Jennie (27 page)

If you have ever watched a fluent ASL person, you'd see immediately that the entire body and face are involved. Watch me. I'm going to tell you a story about Jennie. In ASL. Oh, I hope I can remember it after all these years! But instead of just mouthing the words—like real ASL translators do, to help lip readers—I speak them. See? Here goes. [Dr. Prentiss stands up and demonstrates.]

A-little-while-ago Jennie and Pam go walk. We walk, walk, walk to brook. See water there. Jennie like go swim? No! Jennie no like water! Jennie and Pam go tree. Jennie climb, climb, climb tree. Jennie see everything! Jennie queen of everything! Jennie hoot. Entire town hear Jennie. Pam cannot climb. Pam stay at bottom. Pam cry, cry, cry
.

See what I mean? The whole body is involved.

One of the great myths of ASL is that it is an “artificial” or “invented” language. Not so. ASL has biological and evolutionary roots just as surely as spoken language does. Did you know that research on gorillas has shown that they communicate using gestures? Now listen to this. An ASL-like language may very well have preceded spoken language in human development. A kind of language with gestures and vocalizations. Gradually the vocalizations took over from the gestures, because it's so much more convenient to speak than gesture. I mean, this stuff is
unbelievable
.

With me and Jennie, so much was beyond just signing. So much more was exchanged between us than what you see in those transcripts. There was no way to quantify the incredible level of communication we had.

Jennie and the other chimpanzees had this ability to convey information through facial expression, gesture, and body language. While the utterances remained mostly one to three words, the facial expressions and body language became more and more sophisticated. You see, the problem is that this result was very difficult to quantify. It was mind-to-mind, in a way. But of course, none of that is scientific or quantifiable. If I said anything like that at a meeting, they'd laugh me out of the room. Nobody knows what language is. It isn't just speech, that's for sure. But try to explain that to some of these reductionist structural linguists.

Anyway, I have a theory. I believe that we humans, in teaching chimpanzees and gorillas ASL, stumbled upon a natural communication system already in use. We just enhanced it. This is just my opinion and I wouldn't dare put it in a paper. See, with this vicious
attack against the Jennie project, we never had a chance to look at some of these things.

We had planned a six-year project. It ended up being about five years. Toward the end Jennie and I had quite a bit of trouble. The inconsistent and chaotic atmosphere in the Archibald home was starting to take its toll. Jennie became very disobedient. She picked up a lot of Mrs. Archibald's ways. Very aggressive.

I am very sorry to report to you that the Archibalds began giving Jennie liquor to drink. They were drinkers in the evening, having a cocktail before dinner and then a glass of wine at dinner. They actually allowed Jennie the same. Almost every night. I tried to put a stop to it but was unsuccessful. I know this will sound shocking to you but it was no secret to anyone. I must report it as the truth. So you can see that Jennie's home situation was not exactly ideal.

When Sandy was young, we had a great relationship. Sandy was a brilliant child. He is, if I may use a tired world, I mean word, a genius. Where did that Freudian slip come from?

As he became a teenager, he developed an antagonism toward me. He picked this up from his mother. He made all these outrageous and silly accusations against me. He kept Jennie out late at night. She was bleary and irritable in the mornings when I arrived. He interrupted our sessions. He talked about me to Jennie behind my back. Jennie never did reject me, however. Oh no. She loved me to the very end. Her love for me was more powerful than anything the Archibalds could undermine.

When Sandy reached adolescence he rebelled. He was a terrible role model for Jennie. You see, Sandy affected the pose of an SDS Yippie “radical.” Of course, he wasn't a real radical, just a spoiled white middle-class teenager. He was never in danger of being drafted, either. But this didn't stop him from protesting and calling for the burning of the banks.

Jennie picked up a number of terrible habits from Sandy. I'm
almost positive she smoked pot, and it's possible she even took LSD with Sandy or his friends.

The real blow to the project came in 1973. I expected a renewal of my NSF grant for 1973. This was automatic. The NSF rarely cuts off funding in the middle of a research project, especially when the results are as spectacular as ours were. But there were other forces afoot. Do you remember Senator William Proxmire and his “Golden Fleece” awards? That shit Proxmire found he could get votes by criticizing government-funded scientific research that he didn't understand. Proxmire had about a fifth-grade knowledge of science. Every year he would select a few projects that he felt had no merit and would award them a golden fleece. As in “fleecing” the taxpayers.

Oh my God, I'll never forget the morning I unfolded my
New York Times
and found that our chimpanzee linguistic project “won” a golden fleece. Right on the front page. I felt like throwing up. Proxmire said the American taxpayers had wasted $550,000 teaching five chimpanzees to talk sign language. What could a chimpanzee have to say that might be of interest? Proxmire asked. Well, he said, here it is in black and white, here are the earth-shattering comments from these chimps, after a half million dollars of English lessons: “Gimme banana!” and “I gotta go potty!” He was reading from one of my papers on the Senate floor! The big fat pompous asshole. I should've sued the bastard. Then he went on and on about how our young people can't afford the five thousand dollars to go to college while millions are being spent teaching chimpanzees. As if this money had been taken away from deserving students. The big fat sack of shit.

So, despite outstanding results and excellent peer reviews, the funding was killed. Losing our NSF funding wouldn't have been the end of the world, except that after Proxmire no private foundation would even touch the project. All our funding was withdrawn. We were the lepers of science. It was that fellow at Penn, Craig Miller, who was behind it. Miller got ahold of some videotape of Jennie
signing on some pretext and then analyzed it. They concluded that everything she said was cued. They felt that almost every sign of Jennie's was a repeat of a sign that had just been made by the trainer. Then there was that absurd syntax business again. No language without syntax. Well, what about Latin! These assholes didn't even know Latin! Where did these guys go to school?

Anyway, these conclusions came from people who had never spent any time with chimpanzees. You can't tell anything from a two-hour videotape. I spent five years with five chimpanzees. There are so many modes of communication between human and chimp that can't be quantified. Body language. Vehemence and speed of gesture, facial expression. You had to be there with Jennie to understand the depth of communication. With our enemies out there, and a Senator against us, we got hammered.

This research had been extremely expensive. Maintaining the Barnum estate, paying for teachers, trainers, and keepers twenty-four hours a day for the colony chimpanzees, my time teaching Jennie, and the thousands of hours spent analyzing and processing the data. A humane research environment for chimpanzees is very, very expensive. I'm sure Miller would have been much happier if we'd locked all the chimps in four-by-five cages. When we lost our funding, we had to shut down the project immediately.

This was a terrible loss to science. I can't even begin to tell you. But it also affected Jennie. It was the beginning of the end.

[F
ROM
an editorial in the
Boston Globe
, February 1, 1973. Used with permission.]

Every year, Congress and the public eagerly await Senator William Proxmire's “Golden Fleece” awards. Sen. Proxmire, the watchdog of the scientific community, has tracked down and reported taxpayer-financed scientific research that is redundant, unnecessary, or just plain silly. Those projects that represent an egregious waste of
taxpayer money are given his highest award, known as the Golden Fleece. Many of the projects that win the award seem amusing, until one examines the cost.

This year Sen. Proxmire gave his uncoveted award to a project going on right here in Boston, a joint effort sponsored by Tufts University and the Boston Museum of Natural History. Over half a million dollars of National Science Foundation monies have supported this project since its inception in 1967. The nature of the project? Teaching chimpanzees to “talk” using American Sign Language.

The question is, do we really need talking chimpanzees? The supporters of the project tell us they are unlocking the secrets of human language. But Sen. Proxmire—backed up by an eminent-scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Craig Miller—has called that idea into question. The project has yielded nothing more than elaborate imitative behavior on the part of the apes. Nothing approaching real communication—that is, language—has resulted. And all this after spending half a million dollars of public money. When our inner cities are crumbling, when children go hungry, and when people shiver in freezing tenements because they can't afford to buy heating oil, surely there are better ways to spend a half million dollars.

So we say to Sen. Proxmire: Bull's-eye! Or should we say, Chimp's-eye!

[F
ROM
a letter to the editor, published in the
Boston Globe
on February 11, 1973.]

Dear Editor,

So you think the world doesn't need talking chimpanzees. Well, have any of your smart-aleck editorial writers bothered to come here to Kibbencook and see our “talking” chimpanzee? Her name is Jennie and
she's a member of our family and communicates with those around her a lot better than most human children her age. I open your paper in the morning and I can hardly wade through all the gobbledygook that you try to pass off as “news.” If you call that “communication” then you deserve a Platinum Fleece. As for Craig Miller, not once—not
once
—has he ever met Jennie! So what does he know? Or as Jennie would say, “Phooey to you!”

I
think what the world doesn't need are talking editorial writers.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Hugo Archibald

[F
ROM
an interview with Lea Archibald.]

At the age of fifteen and a half, Sandy got his learner's permit. God save us. Of course, he had to have an adult in the car until he was sixteen, or something like that. That didn't stop him. He began taking the car out when he wasn't supposed to, and Jennie of course went with him. Jennie loved to ride in the car. She would hang out the window and make big vulgar noises and give people the “finger.” I just cringe when I think about it. Hugo was not a stern disciplinarian, and I had more than I could handle.

That winter, the winter of 1973, the big “event” occurred. That was what made Jennie famous all over again. There was an ice storm and everything was covered with a layer of ice. I was out shopping and Hugo was holed up in his study, where he always was. Sandy snuck out the Falcon, and they went down to the high school parking lot. Well, I came home and the car was gone. I thought, That's funny, Hugo didn't say he was going out. And just then Hugo came out of his office. I said, “Where's Sandy and Jennie?”

He said, “Why, aren't they right here?”

As if on cue, the telephone rang. Oh my goodness. It was the Kibbencook town police. They were in an uproar down there. We were told to come down immediately. I could hear in the background this appalling sound that could only be simian in origin. The policeman was hopping mad. He started yelling at me over the telephone, all about how I was going to get a big bill for damages and the animal control people were there because Jennie had bitten a policeman and she would have to be destroyed.

Oh my goodness, you can imagine what we were thinking. We rushed down there. The whole place was in a shambles. The dogcatcher had arrived to get Jennie. The poor man was scared to unlock the jail cell where Jennie was shut in. Jennie was tearing up the place. Oh dear. Forgive me for laughing. It seems funny now but at the time we weren't at all amused.

It seems that Sandy had been skidding around the parking lot, I think they called it “doing donuts.” Making the car spin around in circles on the ice. The police arrived and this one officer ordered Sandy out of the car. The man was angry and acting like a bully, as policemen do. His name was Russo. Bill Russo. Well, I'd known Bill Russo for years, and he was a bit, shall we say, limited. He knew Sandy, or should have known him, but I guess he didn't recognize him with the long hair. Thought he was some kind of crazed hippie. So he ordered Sandy up against the car with his arms out, and started searching him. Well, you know how protective Jennie was. She tumbled out of the car with a scream and gave Russo a good bite on the leg, really opened it up. That chimp was strong.

Like the complete ass that he was, Russo drew his service revolver and pointed it at Jennie. Sandy, of course, went berserk, screaming and grabbing at the gun and wrapping himself around Jennie. He called Russo the most horrid names, fascist pig and that sort of thing. It must have been just awful, thinking this moron was
going to shoot Jennie. I'm sure he would have if Sandy hadn't stopped him. Sandy saved Jennie's life.

So they threw Sandy and Jennie in the back of the car and brought them down to the Kibbencook police station over there on Washington Street. Even though Sandy quite reasonably asked that he and Jennie be put in the same cell, they were separated. And Jennie—who
hated
cages—Well! she just destroyed that cell, tore open the mattress, broke the toilet, unscrewed everything and busted the sink. The dogcatcher arrived and he was this horrid fat thing who was afraid to open the door. He was getting ready to shoot Jennie with a tranquilizing dart. Sandy told him Jennie was part of a secret government scientific project and that if they did anything to her the FBI would put him in jail. Can you imagine? Honestly, it was so funny. I don't know whether this idiot of a dogcatcher believed it, but the police chief had read about Jennie and the research, so he asked the man to wait until we came down.