We'll All Be a Monkey's Uncle

Kaitlyn Greenidge, We Love You, Charlie Freeman

The Freeman family of Dorchester, Boston, has accepted a job at a rural research academy. Because all four family members speak fluent sign language, they’re perfect lab workers to teach an orphaned chimpanzee sign language at the Toneybee Institute, which specializes in teaching primates to speak. So they accept the job over they very young daughters’ objections. Because hey, obviously it’s just a job like any other, right?

Arriving at the Toneybee, the Freemans find themselves the only Black family in Courtland County. The chimpanzee they’re hired to teach proves obstreperous and unwilling to learn. The White students at Courtland County High School, far from greeting Charlotte Freeman with the hostility she expects, seem largely indifferent. And, deep within the institute’s archives, Charlotte finds evidence that the research history is anything but benevolent.

Debut novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge writes a story that, on one level, almost dares you to tease out the autobiographical elements. Charlotte Freeman, the first-person narrator who tells us about half the novel, is roughly Greenidge’s age, a displaced native Bostonian, and shares a smattering of other characteristics. Her primate language backstory includes elements people who enjoy reading science, like me, will recognize from genuine science.

But in other ways, one gets the feeling this novel answers back to previous “great” literature. Charlotte Freeman, fourteen years old in 1990, shares characteristics with famous child narrators, like Holden Caulfield and Scout Finch: a heated childhood perspective, recalled by an adult. That’s just one moment I noticed celebrated White authors’ storytelling subverted by being retold from a Black perspective. You’ll undoubtedly notice even more.

The Freemans have different responses to Charlie. While Charlotte considers him a nuisance and dislikes the inquisitive White research staff, her younger sister Callie throws herself wholly into being a chimp’s sibling and desperately tries to win Charlie’s love. Charles Freeman takes a day job teaching high school geometry, the only Black teacher some students have ever known. Laurel Freeman becomes Charlie’s full-time mother, which starts to blur some boundaries.

Kaitlyn Greenidge

Thrown outside their longstanding comfort zones, the Freemans find their identities disappearing into only one or two characteristics. Surprised by White classmates’ relative nonchalance, she discovers the only other black student in Courtland County; together, they test a mix of revolutionary politics and nascent sexuality. Charlotte’s story increasingly becomes about her deeply felt but directionless anger. She’s earned the right to be pissed off.

While Charlotte’s school days are intricately described, Callie’s education basically doesn’t exist herein (which furthers my belief in Charlotte’s autobiographical qualities). Instead, Callie struggles to win Charlie’s affection, but measures love in human terms: Callie wants a baby brother, Charlie wants a fellow chimpanzee. In desperation, Callie turns to literal wizardry in an attempt to breach Charlie’s defenses.

The parents start off loving and middle-class, but Charlie changes their dynamic. As Laurel’s life orbits permanently around Charlie’s unreasonable demands, Charles disappears into his day job, becoming a stranger. When a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner hastens a collision between the sacrifices Laurel makes for Charlie, and Charles’ brother’s Black Power rhetoric, all semblance of family returns to the dust it came from.

Greenidge’s back-cover synopsis promises the Freeman family will discover shocking secrets inside the Toneybee institute’s history. Well, it’s a Black family in a mostly-White community, and we’re readers, we remember Tuskegee. We already know the discovery will be forthrightly racist. We enter the story with two questions: what will it be? And, how will the living handle learning the secrets the dead strove to conceal?

(As anybody who has taken a postgrad creative writing workshop knows, Black issues are treated as “racial,” but White issues are “normal.” Greenidge plays with that expectation, to great profit.)

One element I think gets short shrift, is sign language. Though the Toneybee Institute hires the Freemans because they speak fluent ASL, it doesn’t get discussed much in the book, besides a few orphaned references to Charlie mimicking the occasional sign. One wonders whether he actually understands what he’s saying; and one never quite finds out, because that story component doesn’t merit enough word count to matter.

Notwithstanding that quirk, Greenidge creates a story of how the need to make a living, and get along in the world, changes people, in ways they usually couldn’t have predicted. The characters undergo their respective journeys and emerge, in unique ways, changed. The novel isn’t “about race,” but it’s definitely tinged by racial experience, which readers will receive their own ways. Because we, too, are changed by the Freemans’ journey.