Russell Banks - The Darling

“Your work?”

“Yes. And, Jeannine, I won’t be needing you to help me with the boys. I’ll look after their meals myself. It’s quite enough if you’ll just do the housekeeping. Especially since you should be going to school now yourself. I’ll pay you an hourly wage and will pay all your school expenses. But I’ll have to ask you to find another place to live.”

“ ‘Nother place to live?” she asked, incredulous.

“I’ll need your room for my office. I’m sure Woodrow can find you a place to live in town.”

Woodrow quietly said, “Really, Hannah.”

“And, boys, from now on you won’t have Jeannine or me following you around, picking up your clothes and cleaning up your messes and treating you like little princes anymore. You are little princes, of course, but you’re going to learn how to be good men, too, and the first step is learning not to expect women to do all your housework for you. That includes cooking and washing dishes and making your own beds and, as soon as you’re able, doing your own laundry.”

Woodrow said, “Men don’t do laundry, Hannah.”

“In my house, Woodrow, everyone washes his own clothes. Even you.”

“Missus,” Jeannine said. She did not turn around. “Can’t I stay inside the garden house? I can put a cot in wit’ the yardman’s t’ings.”

“No, you can’t. I’m sorry, but I’m no longer going to tolerate what went on before,” I said and looked straight at Woodrow, who turned away and stared out the window at the passing scenery.

“Mammi,” Dillon said, “is this the way American boys do? Do they have to wash their own clothes and cook and stuff?” In the six months I’d been away, Dillon had added half a foot in height and fifteen pounds of muscle. The twins, too, had outgrown their little boys’ bodies.

“Not always. But when they don’t, who do you think does it for them?”

“Their mammies.”

“Right. But lots of American mammies have jobs they go to every day. So, who does it then?”

“The boys do, I guess.”

“Right.”

“Well, I think it’s okay then. We can be like American boys. So, are you going to have a job, too? Like American mammies?”

“Yes, I am.”

Willie said, “Me and Paulie think it’s okay, too. We want to be like American boys.”

Woodrow said, “You’re going to have a job?”

Ignoring him, I said to my sons, “You’re going to have to be even better than American boys. They grow up to be American men. But you’re going to grow up to be Liberian men, the kind of men this country will be proud of. And I’m going to help you.”

“Thanks, Mammi,” Dillon said, and the twins said it, too. “Thanks, Mammi.”

Still gazing out the window, Woodrow in a morose, resigned tone said, “Tell me about this job. And why you want Jeannine’s room for an office. There’s no need for the wife of a minister in the government to work outside, you know. It will make me look bad, Hannah.”

“Everyone in this country who can should go to work. And I can, so I will, yes.”

“Will you work for an American company? Or at the embassy?” he asked hopefully.

“I’ve got plans. I’m going to do something that’s never been done in this country before.”

“And what is that?”

“I’m going to build a sanctuary for chimpanzees. For the chimpanzees that have been abandoned by the lab, if any of them is still alive. And I’m going to buy up and save as many chimps as I can find, those pets on chains and in cages that are sold in the markets and in back alleys. And the chimps that people try to smuggle out of the country to be sold as pets or used in experiments in Europe and America. I’m going to restore them to health and sanity, if I can, and eventually I’ll return them to the jungle, where they belong.”

Woodrow looked at me, as if checking to be sure I was the same woman who had left his home barely six months ago. “That’s … insane,” he declared,

“Can we help with the chimpanzees, Mammi?” Dillon asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And so can you, Woodrow.”

“How? No one cares about dumb animals. Not even the lab. That whole monkey program is dead. Been dead for years.”

“I want you to tell President Doe that I have an offer to make that he’ll not be able to refuse.”

“Why?”

“Because I do.”

“Indeed,” he said.

And then I saw that we had arrived at Duport Road, home, with the two huge, drooling mastiffs behind the gate. They were staring cold eyed at a white man in a rumpled white suit and Panama hat who stood in the street a safe distance from the gate. Sam Clement. When the dogs saw the car, they backed off and wagged their thick tails and smiled as Satterthwaite got out and unlocked and swung open the gate. He patted the dogs on their bony heads and told Sam to come on into the yard, then returned to the car and drove it up the driveway. Sam waved at us as we passed him, and by the time we arrived at the door, he was standing at the top of the steps to greet us.

WHEN I FIRST cared for the dreamers, back when the lab was still functioning, I saw them as creatures less evolved than we, as weaker, as deprived of essential and powerful abilities to reason and communicate. Later, when I knew them better, and they knew me, I saw, not that the dreamers in amazing ways closely resembled humans, but that we in equally amazing ways closely resembled them. As a result, I revised those early assumptions and came to believe that I could empathize with the dreamers.

But then, during the months that I was away from my little colony of apes, I began to see the built-in limitations of empathy. Perhaps because of my relationship with Carol and the rivalry with Zack, and because I am a woman, I came for the first time to believe that even the best-intentioned man, one who truly does empathize with women, is nonetheless incapable of knowing how the relations between men and women feel to a woman. Mainly, he is incapable of knowing how he is perceived by her. And therefore she, despite her likeness to him, remains opaque to him, unknowable.

This doesn’t mean that conflict between them is inevitable or inescapable. But there are useful parallels in the relations between men and women, between whites and blacks, between people without disabilities and disabled people, and between human primates and non-human primates. We who have more power in the world, like men with good intentions, try to empathize with those who have less. We try to experience racism as if I who am white were black, to see the world as if I who am sighted were blind, and to reason and communicate as if I who am human were non-human.

And thus I dealt with my chimpanzees as if I were one myself. And what was wrong with this? What was ethically and even practically wrong with having empathy towards the other? For a long time, I answered, Nothing . Nothing at all. It’s good politics. I see a blind man about to cross a street and think, He can’t see the whizzing traffic, he needs me to see it for him, to take his arm and escort him over to where he clearly wishes to go . Operating on the assumption that, if I were blind, I’d need me to help me, I grab the man’s arm and pull him panic-stricken into the traffic, terrifying and endangering him. Because I am sighted, I have relied and insisted on using a guidance system that utilizes sight as its main source of data. But the blind man has his own system for crossing the street. The blind man hears what I merely see, isolates bits of information that are lost on me, and coordinates and remembers data that I’ve not even registered.

I’m talking here about the difference between empathy and sympathy , between feeling for the other and feeling with the other. The distinction came to matter to me. It still does. When you abandon and betray those with whom you empathize, you’re not abandoning or betraying anyone or anything that’s as real as yourself. Taken to its extreme, perhaps even pathological, form, empathy is narcissism.