This memoir reflects the author’s life faithfully rendered to the best of her ability. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of others, and in some cases, people and stories have been condensed into composite form for editorial clarity.
Copyright © 2019 by Keena Roberts
Cover design by Evan Gaffney. Cover photographs: (background) Image Source / Getty Images; (author) courtesy of the author. Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roberts, Keena, author.
Title: Wild life : dispatches from a childhood of baboons and button-downs
/ Keena Roberts.
Description: First edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019021573 | ISBN 9781538745151 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781538745144 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Roberts, Keena--Childhood and youth. |
Americans--Botswana--Biography. | Philadelphia (Pa.)--Biography.
Classification: LCC CT275.R72253 A3 2019 | DDC 974.8/11092 [B]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021573
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-4515-1 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-4514-4 (ebook)
E3-20191011-DA-PC-ORI
E3-20191003-DA-NF-ORI
E3-20190927-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE: Gorilla Man and Fifty Tiny Ballerinas
CHAPTER 1: The First Three Times I Almost Died
CHAPTER 2: A Dead Chicken and an Offer of Marriage
CHAPTER 3: Don’t Bring Your Beer Shirt to Show-and-Tell
CHAPTER 4: The African Night Is Long and Dark
CHAPTER 5: Snakes and Cakes
CHAPTER 6: Stranded in Xamashuro
CHAPTER 7: One Hundred Cases of Beer and a Man-Eating Crocodile
CHAPTER 8: Pearl Jam and Other Things I Didn’t Know
CHAPTER 9: Can We Swim Away from This Party?
CHAPTER 10: Baboon Identification and Other Hidden Talents
CHAPTER 11: There Are No Doctors Here
CHAPTER 12: The Elf Princess Plays Lacrosse
CHAPTER 13: Finding the Moon on Earth
CHAPTER 14: High School Water Hole
CHAPTER 15: The Hippo Situation Is Grim
CHAPTER 16: One Unhappy Cat
CHAPTER 17: We’re Just Going to Make a Run for It
CHAPTER 18: The Leopard Attack
CHAPTER 19: The Infection Rate Reaches 36 Percent
CHAPTER 20: I Am American
CHAPTER 21: The Other Spot at Harvard
CHAPTER 22: A Bear Just Doing His Bear Thing
CHAPTER 23: Extreme Driving in a Broken Toyota
CHAPTER 24: Blood and Dust and Botswana Sky
EPILOGUE: Goodbye, Narnia
Acknowledgments
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About the Author
Reading Group Guide Discussion Questions
Author Q&A
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PROLOGUE
Gorilla Man and Fifty Tiny Ballerinas
I sat quietly on the gym floor and wiggled my toes. I wasn’t allowed to move, but I was so excited I thought I might explode. I always had trouble sitting still, but today it was much harder than usual. The slippery laminate floor felt smooth under my bright blue sweatpants and I ran my fingers idly along the grooves in the wood, needing something to do with my hands and wishing I was outside instead. My heart pounded and the glare from the overhead lights made my dark hair feel heavy and hot. When was it going to be my turn?
The first pair of girls from my second-grade class were called up to do their dance routine. Their blond hair was tied back with glittery silver ribbons, and under their pink leotards they wore tights with sparkles on them. I looked around the room at the fifty girls from my class all sitting patiently around the blue gym mats waiting for their chance to perform. They all look like Angelina Ballerina, I thought, feeling a small swell of pride in my chest. Not one of them had a green bandanna wrapped around her head. Their outfits hadn’t been borrowed from a real-life gorilla researcher.
The glittering dancing girls shimmied across the gym mats, swaying and jumping in time to Kris Kross’s “Jump” and giggling nonstop. They were followed by another pair, who did exactly the same thing to exactly the same song. And another pair. And another.
I elbowed Elizabeth and hissed, “This is so boring. Our routine is going to be so much better.” I couldn’t understand why she looked so pale and unhappy, her brown eyes wide. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “This is going to be so much fun!” She smiled thinly and looked down at her red sweatpants. She’d insisted on wearing red rather than blue because she said she’d look like a Smurf in blue. I tried to cheer her up by offering to wear the blue, but it hadn’t worked. I still thought we should have tried to put together a gorilla costume for her, but I didn’t want to make her any unhappier. I’d considered bringing her a cookie that morning to make her smile, but I didn’t know what kind she liked. I didn’t know anything about her, really, except that her name was Elizabeth and she was almost as new to my class as I was. We’d been paired together for the dance routine because neither of us had a best friend to run to squealing when we were told to find a partner for the class. Well, I did have a best friend, but he was a boy and they got to play basketball instead.
The teacher called up the next pair of dancers; there were only a few more kids to go before we were up.
The routine went like this: I was the hero and Elizabeth was the gorilla I was chasing, who (according to the song) had stolen my woman and driven off in a fancy car. The song didn’t specify whether the hero ever caught the gorilla, but in order to create a dramatic conclusion, I decided that I would end up catching Elizabeth. We would run around in circles for a few minutes during the “chase,” and then the routine would end with me theatrically shoving Elizabeth to the floor and standing over her, victorious. We hadn’t practiced the whole routine yet since Elizabeth hadn’t wanted to, but I wasn’t worried about anything except pushing Elizabeth; she was a lot bigger than I was, and didn’t seem like the kind of girl that got knocked over very often.
The song itself is called “Gorilla Man,” which my dad told me was written by a Zulu sangoma (healer) in South Africa named Condry Ziqub
u. My parents used to play the song while we made dinner, dancing around the kitchen holding my little sister and pretending to be the gorilla to scare her. When I told Dad I wanted to use “Gorilla Man” for my dance performance, he smiled and said, “That’s an excellent choice. Every good story has a car chase.” And then Mom lent me her old green bandanna, the one she had worn to work with Dian Fossey with real-life gorillas in Rwanda.
I knew “Gorilla Man” by heart and had played it over and over in my head as we practiced our routine. I’d instructed Elizabeth on where she should go and what she should do as the drama played out. When the synthesizers began their downbeat, we’d square off: me, the desperate protagonist, and Elizabeth, the debonair gorilla who’d stolen my lady love.
“Look happier,” I had to remind her. “You’ve stolen my woman! You’re in a fancy car! You’re not supposed to look terrified, you’re the GORILLA!” For the past week of rehearsals, Elizabeth had looked nauseated as I jumped around the blue gym mats, acting out my choreography.
But now the day was here, and I couldn’t wait to show everyone how cool I was. My classmates didn’t know me very well since I’d only been back in the US for a few weeks, and no one really understood where I had come from. No one knew where Kenya was, so I had to just say, “I’m from Africa,” when they asked me where I lived. They didn’t know anything about Africa anyway, but just asked whether I had a pet elephant and spoke “African.” My classmates had been genuinely surprised when I said that yes, I owned shoes but didn’t like to wear them unless it was snowing. And no, I’d never seen a Koosh. What was it for? This was my chance to show them that the music from where I lived was so much better than their Top 40 hits. I wiggled my toes again and grinned. This was going to be so good.
Finally, it was Elizabeth’s and my turn to dance. I hopped up eagerly, pulling Elizabeth behind me with one hand. Why did she look so scared? We were about to be the envy of all these boring little ballerinas around us! I squeezed her hand and smiled even wider, nodding to our gym teacher to start the music.
The synthesizers started, then the drums. I started dancing slowly in a big circle, moving my hands and tiny seven-year-old hips with the music, the way my Maasai babysitter had taught me, making sure to hit each downbeat with my right foot and throwing in an extra shimmy here and there with the bump of the synthesizer.
“Tell me where’s Gorilla Man,” Condry Ziqubu wailed, “No one’s found a trace of him…people say he drives a smart car…he looks for beautiful women in town…” Elizabeth half-heartedly mimicked starting a car and started to drive around the gym mat, while I continued to dance. The drums picked up and I danced faster; it felt strange to be dancing to South African music in this school gym in the suburbs of Philadelphia instead of by a campfire in Kenya, but I knew the song so well I let the beat take me away, spinning, stomping, and waving my hands in the air as the bridge chanted, “I’m a, I’m a, I’m a gorilla; I’m a, I’m a, I’m a gorilla!”
After a few short minutes, we reached the climax of the song: the protagonist spots the Gorilla Man driving down the highway and yells, “We gonna find him, catch him, follow that car! We can’t stop now! ’Cause he took my woman and drove away!” I danced my way behind Elizabeth, who had stopped driving and now stood in the center of the mat, looking like she might cry. I had timed it such that I reached Elizabeth just as the song got to its loudest point, and as the synthesizers and drums hit their final downbeat, I put my hands against Elizabeth’s shoulders and threw her down on the mat, where she landed on her back and lay quietly as the music slowly faded out. I put one foot gently on her stomach and raised my fist in triumph. Gorilla Man had been defeated.
I panted in exhilaration and looked around the room. There was complete silence. No one moved. No one spoke. My classmates stared up at me with wide eyes and open mouths, a look of utter shock on their faces. Elizabeth whimpered and I removed my foot from her stomach. She rolled away and ran to the other side of the room, where she buried her face in my gym teacher’s sweatshirt. One of my classmates giggled. Then another. Soon, all fifty second-grade girls were laughing and pointing at me. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I couldn’t run away since they were sitting all around the dance area, and I couldn’t turn to Elizabeth for help because she was crying in my gym teacher’s arms. Bewildered, I stood there, looking from one girl to another in complete confusion.
“You…you didn’t like it?” I said softly. The roar of laughter grew louder, and the pointing continued. My face burned and I felt a rush of nausea. Suddenly, my sweatpants didn’t feel soft anymore, they felt hot and heavy and wrong. Everything was wrong. My pants were wrong, my turtleneck was wrong, my bandanna was wrong, I was wrong. The blood pounded in my head and my upper lip started to quiver. I heard my dad’s voice in my head say, “Stiff upper lip!” but in that moment I hated him. He was wrong too.
I won’t cry, I said to myself. I won’t. I won’t. I waded through the crowd of girls and walked slowly through the gymnasium to where my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Elliott, was standing in the doorway, watching.
I reached the doorway and glared up at her. She squatted down and balanced her elbows on her knees, looking me right in the face, ignoring the laughter that had followed me from the gym. My eyes filled with tears but I angrily brushed them away.
“Well that was certainly interesting,” she said. I thought she might hug me, but was glad when she didn’t. I wasn’t about to cry on anybody’s shoulder and I just wanted to be left alone. “You know what I think?”
“What?” I mumbled, my sleeve in my fist and my fist over my eyes.
“I think that you’re back in the United States now, and not in Africa anymore. And I think it might be time to start acting like the other girls if you want to fit in.”
You’re wrong, I thought. It would take more than acting and dressing like everyone else to make me fit in; my wrongness was bigger than that, and I knew it from the top of my green bandanna to the tips of my toes, still calloused from the hot sand outside our house in Kenya. If I really wanted to fit in, I’d have to change the inside of me too.
CHAPTER 1
The First Three Times I Almost Died
The first time I almost died I was six months old. We had just moved to Kenya and were living in a small green house far out in the middle of the grasslands in Amboseli National Park, close enough to the border with Tanzania to see Mount Kilimanjaro. My mother put me down to sleep in my crib with a candle burning on the windowsill since I screamed if the room was completely dark. As the story goes, when she came back a little while later to see if I had fallen asleep, she found me no longer alone in my room but suddenly in the company of a very large, very angry black mamba.
My mother froze. There wasn’t anything she could do. She couldn’t run into the room without scaring the snake into biting me, so she stood in the doorway, hoping the snake would decide that the flailing baby was too disruptive and leave on its own, which it eventually did, but only after I made an especially loud “coo!” and attempted to grab it by the neck.
I don’t remember the incident with the snake, of course, nor do I remember the second time I almost died, a few months later when my parents sat me down to play in the grass in front of our house only to see me immediately swarmed by siafus, or safari ants.
“So what did you do?” I asked, years later when I first heard the story. Siafu bites are very painful, and our Maasai housekeeper Masaku used to tell me how siafus could kill and eat small animals and had jaws so strong that the Maasai sometimes used them for stitches when they had an injury. I couldn’t imagine a baby surviving being swarmed by them. Mom looked uncomfortable.
“Well, we got them off you, of course,” she said. “Dad brushed most of them off and then we got the rest of them to let go of you by dunking you in the rain barrel behind the house.”
“You dunked me in a rain barrel?” I yelled.
“Of course we did! I mean, it was no big deal,” M
om said. “Obviously you were fine. It was a lot less scary than the first time you met a baboon.”
That one I do remember. I must have been three or so and was again playing outside the house in Kenya. I’d walked a short way down the dusty road that led away from our house and toward the nearby Maasai village, following elephant tracks. I wasn’t paying attention to anything around me, just kicking one of the round balls of elephant poop that the other village children and I often used as soccer balls. I squatted down in the road to pick it up when I heard a rustle in the grass behind me and turned around to find a gigantic monkey standing over me.
Even as a small child I knew it was a baboon. The monkeys Mom and Dad studied were much smaller and had black spots on their faces; they were called vervet monkeys, though I’d always called them “fever monkeys” since it was easier to say. The vervets rarely came close to our house, but the baboons were often nearby; Masaku told me these nyani were garbage animals that came into his village to look for food. It was the job of the little boys in the village to chase them away from the cows and goats since, though the nyani were monkeys, they were skilled hunters and often killed baby goats and ate them. I knew this particular baboon was a male because his snout was wider and heavier than the females’ and Dad said the male baboons were about the size of a Saint Bernard, whatever that was.
I dropped my ball of elephant poop and stared up at the baboon, which didn’t seem all that scary. I smiled at it. Mom always told me that animals aren’t dangerous by nature; they’re dangerous if you startle them, and if you don’t then you’re just another animal to them. Then the baboon grunted and took a few steps closer to me.
“Keena,” I heard Dad say quietly from the front steps of the house where he’d been watching me play. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Okay!” I said brightly, still looking at the baboon.
Me and Dad in the backyard of our house in Amboseli National Park
Wild Life Page 1