Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman, spent ten years as a tour guide at various sites for African American history. In her essay, “Harmony and Discord”, she notes that her experience left her feeling there was “something wrong with how Americans talked about race.” To Greenidge, our language around race was either “obsessed with progress” and “did not allow for tangents or for misfits or for bitterness”, or it focused around “a version of black history that only cared about the pain, the degradation, the terror”.
Greenidge’s debut novel, on one of its many levels, seeks to address this lack in our language around race. We Love You, Charlie Freeman centers around the Freemans, a black family that agrees to teach sign language to a chimpanzee (the titular Charlie) at an institute located in a predominantly white town in Western Massachusetts. The story moves back and forth between the Freemans’ story — switching perspectives from family member to family member — and the sordid history of the Toneybee Institute that hires them. The two stories converge on thematic and emotional levels and raise some serious questions about not just the language we have (or don’t have) about race in America, but the aspects of race we haven’t yet put words to.
The book begins, then, as a story about communication. The two Freeman daughters, Charlotte and Callie, both know sign language and often sign to each other rather than speaking. At the start of the book, the girls — especially Charlotte, the older daughter — are curious and worried about the move to the institute. Callie draws a picture for Charlie, while Charlotte recounts the pets the family has already killed: a rabbit, some fish, and the mice. When her mother tells her to drop it, Charlotte silently keeps the conversation going, signing to her sister. “The mice, I explained with my hands. We had mice and they died of heart attacks because the mated too much. They fucked — and here I spelled it out because I didn’t know the sign for that yet — they f-u-c-k-e-d to death“
This small scene, of the girls’ worries and the way they pick on and poke at each other, becomes a heartbreaking memory as their relationship fractures at the institute. It’s particularly sad because this form of communication doesn’t bring them friends. Even when her mother sent them to a camp for deaf children, Charlotte and Callie were ignored when others found out they weren’t deaf. Their sign language only allows them to communicate with each other and, in particularly intimate moments, their mother.
As the family settles into the institute, they all seem to go in different directions. Charlotte finds a friend in Aida, one of the only other black girls at school. Laurel, her mother, connects with Charlie and begins to teach the chimpanzee while also growing increasingly and, for the rest of the family, uncomfortably close to the animal. The father, Charles, begins teaching at the school Charlotte attends. Callie — left behind by mom for a chimpanzee, by Charlotte for a friend at school, by dad for a job — sneaks food and begins to put on weight.
The family’s time at the Toneybee Institute becomes a time of secrets that can only be kept for so long. Charlotte realizes, to her horror, the strange ways in which Laurel and Charlie have gotten close. Charlotte herself awakes to her own identity through her budding relationship with Aida. The Toneybee Institute’s own horrible past is reveal to us and, eventually, the Freemans.
The novel shifts, in intermittent chapters, to the story of Nymphadora, a lonely black woman in the ’20s. A scientist seemingly befriends her and talks her into letting him draw her naked body in various positions. What she sees as an intimate exchange becomes, tragically, a horrifically racist attempt at scientific research, one that includes not just these drawings but also degrading psychological exams of black men in Nymphadora’s community.
The notion of being looked at, the constant state of being watched, informs the black experience in this novel for both Nymphadora and her community and for the Freemans. For Charlotte, Aida becomes a source of new “rules” for being black. She had grown up learning unspoken rules of assimilation:
We’d had our own version of these rules back home in Dorchester, but they have been rules of what you weren’t supposed to do in public, what you weren’t supposed to do around white people. Laugh too loudly, show anger, dress raggedly, show any sign of disorder or chaos. Fit perfectly — without strain — into space.
With Aida and her mother Marie, however, Charlotte was not taught rules of assimilation but rather of separation, of race identity through denial of perceived white norms:
According to them, these were the things black people did not do: eat mayonnaise; drink milk; listen to Elvis Presley; watch Westerns or Dynasty; read Time magazine; appreciate Jack London; know the lyrics to Kenny Rogers’s songs; suffer fools; enjoy the cold or any kind of winter.
This split language around how to act, between how to fit in and how to distinguish yourself, constitutes another form of looking and being seen in the novel. The former seeks invisibility, negating any gaze coming your way by becoming invisible through assimilation. The other seeks to defiantly stand out from those that would set you apart in the first place. Both prove damaging to Charlotte and her family.
Charlotte is at the center of all of this and, despite her lack of relationship with Charlie or involvement with teaching him, she is at the heart of this novel. She loves Aida, and Aida seems to love her back, and the two communicate their confusing love and budding sexuality without words, with just the touch of a hand on a back, with a look. They connect behind closed doors, where no one can see, and still they don’t speak. For all the history that floats around their story, theirs is the most heartbreaking part of the novel, the one that brings all the isolation and confusion of identity — through not just race but also gender and sexuality — to the surface and lets these characters wonder if they are equipped to deal with it.
Things do unravel at the institute. The past becomes known and secrets of the present bubble to the surface — over the course of a Thanksgiving dinner, a family event filmed by the people at Toneybee. But if these elements, from Nymphadora to Charlotte and Aida to Callie’s isolation to Laurel’s fascination with Charlie to her strained, distant relationship with her husband, all have thematic ties, they also strain the narrative structure of the novel. The back and forth between the Freemans and Nymphadora sets up ideas in the text, but it also keeps the story from setting up and progressing.
Despite all the ideas of being looked at, We Love You, Charlie Freeman often asks the reader to look at too much, or to dart back and forth between things so that — while we look at them a lot — we don’t always get to see them. This could be another point of the text, a structure meant to mirror the fleeting ways in which we look at and define each other. But if that is an effective thematic tool, it’s not a particularly satisfying one. To see chapters from the father’s perspective, for example, speaks to the many effects of this kind of observation, but his story is not as compelling as Charlotte’s, while the heartache Callie is going through simmers under the surface for too long.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman certainly earns some of its moments. There are scenes that will break your heart and details that will smack you sideways. In the end, the book raises important questions about what it means to be other, how that constructs the way the majority looks at you, and how we haven’t quite found a language — sign or spoken — for that. But, oddly enough, it’s sometimes those very ideas that obscure the characters and their stories from us.