Дуглас Престон - Jennie

Dr. Prentiss started giving us ASL lessons. It wasn’t quite as simple as she had said. Although Jennie was supposed to learn only five or ten signs the first year, she wanted us to learn hundreds. Give, drink, eat, tickle, hug, more, you, me, tricycle, sorry, dirty (that really meant “I have to go to the bathroom!”), and many others. We made up signs for our names and Jennie’s name. Her sign was an ASL “J” — the little pinky extended from a clenched hand — but pointing at her chest. [She proceeded to demonstrate the gesture.] Mine was an ASL “L” drawn through the air in a kind of “Howdy!” gesture. Like this. [Another demonstration.]

Dr. Prentiss’s demands on us were excessive. She actually expected us to sign whenever Jennie was around, whether we were talking to Jennie or not. Can you imagine? It was a ridiculous imposition and I vetoed it immediately. I had to put my foot down on a number of occasions. After all, it was my house and my daughter. I mean my chimpanzee daughter, of course. She also wanted us to sign silently. I said, “Why on earth sign silently when Jennie understands spoken English already? No thank you,” I said, “we will speak the words while signing them.” I also pointed out to her that Sarah was just two years old and still learning how to speak. If we started this silent signing business, goodness knows how she would have turned out. Jennie wasn’t the only child we were raising. With all her brains, Dr. Prentiss never thought things through. She didn’t have any common sense at all.

Don’t get me wrong: we were thrilled about the prospect of being able to communicate with Jennie. That was terribly important to us. We wanted to unlock her mind and her thoughts.

Sandy was the most enthusiastic of all. He picked up ASL just like that. We already knew he was a genius — I mean he scored at that level on IQ tests. You should have seen him after a few years, signing furiously all over the place, just as fluent as a deaf person. It was a beautiful thing to watch him sign. The physical movement, the fluidity, of ASL is so lovely and graceful. It’s like a dance, you know. The whole body is involved. In a way it’s even more beautiful than spoken language. I’ve forgotten most of it now, it’s been so long.

So Dr. Prentiss started coming three days a week. I heard a lot of noise from the basement where they played, but I didn’t see any evidence of signing. Some days they went outside and climbed around the crab apple tree, and I saw her signing away. But no response from Jennie. Hugo and I fumbled our way through signing, and clear wore out that ASL dictionary but Jennie seemed totally uninterested. It was so discouraging. She’d sit there on the floor playing with a stuffed animal or something, and Hugo and I’d be bending over her, signing away till we were blue in the face, looking up signs in the dictionary, arguing about what sign was what. And you know what? She’d just look at us with that what-the-heck-are-you-crazy-humans-doing-now expression on her sweet little face.

After a month of this I took Dr. Prentiss aside. “Now look here,” I said, “what’s going on? Why isn’t Jennie learning anything? She’s darn smart enough to learn these signs,” I said, “so what’s the problem?” What was wrong with her teaching?

Dr. Prentiss was a defensive girl. Woman, I mean. She got all huffy and said our expectations were too high. It might take six months for the first sign, she said. Six months!! I was furious. Why. This was the first I’d heard of six months. Well, I talked to Hugo and he tried to calm me down, but I was not going to have this woman in our house for six months. We had quite an argument about it, Hugo and I. Oh dear.

Dr. Prentiss began working intensively with Jennie during the late spring of 1967. She felt that a warm relationship was a necessary prerequisite to teaching a chimpanzee sign language. While this may seem obvious to the uninformed reader, in fact it was a highly controversial position in the field. Many primatologists felt that early efforts to teach chimpanzees ASL had been compromised by the strong bond that always developed between researcher and subject. They believed that such a relationship would destroy the researcher’s objectivity and would cause unconscious “cueing” to the chimpanzee. This criticism of ASL teaching to chimpanzees, unfortunately, continues to this day. There are still a great many eminent ethologists who dismiss the validity of all ASL experiments done with chimpanzees for this very reason.

Dr. Prentiss, Harold Epstein, and I felt otherwise. Human infants need a close bond with their mothers and a great deal of love while learning language. There was no reason to suppose chimpanzees were any different. We could have introduced rigorous double-blind controls for teaching Jennie ASL, denying her direct human contact and therefore eliminating the possibility of cueing, but the end result would be a perfect experimental setup with a negative result. A human baby could not learn language under those circumstances, let alone a chimp.

Dr. Prentiss spent twenty-four hours a week with Jennie. After four weeks, to our surprise and disappointment, there were no results whatsoever. Jennie could imitate anything, and we expected her to pick up signs as fast as, for example, she had learned to wash the dishes, start the car when our backs were turned, light matches, unscrew light bulbs, and use scissors to cut all the hair off her tummy.

We expected it would take only a day or two for Jennie to pick up her first sign. Instead, we had been waiting a month, without any encouraging signs at all. Sandy in particular was very disappointed. He had studied ASL with enthusiasm and had learned dozens of signs, but after a month with no progress from Jenny his interest was flagging. Dr. Prentiss encouraged us, saying that imitation and communication were quite different. It would be simple to teach Jennie to imitate hand gestures; it was a different matter entirely teaching her to communicate with hand gestures. Looking back, I am amused by our reaction. We were typical parents, overly ambitious for our child, full of expectations, and ready to blame a lack of progress on the teacher.

Let’s see now... About five weeks after Dr. Prentiss started, I was in the kitchen cooking dinner. Dr. Prentiss had just left, and Jennie was inside playing on the kitchen floor. She got bored and started banging her cup on the floor. I turned around and said, “No!” very crossly. She stopped for a moment and then started banging again. Except this time she was banging her cup and spoon. And she made that sassy noise, you know, the Bronx Cheer. That razzing noise with her lips, while sticking out her belly. Right at me!

She knew exactly how to get under my skin. I picked her up and swatted her on the fanny. Now don’t be shocked. The truth is, it did no good to swat that chimp on the fanny. It didn’t hurt her a bit. Chimpanzees don’t have a nice cushioned tush, you know. It’s all bone and hard as a rock back there. But it made me feel better. And of course it upset her, because she was very sensitive to our moods. Although sometimes when I spanked her she would laugh and pretend that we were playing and start swatting me back. Oh, that used to make me boiling mad.

Anyway, after I swatted her she sat on the floor rocking back and forth, going “Oooo oooo ooo.” Very upset. I was still angry and I said, “Shut up!” And then, then she made a sign. I was stunned. I said, “What?” and then I signed What? She did it again, insistently. It was the sign for hug , like this. [She demonstrated the sign by crossing her arms over her chest.] I was startled, but then I thought, Oh well, that’s a natural gesture. That’s not a sign. She’s done that before. You see, Jennie would sometimes hug herself in a way that was very similar. So I signed Hug who? just to see. And Jennie signed back Hug, hug, hug, hug Jennie, Jennie! She actually signed her name! Jennie! [Again she demonstrated the sign.]