EKPHRASIS : Art Describing Art : 2015
California Writers Club, Mendocino Branch : A Collaboration : Artists Co-Op of Mendocino
Writers Providing Works for Visual Artists Responses
Norma Watkins “Raised by Apes”
Provided work for the responding visual artist,
Lynne Whiting Robertson “Tarzan and the Apes”
Raised by Apes by Norma Watkins
From age three to five, I went through the medley of childhood diseases: two kinds of measles, mumps, and chicken pox. Books were my father’s solution to bedridden fretting. Jackson, Mississippi, had no bookstore in the 1940s. We purchased books at an office supply store downtown. Daddy arrived in my sick room one evening with a red-bound volume, sat on my bed, and began to read. The book was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. I fell into that jungle world as if shoved off a cliff.
I was there with the wrecked plane. I was the tiny boy-child rescued by an ape. I grew with Tarzan in that tangled jungle, him outpacing me (This being one of the joys of fiction: the intolerable slowness of childhood is overcome.). Tarzan and I—never mind that I was a girl—grew into muscular adulthood inside the red covers of those books. On stout vines, we swung bare-chested among the treetops, making friends of the animals, screaming our jungle calls, rescuing the helpless and punishing the wicked.
I learned the agony of suspense from Burroughs, who made you wait through a deadly London chapter with Tarzan’s family, before moving on to the next cliff-hanging, nail-biting jungle adventure.
Volume after volume, through my childhood diseases, through a cracked collarbone and a broken arm, the shelf of red-bound books grew.
After I mastered reading, I went through them again. With Tarzan, I taught myself to read from the dictionary he scavenged from the wrecked plane. Through his eyes, I struggled to decipher an alphabet that looked like insects fixed to the white page—exactly the way letters looked to me before I learned. I suffered with Tarzan when he grasped the words, but was unable to speak because he’d never heard another human voice.
Daddy and I reached the end of the store’s supply of Tarzan, but I was old enough by then to ride in the back of the bus to the public library with my nurse Marie. The children’s library was in the basement and the main library upstairs. I searched through the basement shelves for any Tarzan books I might have missed and found nothing. We went to the lady at the desk for help.
She greeted Marie’s polite request with a certain stiff-necked disapproval. I would not understand for years that my nurse was only allowed inside this library because she was in uniform and accompanied by white me.
I wanted Tarzan? The librarian was sorry to inform us, but the books I sought were shelved upstairs in the adult library, and no, I was not old enough to be allowed up there. Tarzan books were not considered suitable reading for small children. She spoke with some satisfaction. Didn't I know these books promoted evolution? He was, after all, raised by apes.
From age three to five, I went through the medley of childhood diseases: two kinds of measles, mumps, and chicken pox. Books were my father’s solution to bedridden fretting. Jackson, Mississippi, had no bookstore in the 1940s. We purchased books at an office supply store downtown. Daddy arrived in my sick room one evening with a red-bound volume, sat on my bed, and began to read. The book was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. I fell into that jungle world as if shoved off a cliff.
I was there with the wrecked plane. I was the tiny boy-child rescued by an ape. I grew with Tarzan in that tangled jungle, him outpacing me (This being one of the joys of fiction: the intolerable slowness of childhood is overcome.). Tarzan and I—never mind that I was a girl—grew into muscular adulthood inside the red covers of those books. On stout vines, we swung bare-chested among the treetops, making friends of the animals, screaming our jungle calls, rescuing the helpless and punishing the wicked.
I learned the agony of suspense from Burroughs, who made you wait through a deadly London chapter with Tarzan’s family, before moving on to the next cliff-hanging, nail-biting jungle adventure.
Volume after volume, through my childhood diseases, through a cracked collarbone and a broken arm, the shelf of red-bound books grew.
After I mastered reading, I went through them again. With Tarzan, I taught myself to read from the dictionary he scavenged from the wrecked plane. Through his eyes, I struggled to decipher an alphabet that looked like insects fixed to the white page—exactly the way letters looked to me before I learned. I suffered with Tarzan when he grasped the words, but was unable to speak because he’d never heard another human voice.
Daddy and I reached the end of the store’s supply of Tarzan, but I was old enough by then to ride in the back of the bus to the public library with my nurse Marie. The children’s library was in the basement and the main library upstairs. I searched through the basement shelves for any Tarzan books I might have missed and found nothing. We went to the lady at the desk for help.
She greeted Marie’s polite request with a certain stiff-necked disapproval. I would not understand for years that my nurse was only allowed inside this library because she was in uniform and accompanied by white me.
I wanted Tarzan? The librarian was sorry to inform us, but the books I sought were shelved upstairs in the adult library, and no, I was not old enough to be allowed up there. Tarzan books were not considered suitable reading for small children. She spoke with some satisfaction. Didn't I know these books promoted evolution? He was, after all, raised by apes.
