Jennie (26 page)

They linked hands and sang “Give Peace a Chance,” with Jennie right in there with the thick of them. She had no idea what was going on, but she loved the crowd, the singing, and the undercurrent of excitement. She was in her element.

The police and a National Guard unit lined the marchers' route, but there were no pointed guns or tear gas. The police were well behaved and the only unpleasant note came from a group of working-class men in black leather jackets, who were protesting our protesting with jeers and catcalls. Kibbencook was not a hotbed of radicalism, and even antiwar marches were organized with a certain decorum. It was a thoroughly suburban protest.

During the march, Jennie behaved herself beautifully. She did not start a riot, attack the police, burn the flag, or spit on the National Guardsmen. It was an odd sight indeed seeing these young teenagers treating this ape as a friend—albeit a rather special friend. Jennie would sign away until she was blue in the face with Sandy's
friends, but none of them understood what she was saying without Sandy translating. This never seemed to matter much to them or to Jennie. She made herself understood in one way or another.

The local press was there, and the next day there was a picture of Jennie and a line of protesters, hands linked, on the front page of the Kibbencook
Townsman
. There were several nasty letters to the editor making crude comparisons between Jennie and the marchers. The letters made Sandy angry and he responded with a letter to the editor pointing out that chimpanzees were perhaps more intelligent than certain American politicians, since war was unknown among apes. This was, of course, before Dr. Jane Goodall's observation of a deadly conflict between two chimpanzee groups in Gombe.

The march deeply impressed me. It was a moving experience, seeing young people so earnestly concerned about the morality of our involvement in Vietnam. While many of their ideas may have been naive or youthfully excessive, their hearts were in the right place. It was one of the first times in the history of America where a large segment of the population had questioned the morality of war—not just
a
war but
any
war. They were not going to accept blindly the values of their parents.

Sandy had just turned fourteen. I felt that I was witnessing the beginnings of a great sea change in America. I was deeply moved. Through this terrible ordeal of Vietnam, I believed, we might finally see America becoming what the founding fathers had envisioned, a nation with a moral purpose in the world and a nation that cared about all its citizens. We might see the end of the cynical Nixon-Kissinger version of
realpolitik
.

It hasn't turned out that way, but then we are all a little older and wiser.

Not long after the march I purchased a Trans-Lux eight-millimeter silent movie camera, a projector, and a set of lights. I hoped to
capture on film her childhood playfulness before it vanished completely. I was almost too late.

I began to film Jennie at home, doing the things she normally did: eating, squirting the hose, running around the house, playing with Sandy. When the first batch of film came back from the developers, we set up the screen and settled in for an evening of home movies. We were curious what Jennie's reaction might be to seeing herself on the silver screen. She had a streak of exhibitionism, a necessary prerequisite for movie stardom.

When the lights darkened and the moving picture flickered on, Jennie became still and attentive. Her image suddenly appeared on-screen, squatting on the piano stool and pounding away at the keys of our old Weser “cabinet grand.” When Jennie saw herself on the screen, she let fly a short scream and stood up, hopping up and down in excitement and pointing at the screen. Then she began to sign
Jennie
and point again. If ever there was proof of self-awareness, this was it.

Yes
, Sandy signed,
that's Jennie playing piano
.

Me Jennie!
signed Jennie. She went up to the screen to examine her image more closely. Her shadow obscured the screen, and she began poking at her shadow, grunting with puzzlement. Then she went over to the projector and tried to look into the lens, but the light was so bright she backed away with her face wrinkled up and her eyes blinking. We tried to persuade her to sit down and watch, but whenever her image appeared on-screen she sprang back up and hopped up and down, squealing with excitement.

It was curious to see her reaction. With each change of scene Jennie signed what was happening:
Jennie eat
or
Jennie wet
or
Fire fire
when she was shown pulling roasted apples out of the fire. When we filmed Jennie chasing one of the neighbor's dogs she jumped up with a screech of derision and raced to the screen, signing
Bad! Go away!
In another scene we gave her a hamburger loaded with pickles and ketchup, so we could record for posterity her dinnertime manners. When she threw the hamburger in the film,
Jennie laughed and whirled about on the floor, signing
Bad Jennie! Bad bad Jennie!

One of the truly interesting sequences occurred when Sandy brought home a milk snake he had caught in the fields in Maine. We knew Jennie had an irrational fear and hatred of snakes. We put the snake in a shoebox and left it on the coffee table in the living room. I set up the camera in a strategic place to record the action and Sandy called Jennie in from the orchard.

She came tumbling into the house and raced to the living room. Jennie had extraordinary powers of observation and always noticed when something new had been added to a room. She immediately saw the shoebox and stopped dead. She reached out to touch it, and quite suddenly she jerked her hand back and her hair rose in fear. To this day I do not know how she knew there was a snake in the shoebox. Chimpanzees do not have a sense of smell keener than humans, and milk snakes are clean and do not have a detectable odor.

She took Lea's hand and whimpered loudly and stamped on the floor a few times, but she did not retreat. Her curiosity was too strong. Pulling Lea by the hand, she advanced on the shoebox, swatted it, and scurried back behind Lea.

The box did not open.

She signed
Box open box
to Lea, but Lea merely signed back
Jennie open box
.

Jennie took another quick step toward the box and gave it a harder swat, which sent it tumbling to the floor, spilling the snake on the rug.

At this Jennie let fly a terrific scream and ran to the door, where she stopped and stood swaying on her knuckles, screaming and drumming on the floor with her feet. She ran halfway to the snake, pounded and stamped the floor in a display of anger, and retreated back to the doorway. Her magnificent performance was lost on the poor snake, who was either dazed from his fall or merely half asleep on the soft rug.

She signed
Bad! Bad!
and made another charge and retreat at the snake, to no effect. The snake just lay there, flicking its tongue. Sandy fetched the snake and eventually persuaded Jennie to touch it from a distance, which she did with her arm stretched out and her face averted with a grin of fear. I recorded the entire encounter on film, and Harold Epstein and Dr. Prentiss both watched it with great interest. We concluded that chimpanzees must have a genetically programmed fear of snakes, as well as the ability to detect them when they are hidden, something that we humans have lost.

During that next year I took several thousand feet of film of Jennie and Sandy: the two of them roasting marshmallows and dancing around a campfire in the field behind the farmhouse; Jennie and Sandy riding their bikes around the neighborhood; Jennie and Rev. Palliser waving at the camera. The camera revealed one limitation in Jennie's intelligence: she never made the connection between the camera and the home movies that we later viewed. As a result she was never self-conscious in front of the camera. This was a great contrast to Sandy, who became increasingly irritated at being filmed. He had turned fifteen and, like most teenagers, was agonizingly self-conscious.

Jennie was nearing the age of puberty. Just as Harold Epstein had warned, she was becoming increasingly unruly. She had always “tested” the limits of her power, but as she reached the age of eight her testing of us became more strident and aggressive. We found ourselves quite unable to oppose her at times.

Jennie's rebellion at eight paralleled Sandy's at fifteen, and the two of them often defied parental authority together. It was a conspiracy: each would undermine our efforts to discipline the other. It was not uncommon that when I became angry at Sandy for some reason, Jennie would start bristling up, barking and swaggering toward me, in a classic threat. When we tried to discipline Jennie, Sandy would often say “Leave her alone” or “Come on,
Jennie, let's get out of here,” and Jennie would drop her contrite expression and stare at us with sheer insolence.

I particularly recall one time when Jennie had been pounding on the piano for too long while I was trying to work, and I shouted at her to stop. Sandy was in the room reading a book. Jennie stopped and got off the piano stool, crouching and looking guilty. Then Sandy said, “Why don't you quit picking on her. You're always at her, trying to control her every little move, make her do this and not do that.”

As if she understood what Sandy said, Jennie hopped back on the piano stool and pounded several times on the keys. When I shouted at her again, she started spinning on the rotating stool, signing
Phooey
with each turn. And then she pounded once more on the keys in a most insolent way, to make sure I got the message.

Looking back over the calming gulf of years, I see the humor in this scene of a rebellious chimpanzee and teenager making a father's life miserable. At the time, however, I was very angry. It is difficult for a parent—particularly a father—to understand and react appropriately to a rebellious son, but when you have two who are reinforcing each other, it is intolerable. The two of them, through their defiance, made me feel powerless, rejected, and superannuated. They made me feel like a useless middle-aged man.

[F
ROM
an interview with Dr. Pamela Prentiss.]

This shitty tape recorder of mine seems to be broken. Will you send me a copy of your tapes? Thank you.

Frankly, I'm disappointed you haven't read these papers. How can you write a book about Jennie without reading this stuff? You've had a whole month. I know it's a lot, but you need to know all this.

Let's see . . . I have one thing for you here. This is what we call
a matrix analysis. It's a three-dimensional computer plot. I did this myself using the old IBM 3000 mainframe at Tufts. You could do this graph today with a little Macintosh powerbook. Anyway, it shows Jennie's progress in language. This should go into your book. It's very important.

You see the x-axis is time, and the y-axis is the number of times each individual sign is made per unit of time, and the z-axis is the average number of words per utterance. Isn't this fantastic? Look at how her language ability just
exploded
after eighteen months. See that big bump? Looks like Mount Everest!

And here, by 1972, you see she's already using one hundred and forty signs regularly in two- and three-word utterances. Blows your mind. . . . No, that's the z-axis. See, it's
three
-dimensional. . . . No wonder, you're holding it
sideways
. Each point consists of three degrees of freedom. Three variables. If you can't see it I can't explain it to you. Sometimes I don't know why I bother.

By 1972, the project was four years old. Jennie had learned over one hundred and fifty signs. It was unbelievable how she was signing. Now you see this trough? This dropoff? No, look, it's right there in the graph. This was a disappointment. We hoped that as she learned more signs her utterances would become longer and more complex, until she was creating sentences. If that had happened this, here, would be a smooth surface. Not this big drop. Looks like a canyon, here. See? Even as her vocabulary increased most of her utterances remained one to three words long. Four-word utterances were rare. She was able to get out a five-word statement only with a lot of prompting.

She had difficulty creating the subject-verb-direct object form that human children naturally take up. In English, of course. Other languages are different. It's all there in the papers I gave you.

Jennie, you see, had trouble going from
give ball
to
give me ball
. The concept of the indirect object—like
give ball to Sandy
—was beyond her abilities. She could understand it, but not say it.

Her syntax was weak. It was terrible. We did statistical analyses
of her utterances and found only a slight correlation with correct syntax. What I mean is, she would sign
Ball give
almost as often as
Give ball
. Of course, our enemies—I mean that jerk Craig Miller at Penn—seized on this and said that without syntax there wasn't language. Well that's a lot of shit. Excuse my French. I mean, not all human languages even use syntactical constructions. Like Latin, for Christ's sake. Miller was a real shithead. He was out to get us. Oh, you've still got that tape recorder on. Well, don't put that in. [Laughs.]

Don't get me wrong. We weren't disappointed in Jennie's progress. It was just that our hopes had been raised by the incredible rate of learning in the first three years, and we had expected ever more complex sentences to result. It didn't happen. We noted the same “plateau” among our colony chimpanzees, though at a lower level of vocabulary. This was a big divergence from the way human children learn language, and that itself was interesting. But it wasn't the big deal that Miller made it out to be.

Did you read those transcriptions that I gave you? “Conversations with a Chimpanzee”? Good. You know, I can't get that book published. Nobody'll touch it after that Proxmire shit. Anyway, from reading that you can see how incredible the communication was between us. Jennie and I communicated like you wouldn't believe. What you don't see from those transcripts is the body language. For example, in ASL a question is not noted with a special sign, or even syntax, but with a pause and a quizzical expression, a lifting of the eyebrows. Just like in Italian. Like this:
Jennie eat
. And
Jennie eat?
[Dr. Prentiss demonstrates.] See? It's signed the same way, but the question is in the body language.