Tania James: Aerogrammes: and Other Stories

Pearl’s husband thought her insane for going to Sierra Leone. He refused to accompany her or take her to the airport. She left him the number of the hotel in Bo where she and Neneh would be staying for a week, preparing for the flight back home. Whenever he tried to change the subject, Pearl switched it right back. Whenever he grudgingly referred to “the girl,” Pearl asserted her name— Neneh .

But when Pearl arrived in Bo to claim Neneh, all her stern conviction dissolved, displaced by the immediate necessities of the child made real. Because Neneh’s grandmother was too old to travel from her village, Neneh had come with a representative from the NGO, a plumpish woman wearing a head wrap of blue and green and a matching skirt that fishtailed around her ankles. They had dinner in the hotel restaurant, groundnut soup and country rice, while the woman talked about Neneh’s mother. Pearl had thought that learning of the other woman would crush her, but instead she was oddly fascinated. Isatu had taken any number of jobs to support her child, selling cassava by the road and dyeing gara fabrics. The NGO worker kept saying the word “suffer” over and over: “Even just for buy half back and feeding and clothing, she suffered a lot .” The whole time, Pearl was vaguely aware of Neneh regarding her with a strange vigilance, as if trying to memorize her entirely.

When it was time for the NGO woman to leave, she kissed Neneh once on each cheek and accepted the package Pearl had brought for Neneh’s grandmother, gifts that seemed all wrong. What would the old woman do with a flannel nightgown in this broiling heat? Pearl had also slipped money up the nightgown’s sleeve, but would Neneh’s grandmother know where to convert the dollar bills?

For Neneh, Pearl had brought a red headband and a lacy white dress that would surely attract swarms of sienna dust. Dutifully, Neneh fit the headband over her braids and refused to remove it until she went to bed. With equal resolve, she would not go anywhere without holding Pearl’s hand. While Neneh slept, Pearl stared at the girl’s curled fingers, her hard palm inscribed with the same lines that appeared on her father’s. The lines filled Pearl with wonder rather than hate, and it was at that moment, tracing the birdlike bones of Neneh’s hand, that Pearl understood how hate could carry her only so far.

Several days before they left for Ohio, Pearl thought it would be good to get Neneh out of the hotel. Pearl had chosen the hotel for its royal-sounding name — Sir Milton — but the toilet bowl was bereft of its seat, the water tasted of metal, and the mosquito nets had holes that left her scratching all night. The receptionist suggested that they visit the Cotton Tree, the site where the first African-American slaves, freed and arrived in 1792, had held a thanksgiving mass. Pearl felt apathetic about visiting a tree, but it turned out to be more astonishing, more alive than any monument she had seen, its massive trunk roped and coiled with fantastical vines as thick as her arm, with bat-filled branches that sprawled up against the pale blue sky. Deriving some strength from its ancient shade, Pearl felt that she could stand and stare forever at the tree, with Neneh at her side, and for the first time during her visit, she felt capable of everything her friends and family had dismissed.

When she and Neneh walked past the vendors, Pearl did not flinch at what she saw: the dismembered parts of what seemed to be a goat, lying in the heat, bright with blood; the stares of local children gleefully pointing at her and calling out, “Pumui! Pumui!” There were women selling fruits and vegetables piled on burlap, green plantains and thick fingers of cassava, tables of trinkets in bowls, balls of black soap, mountains of country and white rice, hills of sesame seeds and black-eyed peas. Toward the end of their walk, Pearl and Neneh came upon a baby chimpanzee in a cardboard box.

As Pearl reached for the chimp, she felt a rejuvenating sense of certainty, a rectitude with no moral or rational ground. She was destroying her old life, blow by blow, and building a new one out of new names. Neneh, and now Henry; the name came to Pearl as a breeze. She tucked Henry into her orange shawl and stroked the soft saucers of his ears. She did not consider what her husband would think of this latest development. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t called a single time, and Pearl had known all along that he would not be home when she returned.

• • •

On the plane, Henry was so wide-eyed and serene that the flight attendants let him ride in Pearl’s lap, swaddled in her shawl. It had been relatively easy for Pearl to secure the import and export permits necessary for his adoption, but later that year, the United States issued a ban on the importation of chimpanzees as pets, citing them as health hazards and possible vessels for disease. Pearl was relieved that Henry had slipped by the ban. She dismissed the thought that her little coconut could be a hazard to anyone.

So for a time, there was Pearl, Neneh, and Henry. In Canton, Henry adapted well to their lives, eating at the dinner table and watching television in earnest, especially if a nature documentary appeared on PBS. He enjoyed simple pleasures — a fried egg sandwich, a Dole fruit cup, the dial tone of an unhooked phone. Pearl grew so frustrated with finding phones off the hook that she gripped Henry by the arm and scolded him; he avoided her eyes. After she released him and sat down to watch the evening news, he leapt into her lap and planted an open-mouthed kiss on her lips.

Those were difficult years, when most of Pearl’s friends and family stopped visiting, their phone calls dwindling. Pearl made them uncomfortable. Once, in her mailbox, she found a folded drawing of herself as a chimp, with a sloping forehead, flaring nostrils, a bun. She’d had smart-ass students before, but this somehow made her face simmer with shame. She rolled up the paper and used it to twirl out the spiderwebs inside the mailbox.

Pearl forged ahead. She took it upon herself to homeschool Neneh in all subjects, well through the fourth grade. Neneh was a poor student, and sometimes Pearl wondered if she was progressing sluggishly on purpose, reluctant to join a school with children her own age.

When Neneh turned ten years old, she enrolled at Walden Middle School, a short bus ride away. On the second day of class, Jurgen Roberts turned to her and asked, “Is it true your brother’s a chimp?” Just as Neneh was about to answer, Miss Davis demanded to know why Jurgen would ever say such a thing about someone’s brother.

Neneh left school that day with the distinct impression that the answer she had almost given Jurgen Roberts was wrong. The correct answer to his question would have been: Henry’s not my brother, he’s my pet . She considered treating Henry as she had seen other people dealing with their dogs and cats, as though she were an authority whose job it was to tame his behaviors. One such behavior was his proclivity to blow kisses at the blond mailwoman who slipped their mail through the slot and blew him a kiss in return. It was weird. What if, by some slim and lovely chance, Natalie Sharpe came over to play one day? Would Henry, beguiled by her flaxen hair, try to kiss her, too?

But Natalie Sharpe moved to Indiana, and Jurgen Roberts started going with Allie Sanfilippo, the girl who sat in front of him, at which point he stopped turning his head farther than forty-five degrees. Everything about the world of school was mercurial, the alliances tenuous, the cafeteria a minefield; at home, Henry was always waiting for her on the foyer stairs. He was her brother, whose leathery soles she liked to tickle until he gave desperate, panting bursts of laughter. A brother who winced when the trunk door fell on her head, who rubbed his own head in sympathy. A brother who stole the last grape Popsicle before she’d had even one, but at the very least, if she complained, he would break off a melty half and hold it out to her on his palm. “The half with the stick,” Neneh would insist, and, playing innocent, he would look away, as if he couldn’t understand her.