Jennie (17 page)

R. has blossomed under Jennie's influence. It breaks my heart to watch her walking with Jennie, hand in hand, around the room, thinking how much she wanted a child. Thinking that she might have had a daughter of her own but for me. R. brought out cookies and milk. We perused the book slowly, and Jennie became restless. She finally stood up and wandered about the house, picking up objects. R. became cross and slapped her hand. Jennie crouched on the floor screaming and holding her hands over her head, and it was a rather upsetting scene. I brought Jennie back to the Archibalds' and R. later felt very sorry and even wept a little. A child would have made such a difference in her life.

Jennie is now signing
Jesus
, making an unmistakable connection between the image and the sign! We were perusing the picture book, and when we arrived at the Sermon on the Mount she rubbed the
dome of her head while pointing at the picture. I think we shall leave the head rubbing as our sign for Jesus; the halo seems beyond her now. I have been endeavoring to inculcate in her some concepts, simple ones naturally. Such as God as a man who inhabits the sky. Of course, I am not one of those who believe God is a bearded man seated on a throne in the clouds, but as a
concept
it is appropriate for children and those with weak intellectual faculties. I have adopted as a sign for God the “one way” sign of the Christian evangelists; that is, the index finger pointing upward. Really, it is surprising that the books on ASL do not address religious words. It is perhaps another sad indication of the increasing secularization of our society, as if deaf people do not need to speak or know of God.

My approach is this: all good things come from God. Therefore, when Jennie receives anything that delights her, such as a tickle or cookies and milk, I make the God sign and point upward. I have also been “explaining” to her who God is, using other signs, such as
person
and
good
and
beautiful
and
love
. I do not know which, if any, of these signs she knows, except
love
, which she uses in its earthly sense, as in “affection.” Is she capable of understanding a higher “love”? Only time will tell.

Our progress is slow. Jennie is often distracted, and she has begun to tease R. She will behave like an angel until R. enters the room, and then she will be up and about touching things, which she
well
knows R. abhors. Today R. shouted at her and Jennie, cool as a cucumber, deliberately let fall a knickknack she was holding, which fortunately bounced unharmed on the carpeting. Then she signed
Sorry
in a manner that I can only characterize as insolent, although R. does not, fortunately, understand American Sign Language. Jennie had been frequently employing another sign that had a rather
vulgar air, and which I looked up and discovered was “Phooey!” Imagine teaching an animal to speak like that. I was shocked and amused at the same time. Jennie is very like a human child in challenging and testing her elders. I feel that R. wants to love Jennie, and wants Jennie to love her. She does not, I fear, have the right touch with Jennie. She is too cross and nervous, and she is overly attached to material objects. Jennie is very sensitive and has a mischievous streak in her. The combination is not good.

It has, indeed, been a trying day. Jennie tore pages from
The Life of Christ
and attempted to eat one. She signed
God
over and over again, indiscriminately, at everything, and I simply was incapable of making her desist. It was redolent of blasphemy, of taking the Lord's name in vain.

No one promised this would be easy. Some of my most devout congregationals are often those who came to God through adversity and sneering doubt.

[F
ROM
an interview with Harold Epstein.]

I'm sure you've heard from Mrs. Archibald all about the subject of Dr. Pamela C. Prentiss. Now Mrs. Archibald is a strong-minded, capable, smart woman, sharp as a tack, and cranky as hell. In almost any marriage there is a dominant partner, and she was the dominant partner in that marriage. This is not to say Hugo was weak. I think you know what I mean.

Dr. Prentiss, in many ways, was just like Mrs. Archibald. More intellectual, perhaps, but not smarter. More defensive. Wrapped up in her science, and not aware of much else. As often happens when two strong women meet, they clashed. I want you to take what Mrs. Archibald said with a grain of salt, you understand?

Now these two women respected each other, and that's what kept the project going. Hugo and Lea were both excited by Jennie's progress. Lea, as a good mother, recognized what an important
force Dr. Prentiss was in Jennie's life. Dr. Prentiss, for her part, may not have approved of Lea's relationship with Jennie, but she recognized that, for all intents and purposes, Lea was Jennie's mother. You don't second-guess a mother.

Dr. Prentiss took herself very seriously. Ah! You see, she was compensating for her looks. Beautiful blond women are supposed to be dumb, and she was, shall we say, a little overanxious to correct that misapprehension. The Jeep, the old clothes, the absence of makeup, all this was by way of compensation. And back then women were discriminated against in science. No doubt about that. So she was a bit defensive.

It is no mystery where the real source of conflict with Mrs. Archibald came from. The feminists are going to jump down my throat, but Dr. Prentiss, like most women, had a strong maternal instinct and this she directed to Jennie. All subconscious, of course. This put her in subconscious conflict with Lea for Jennie's love and attention. Two mothers, one child. This is not to say both individuals were undisciplined neurotics. To the contrary. They handled their relationship quite well, considering. I don't believe the conflict affected Jennie. Of course I wasn't there when they were together.

Let's talk about the science for a moment. Can you stand it? Just a little bit? If it gets too dull you can always edit it out. Young man, I'm going to make you understand the scientific issues here whether you like it or not.

Dr. Prentiss came 'round my office from time to time, to discuss her findings. We had an informal arrangement. As a psycholinguist, she lacked a sense of the human context of the experiments. I, being a cultural anthropologist, was able to provide this.

I felt that we were seeing results that had wide implications. The colony chimpanzees weren't learning at anywhere near the rate of Jennie. Dr. Prentiss therefore concluded that language acquisition in chimpanzees was dependent on their degree of human socialization. We know that language acquisition in human children is also dependent on their degree of socialization. The link between human
culture and language is so tight, and so complex, that—Pam reasoned—even an animal requires some degree of human socialization in order to learn language. Astounding! Happily adjusted chimpanzees, no matter how pampered, just can't cut it the way a home-raised chimp could. This was her conclusion.

Now I detected a flaw in this hypothesis. What if Jennie were a genius? Dr. Prentiss saw my point immediately. Jennie's fluent signing ability might not be the product of human socialization; she might just be smarter than the Barnum chimps.

However, a solution suggested itself to me rather quickly. Why not devise a chimpanzee IQ test? We agreed this was a brilliant idea.

Little did we know where it would lead us, and what astounding results would emerge.

We devised a set of tests that were not dependent on language. This was to equalize Jennie's advantage over the Barnum chimps. We created a number of “problems” and set the chimps to solving them. The details are complicated, but I will describe a few. You see, it was the results from these cognitive “problems” that so startled us. To the point where Dr. Prentiss greatly expanded the Jennie project. It was these IQ tests that finally (in my mind) erased the dividing line between human and animal.

The problems ranged from simple to very difficult. The simpler ones were mechanical, the more difficult ones cognitive. The problems required only the minimum of signing ability, well within the range of the colony chimps. Dr. Prentiss and I had a great deal of help from an ethologist at the museum named Alfred R. Jones, and a psychologist at Tufts by the name of Murray Sonnenblick.

I'm going to describe some of the tests and their results. The conclusions were
astounding
. I can see you are nodding off already. Bear with me; I promise you will not be disappointed. This is not boring.

We tested Jennie in the museum. In an empty storage room in the basement, which we painted with bright colors and turned into a playroom. We built a one-way mirror in the door, visible from the
corridor outside. It wasn't the most comfortable observation point, sitting out there in the filthy basement corridor, with the steam pipes rumbling—but it sufficed.

The first tests involved mechanical problem solving. Many of these tests we adapted from earlier primate researchers.

The first test was called the “banana in the tube” test. It was originally thought up by Yerkes. We bolted a tube to the floor, open at both ends. Then we put a banana in the middle, out of reach. The only way to get the banana out was with a pole, by poking it through the tube and pushing the banana away from you and out the other end. Somewhat anti-intuitive.

We put Jennie inside the room and left. There was a long pole in the corner. Jennie explored everywhere, and it wasn't long before she peered into the tube and saw the banana. Jennie was so upset! She screamed and pointed and signed
Banana, Jennie eat banana! Give banana!
Nothing happened, so she tried to reach it. She hammered on the tube. She somersaulted and hooted. She drummed her hands and feet on the floor. We gave her an hour of this and then let her out. It took her three one-hour sessions before she solved the problem.

She was staring down the tube through her legs, and chattering grumpily, when suddenly she stopped, stood up and went directly to the pole propped in the corner, and grabbed it.
In that very instant
it was obvious to all of us that she had solved the problem. Sure enough, she went straight to the tube, pushed the banana out, and ate it with a great smacking of the lips. It was extraordinary. We could actually see when the idea occurred to her to use the pole.

Our psychologist, Dr. Sonnenblick, told us we should test Jennie for an ability called “cross-modal transfer.” This is nothing more than the ability to recognize through touch something we see with our eyes, and vice versa. This was, Sonnenblick said, supposed to be a uniquely human ability.

Aha! Not so. We let Jennie feel a football blindfolded. Then we showed her photographs of five objects. Right away she picked out
the football. We showed her a picture of a teacup, and then blindfolded her and let her feel five objects. Again, she picked out the teacup. The other chimps at the Barnum colony were also able to do this. Ha! You should have seen Sonnenblick's face!

I won't go into all the experiments that were done. The IQ tests showed that Jennie was smarter than the colony chimps, but not by an overwhelming margin. So, in fact, her upbringing as a human had something to do with her acquisition of language. Very, very interesting!

This was not all we discovered. The question of the chimps' IQs became secondary to what we learned from the tests themselves. And what was being discovered about chimpanzees in the wild.
I'm telling you, the sharp dividing line between man and ape has been erased
. Many of the fundamental traits that we thought distinguished humans from the animals went the way of the flat earth. Now let's see . . . I want to read you something. [Editor's note: At this point Dr. Epstein took a book down from his shelf and flipped through it.]

Aha! Diogenes. Here we are. “Plato having defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers, Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it into the Academy, and said, ‘This is Plato's man.' On which account this addition was made to the definition: ‘With broad flat nails.' ” [Laughs.]

You see, we've been trying to define Man for a long time. I mean in contradistinction to all the animals. We're obsessed with it. It was a ridiculous exercise then, as Diogenes points out, and it is now. But we can't help it, can we?

Many years ago they said: only human beings have the ability to make and use tools. Not so: Jane Goodall observed wild chimpanzees making and using tools. Then they said it was language that made us human. Not so again: since the late fifties chimpanzees have been learning ASL and other symbolic languages.

Well then, they said: only humans have imagination and creativity. Well, I told you about Jennie and the doll. We did other tests
that showed extraordinary imagination and creativity on the part of chimps.

So they said that we human beings are the only ones who could understand and manipulate symbols. Right? Wrong. In dozens of tests, Jennie and the colony chimps showed ample knowledge of symbols and pictures. I remember Jennie putting her ear to a drawing of a conch shell, listening for the sea. We were able to show that she recognized certain letters and even two or three words. Yes indeed, whole words. The Barnum chimps used colored disks to get food and toys.

Aha! they said, but chimpanzees surely don't have the awareness of self that humans do. Wrong again. All you had to do was put Jennie in front of the mirror and sign
Who that?
and she would sign
Me Jennie!
Now if you can devise a better test for self-awareness than that, be my guest.

Yes, they said, but only humans have the ability to abstract and generalize. Right? Sorry, my friend. Jennie and the colony chimpanzees all showed the ability to classify apples, oranges, and bananas into the concept of
fruit
. She could classify plates, cups, and spoons in the category of
tableware
, many kinds of insects as
bugs
, and so forth. Jennie used the
open
sign to indicate the opening of doors, cans of food, turning on the water faucet, and opening the mouth. Think about that for a moment. That alone requires a high level of symbolic reasoning, generalization, and symbolic classification.