their passions. So much need, so much want, all sounding at me. My heart flipped over in terror. I fled.
I bought a one-way ticket to the place farthest away from Courtland County that I could possibly think of: the Belgian Congo. My trustees insisted on giving me a chaperone whom I grudgingly accepted. She was a spinster aunt who was too overwhelmed by life to bother looking out for me. I may as well have been on the trip alone, so wrapped was I in my helplessness. Every day of the journey I willed the ship to go faster, to sail straight into the equator and beyond, into the jungle, where I imagined whatever was wrong could be baked out of me.
My first sight of the Congo, I loved it. I loved the brown of the river. I loved the low trees. I loved the smaller figures I spied on the distant shores: I imagined they were naked and brown, too. I loved the heat. God! How I loved the heat! You cannot understand, what a shock it was to these cold New England bones to be in that heat. It beat you down and made you want to beat it back. It was a challenge to your heart to go on slapping. All of the other white people onboard the ship complained bitterly about it: it became a kind of game for them to bang on and on about how they couldn’t get a proper bath in the ferry sinks and could never get completely clean. But who wanted to be anything as petty as clean when the great dirty stink of the jungle rose up all around you?
You must believe me, African American people, when I tell You I’d never experienced anything like it. The jungle seemed to sigh when I sighed. When I gazed over its rails and down at the river, it felt as if the whole expanse of water had broken wide with my shame, as if everything in the world shimmered mockingly at my mistake, as if the waters of Africa were raging with me. I stretched my arms along the ship’s railing and breathed in, really breathed in, for the first time since I’d run away. The air smelled deep and low, like the clay bricks of the conservatory. It smelled like creation.
My first day in Leopoldville, I saw a group of white men from my hotel, crowded around a table in the market, picking up roasted skulls of some large and foreign animal and licking at the inside of the bones until they got out all the meat. I tried to do the same, but my chaperone stopped me.
I saw a beautiful black man in a three-piece suit hurrying down the street in front of me. He turned and smiled, and I saw that his teeth were a brilliant green. I went up to him and offered him cash if he would come with me and grin at me with those green teeth all day, and tell me where they came from, and how he came to dress so well. He grew frightened and only bowed, and pretended not to understand the French I spoke.
One night, I escaped my chaperone and went to a canteen. It was on the avenue Prince Baudouin, a long street that went from the white ville to the black cité. Some men I met at the hotel bar offered to walk me.
The canteen was at the end of a long dark road and inside everything was lit by spirit lamps in old tin cans. In the canteen, I saw black women in A-line skirts and blouses, their heads wrapped in African turbans, dancing to a black band doing their best approximation of jazz. Their black, black skin glowed in the spirit lamps. The white men I went with, the ones who’d helped me escape my chaperone, whispered to me that the women were prostitutes, hoping to shock me.
I walked up to the darkest, brightest one and I paid her to share a dance with me. She was little and warm and I pressed her too close. I felt her stiffen. I felt the fat of her hips underneath my hands. She told me her name was Marie-Angélique. I imagined that she would breathe to me, as my mother never had, as my father never had, that she loved me. But only if I held her tighter. I held her all night, and when the music of the canteen stopped, I made her sit with me and the white men at the bar. I made her show me how she tied her hair up and I took out one of my handkerchiefs and asked her to tie up my hair, too. She stuck her dimpled fingers into my lank hair. I closed my eyes when I felt them there. But it was no use. All around me the air crackled with the white men’s disgust and rage and lust.
I announced to my chaperone that I wanted to go on safari. We left the city and traveled deeper into the forest. I know, African American people, that I sound like every old white biddy who writes about her Africa, but truly, it was uncanny. The trees were really the sturdy necks of great ladies. The bark on them was smooth and glossy as glass but the darkest pitch I’d ever seen. The trunks were covered entirely in purple flowers and in between the stems sprouted the thickest cobwebs I have ever seen. They were violet in the shade of the jungle, and when we walked past, they trembled so delicately I imagined the trees had budded shivering décolletages. Everything—the flowers, the trees, my own slick skin—was covered in the sweat of the world. I held a gun at my side, and each futile shot I made sent a halo of spent gunpowder above my head.
I wore a suit of barathea I’d ordered special. The only way you can clean that fabric is with gasoline. In the jungle, I spent every night wiping down the sleeves of my dress. The scent made me dizzy and I took it in in great huffs, clamoring to swoon, finding comfort in the fact that I bathed in fuel and smelled like a fuse.
I was an American heiress dressed in dun colors wandering around a jungle floor. I had an inheritance waiting for me that I did not want. Nobody in the world loved me or ever had. I did not know myself.
On the final day of safari, before we were to head back, I shot the chimpanzee.
I did not expect to kill her. I did not even think I made a direct hit. I’d been aiming wildly at the leaf cover above me and only occasionally jerking my trigger finger. After I made the shot, I stepped forward, my ears still ringing, ready to trudge on, and I only knew I had hurt something when, from the corner of my eye, I saw her fall from the tree.
I got to her first, before the others. I took her hand in mine and she did it then. She spoke to me. I leaned very close, until she was breathing right up to my ear. So close that when she parted and closed her lips, I could hear the knuck knuck knuck of her teeth clacking together. I could smell the rotting meat on her breath, but it didn’t smell bad. It smelled sweet.
Her voice was low, with labored, strangled breathing. I knew she was dying. I felt a stumble of a pulse where I held her close. I waited. And she huffed out a few more broken breaths. Then she hissed. Her tongue, thick and gray as old steak gristle, flicked the rind of my ear. She whispered something, one last thing, and I know it was words, I know it. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but believe me, African American people, she spoke to me.
When I told Francine Gorey this, she stopped writing down her notes. At the time, I flattered myself to think it was because she was as moved as I.
“What do you think she said?” she asked.
And this is the whole tragedy of my life. I don’t know what she said. I just know that she said it.
And I would give anything, have given everything—my money, my reputation, my happiness—to know what this thing was, what she said to me. I would give anything to be back there, listening closely, and I would make sure to hold up my hand in time to stop the guide from trampling up, crashing underbrush, cracking sticks one two three, and drowning out that beautiful chimp’s last words to me.
She was still speaking to me when my boy got there, but I couldn’t hear. I only heard dead leaves breaking. I turned to my boy, wildly hoped for a moment that he maybe, with some secret African sense or African better-built ears for the jungle, heard her over his own noise.
“Did you hear it?” I almost shouted at him.
He grinned wide and nervous. “Yes, miss,” he said.
I had them pack up her body and took it back with me to Leopoldville. The concierge at the hotel told me he could find a man to stuff her and do a very nice job, but the man he recommended was a quack and what he sent back to me quickly ripened and rotted so that the customs officials rejected it and I had to throw her corpse overboard as we sailed back toward the Atlantic.
I told You, African Americans, when I first heard what people were saying I did to You, I felt ashamed. I recognized the feeling because I have felt it before. That animal’s end, and my hand in it, shamed me. My own shallowness up until then shamed me. I can barely tolerate the guilt I feel now, toward You, African American people, so imagine how all that shame felt in my limbs when I was lithe and eighteen, a rubber heiress who feared she killed something miraculous.
Back home, I poured all the money I had into setting up the Institute. I took over the conservatory, threw out the music and its needs I couldn’t fill. I let chimps and scientists fray the carpet. I thought I had to make the world over. I was compelled to do something as new and terrible as getting an animal to talk. The bonus, of course, would be if the animal could talk about something relevant. But I wasn’t going to get greedy, on top of it all. I spent my millions and would have been happy with just a sentence about the weather.
The very first experiment, I thought that maybe we had done it. I thought we could have succeeded. I had a colony in Florida send me a chimp. Her name was Daisy.
In setting up the Institute, I consulted many experts on chimpanzees and general zoology. One of them had mentioned the possibility of getting Daisy to speak through massage. He said it was just a theory, that nobody had tried it out yet, but that if someone could sit and rub her mouth into the shapes of words and whisper in her ear, it might encourage Daisy to talk on her own.
Francine Gorey says in Man or Beast? that these experiments were cruel and unusual punishment, and I think, perhaps, she is right. But the experiments did yield results. Daisy did speak, after a fashion.
As soon as Daisy came to me, I hired an African American nursemaid from Spring City to care for her. She was named Nadine Morton. She is quoted in Francine Gorey’s book. She is, at present, my nurse. Today, African Americans, in 1990, it is a kind of comfort that Nadine Morton remembers Daisy’s youth much as I do. Nadine Morton bathed her and played with her a bit every day and dressed and fed her.
Every morning, Nurse Morton brought little Daisy to my room while I was still in bed. She placed her in my arms, and it was me alone who massaged dear Daisy’s lips into words, worked her soft and hairy little cheeks with my fingers, coaxing the English out of her.
Francine Gorey calls this cruel, an
d maybe she is right. But by her second birthday, Daisy could talk. Four words: Mama, Papa, cup, and ball. My society friends, my board of directors, my scientific observers all toasted me and Daisy with flutes of champagne.
But I must admit, Daisy’s voice sounded odd: a far-off hiss that came from the back of her throat, like a gas burner left on in an empty room. Daisy did not so much move her lips to speak but instead opened her mouth wide and rooted her tongue around her billows of breath. While she spoke, she threw her head back and peered at us all from underneath her heavy eyelids.
Each word took Daisy a long time to learn, and she did not seem inclined to put them into sentences. Still, emboldened by her progress, I hired a sound man to record her voice and I wrote away to a few scientists, telling them about her. They were cautiously optimistic: they wanted to know if she could learn more. Here is where my ambition took over and I cannot hide behind half admissions anymore. I know I was in the wrong. I kept Daisy close and I tried to teach her more words, but she was exhausted by the five she already knew.
Nadine Morton complained bitterly about having to spend all day listening to Daisy husk out those words over and over. My fingers cramped—there are only so many facial massages you can give to a monkey. Daisy seemed to sense our disappointment. The heartbreak of her failure was doing the same thing to her every day—working my fingers into the cheeks, sounding out the words, watching her follow my lips, and the results never changing. Daisy held all of that ambition in her breath, and then it died on her lips, fell into nothing.
The last word Daisy learned was cup, and then she stopped speaking altogether and only sighed, that same queer hiss of air, which got higher and fainter. When a bout of influenza came around with her third birthday, little Daisy lifted her head and sighed that in, too, and quickly died.
I can say now, though it shames me to my core, I was relieved when Daisy died. I loved Daisy, but I did not know how to mother her. I was not a natural-born mother.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 19
