We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Author:Kaitlyn Greenidge [Greenidge, Kaitlyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61620-607-9
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2016-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

Charlotte

“They’re all racists.”

“Who?” Adia asked.

I had caught her before she went into school. It didn’t take much to get her to skip. We’d snuck back into her house while Marie was out teaching her morning class, and now we sat huddled together underneath the blankets in her room.

“The Toneybee Institute.” I slid the book toward her. “It says it right there.”

Adia flipped the pages and slid it back to me. “You’re gonna tell me what’s in it, or you’re just gonna sit here and watch me read it?”

“The lady who wrote this book. She came here and talked to the lady who made up that institute, the Toneybee Institute. She interviewed her.” I tapped the cover. “Miss Toneybee-Leroy. And she found out about it. They used to do experiments. In the 1930s. This doctor, Dr. Gardner, he did experiments on black people and chimps, and they did this one horrible, disgusting thing with this woman, this black woman who lived around here, and one of the chimps—”

“What happened?” Adia said, confused.

“It’s in the book,” I said again. “It’s there.”

“Are there, like, pictures if I don’t want to read the whole thing?”

I showed her the inset of photos: a black-and-white shot of the outside of the Toneybee; a hazy reproduction of Julia Toneybee-Leroy’s oil portrait; and then a few old pictures of what must have been Miss Toneybee-Leroy again, young and in a blouse and a pleated skirt and a cloche on her head, with a chimp riding her hip. The chimp wore an identical outfit, right down to the skirt and the hat.

“Those don’t look so bad,” Adia said faintly.

“Just wait.”

She turned the page.

“This is it?’

I nodded, gravely.

“I don’t get it. It’s a still life, right?”

I closed my eyes. “No.”

“Well, what is it?”

“It’s . . .” I thought I couldn’t say it. “It’s backsides. This one”—I pointed to the one on the left—“is the backside of a woman. They just know her name is Nymphadora. That’s all they could find in the archives. And this”—I pointed to the other one—“is the backside of a chimpanzee. A girl chimpanzee.”

Adia frowned. “Why?”

“Because,” I said, “they’re comparing.”

Adia was still looking at the drawings.

“They did the same thing to men,” I continued. “Not pictures or anything, but they did, like, brain tests on the black men who lived in Spring City and messed up their brains and then compared them to chimp brains. And they forced this woman to pose, they forced her to do it and then they made up a name for her so we can never find her. They’re evil, Adia. They’re all racists.”

She closed the book and I finally began to cry.

Adia and her mother warned me for weeks that the world was like this. Here was proof that it was worse. I wanted her to save me, to explain, to wax sharp and go hard.

I breathed in the balm of Adia and her mother and what I’d counted on as their superior knowledge. It smelled like flaking newspapers and the brown milky slip in its bucket.

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