FOR nearly eighteen years I’ve been keeping a secret to honor the memory of someone, now pretty certainly dead, who didn’t want it told. Yet over those years I’ve come gradually to feel uncomfortable with the idea of dying without recording what I know — to believe that science would be pointlessly cheated thereby, and Sally, too; and just lately, but with a growing urgency, I’ve also felt the need to write an account of my own actions into the record.
Yet it’s difficult to begin. The events I intend to set down have never, since they happened, been out of my mind for a day; nevertheless the prospect of reexperiencing them is painful and my silence the harder to break on that account.
I’ll start, I guess, with the afternoon an exuberant colleague I scarcely knew at the time spotted me through the glass door and barged into the psychology department office calling, “Hey, Jan, you’re the expert on the Chimp Child — wait’ll you hear this, you’re not gonna believe it!”
People were always dashing up to inform me of some item, mostly inconsequential, relating to this subject. I glanced across at John from the wall of mailboxes, hands full of memos and late papers, one eyebrow probably raised. “What now?”
“We’ve hired her!” And when I continued to look blank: “No kidding, I was just at a curriculum committee meeting in the dean’s office, and Raymond Lickorish in Biology was there, and he told me: they’ve definitely given Sally Barnes a tenure-track appointment, to replace that old guy who’s retiring this year, what’s his name, Ferrin. The virus man. Raymond says Barnes’s Ph.D. research was something on viruses and the origin of life on earth and her published work is all first-rate and she did well in the interview — he wasn’t there so he didn’t meet her, but they were all talking about it afterward — and she seems eager to leave England. So the department made her an offer and she accepted! She’ll be here in September, I swear to God!”
By this point I’m sure I was showing all the incredulous excitement and delight a bearer of happy tidings could possibly have wished. And no wonder: I wrote my dissertation on Sally Barnes; I went into psychology chiefly because of the intense interest her story held for me. In fact the Chimp Child had been a kind of obsession of mine — part hobby, part mania — for a long time. I was a college freshman, my years of Tarzan games in the woods less far behind me than you might suppose, in 1990, when poachers hauled the screeching, scratching, biting, terrified white girl into a Tanzanian village and told its head man they would be back to collect the reward. Electrified, I followed the breaking story from day to day.
The girl was quickly and positively identified as Sally, the younger daughter of Martin and Hilary Barnes, Anglican missionary teachers at a secondary school in the small central African republic of Malawi, who had been killed when the light plane in which they and she were traveling from Kigoma had crashed in the jungle. A helicopter rescue crew found only the pilot’s body in the burned-out fuselage. Scavengers may have dragged the others away and scattered the bones; improbable survivors of the crash may have tried to walk out — the plane had come down in the mountains, something less than 150 kilometers east of Lake Tanganyika — and starved, or been killed by anything from leopards to thieves to fever. However it was, nothing had been heard or seen of the Barnes family after that day in 1981; it was assumed that one way or another all three had died in the bush.
No close living relatives remained in England. An older daughter, left at home that weekend with an attack of malaria, had been sent to an Anglican school for the children of missionaries, somewhere in the Midlands. There was no one but the church to assume responsibility for her sister the wild girl, either.
The bureaucracies of two African nations and the Church of England hummed, and after a day or two Sally was removed to the Malosa School in Southern Malawi, where the whole of her life before the accident had been lived. She could neither speak nor understand English, seemed stunned, and masturbated constantly. She showed no recognition of the school, its grounds or buildings, or the people there who had been friendly with her as a small child. But when they had cleaned her up, and cropped her matted hair, they recognized that child in her; pictures of Sally at her fourth birthday party, printed side by side in the papers with new ones of the undersized thirteen-year-old she had become, were conclusive. Hers was one of those faces that looks essentially the same at six and sixty.
But if the two faces obviously belonged to the same person, there was a harrowing difference.
A long time later Sally told me, gazing sadly at this likeness of herself: “Shock. It was nothing but shock, nothing more beastly. On top of everything else, getting captured must have uncovered my memories of the plane crash — violence; noise; confusion; my parents screaming, then not answering me — I mean, when the poachers started shooting and panicked everybody and then killed the Old Man and flung that net over me, I fought and struggled, of course, but in the end I sort of went blank. Like the accident, but in reverse.”
“Birth Trauma Number Three?” We were sitting cross-legged on the floor before the fireplace in my living room, naked under blankets, like Mohicans. I could imagine the scene vividly, had in fact imagined it over and over: the brown child blindly running, running, in the green world, the net spreading, dropping in slow motion, the child pitching with a crash into wet vegetation. Helplessness. Claustrophobia. Uttermost bowel-emptying terror. The hysterical shrieks, the rough handling…Sally patted my thigh, flushed from the fire’s heat, then let her hand stay where it was.
“No point in looking like that. What if they hadn’t found me then? At University College, you know, they all think it was only just in time.”
“And having read my book, you know I think so, too.” We smiled. I must have pressed my palm flat to her hot, taut belly, or slipped my hand behind her knee or cupped her breast — some such automatic response. “The wonder is that after that double trauma they were able to get you back at all. You had to have been an awfully resilient, tough kid, as well as awfully bright. A survivor in every sense. Or you’d have died of shock and grief after the plane crashed, or of shock and grief when the poachers picked you up, or of grief and despair in England from all that testing and training, like spending your adolescence in a pressure cooker.” I can remember nuzzling her shoulder, how my ear grazed the rough blanket. “You’re a survivor, Sal.”
In the firelight Sally smiled wanly. “Mm. Up to a point.”
Any standard psych text published after 2003 will describe Sally Barnes as the only feral child in history to whom, before her final disappearance, full functional humanity had been restored. From the age of four and a half until just past her thirteenth birthday, Sally acted as a member of a troop of chimpanzees in the Tanzanian rain forest; from sixteen or seventeen onward, she was a young Englishwoman, a person. What sort of person? The books are vague on this point. Psychologists, naturally enough, were wild to know; Sally herself, who rather thought she did know, was wild to prevent them from turning her inside out all her life in the interest of science. I was (and am) a psychologist and a partisan, but professional integrity is one thing and obsession is quite another, and if I choose finally to set the record straight it’s not because I respect Sally’s own choice any less.
From the very first, of course, I’d been madly infatuated with the idea of Sally, in whose imagined consciousness — that of a human girl accepted by wild creatures as one of themselves — I saw, I badly wished to see, myself. The extreme harshness of such a life as hers had been — with its parasites, cold rains, bullying of the weak by the strong, and so forth — got neatly edited out of this hyper-romantic conception; yet the myth had amazing force. I don’t know how many times I read the JUNGLE BOOKS and. . .
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