SIGNS LEAD TO A NEW LIFE. KAITLYN SHARES A
SECOND PASSAGE FROM HER FIRST NOVEL.

It’s more common than you’d think, having a chimpanzee for a sibling. Callie and I used to think we were the only ones, but we’re not. Of course, they didn’t tell us about the others before the experiment began.

There was a boy, Vincent, in the 1930s. I’ve seen the pictures and in them, he wears one of those old-fashioned nightdresses, the hem skimming his ankles. His cheeks are so round that the fat swells up and pushes his eyes to slits. Vincent’s parents were behavioral scientists and they decided to raise him with a sister chimpanzee. Her name was Elaine. Vincent and Elaine were set against each other in a friendly competition, to see who would develop the fastest. They shut it all down when the chimp began to win.

Elaine was just better at everything. She understood commands faster, she was stronger, and she walked first. I’ve seen the archival film, too, of her first steps: quick, elegant strides across a washed-out front yard, knuckles lightly grazing the lawn. When I watch that film, I feel sorry for Vincent. She’s so goddamned sure of herself. You watch that film and Elaine is so graceful, it looks like she’s about to lope straight up the evolutionary ladder.  And then, on top of it, Vincent wasn’t merely slow. He regressed. He tried to copy Elaine’s gait, but his rounded ankles and chubby wrists were no good for walking on all fours. He diligently mimicked Elaine’s hoots but refused to speak. He wouldn’t eat with a knife and fork, which is especially odd because even Elaine used a spoon. The final straw came, though, when Vincent’s parents found him kneeling in front of the back porch door, his gums shredded and his mouth full of blood. Elaine was beside him, shrieking: it was the sound of her screams that led them to Vincent. He’d been mimicking her again. She liked to grind her much stronger teeth against the steel mesh on the screen door. After they shut the experiment down, Elaine was donated to a breeding colony in Florida and Vincent got stitches in his mouth.

    There was another family, in the 1970s. They raised a chimp in a brownstone in Boston’s Back Bay, but they didn’t do it for science. They did it for the notoriety. The father was a philosophy professor and liked practical jokes. He named his chimp Baron Von Hominid and taught him to sign three words. When the Baron got good enough, the professor booked him on a lecture circuit of the private schools and university clubs in Boston. I’ve seen the photos for this, too: publicity shots the professor had taken when the Baron was at the height of his fame. When he performed, the Baron always wore a three-piece suit, a tiny cream ascot, and a golden wig with a white elastic band that ran under his chin to keep his hair steady. His feet were bare, not even socks. If you’re going to go through the trouble of putting a three-piece suit on a chimp, you would think you’d have the stamina to put on socks. But the professor didn’t. The Baron stood on naked toes to sign his three words for anyone who paid to watch.

The Baron was such a quick study that he would keep making the signs even after he had left the stage. The professor and his family got so used to the Baron and his signs, they stopped paying attention. So that in the dim hallways of that brownstone, the chimp would hold up his hands, his wrists hampered by fake silver cufflinks, and sign “house, man, boy” over and over again to nobody. When the professor couldn’t break even on the lecture circuit, he sold the Baron to a vineyard in Northern California. The vintner trained him to take great gulps of wine in his mouth, swill the liquid around with his tongue and then spit thin red streams into the air over his head, all while dressed in his formal attire. A year into his new profession, the Baron died of a weak liver, his teeth rotted down to the jawbone, his ascot stained with wine, suffering from the culmination of a hundred hangovers, never cured.

But we were a real research project from the start. Dr. Marietta Paulsen, the director of the Toneybee Institute, wanted our chimp to learn sign language. She thought the best way for him to do that was with a family, which is where we came in. Mom shot to the top of the list of applicants. They told her it was because her children already knew how to sign, but it was really because our family was black. It was a public relations coup, given the Toneybee’s reputation.
It’s been twenty years since the experiment ended and almost nobody remembers that it even happened. The people that do remember are the ones I avoid: racial militants; animal militants; trivia buffs; fans of great apes; the relentlessly quirky. The people who know about us are the kind of people who comment on blogs that list our family, alongside that photograph, in posts with titles like “Top Ten Wackiest Sacrifices for Science” and “Weirdest Childhood Pets.”

They track down the Toneybee’s report of the experiment, or they’ve read that bitch of a book Man or Beast? in some patchouli scented college seminar room. They look me up and write to ask if all of it is true.

I don’t write back to the cranks or the ones with a mission, but I gladly respond to the softball questions.

“What was it like having a chimp for a brother?”  

I’ve learned you can’t really answer much more than that. You have to stop the questions there, before things get weird. Things always get weird. Usually, people are just ramping up, waiting to steer the conversation towards what they really want to talk about: some form of race baiting or speculating about hygiene, or, inevitably, questions about sex. To stop any of that from happening, I make a crack about the smell. When we lived with Charlie, my braids, the cuffs of my sweatshirts, the yellow polyurethane collar of my winter coat, everything I owned took on the hefty, mournful stench of wild animal. I write, “Having a chimp for a brother stinks.” I like imagining the groans that come after that awful pun.
Callie always liked that smell. Now that she’s an adult she tries to recreate it. As soon as she got her own place she adopted three cats. She buries her nose in their shaking, hairy sides and says their skin reeks of home.

    Chimpanzees have a very particular smell. Charlie’s open mouth was one great rush of soured milk. When he got a little older, he liked to shuffle his lips up and down the palms of my family’s hands. Mom and Callie submitted to it because it made Charlie happy, but their fingers ended up smelling like a rancid dairy case. And Charlie didn’t like the taste of lotion, so Mom and Callie stopped using it and their hands were always ashy.

     There was the scent of Charlie’s hair, the same waxy perfume as a human’s scalp but sharper, as if the roots were doused with witch hazel. There was the bashful whiff of piss and sweat, but this was mixed with something slighter and tangier, oniony and frantic. These days, Callie even pines for the onion smell. She says that’s what made Charlie unique: that it was the perfect expression of his personality. It always smelled like flop sweat to me. So I guess, in that respect, Callie’s right. We can both agree that Charlie was nothing if he wasn’t high-strung.

But the truth of it is, even besides the smell, I hated living with that fucking monkey.

It feels good to finally say that.

                    ˜
The point of our experiment was to teach Charlie as many basic signs as possible, and prove that he truly understood them. But Dr. Paulson was secretly more ambitious. In the early days, when she was just thinking of the possibility, she guarded her hopes, wouldn’t say them out loud to anyone, only identified them as a possible feeling. She feared that it was scientifically impossible, but in her heart, Dr. Paulsen hoped that one day Charlie could, instead of banana or blue or book, say something more sophisticated, some question filled with subtext, the fluent and nuanced language of familial love.

Mom smartly didn’t mention knowing anything about the Toneybee’s past during her interviews. The Toneybee Institute wrote it into our contract that in addition to Mom’s salary, we would get free room and board at the Toneybee and a new car. The Toneybee Institute promised to pull strings to get my father’s job as a public school math teacher transferred from Boston to Courtland County, where he’d get paid more and teach better-behaved students. If we wanted to get all of this, though, Charlie had to become a part of our lives. We had to eat dinner with him every night. He had to be included in all family activities, traditions and outings. Our parents, at least, had to agree to accept him as their own. Mom and Dr. Paulsen assumed Callie and I would follow. Dr. Paulsen said we were just the right ages: I was fourteen; Callie was nine. She thought we were young enough to still be enthusiastic, old enough to be trusted.

When Dr. Paulsen called to tell my mother she had the job, Mom said, “I’m not doing it for the money.” And Dr. Paulsen said, “Of course not, we didn’t think you were.”

There was a short, uncomfortable silence between them on the phone. Dr. Paulsen took a deep breath, searched for something to dispel the awkwardness. She finally said brightly, “We’re very excited. You’re the only applicant whose children already know sign language.”

                ∼

If she could have, Mom would’ve always talked with her hands.

She was the only child of the only black family in Farragut, Maine, a town on the state border with New Hampshire. Mom was born in Farragut in 1950, and when her parents brought her home from the county hospital, they could declare with certainty that they were the only three black people for a one hundred-mile radius. Mom always said it that way, “a one-hundred mile radius”, so that Callie and I imagined a large bull’s-eye, its red rings hovering over the space between two dashes on the perforated state line. The small dark spot, full stop at the rings’ center, was our mother.

    Nobody ever called her family Niggers. Most people avoided calling them anything at all. Because they were the only ones it was enough to say “The Harrises” and leave the rest of it, all of it, unspoken. “They didn’t call us anything worse than Negro,” Mom told us. “But when they said that, they lowered their voices like it was a dirty word.”

    I think, when I imagine it, that it was like walking around with cotton balls always in your ears, creaking close and quiet in your eardrum.

    It was in this silence—the silence of never asking more than what was polite, the silence of never being spoken to first in public, the silence of being courteously ignored, the silence of never naming things outright—that Mom grew to hate the failures of the spoken word. From an early age, she was on the lookout for something better than speech. She tried gibberish first, a series of squeaks and snorts that her mother eventually spanked out of her. Next were notes, but she was a terrible speller, an even worse drawer. Her letters were always misunderstood by her well-meaning teachers and her mother, figuring Mom had it bad enough as the only black girl, she didn’t have to be peculiar, too, ordered anyone who received the notes to tear them up, unread, and toss them at Mom’s feet like so much mute confetti.

Mom had nearly given up when the Fabulous Mute Negro Players came to stay.
Among a certain class of Northern blacks, Mom’s family was famous. Other black people in New England, already generally assumed to be a rare species, told each other about the rarest ones of them all, way up North by the border. Their existence was confirmed when, in 1952, when The Colored Motorists Guide to the United States listed their address. The book was printed to let black people know which motels would take them and which would not, and discreetly suggest which counties you couldn’t drive through past sundown. Mom’s tree farm was the only entry for the entire state of Maine, and some adventurous types took this as a challenge, an invitation to drive up and see. The rumor spread that the Harrises were the farthest North Negroes in the entire continental United States. Slowly, the farm started receiving visitors—Buick-fulls of black families, newlyweds on their first vacations, lone male drivers who were simply bored.  They all factored in a half a day’s detour to see the Harrises of Farragut, Maine.
It wasn’t enough they came to visit, the visitors always needed proof and so my mom exists in hundreds of mid-century vacation albums, posed against the gray wooden fence in her front yard, the hills lazing behind her, her name and “Maine” scrawled in the picture border. The more artistic shot her at a lower angle, so she looked as foreign and majestic and stark and foreign as possible.

When the tourists set their cameras down, they all said the same thing: “We really do live everywhere.” They said it with so much satisfaction, so much triumph, that it embarrassed my mother and made her a little sad. She wanted to say it didn’t matter if black people were everywhere, if no one would talk to us, if we were always alone, but she found that she couldn’t speak in front of the visitors. They made her nervous.

After they took Mom’s picture as proof, the visitors allowed themselves to be plied with lemonade before starting the drive back. Mom lay in the grassy space beneath the porch and listened to the visitors gossiping with her parents. They told the Harrises about a cousin in Alaska; an aunt in Wyoming; a brother stationed in Zurich who shocked some baby Swedes with his pink gums and white palms: “They thought he’d be black all over.” Her parents chuckled politely.
The women looked at the jagged ends of her mother’s hair, straightened haphazardly with a hot comb warmed on a wood stove, and say, “How do you do it out here? Nobody’s wearing it that way anymore.” The men looked across the meager acreage of her father’s farm and said, “Well, Mac, it’s a living, I guess.”
Mom said there was something off in the tourists’ voices. It was a lacking more painful than the emptiness in white people’s speech. It frustrated my mother for many years that she couldn’t name it. She didn’t hear that tone again until she worked at a deaf school, heard the careful, patient shouting of the teachers who assumed the students were too stupid to read their lips and understand.
 The Fabulous Mute Negro Players came the summer my mother was twelve. They arrived in a rusting silver school bus, their name stenciled in flaking blue paint on the side. They pulled up late on a Friday afternoon, idled hesitantly at the front gate until, as if finally deciding something, the engine chocked off. Mom, playing by herself in the yard, stood up to get a better look as the bus door opened.

First out was a young woman in a blue calico dress, the collar cuffed close to her neck. Next down the steps was a man, younger than the woman, more like a boy. He was painfully thin and wore a dress shirt and long pants despite the heat. Finally a girl, about sixteen. She wore the same dress as the woman, except hers was too tight in the chest.

The three of them stepped on to the soft sill of Harris land, turned to each other, lifted up their hands and began to move them through the air. Mom shivered. She knew she was seeing something that was meant for her. The woman waved her hands through the air and the boy and girl nodded, then all three turned towards the house. My mother backed away from them, afraid of what was coming towards her. It was too much. It was too honest. She told me and Callie it broke her heart to see the thing she didn’t even know she wanted walking straight towards her.

Mom heard the porch door slam behind her, her mother’s steps shush across the lawn. Mom stayed where she was, held back, as her mother called out, “Hello, hello.”

The oldest woman in the group turned. She said in a queer voice, one with the sweetest hollow Mom had ever heard, “Hello. They told us all about you.”
That summer, the Fabulous Mute Negro Players were from South Carolina and they were touring the North for the first time, playing black churches and resorts. At every stop in New England, someone told them about Mom’s family. Their final booking was a weeklong engagement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The entire seven days they were in town, everyone urged them to see the Harrises of Maine before they left. Take a picture, they were told, get a souvenir of the North. At the end of the week, they were convinced. They told the bus driver they were taking a detour to Farragut, Maine.

Almost nobody, deaf or hearing, had even seen sign language when Mom was growing up. The Fabulous Mute Negro Players knew it because they came from a place forgotten by the wider world. Well-meaning carpet baggers founded a deaf school during Reconstruction, on a small scrap of land off the coast of Georgia. All the students were from the same stretch of swampy back country, where the handful of black families had married each other over and over again, the only discernable side-effect being hereditary deafness, the result of those few black bloodlines tangling up in knots that blocked every fifteenth eardrum.

When the school was founded in the 1860s, sign language was just beginning to be taught, its potential extolled as a new way of understanding. This acceptance was short-lived. Sign language was soon denounced nearly every place else but it didn't matter for the Fabulous Mute Negro Players. Their school ignored the change. The teachers kept teaching it even after it was banned from nearly all the other deaf schools in the country; even after doctors wrote papers declaring sign language an abomination, a relic, a language for the genetically doomed and mentally unhygienic. Because the school was poor and black and Southern, nobody noticed or particularly cared that its students kept talking with their hands. Eventually, the school used up the endowment the carpet baggers had left behind, and that’s why the Fabulous Mute Negro Players were on the road. They were the school’s most attractive and engaging students, and they had toured the South with success, buoyed by the novelty of black people pantomiming with their hands. After successful runs on the great cities of the South, they decided to try the North for more cash.  

The Fabulous Mute Negro stayed at the farm for so long, they didn’t want to risk driving back at night. They were the first visitors to stay overnight. They would only agree to it, they told my mother’s family, if they could put on a performance as payment.

So Mom and her dad strung a bed sheet between the branches of the pine trees in their front yard. The Fabulous Mute Negro Players arranged themselves behind the curtain, on a carpet of scorched pine needles, and began. It was the story of Hagar in the Wilderness. Mom had never heard of it before. Her family wasn’t religious.

When Mom taught sign language to us growing up, she could still remember all the signs the players made that night. The duplicitous Abraham was played by one of the skinny boys she’d seen leaving the bus. He wore a cotton-ball beard. He circled his meager fingers around his head until they became the word family.  The girl with the too tight uniform played Hagar. For the show, she wore a piece of white canvas doubled up into a voluminous toga. She smiled at Abraham and the braces on her teeth winked in the porch light. She pulled a brown baby doll from the folds of her costume, hugged him to the rough fabric stretched across her chest. She held up one hand and wrote his name out on the air in front of her: I-S-H-A-M-A-E-L. She swept her fingers into the shapes of the written letters. She didn’t use the sign alphabet. She did it that way so Mom and her parents would understand.

From behind the curtain came the teacher, who took the part of Sarah, her back bent over into barren old age. She stood beside the trim Abraham and they both crossed their hands into an ‘X’, banishing Hagar from their home.

At that sign, all the other Players behind the bed sheet curtain twisted their arms and legs up into the limbs of trees: their silhouettes became Hagar’s wilderness. Hagar clutched the baby doll to the crackling front of her costume, pretending to nurse him. The trees behind the curtain shook and trembled. Hagar, stood up, held the doll to her tighter. She threw her head back and cried out to God. She didn’t use her hands, just opened her mouth and only a thin, accusatory hiss came rushing out. Even as she tossed the dummy Ishmael from her arms, threw herself face down on the ground, Hagar kept up with that awful hissing.

And then came Hagar’s salvation: a little boy dressed all in white. The whole performance, the boy had stood to the side, watching Hagar’s troubles.  He came forward when Hagar hit the dirt. The boy took her by the elbow and helped her to her knees. He lifted up her chin, caressed each side of her face with the back of his pudgy, little boy palm. Then he held his own three fingers up to his chin and ran a stream that became water to Hagar’s parted lips.

In the morning, before the Fabulous Mute Negro Players departed, Mom pestered the teacher and the girl who played Hagar to teach her some signs. They taught her how to spell her name, and the sign for applause. All that fall, Mom worked on her parents to order her a sign language dictionary. They eventually relented, and every afternoon she sat with it open in front of her, a hand mirror propped on her lap, signing the alphabet to her own reflection. She tried to move her fingers with the same practiced grace the actors used.

When the Fabulous Mute Negro Players returned the following summer, Mom could sign to them, though it was only about the weather. They signed back that they were surprised it could get hot in Maine.

That summer, the Fabulous Mute Negro Players were on a mission. Before the play started the teacher stood up and began to speak. She gave a quick, fiery plea against evil let loose in the world. Mom didn’t really follow it. She was listening to the woman’s voice, the warm concave intonations of the deaf that Mom was beginning to love.

They did the story of David and Bathsheba. The gawky teenager who played David, his fingers trembling dramatically with desire, signed how much he wanted the woman he’d seen bathing her hair on the roof and Mom’s cheeks burned.

The third summer the players returned, they were even angrier. On their tour they’d seen good black Christian men and women losing all respect for themselves, giving into lust and greed and fear and selfishness. By this time, Mom was good enough at signing to act as their translator. The pretty woman teacher, her eyes wary, her dress a little more faded, moved her hands in a rush and Mom, puzzled, translated for her parents. “She says the whole world’s about to burn. She says we’re living in—" Mom paused. She didn’t recognize the sign. The teacher snorted impatiently, finally condescended to slowly fingerspell the word. “She says we’re living in B-a-b-y-l-o-n,” Mom said.

That night, the Fabulous Mute Negro Players asked my mother to perform with them. They taught her a monologue. By then, they’d worked themselves up to the Book of Daniel. Mom played the ghostly hand that wrote riddles to King Belshazzar. She held her wrist through a slit cut in limp bed sheet cotton and signed the terrible fate of heretics out into the night.

It’s funny, but the religious stuff flew right over Mom’s head. All the signs they taught her—blasphemy and sin and retribution—were just beautiful shapes. She didn’t stop to think about their meaning. She arched and bowed her fingers, mesmerizing herself with the forms they made.

The night Mom performed with the Fabulous Mute Negro Players was the happiest night of her life. But her triumph was bittersweet. That was the last time she ever saw them.

The next August passed with no sign of the rusting silver school bus. As September began, Mom realized that the words she’d made were real, at least to the Fabulous Mute Negro Players. They were so sickened by the world they couldn’t venture into it again. By the runs of sap that gummed down the pine trees in her front yard in Farragut, Maine, Mom sat down and wept.  

By the time she graduated high school, sign language was beginning its revival and she finally had other people to speak it with. Mom enrolled in a teachers college to become a sign language interpreter. Her first class, she was dismayed to see the professor move his hands harshly, as if he was boxing the air in front of him.

After the professor watched Mom sign a few times, he told her, “You’re doing it wrong. You’re signing badly. I don’t know how you do it, but you’re signing like a Negro from nowhere in the South.”

Mom stiffened, ready for another insult. “What do you mean?”

He said, “You use two hands when you only need one. You’re too expressive in the face. You spell everything out instead of giving it its proper sign.” He saw the shock on her face and softened his tone. “It just means, my dear, that you’ve got a bad southern accent.”

Mom had never heard of accents in sign language. She thought he was mocking her. When she learned that he wasn’t being cruel, that there really was Ebonics for sign language, she was heartbroken. She’d always seen it as the truest language, without any connotations. You couldn’t hear anything, no fear, no condescension, no awkwardness and no hate. Everything was expressed without nuance and yet with a deeper feeling.  It was a blow to learn that there were countries even in silence.

When she graduated, Mom worked for a little while at state institutions for the deaf but they were too sad, too violent and the other teachers there made signing seem like a bad habit, like they were picking their noses in public. Mom was working at a small deaf elementary school outside of Boston when she saw the ad for the Toneybee Institute and felt the same shiver of anticipation that ran through her the night she met the Fabulous Mute Negro Players.

Mom taught us to sign with the accent. My father thought it was funny that our hands spoke with a drawl. He didn’t know sign language at all: he knew a few nouns, some verbs, could sometimes follow us when we signed but mostly was at a loss. My mother sent us to a deaf summer camp every summer, hoping we would continue to practice the language. All it ever proved good for was learning the dirty words she would never teach us. She told us signing was her gift to me and Callie. “You need all the words you can get in this world,” she’d tell us, sadly.