Russell Banks - The Darling

“Yes, I know.”

He laughed. “I mean not just for eatin’. I like ’em. I t’ink this a very good idea. Good for the chimps, an’ good for me. Good for Liberia. So I’m gonna say yes to your proposal, to this sanctuary idea.”

“Then it’s not too early for me to drink with you, Mister President.”

He laughed again and pulled a bottle of Johnny Walker and two glasses from the drawer at his knee and set them before us on the desk and poured three fingers of scotch in each. Raising his glass, he said, “To the chimps, then.”

“To the chimps,” I said and did the same.

Before I left the room, Samuel Doe by phone had ordered his chief of staff to turn over an old, unused military prison located in Toby, five miles east of Monrovia. He knew the place well, he said, because he had once been stationed there. It had twenty cells and an exercise yard surrounded by a high electrified fence. It was in decent repair and could be modified for the chimps easily and cheaply. From the desk drawer where his whiskey had been stashed, he pulled handfuls of American currency, hundred-dollar bills, and counted out one hundred of them, ten thousand dollars, as if counting out playing cards. He wrapped the bills with an elastic band, handed the wad to me, and said, “You on the unofficial presidential payroll now. An’ when you need some more money for your sanctuary, come straight to me. Don’ go no place else. An’ when the place ready and open for business, we’ll make us a big ceremony out there at Toby. Lots of press people. Television. All the foreign ambassadors. ’Specially the Africans! I want them peoples to see what us Liberians doin’ here for the poor endangered species of Africa!”

“Thank you, Mister President,” I said.

He refilled our glasses and raised his again. “To the chimps!” he said and drained it.

“Yes. To the chimps.”

AND SO BEGAN my life as keeper of the chimps, as their rescuer and champion of their cause in Liberia. All right, as their surrogate mother. My human children seemed to require little of me. Perhaps because they were boys and because of my inescapable peculiarities — I don’t want to say my neuroses or personal deformities — but from the beginning, my sons were more Woodrow’s than mine, more African than American, more black than white. I looked after them, of course, made sure they were properly fed and clothed and bathed, drove them to school and picked them up, oversaw their education and social lives in town, but did it in a general, distant way, and left the details to others. Left them to Woodrow, mainly, who guided their religious training, encouraged them to become sportsmen, and, increasingly, took them to visit their grandparents and the rest of the Sundiata clan in Fuama, where they were being prepared for initiation into the Poro society, which, of course, would distance them even farther from me. They were good boys, well behaved, obedient, smart, and only occasionally mischievous or troublesome, and it was not difficult for us, despite our daily proximity, to grow distant from one another. They seemed to welcome and utilize that distance as much as I. Certainly neither they nor I complained of it.

Was I altogether without a maternal instinct? Let’s say I was ignorant of it, that in me it was deflected early on. It was an instinct not so much repressed as stunted, bent, deformed, so that I could not engage and express it in the normal way. In my twenties, in Weatherman, I so severely attacked what we think of as natural instincts, so pruned and cropped them, cutting them back to their roots and in a few cases pulling up the roots as well, that in my thirties and forties I was nearly incapable of cultivating them. My youthful radicalism of necessity masculinized me. To feel regret for having thwarted so many of my so-called natural instincts I would have had to feel regret for my youthful radicalism and the idealism that drove it, and I could not do that. I still can’t.

I was a bad mother, yes, but not a neglectful one. And I was an inattentive, detached wife, but not a cruel or malicious one. And though I was a solitary, self-absorbed woman, I was nonetheless socially compliant and friendly to all, just as I am today with Anthea and the girls who work at my farm and with my neighbors here in the valley. I was as devoted then, and am still today, to certain abstract values like justice and equality as I was in my early years, and if the price I paid in my early years for that devotion was anger and violence against those who were unjust and oppressive, then in my later years the price was cool detachment from those who loved me and whom I claimed to love. Over the years, as I grew older, the dark shadow I cast slowly paled and turned white.

AN ADULT MALE CHIMP can weigh over two hundred fifty pounds and is strong enough to overturn a car or hurl an adult male human across a large room. Adult female chimps are considerably smaller and more pliant, although they can be and often are fiercely protective of their young. Both male and female adolescents are like human adolescents — awash with hormones, amorous, quarrelsome, competitive, energetically testing themselves against one another and adult authority, and capable of fond attachments that seem nearly homoerotic. It’s the babies and youngsters, of course, that we know from circuses and kiddie shows on television. It’s the babies that get captured and sold as pets, after their mothers and other protective adults have been gunned down and sold for food or consumed by the killers on the spot.

All species are in danger of being killed by humans, even the human species, but only a few are as endangered as the one that most resembles us. Like us, they have no tails; like us, they have fingernails and toenails and not claws. They have elbows and knees. They have necks thick and thin, and soft, round bellies when they grow old. They have reproductive systems and endocrine systems and interior organs — heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, and intestines — that are located and shaped like ours. Though they cannot speak, they communicate with one another and with other species with subtlety and ease and efficiency. They have eyes located at the front of their head and open ears attached to the sides of the skull, and they vary in the same degree as humans in complexion and pigmentation and hair color and facial features from one to the other. Because of the extra Y chromosome carried by the males and the number of specific genes attached to it, a male chimpanzee is genetically closer to a male human than to a female chimpanzee, and a female human is closer to a female chimpanzee than to a male human. They are not our distant ancestors; they are our close cousins.

If humans, like the rest of the animals, could not speak, we would all live together in peace, devouring one another solely out of necessity and instinct, our positions in the food chain nicely balanced by need and numbers. If we were as speechless as my collies on the farm or the hens and sheep and the geese, if we barked or baa’d or clucked or if like the chimps we could only hoot and holler and otherwise had to depend on body language, we would not kill one another or any other animal solely for the pleasure of it. The power of speech is the speech of power. Vows of silence are pledges to peaceableness. Silence is indeed golden, and a golden age would be silent.

FOR A FEW YEARS, then, and for the first time in my life, I not only had a cause, but was able to pursue it with measurable success. There were few to witness my success, few who mattered to me. My father was dead; my mother was thousands of miles away and wouldn’t get it anyhow; and everyone from the Movement from the top to the bottom was scattered and lost to me, many of them gone over to the other side. Those who remained on the Left, from what I gleaned from occasional newspaper and magazine accounts, were more interested in designing holistic lifestyles than in working for radical social and political change. The very idea of revolution, which in the late sixties and early seventies had seemed ready for immanence, had been turned into a comic metaphor for self-indulgent self-delusion. Not for me, however. Not in those later years in Liberia, where, while I awaited the return of Charles Taylor at the head of a rebel army, imagining him as a latter-day African Fidel Castro, I busied myself with saving a little troop of chimpanzees in a renovated prison a few miles east of Monrovia, tirelessly working to keep them from being exploited or killed, as if they were my disadvantaged neighbors and I, by accident of birth, had the power and privilege and the right to do so.