Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (39 page)

Big Guy, he’s really something. I seen him fight off two, three, lots
of Strangers, all at once, all by himself. One time he save a little kid that fall into the water. Would’ve drowned for sure. Big Guy, he’s got balls.

After Big Guy it’s pretty much what I say goes. I’m high up. Besides Big Guy, hardly anybody gets on me. ’Course, I need help now and then from the other guys. I spend a lot of time stroking them. But that’s OK. You should see some of the guys my kid brother has to let get on him. Sometimes if Big Guy’s pissed off, you can calm him down just by touching his cock. Sometimes you gotta do more. It just means you’re cool.

When there’s enough to eat and there’s no Strangers around, everybody chills out. Guys get calm. In the early afternoon they all get sleepy, you know, and take naps. Not much trouble then. Too much calm, though, you get itchy for patrol.

I come up through the ranks. I don’t get to be number two by accident. When I start out, I’m not grown yet, nobody give me respect. I want respect so bad back then. When I get big enough, some of the other kids, then some of their mothers and sisters, they start giving me respect. Then all the females. Then I gotta start working myself up with the guys. It was hard. Sometimes I gotta beg food from them. Meat especially. Sometimes, when they give me a little piece, I’d grab it all and run. They’d get real pissed off. It wasn’t easy then. Now it’s different. Now everybody give me respect. Even Squint, sometimes. Even the Big Guy, sometimes.

We get on good. I help him, he help me. He scratch my back, I scratch his, know what I mean? I’m real close to him, closer than anybody except maybe Squint. But one time he got mad at me for not showing enough respect. He think he’s gonna teach me some manners. We have a big fight. Lots of other guys join in. More fights break out. More guys jump on. Maybe they’re helping their brother, or maybe they’re nervous about Big Guy and me fighting. Guys who’re fighting ask for help from guys who’re just watching. Pretty soon everybody’s fighting.

But Big Guy, he don’t look at nobody else but me. And he whip my ass. Then he start calming everybody down. I had to respect him. That was like a real Boss. Still, he beat me in front of everybody. One of these days I’m gonna make my move. He’s been good for me. But I want him off me. Someday I’m gonna be all over him.

Right now, though, Big Guy and Squint and me, we gotta stick together. Some of the young guys are getting restless. They want to stick it to us. I know what those guys are like. When they see us they suck up to us. They show respect. But inside, they think “Up yours.” They think, “My time’s gonna come.” Well, my time’s gonna come first.

——

One thing I wouldn’t let even the Big Guy mess with. That’s my kid. That’s where I draw the line. No one messes with him. When we’re out together, scrounging for something to eat, and I see my kid looking up at me, I know I’d sooner die than let anybody hurt him. He feels like that about me too. When the guys—even top guys—threaten me, my kid come over and try to protect me. They respect him for it. ’Course, just like every other kid around here, all he’s really got is his mother. If I don’t protect him, who will? When he was little he’d eat stuff that make him sick. I gotta stop him. I gotta show him what’s good to eat. He really need me then. He still does, more than he know. Sometimes the guys babysit and they seem to like him. But you can’t trust guys
.

One of the young guys wanna fuck his mother. She don’t want to. One of these days he gonna hurt her bad. He can fuck his sister, but he should leave his mother alone. When the mood comes over the guys, though, they can’t help themselves. They go crazy. They act like animals
.

Sometimes guys go so crazy, they beat a kid to death for nothing, just for being there. A guy, he gets to be a pain in the ass, he gets chewed out by some big shot. So he go look for somebody to kick around, some nobody—some female, some kid. When guys get pissed off it’s no good for anybody—least of all females and kids. You work real hard to get them calm
.

One time my sister’s kid, he musta got sick or something. All of a sudden he can’t move his legs no more. He can’t walk. He just drag himself along by his hands. He look real weird. First, folks look away. None of the guys come ’round to babysit no more. Later, they hassle him. Then they attack him. Then they kill him off, snap his neck. I was sad for my sister
.

My kid, all he lives for is to be in the gang, get respect, go out on patrol. He’s too little now, but his time’ll come. He’d do anything for
a pat from the Big Guy. Me, too. I love it when the Big Guy touches my hand
.

And he stop the young guys from fighting. He’s got a look that says “Up your ass.” Most of the time he just flash that look and the guys, they calm down. Grown-ups, they know how far they can go. They make lots of threats. Except for Strangers, though, nobody gets hurt much. But real young guys, they don’t know the difference. After they get to a certain age they can hurt each other bad. I don’t want my kid hurt by some asshole who don’t know his own strength. Big Guy puts a stop to that
.

And he takes care of me. The Big Guy—or Buddy, but I know the Big Guy put him up to it—sometimes goes ’round handing out food. Meat especially. Meat’s not so easy to come by. They always give me and the kid some. They give it mostly to the good-looking females, like me, to make sure we’ll come across. But I’d do it for free, anytime he wants. A lot of folks beg for more when they hand the food out. Not me. I don’t have to
.

When the guys leave me alone, I spend all my time with my sister, my girlfriends, my grown-up daughter. We watch out for each other. We give each other respect. I’d be nowhere without them
.

One time when I was young—before anybody fucked me except for play—I got fed up. I wasn’t getting no respect. I was off by myself taking a walk and I see this cute guy. He don’t see me. He’s a Stranger—you can tell right away—but he’s real cute. Then all of a sudden he’s gone. After, I keep thinking about him. Maybe all Strangers are as cute as him. Maybe Strangers gimme respect. So I go to check ’em out
.

It’s a long walk and I don’t wanna run into our patrols. But I get there OK. Pretty soon I find a guy. A Stranger guy. I don’t think he’s the same one I seen the first time, but he’s real cute, too. I give him a look, and I can see he’s eager. There’s two females there, though, his kind, and they’re not happy to see me like he is. They come at me, yelling and scratching and biting, and I run back home. It’s a long way. When I get here, it don’t seem anybody notice I’m gone—except for Mom, of course. She gimme a big hug. I miss Mom
.

MORTIFYING REFLECTIONS

E
arly in the fifth century
B.C.
, Hanno of Carthage set sail into the western Mediterranean with a fleet of sixty-seven ships, each with fifty oars, carrying altogether thirty thousand men and women. Or at least this is what he claimed in the
Periplus
—a chronicle that was posted in one of the many temples consecrated to the god Baal after his return home. Sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar, he turned south, establishing cities along the West African coast as he went, including present-day Agadir, Morocco. Eventually, he came to a land filled with crocodiles and hippopotami and many groups of people, some herders, some “wild men,” some friendly, some not. The interpreters he had brought from Morocco could not understand the languages spoken here. He sailed by what is now Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. He passed a great mountain from which a fire reached “to heaven,” and from which, night and day, “streams of fire flowed into the sea.” This is, almost certainly, the Mount Cameroon volcano just east of the delta of the River Niger. He may have gone almost as far as the Congo before returning.

In the last of eighteen short paragraphs in his
Periplus
, Hanno describes finding, just before turning back, an island in an African lake,

The males escaped by climbing precipices and hurling stones. But the females were not so lucky.

Modern scholars take these beseiged and mutilated beings to be either what we today call gorillas, or chimpanzees. One of the details, the throwing of stones by the males, suggests to us that they were chimps. The
Periplus
is the earliest firm historical account we have of a first contact between apes arid humans.
³

——

The ancient Mayan authors of the
Popol Vuh
considered monkeys to be the product of the last botched experiment conducted by the gods before they finally got it right and managed to create us. The gods meant well, but they were fallible, imperfect artisans. Humans are hard to make. Many peoples in Africa, Central and South America, and the Indian subcontinent thought of apes and monkeys as beings with some deep connection to humans—aspirant humans, perhaps, or failed humans, demoted for some grave transgression against divine law, or voluntary exiles from the self-discipline demanded by civilization.

In ancient Greece and Rome the similarity of apes or monkeys with humans was well-known—indeed, it was stressed by Aristotle
*
and Galen. But this led to no speculations about common ancestry. The gods who had made humans were also in the habit of changing themselves into animals to rape or seduce young women: Like the centaurs and the Minotaur, the offspring of these unions were chimeras, part beast, part human. Still, no ape chimeras are prominent in the myths of Greece and Rome.

In India and ancient Egypt, though, there were monkey-headed gods, and in the latter large numbers of mummified baboons—indicating that they were cherished if not worshipped. A monkey apotheosis would have been unthinkable in the post-classical West—in part because the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religion came of age where nonhuman primates were rare or absent, but mainly because the worship of animals (for example, the Golden Calf of the Israelites) was singled out as an abomination: They were pedaling away from animism
as fast as they could. Apes were not widely available for examination in Europe until about the sixteenth century; the so-called Barbary ape of North Africa and Gibraltar—which is what Aristotle and Galen apparently described—is actually a monkey, a macaque.

Without exposure to the beasts most like men, it was difficult to draw the connection between beasts and men. It was easier by far to imagine a separate creation of each species, with the less vivid similarities between us and other animals (the suckling of the young, say, or five toes on each foot) understood as some trademark idiosyncracy of the Creator. The ape was as far below man, it was asserted, as man was below God. So, when, after the Crusades, and especially beginning in the seventeenth century, the West came to know monkeys and apes better, it was with a sense of embarrassment, shame, a nervous snigger—perhaps to disguise the shock of recognition at the family resemblance.

The Darwinian idea that monkeys and apes are our closest relatives brought the discomfort to the conscious level. You can still see the unease today in the conventional associations with the word “ape”: to copy slavishly, to be outsized and brutal. To “go ape” is to revert, to become wild, untamed. When we handle something idly, in an exploratory way, we’re “monkeying around.” To “make a monkey” out of someone is to humiliate him. A “little monkey” is a mischievous or playful child. A “monkeyshine” is a prank. To “go bananas” is to lose control—reflecting the fact that monkeys and apes, who indeed love bananas, are not subject to the same social restraints that we are. In Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, monkeys and apes were emblematic of extreme ugliness, of a doomed craving for the status of humans, of ill-gotten wealth, of a vengeful disposition, of lust and foolishness and sloth.
⁵
They were accessories—because of their susceptibility to temptation—in the “Fall of Man.” For their sins, it was widely held, apes and monkeys deserved to be subjugated by humans. We seem to have weighed these beings down with a heavy burden of symbols, metaphors, allegories, and projections of our own fears about ourselves.