Other things that Americans ate were different too. Americans didn’t drink Ribena or eat the same kind of Smarties that I did in Kenya, the candy-coated chocolate kind that came from a place called Great Britain in cardboard tubes and tasted different from American M&M’s. Americans also didn’t take tea in the afternoon or pepper their sentences with British words like “rather,” “knickers,” and “jolly,” the way my parents’ friends in Kenya did. Mom told me that Kenya had been colonized by Great Britain before becoming independent in 1963, but a lot of the trade between the two countries continued and that was why so many of the things we found in Nairobi were actually not Kenyan at all, just imports from Britain. Even though Americans seemed to be trying to speak English too, everything they said sounded like it was coming through their noses.
I was too close to the ground to hear much of Dad’s dealings with the various vendors, so I stayed tight to his side as I was instructed and people-watched instead. These Americans seemed awfully clean and tidy, which meant that they didn’t spend much time outside. Their clothes looked new, without any stains or rips on the sleeves or pant legs, and their hair was combed in neat little lines that fell politely and obediently around their faces. America, I thought as I looked around the farmers market at the staid patrons in their fancy coats and shiny shoes, was a place to behave.
We hadn’t been back in the States for more than a month or two before I was rudely dragged out from under my bed in the middle of the night and driven to the house of a family friend where I was to stay while my parents went to the hospital to retrieve my new baby sister, Lucy.
Lucy was a tiny baby, about the size and shape of a small vervet, and had bright blue eyes and a shock of dark, fluffy hair, very unlike my own eyes and hair, both of which were dark brown like my mother’s. I remember the dark hair in particular because one day when she was about six months old, all of her hair seemed to fall out overnight and was replaced with the bright, almost iridescent blonde hair she has had ever since.
“What do you think of her?” Mom asked one day when I was helping her give Lucy a bath in the kitchen sink. I was in a grouchy mood because all of my stuffed animals were in the big white cleaning machine and Lucy had been screaming all morning.
“I think,” I said, “that Lucy will become smaller and smaller until one day she becomes a plant.”
“That so?” said Mom.
“Yes. A plant.”
Through no fault of her own, Lucy was an incredibly colicky baby and took up a lot of my parents’ time, between calming her down, trying to get her to eat, and then cleaning up the baby vomit from all the creative places Lucy managed to spray it. It was clear that Mom and Dad needed help, though I wasn’t sure how I could contribute. Lucy seemed very sick, and I was worried that if we didn’t figure out how to make her better, my parents would never have time to play with me again and Lucy might really turn into a plant (which, I admitted to myself, I didn’t really want to happen).
While Lucy rocked back and forth in her baby swing, I pulled over my red plastic stool and pretended to read to her. I couldn’t read the actual words, of course, but I’d memorized all my favorite children’s books to the point where I knew what happened on every page and could recite the stories to her from start to finish, filled with dramatic voices and reenactments of the action scenes.
The story I told Lucy most often was from the book Babar and Zephir. When the monkey princess Isabelle is kidnapped from the tree city of Monkeyville, Zephir the monkey goes on a quest to rescue her from a strange yellow beast, a kind of hornless rhino named Polomoche, who hides in a green cloud smelling of rotten apples. Real monkeys don’t do this, I pointed out to Lucy; real monkeys sit in trees and talk to each other and eat fruit, but they do not fight sea witches or evil mermaids or whatever kind of animal Polomoche was.
“You’ll see,” I said to Lucy. “Soon we’ll take you to where the monkeys live and you won’t cry anymore.” No one ever cried when there were monkeys to look at; I knew that for sure.
Back in Kenya, Masaku and the men from the village came by to welcome us home and offer their condolences to my father. Only two children, and both girls? My father was a very unlucky man—my mother should have drunk more liquid goats’ fat when she was pregnant; that was the best way to have sons. Dad feigned weariness and shook their hands, agreeing that the best thing for his small girls was to find them husbands as soon as possible.
One of the ladies from the village started coming to the house every day to help look after Lucy and me while my parents were out working. Soila was very kind and patient, and while I found her more nurturing and significantly more snuggly than Masaku or his wives, I was a bit disappointed that her version of playtime was usually of the indoor variety and involved a lot less animal poop identification.
Soila often brought her two sons with her to the house. At seven and eight years old, Njaraini and Ma were slightly older than me, and were already doing things that the big kids did, like guard the village goats from the nyani and visit the truck graveyard, where the long-haul truckers from Rwanda and Burundi abandoned their trucks when they broke down and no one had the money to fix them. The truck graveyard was one of my favorite places to go, but Dad wouldn’t allow me to go alone, and only took me on special occasions like my birthday. But when Njaraini and Ma started coming by to play, Dad said it was safe enough for us to go to the truck graveyard by ourselves as long as we stuck together.
Njaraini, Ma, and I visited the truck graveyard almost every day. The trucks were our jungle gyms, and so large that we could spend hours scrambling through the cabins, climbing up the ladders on the sides, and poking around the wheels, all of which were taller than we were. All the best pieces from the trucks had long since been looted and sold, but if we were lucky we could find a lug nut or a spring from one of the engines. Masaku shook his head when he found the pockets of my shorts full of rusty car detritus and stored all the pieces carefully in a plastic bag to give to the boys when they came back to play the next day, as he didn’t consider car detritus appropriate toys for a girl.
Njaraini, Ma, another friend, and me sitting in a hole in the truck graveyard
One afternoon, Njaraini, Ma, and I were running through the village toward the truck graveyard when we came across a small yellow chick. Usually all the village chicks and chickens moved around together to keep them safe from the wild animals, but this one was all alone and looked scared. Ever so gently, I picked the chick up around its middle and cupped it in my hands, being careful not to wrap my fingers around its neck. I’d seen men from the village carry dead chickens by their necks and didn’t think that was the proper way to carry a live chicken. I told Njaraini and Ma that we should return the chick to the village, and Njaraini said we should be extra careful because this chick belonged to one of the chief’s chickens, and therefore to the chief himself.
Slowly, we walked back to the village, passing the chick between us so we could all have a turn holding it and feeling its soft feathers against our hands. I don’t remember how it happened, but by the time we got back to the village the chick had been passed between us many times and somewhere along the way it had died. I was horrified for the baby bird, but Njaraini and Ma flew into a complete panic. As soon as they saw the limp chick dangling in my hands, they said the chief was going to beat them if he found out, and they dashed headlong back toward the truck graveyard to hide.
I felt sick to my stomach and disgusted with myself that this beautiful little creature had died when I was supposed to be taking care of it. I marched resolutely back toward the village and, under the watchful gaze of the mzee sitting around the fire and a number of other children, deposited the dead chick very carefully on the concrete step of the chief’s hut. Then I ran home and told Masaku everything.
Masaku told me the next day that Njaraini and Ma had hidden in the truck graveyard for the rest of the day but had in fact been given a beating by the village chief when they returned hom
e for dinner. This felt grossly unfair to me since I was also responsible for killing the chick, and I demanded that Masaku take me to the village chief to receive my share of the beating. Masaku refused, but promised to pass on my outrage to the village chief when he went home. I don’t know what Masaku actually told the chief, but he reported to me that the chief had laughed at my request and called me a brave little girl.
“You are not like the other children,” Masaku told me. “You do not get a beating.” I stomped my foot and glared at him. What Masaku said didn’t make sense to me. I was just the same as Njaraini and Ma; why did everyone insist on treating me like I wasn’t?
“You are not like Njaraini and Ma,” Masaku said. “You are not Maasai; you are a white, American girl. You are very different.” This made my stomach hurt, but I couldn’t argue with him. I had always known that my skin was a different color than his, or Soila’s, or Njaraini’s and Ma’s, but the ramifications of those differences hadn’t been clear to me, at least in a personal sense. I thought through what Masaku said. I knew we were fortunate to have a car, which none of the villagers had, but that Mom and Dad tried to share the car by letting the villagers borrow it and helping to shuttle people to the nearby health center in Loitokitok if someone was sick. I also had more books and toys than the other children did, but tried to follow Mom and Dad’s example by sharing them with my friends whenever they asked. These concrete actions were obvious to me in the sense that if my family had something that someone else needed, we shared because that was the right thing to do. But the idea that where I was born and the color of my skin made us fundamentally different from each other—that was new to me. Even though I lived in a house and my parents had a car, we still lived in the same place and loved the same things, so how could we not be the same? My six-year-old mind couldn’t figure it out.
I was very sad when Soila told me that Njaraini and Ma wouldn’t be coming by to play anymore. I missed their company, and without them I didn’t have a soccer ball to kick against the side of the house or toward the zebras in the grass behind the clothesline. Soila said they missed me too, but that didn’t matter much if I was never going to see them again.
My family had almost forgotten about the chicken incident when one night a Maasai warrior from the village stopped by the house after dinner. He’d heard about the brave little white girl in the green house and, despite the fact that she was only six years old, was interested in adding her as one of his future wives for the generous price of five cows. Dad politely declined.
CHAPTER 3
Don’t Bring Your Beer Shirt to
Show-and-Tell
When I was six, we left Kenya for good. My parents’ work with the vervet monkeys had been successful, science-wise, but it was becoming increasingly difficult for them to conduct their research. The Maasai herdsmen’s cattle ate the undergrowth where the vervets liked to hide and scared them up into trees, completely disrupting their normal behavior and making it impossible for my parents to conduct their experiments.
By 1990, times were changing in the world of primate research too. The three greats of primate research, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birutė Galdikas, first brought the world’s attention to the great apes in the 1960s and 1970s and documented a great deal about what the animals ate, what their family structures were like, and how they interacted with each other. When it became clear that primates were much more complex than anyone thought, a new generation of primatologists like my parents began asking even tougher questions: How did primates communicate in their social groups? Did they know the difference between their sister, their cousin, and a stranger? And if so, how would their behavior change if they were interacting with a close family member compared to a stranger? How much did they really understand about their world?
Vervet monkeys don’t do anything as stylish or intellectually challenging as using stone tools or fishing for termites like Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees did, but they do have a number of interesting behaviors. At the time my parents were doing their research, there was a huge debate going on in the primate world about language, and whether we can take something like a monkey chirp or chatter and call it a “word.” Many scientists assumed that animal vocalizations were just involuntary expressions of emotions, like shouting out when something surprises you or touching a hot stove. This wouldn’t be considered language. Others took a different approach, focusing less on what primates do on their own and more on what they could be taught to do. There were several famous examples of gorillas being taught to use human sign language in laboratory settings, and many scientists took this as proof that primate language did exist since primates had the capacity to learn it, even if they didn’t use language in their own societies in the same way.
My parents ascribed to the idea that if you could teach a captive chimp or gorilla to understand the meaning of a sign, this ability to understand meaning must have been favored by evolution, so we ought to be able to discover how it functions in the wild. In the 1960s, a colleague of theirs named Thomas Struhsaker reported that vervet monkeys give different-sounding alarm calls in response to predators like leopards, eagles, and snakes, so my parents decided to study these calls with playback experiments on the animals in their natural habitat.
My parents hated lab work. They didn’t like locking animals up, and despite the importance that others in their field had attached to the idea of teaching primates to use sign language, they believed that teaching an animal to do something wasn’t as interesting as looking at what that animal already does in its own natural setting. “You can train a dog to ride a bicycle,” Dad used to say. “That doesn’t mean that if you put a bicycle in front of a dog he’ll just know how to ride.” What Dad meant by this is that there’s a difference in what a vervet could be taught to do, which demonstrates a certain capacity for learning, and what they do unprompted. Observing this natural behavior (or manipulating it) is what would help show how and why vervets do what they do, and the implications those behaviors have on how human communication has evolved from it.
The vervet monkeys in Amboseli were highly communicative and spent most of their day interacting with each other while they ate and hopped through the acacia trees. They barked and chirped and chattered and screamed. All of this, my parents believed, showed the members of the group engaging in social communication that not only signified intent and feeling but also served to further solidify the social bonds among the individuals.
Building on Struhsaker’s earlier vervet communication work, my parents focused their research on the three distinct calls that vervets made when they saw a predator. Each call sounded different from the others, and each produced a very different reaction in the vervet group. My parents showed that the vervets’ reactions to the alarm calls weren’t just instinctive reactions, but that they really understood what each call meant—that, as Dad would say, “call X” means “response X.” My parents proved this by manipulating the vervets’ situations to show that pairing “call X” with “response Y” made the vervets completely confused, indicating that they knew the pairing was somehow wrong. Using a classic experiment, they would strategically place a stuffed predator in the vervets’ path (like a stuffed leopard they borrowed from a Nairobi museum) and then play the incorrect alarm call for the vervets over a hidden speaker (like the call for “snake”). Some of the vervets would give the “leopard response” and jump into the trees and others would give the “snake response” and stand on their hind legs to look around. Then, all would look at each other as if to say, “What the hell?”
This was a big deal in the world of primatology, and my parents, excited and reenergized by the success of their experiments, were desperate to find another field site where they could continue their work, if not with vervets than with other monkeys. There weren’t many realistic options for them, however. They didn’t want to go back to Dian’s gorilla camp in Karisoke and, because they had my sister and me (then three and five years old) in tow, could
n’t go to any of the chimpanzee study sites. Chimpanzees have been known to hunt and eat human children. My parents told me a story of some chimps raiding the research camp of a colleague and chasing their four-year-old daughter around and around the camp, trying to kill her, before being chased off by their research assistants.
“I don’t think I like chimps,” I declared after hearing this story.
“That’s okay; neither do I,” Dad said. “I’d much rather stick to monkeys.”
Leaving Kenya felt like a punch in the stomach. Mom tried to downplay our departure by telling me it was just a vacation to visit my grandparents, but when she and Dad donated all our clothes and toys to the village and sold the car, I knew we were leaving for good. I sobbed when Masaku left our house for the last time, but he merely grunted and told me I was going home and should be happy about it.
“BUT I AM HOME!” I bawled, wrapping my arms around one of the car tires and pressing my face against the dusty rubber. Mom shook Masaku’s hand and pried me off the tire, but I didn’t stop crying until we got on the plane and a flight attendant handed me a dinner tray with a bread roll and a little jar of jam. I adored the tiny “jam-jammies” that we got on planes and in hotels, and when Mom handed me hers and Dad’s to play with too, I cheered up a little bit.
Back in Philadelphia, Mom said I was old enough to go to school and “might as well give it a try” while she and Dad were busy at the university and toddler Lucy was in day care. I had never gone to school before, though Mom and Dad had taught me how to read and write while we were in Amboseli. There had been a school in the nearby town of Loitokitok, but since the kids there were just working on reading and writing and basic math anyway, Mom and Dad said I could just as easily do that at home. After all, they were both professors. Despite my objections to the idea when I heard that school was an inside activity, Mom applied for me to enroll in a fancy nearby private school to start first grade. She selected this school at the recommendation of some colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania whose children had gone there and because the school administrators were comfortable with the idea of her and Dad taking me out of school if and when they found another field site and moved. Though there were two excellent public schools nearby, neither had agreed to let me join the class if we were just going to leave again, telling my mother I was either in school or I wasn’t; Mom couldn’t just withdraw me whenever she felt like it. So, private school it was.
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