“I need you to walk backward to me. Do you think you can do that?”
“Yes, Daddy!” I said. I waved to the baboon and began walking backward through the soft sand in the road. As I retreated, the baboon immediately sat down and snatched up my soccer ball, happily picking through it for partially digested seeds and fruits. Fresh elephant poop is one of their favorite foods.
It didn’t occur to me that the baboon was any danger to me. Dad seemed relieved when he finally picked me up, but didn’t raise his voice or shout in any way that made me think he’d been worried for my safety. Baboons were familiar, and just as much a part of my daily life as the Maasai warriors who trooped down the road singing songs in their bright red shukas or the herds of elephants, buffalo, and zebras that roamed through the grassland around our house, which Dad drove me out to see in our Land Rover if I’d been good.
We’d been living in Kenya for almost two years by then, all in the little green house in the grasslands under the mountain. I knew that Kenya was in Africa, and Africa was a long way away from another place called America, where Mom and Dad said we had another home that I didn’t remember. “Home” to me meant soft wind and waving grass, the smell of zebras and the whooping of hyenas as the sun set over the plains. Home was our housekeeper Masaku letting me tenderize meat with an empty wine bottle before dinner and shaking out my shoes before putting them on in case scorpions or spiders were inside. Home was spending my days wrenching the lug nuts on and off the wheels of our truck and going on game drives with Dad to look at buffalo and watch quietly as they moved through the grasslands like ships on the sea.
America was where I was born, or so they told me. When Mom learned she was pregnant with me, she had driven into the capital city of Nairobi to one of the few clinics that had an ultrasound machine. Shaking his head sadly, the ultrasound tech informed my mother that her fetus was “too deformed” and had “a very, very small head. Too small for a human baby.” Mom unsuccessfully tried to stay calm and made arrangements to fly to California to have her child, since my parents’ academic affiliation with Stanford University gave her access to the hospital there.
The second I was born I was whisked into the neonatal intensive care unit and a team of doctors descended on me, led by a neonatologist named Dr. Sunshine. When I was finally brought back to my mother, Dr. Sunshine said cheerily, “Her head is fine. Just please promise me: no more backroom ultrasounds.”
I also knew I had grandparents in America, though I never saw them. They often wrote us letters that my mother read to me, and sometimes sent me presents, including a stuffed owl I named Bundi, which Masaku had told me was the Swahili word for owl. Everyone gave me stuffed monkeys, since that’s what my parents studied, but I liked the owl best because it was different. Masaku said that witches turned themselves into owls at night and that it was very bad luck if an owl landed on your house because it meant that someone who lived there would die soon. He refused to touch Bundi, even though it was just a toy.
My grandparents were furious when my parents brought me back to Kenya only a couple of months after I was born. When my mom had become pregnant with me, my parents had only recently relocated to Kenya from the Karisoke Research Center in Ruhengeri, Rwanda, where they had been working with the famed gorilla researcher Dian Fossey in a camp that was very basic and hardly a place to raise a baby. My grandparents were worried that our home in Kenya might be just as unsuitable.
It’s important to specify that these concerns came almost entirely from my dad’s parents, the ones who lived in suburban Chicago. His family was (as he later put it) “painfully conventional,” and the idea of moving halfway around the world to study monkeys was an unbelievable shock to the country club community he had grown up in.
“I just don’t know what to tell them,” Dad’s mother drawled in a Southern accent she brought with her from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
“There aren’t any monkeys in the US,” Dad would say. “If I’m going to study them in their natural habitat I kind of have to go where that is.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to be an architect?” his father would ask, and Dad, third in a line of Robert Seyfarths and the first nonarchitect, would simply nod.
“This is what I’m going to do,” he said. Eventually, they agreed it was fine as long as he didn’t take his children with him, whenever they came along.
Mom’s mother, my grandmother Sally, was never bothered by Mom and Dad’s work. Mom was raised in the Foreign Service, in a family that spent time in Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Nicaragua all before my mom was a teenager, and before her father was killed in a plane crash on an aid mission in the Philippines. No one in her family was bothered in the least by having few modern amenities or not speaking to family members for months or sometimes years at a time because the mail was so slow. When she met Dad in college and decided to follow him into his PhD program in animal behavior so she could go “ask interesting questions about interesting animals in interesting places,” as she used to tell me, her mother and siblings barely batted an eye.
“It really was very wet and cold up there in Dian’s camp,” Mom told me. “We lived in these tiny wooden huts that were heated with wood stoves and were always full of smoke. It was so wet that nothing ever dried and it was very hard to keep our notes and recording equipment from being chewed up by rats. There were just so many rats…” she trailed off. “At night they would sometimes run across my bed and I’d have to hit them with books.”
It sounded to me like the entire time at Dian’s camp was difficult. First, studying the gorillas was challenging. In order to observe their natural behavior, the scientists had to do everything they could to make sure the gorillas ignored them, including standing quietly as young silverbacks charged them in displays of aggression, and letting themselves be shoved down a hill covered in stinging nettles if the babies wanted to play with them. Back at the camp, Dian liked to slap Dad on the back and call him Bobby, even after he repeatedly told her that he preferred to be called Robert.
“Not to worry, Bobby,” Dian would say, throwing her arm around Dad’s shoulders. “Auntie Dian will always be there for you.”
As Rwanda became more and more dangerous to work in politically, Dian began to show signs of strain. Her paranoia became increasingly odd, and when she eventually confided in my parents that she thought her phones were being tapped, they decided that the time had come to move on to a more stable and comfortable situation.
Kenya, my parents patiently explained to my grandparents, was much safer. Vervet monkeys are small and nonthreatening, and we could live in a real house, far away from the smoking shacks of Dian’s mountain camp. But it was no use. To my grandparents, everywhere in Africa was the same and the whole continent was dangerous. One of the first sentences I learned to say on my own was, “I am fine, I am safe,” spoken confidently through a phone from a hotel in Nairobi to my grandparents’ house in the suburbs of Chicago.
And I really was fine, at least to the extent that I understood what that meant as a toddler. Every day, my parents would leave in the Land Rover to spend the day watching and observing the vervet monkeys, while I would hang out with Masaku as he did chores around the house or took walks to the village to talk with the other mzee, old men like himself. Masaku smelled like wood smoke, and his hands were soft and strong as he held on to mine as we walked.
Masaku taught me the names of all the animals on the plains in front of our house and that each animal has a different kind of track and its own kind of poop. As we walked up and down the road between the village and our house, he would point out crisscrossing lines of animal prints and wait for me to tell him which animals they came from; these small ones were gazelles’, these hoofprints were zebras’, and this poop was from a hyena—the easiest of all to identify because hyena poop is always white from the bones they eat. How many lobes on the paw of a simba (lion)? I held up three fingers. And do you see claws when you see the track of a duma (chee
tah)? I nodded my head yes. Cheetahs’ claws don’t retract into their paws like lions’ and leopards’ do.
Sometimes one of Masaku’s three wives would help babysit me, though as a child I always had a hard time telling them apart since they never really spoke to me. None of them ever said anything above a whisper. When Dad asked him why, Masaku replied, “One of them cursed the other two so they can only speak in a whisper and the one who did the cursing also whispers in order to hide her identity.”
“And you don’t mind?” Dad asked.
“Oh no,” he replied. “The house is so quiet.” And every afternoon, Mom and Dad would come back from work and take me on game drives out through the grasslands of Amboseli National Park to look for animals. The buffalo were my favorite since they moved around in such large groups that they would completely surround the car and make me feel like I was part of the herd. We often saw elephants, zebras, and herds of hundreds and hundreds of wildebeests grazing under the mountain and bleating like cows. My parents and I would sit out there for hours, quietly watching the animals go about their business, while Dad would periodically reach out the window of the Land Rover to empty my plastic bin into the grass. Potty training had to go on, even when there were wildebeests to watch.
Every morning as the sun came up and every evening as it set behind Mount Kilimanjaro, I sat on the front step of the tiny green house and watched the animals move across the land. Birds flew home to roost, elephants rumbled to their babies, and zebras moved out of the trees into the grass where they could see any approaching predators more easily. When it was time for dinner, we ate at a small foldout table in the kitchen, lit by hurricane lanterns and open to the night. Sometimes Mom and Dad told me the story about how an elephant sneezed on their windshield, and sometimes we’d talk about the vervet monkeys and how they were different from the gorillas they studied in Rwanda. When I went to sleep under my mosquito net with my stuffed owl, the thick smells from outside surrounded me and reminded me the animals were still there, just going to sleep as I was, and we’d see each other again in the morning when the sun came up.
Despite the peace of being alone with the wind and the animals, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of disquiet creep slowly into my life. Why did Mom and Dad keep telling me my home was not my home? And what were these machines in my books called elevators, escalators, and microwaves? These things were as foreign to me as this place called America, and even though I was told I’d seen them before, I wasn’t interested in going back. There was so much to see and do and learn about in Kenya, and Mom and Dad said there were no animals in the US. Why would I want a home that didn’t include them? America could stay safely where it was, on the other side of the world; I had all the home I needed already.
CHAPTER 2
A Dead Chicken
and an Offer of Marriage
We left Kenya for a few months in the summer when I was two and a half years old. My parents had accepted full-time teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania and had to “make an appearance” in the US in order to reassure the university that they wouldn’t be spending all their time in Kenya, though they had every intention of being there as much as they possibly could. They also wanted to be in the States because they were expecting another child and didn’t want to risk undergoing the same traumatic experience that they’d had with me. They bought a small yellow house in the suburbs of Philadelphia and, despite my vehement objections about its having “too big an inside and not enough outside,” they made me live in it.
The house itself was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Though it was fairly small by US standards, it felt huge in comparison to our house in Amboseli and had all kinds of features that were completely new to me. The front door was not just a door but actually two doors, one on the outside made with heavy glass and one on the inside that was made of wood that was even thicker and harder to push open. I had to open both of these doors to enter the actual house. Once I finally got inside, there was a big room that was called the “living room,” even though we lived in all the rooms. The house also had a “dining room,” where we ate dinner on special occasions like Christmas or when my grandparents came to visit, and a tiny room off the kitchen where there were two large white machines that made a lot of noise and vibrated against the tile floor like a herd of stampeding buffalo. This small room was always warmer than the rest of the house and smelled clean, like wind after the rain or the grass after Masaku cut it with his machete.
But the house’s most exciting feature by far was its second floor. I knew what stairs were, and I’d even gone up and down them a few times in fancy places like the airport or the shopping center in Nairobi, but I’d never had them in my own house, where I could go up and down them whenever I felt like it. The stairs started in the hallway next to the heavy front door and went up exactly twelve steps before they stopped at a small square resting place called a “landing,” took a left turn and went up six more steps to the second floor of the house. Mom said the stairs were not as fun as stairs ought to be because they were carpeted and no good for Slinkys, which needed wooden stairs, but I cared less about that than the fact that they also came with a dark wooden bannister.
The bannister was smooth and heavy, much like the front door, but smelled different. If I put my nose right up to the wood and closed my eyes, I could smell dark trees with fluttery green leaves, smoke from a campfire, and just the faintest hint of buffalo. I knew that buffalo often liked to scratch on trees to clean themselves, so I assumed this bannister had come from one of those buffalo-scratching trees.
There were all kinds of things for me to do during the day in the new house. When I got tired of running up and down the stairs, I could put on my socks and slide across the dining room floor, climb the shelves in the linen closet, or find other things to jump off of, like the magnolia tree in the front yard, the hood of the car, or the hot metal contraption in my bedroom that hissed and spat but made the room warm and cozy when it was cold outside. It was cold in Kenya, but never enough that you needed anything more than a campfire. This was a different kind of cold, the kind that somehow got under your jacket where it wasn’t wanted.
I distrusted this metal apparatus during the day but was terrified of it at night. That was when the daytime animals and birds went to sleep and the nighttime animals began their silent hunting; it was supposed to be a quiet time. But the radiator in my bedroom didn’t seem to adhere to any of the same rules as the rest of the natural world, and that made it dangerous. It pinged and whistled all night long and made it hard for me to sleep. When I closed my eyes, I kept picturing the steamship from the movie Pinocchio that took the bad boys away to Pleasure Island to be turned into donkeys. Instead of the comforting familiarity of hyenas whooping and zebras calling, in America the only company I had was the bubbling muttering from the metal monster in the corner of my room, waiting for me to fall asleep so it could turn me into a donkey.
My bedroom itself also became a threat when the lights went out. The house creaked and groaned as the wind blew outside and I wondered how the second floor was supposed to stay attached to the first when all that connected them were pieces of wood and nails. Masaku used to give me bent nails to straighten while I helped him cook and I knew how easy it was to reshape them. At any moment I expected my room to either topple backward off the house and land in the backyard or for the floor to splinter under the legs of my bed and collapse in on itself, crushing the room below it and sending me toppling into the basement, which, naturally, I imagined to be full of snakes and spiders. Sometimes, desperate to hide from the sounds of the wind and the threats of the radiator, I would grab Bundi and crawl under my bed. It felt safer there somehow, and if I laid my head sideways on the floor I could hear the hum from the refrigerator in the kitchen below. This sound wasn’t so scary to me since it reminded me of falling asleep on a plane flying to Kenya. Finally, I would fall asleep.
Outside our house, too, I found America to be a te
rribly confusing place.
“Is that Nairobi?” I asked Mom, pointing to a steeple poking through the trees outside my window.
“No, Nairobi is very far away. That’s a church.”
“What’s a church?”
She rocked back on her heels, taking a pause from helping me tie my sneakers. “Ah… that’s a good question. A church is a place where people go when they feel sad or confused and want to sit and think for a while.” I considered this a moment and then nodded. I’d never been inside a church before, but since it was built with stone, I assumed it must be something like a cave on the inside, which sounded like a very good place to sit and think.
Every Saturday morning, Dad took me out in our red Volvo station wagon to do errands with him. Our first stop would be the bank, where Dad would take out exactly one hundred dollars in cash and fold the bills neatly in the wallet he kept in his back pocket. If I was being good and not asking too many questions, he would let me push the buttons on the robot that gave him the money. But no matter how nicely I asked, he would never let me smell it. Money was interesting because it looked like it might come from a plant but smelled completely different.
Our next stop would be the farmers market, which was my favorite place in all of America. The farmers market was a large room with four wide aisles in it, all of which were full of people in overalls and old-fashioned hats selling vegetables still dirty from the ground, fancy pastas in the shapes of springs and ribbons, and sticky cakes covered in raisins that smelled like Christmas and made my mouth water. Dad always went immediately to the cheese counter, where he asked a man with a big beard for “one piece of American cheese for immediate consumption.” The man would smile and remove a piece of white cheese from a large stack and hand it to me, wrapped in a piece of wax paper. As Dad continued to talk to the man about various cheeses, I would slowly peel the cheese apart in thin strips and dangle them over my open mouth, like prisoners on a pirate ship being made to walk the plank. We never had cheese in Kenya since the Maasai thought fermented milk was disgusting and much preferred to drink it fresh from the cow and mixed with blood to make the warriors strong. I liked it because it felt smooth and slippery.
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