James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

CHAPTER 1: THE INNOCENT ADVENTURESS

And when you see even the outline of my dear, damnable mother you’ll feel you were interviewing not only the wrong writer but the wrong woman.

—ALLI SHELDON

Mary Hastings Bradley is forgotten now, but in her daughter’s lifetime she was a famous writer. She had stories in magazines that everybody read; she gave parties everybody attended. She was a socialite, an explorer, and a big game hunter. Her earnings kept her daughter in mink coats and finishing schools. She could be a blue-eyed beauty in a lace dress one day, an expert markswoman in khaki trousers the next. For a publicity portrait she posed in an evening dress, seated on the skin of a tiger that she had shot herself.

From her earliest childhood she wanted to write and have adventures. When she lectured on her career, she told her audience that her first memory of writing was of

sitting before my dolls’ house laboriously printing out the story of what I thought was happening there. It was an Indian attack, I remember, and I remember my dear Mother saying: Don’t you want to clean your dolls’ house, Mary? Don’t you want to change your dolls’ dresses? No, Mary didn’t. She wanted to write about an Indian attack.

But for a long time she didn’t get the chance to risk her life, and most of the exploits in her writing were romantic ones. Reviewing her 1921 novel The Innocent Adventuress, the New York Times called her a well-qualified composer of literary confectionery who had written a little sugar-plum of a book:

How Maria is lost on a mountain all night, who rescues her and bears her in his manly arms to his shack and whom she eventually decides upon as a husband ought to be fairly clear to the astute reader. The book is written with verve, and […] is not without sufficient interest to pass an idle hour or two.

One of her early books, The Wine of Astonishment, was about the seamy side of life, and was banned in Boston, but it was about a boy’s coming of age. Her very first was a historical novel about Anne Boleyn called The Favor of Kings, published in 1912. She later said of it: I had the real stuff of history in my grasp but I was much too well brought up then to make full use of my robust material. Mary, too, was an innocent adventuress: if she wanted to have adventures, or write about them, she would have to keep up the appearance of propriety. The woman and the one who had adventures had to be two different people.

*   *   *

Mary Wilhelmina Hastings was born in Chicago on April 19, 1882, into a family that, on her mother’s side, had come to Chicago when the city was new. Mary’s grandparents were proud of their pioneer spirit and their English and New England blood. They taught Mary (who would later teach Alice) to admire courage, believe in progress, and climb socially. They passed on firm Victorian ethics and an American faith in self-transformation.

Mary adored her young mother, Lina Rickcords Hastings, but her father, William Hastings, was a more unsavory type, a hot-headed Southerner who may have been alcoholic and abusive. He died when Mary was about nine years old, though Mary sometimes claimed he had died before she was born. Afterward Mary’s mother married a doctor named Arthur Corwin and had another daughter, Sylvia, twelve years younger than Mary. A death in the family, a usurpation: this is the kind of early experience that makes a writer. It left Mary with an enormous need to be seen, to be loved, to be a heroine.

By the time she graduated from Smith College in 1905, Mary was being seen: she had already sold short stories to the popular magazines Munsey’s and the Woman’s Home Companion. She told her parents she was moving to Greenwich Village to live in a garret and become a serious writer. For a woman, though, to be loved and to be a heroine are not always the same thing. When her parents said no, Mary chose love over seriousness and returned to Chicago.

As a consolation, the Corwins offered a trip to Europe, chaperoned by an older cousin. Mary spent a whole year traveling. She visited Germany, France, Italy, and Egypt, where she took a boat trip up the Nile. This first glimpse of Africa made a deep impression. She then spent three months in Oxford, writing, sending her stories home for her mother to type, and researching her novel rehabilitating Anne Boleyn.

After she returned she used Europe as a background in stories such as The Girl from Home. In this light romance, published in Good Housekeeping in 1911, an American girl studying in Paris discovers that romantic Frenchmen are not to be trusted. Her friend Achille declares:

I also have no such wish to marry—that is of an impossibility. […] But the present we may have, and we are both young and poor together. Shall we not make life sweeter for one another?

She felt his hands stealing about her, felt him bending closer—she sprang from him, her heart hammering in sick dismay. […] That he should think such a thing of her—should suggest—

After this, she finds that dull, dependable young men from home can have their charms.

Mary was all in favor of dependable men. In 1909, when she was twenty-seven and living with her parents, she met a thirty-four-year-old lawyer named Herbert Bradley. He had just come back from Montana and was setting up a respectable law practice in Chicago. He too liked travel and adventure. They married a year later, with a honeymoon on horseback in the Rockies.

Herbert Edwin Bradley was born December 20, 1874, in Canada, the third of six sons of an Ontario farmer. As a young man he worked his way through teachers’ college, then law school at Ann Arbor and Chicago. At first he was a mining lawyer; by the time he met Mary he had started investing in real estate, putting up apartment buildings on Chicago’s South Side. These investments would make him rich. He was good-looking in a dour way, sensible, practical, careful with money. He had a sensual mouth, Alli thought, that belied his Canadian reserve. He had a side that was spontaneous and funny and made off-color jokes, and a melancholy streak that he did not let people see. He approved of Mary’s writing career and was prepared to support her, financially, practically, and emotionally. They were a good match.

In 1912, Herbert and Mary moved into the apartment they would live in for the rest of their long lives. The building at 5344 Hyde Park Boulevard was one of Herbert’s investments, a plain, three-story brick apartment house between the University of Chicago and the lake. The Bradleys had the entire top floor, plus a penthouse and roof garden. The apartment had plenty of room for their servants—cook, chauffeur, a series of governesses—and later for the Bradleys’ collection of trophies, skins, and African souvenirs.

It had room for their parties and their many friends. Mary and Herbert were social, gregarious people whose soirees and travels were covered on the society pages of the Chicago papers. Where Alice would invent alter egos to do her writing, Mary turned herself into a writer character, a figure in the Chicago society columns:

Mrs. Herbert Bradley, always one of the busiest women in town, finds her life complicated by the opera season. Her publishers make no allowance for opera-going when they set deadlines. […] As a result she finished her last novelette by dint of staying up all night after an opera performance, and startled the household when she appeared for breakfast in her evening clothes.

Mary’s energy, intensity, and generosity attracted people. She had a manner that was both grand and utterly sincere. She inspired loyalty: servants stayed with her for decades. She inspired trust: people told her their life stories. Alice wrote wryly years later,

There’s always room for another person or project in Mary’s life. If we went to the Antarctic desert, some lone Eskimo would appear and Mary would say, Why, you remember George here, he’s the man who— and we would hear all about George’s ancestors and descendants […] and George would tell me what a terrific person my mother was.

Like many creative and exciting people, she created a magical world around herself, drew her friends into it, and reigned inside it. The price for being swept up in Mary’s charm was to leave something of yourself behind.

She was not an introspective person—keeping a diary made her feel silly and self-conscious—and didn’t let people see inside. Mary’s niece Barbara Francisco, the daughter of her half sister Sylvia, recalled that despite her warmth, you couldn’t get close to her at all. She was always on stage.

One of the few people allowed behind the scenes was Alice. Under Mary’s gay and worldly air, Alice later wrote, it was understood that she was enduring terrible grief.

The house on Hyde Park Boulevard had been meant for a big family. Instead, Mary had a series of miscarriages in the five years before Alice was born. (The probable cause, Rh factor incompatibility, was not recognized until years later. Alice survived because her blood type was Rh negative, like her mother’s.) Mary was thirty-three when Alice was born, on August 24, 1915. Her birth must have given the Bradleys hope. But the worst was yet to come. When Alice was four, in 1919, Mary carried another pregnancy to term. Alice’s sister Rosemary lived only a day.

In public, Mary was brave; in private, she never stopped grieving for her lost child. A death in the family raises the stakes: it makes the survivors more protective, more loyal, more frightened, more dependent. Alice became the sole and dutiful recipient of all Mary’s hope, possessiveness, and love, and did her best to be the daughter Mary wanted. Sometimes she was afraid she was not that daughter: surely her dead sister would have been better than this flawed and disobedient living child. Death in the family may have made Alice a writer too, but first it nearly frightened her into silence.

Mary kept her surviving child close. Until she was six, Alice later claimed, she spent most of her time at home on the Bradleys’ roof garden, with only nurses and a white rabbit for company. Mary distrusted the modern city, where motors—automobiles—menace every curb and crossing, and where [Alice] could never for an instant be safely left alone on the streets.

Then the Bradleys went to Africa.

*   *   *

In 1921, to Americans, Africa was still the Dark Continent, a wild, dangerous, and enticing last frontier. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 book African Game Trails introduced America to the great white hunter and popularized the word safari. In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs published his first Tarzan story. Stories also came out of Africa about colonial cruelty and exploitation. In America in the early twentieth century, Belgian atrocities in the Congo was a familiar phrase. But Mary preferred the tales she had read as a child in Henry Morton Stanley’s In Darkest Africa, of a vast continent peopled with savages, of feverish jungles and mighty rivers, of treacherous beauty and swift death, of a primitive barbarism that had been going on from the beginning of time […] unknown and untouched by trade or civilization.

Mary had also listened to the adventures of two family friends, Carl and Delia Mickie Akeley. Before the First World War, the Akeleys had traveled widely in British East Africa, hunting animals for Chicago’s Field Museum and New York’s American Museum of Natural History. (The elephants they collected still stand in both museums.) Carl Akeley had begun his career as a taxidermist, but became a legendary naturalist and hunter. The tooth marks of a leopard on one arm recalled an attack which he had survived by killing the big cat bare-handed. Mickie, too, was a courageous traveler and an excellent shot. A close friend of Herbert’s, Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, had hunted with the Akeleys in East Africa in 1909.

Now the Akeleys were in the middle of a divorce and Carl Akeley was looking for companions and backers for a new and difficult expedition. He had plans for an African hall at the AMNH, and wanted to display the rare mountain gorilla, first seen by Europeans only nineteen years before. To get gorillas he would have to go to Central Africa—new territory for him—and travel on foot to their habitat in the eastern Congo. He also had another ambitious plan. No longer satisfied with collecting and mounting specimens, he wanted to film gorillas in the wild, using a new motion picture camera of his own invention. He suspected that gorillas were peaceful animals, and hoped to show they should not be hunted for sport.

The Bradleys were wealthy enough to help finance an expedition, and Akeley judged his younger friends hardy enough to make the trip. (Akeley was fifty-seven, Herbert and Mary forty-six and thirty-nine.) This would not be a tourist safari in British East, arranged by a professional outfitter in Nairobi. The area they were going to had first been explored by Europeans only thirty-five years before, and was accessible in about the same sense that the top of Mount Everest is now. Still, the Bradleys decided to take Alice with them, with a young woman named Priscilla Hall to look after her. Akeley’s secretary, Martha Miller, would also join the party.

The idea of taking a six-year-old girl along appealed to Akeley. While Mary dreamed of a jungle frontier, he had become impatient with the Dark Continent myth. (Firmly contradicting Stanley, he called his memoir In Brightest Africa.) To take a child on safari, he felt, would be to undermine the image of Africa as a savage wilderness. He wanted Alice to be the witness to an Africa of peace and beauty, the lamb sent to lie down with a gentle lion, and hoped that Africa seen through the eyes of a sweet little girl would all be much more beautiful than when seen through the eyes of rather blood-thirsty sportsmen and adventurers.

While Akeley was remaking hunting, Mary was preparing to remake motherhood. She wanted to be a mother and an adventure heroine both, to shoot lions and raise a daughter. There was pressure on her not to do this. When the Bradleys told the papers of their plan to go to Africa, Alice later said, editorials cast doubt on Mary’s fitness as a mother or suggested that Akeley was taking the women along as decoys to attract male gorillas. To prove she was a good mother, Mary would have to do her best, not only to protect her daughter, but to raise an exemplary girl. She could have adventures, but only if Alice would compensate for them with white dresses, blond curls, a pretty face, and her best behavior.

When we first meet young Alice, not only is she a character in one of Mary’s books—a children’s book about Africa called Alice in Jungleland—she is wearing a disguise of Mary’s making. It is August 1921, and she has just turned six, on board an ocean liner steaming from Southampton to Cape Town. The ship has announced a costume party for children, for which her mother has not come prepared. Improvising, Mary makes Alice a dress out of white crepe paper and pink ribbon, puts her in a child-sized wooden box, ties the box with a bow, and has two sailors carry it in to the party. The box is opened to reveal little Alice standing in it like a French doll at a toy shop. […] Every one had been afraid that she would never stand still, but she surprised them all by keeping perfectly quiet, just like a real doll in a box—in fact she felt so strange and shy that she didn’t want to come out of the box at all.

According to Mary, Alice was thrilled when she won a prize, and perhaps even more excited by the company: she’d never been with so many children before.

For Mary, going to Africa was a way to prove herself. For Alice it was the site of a freedom she could not quite touch and a terror she could never escape. In Africa, she later wrote, she contracted "a case of horror vitae that lasted all my life."

CHAPTER 2: AFRICA (1921–22)

In Africa, Alice was an object of fascination to everyone who met her. When she was allowed to walk, Mary wrote, she

danced along at the head of the line [of porters], holding her Daddy’s or her Mummy’s hand and waving a greeting to the native women in the fields. […] [The Congolese] had never seen a white little girl before and Alice was very strange to them, with her blue eyes and long yellow curls. They used to crowd round her on the way, and in camp would wait hours before her tent, to see her having her curls brushed. […] They felt sure that [her hair] must be some ornament she fastened on, and they used sometimes to touch it slyly, with a little pull, to make sure that it really grew on her head!

Her parents went to Africa to explore and observe. Alice got to be the baggage (she was carried most of the way by porters) and the view.

Later, when she got the chance to tell her own stories about Africa, she recalled being fascinated, indulged (if I dropped something I was quite accustomed to clap my hands and have six large, naked cannibals spring to attention and pick it up for me), occasionally miserable (looking at a photo of herself in a white dress riding a baby elephant, she remembered that she had had thin silk underpants on), and often extremely frightened. She had to be watched or she might be killed, by leopards or worse. If she even went for a pee in the high grass, her mother had to come along with a rifle.

As Mary liked to remind her readers, there were plenty of bad fates in Africa. In the adult travel book she wrote about the trip, On the Gorilla Trail, she lists gruesome endings for travelers, who are killed by leopards, crocodiles (Some hunters say that he crunches down his prey at once; others, that he holds it under until it is drowned), bugs, fevers, the sun. She visits the graves of Belgian soldiers who fought World War I in the colonies. She takes up the big game hunters’ debate on which animal was deadliest, lion, elephant, buffalo, or rhino, and jokes, Between the lion’s chances for lunch and ours for a rug the odds were sportingly even. But Mary’s story is about conquering death. Alice’s is about feeling powerless in its sight.

As the party moved north by train from Cape Town, at twenty miles an hour, stopping at Kimberley to see the diamond mines and at Bulawayo to see the statue of Cecil Rhodes, Mary measured what they saw by its state of civilization—the wilder the better. Victoria Falls felt like the edge of the known world, with their mad leap of water over savage rocks and barbaric blaze of red aloes on the banks against the white foam. Here they put on their pith helmets, which they had been told to wear at all times against the equatorial sun. But they still felt like tourists, staying at a hotel and being taken to the falls in little trolley cars pushed by local laborers along the tracks.

Mary had mixed feelings at Elisabethville, now Lubumbashi, 2,500 miles by rail from Cape Town, their first stop in the Belgian Congo and the last European town before Kampala. They arrived there on September 11, after more than a week in the train, and slept at their first tropical hotel, with a veranda and a bar full of American mining engineers. Ten years before, Elisabethville had been a collection of tin shacks, but now it was a city built for the future, well laid out, with wide streets and attractive administrative buildings. There are clubs and tennis and golf and motors—in spite of the dollar and a quarter for gasoline—good shops and Belgian and English libraries. Chicago had grown up in less than a hundred years from its own collection of shacks, and Mary must have pictured Elisabethville making the same progress, culminating in some Congolese skyscraper to rival the Wrigley Building, then rising on the banks of the Chicago River.

At Lake Tanganyika, too, Mary thought of Lake Michigan before the pioneers came, and foresaw factories, movie theaters, a whole dirty Chicago springing up along its idyllic shores. The scene she saw was beauty itself, the perfect loveliness of beauty undespoiled. But it was beauty with a doom on its bright head, for already the white man had come. […] In ten years, twenty or fifty, civilization and its gauds would be enthroned. The old Africa would go. Their very arrival on the frontier was the beginning of its end. Alice grew up, she once wrote, in a world suffused with sadness; everywhere it was said, or seen, that great change was coming fast and much would be forever gone.

But if Elisabethville was a little too modern in some ways, it was not modern enough in others: they waited for an anxious week for lost luggage and searched in vain for trained local staff for their safari. In East Africa, a standard safari package included a crew of tent boys (personal servants) and gun boys (who carried equipment and provided backup on a hunt), plus an interpreter, a cook, and porters. But this was not the usual safari route. At last they managed to hire three men who had been house servants for the Belgians. One of them, Mablanga, became Alice’s boy and watched over her protectively, while she impressed him with stories about how people lived in America.

At last they left Elisabethville on a train northbound to Bukama, where they embarked on a smoky little flat-bottomed wood-burning steamer, hardly more than a raft with an awning, with a Belgian captain and a Congolese crew. Pushing out onto the Lualaba River as a tropical rainstorm pounded the water, they felt they were on the trail, really in Africa, headed up to the heart of it. They had their traveling clothes on now, the men and women in khaki shirts and trousers, Alice in a miniature safari jacket and pants tucked into leather boots. Mary had worried Alice would be careless about wearing her pith helmet, but Alice was as anxious as her mother was to prove herself in Africa. Not only did she never forget her own helmet, she reminded the others with irritating vigilance.

When Herbert held Alice up to the rail to see their first elephants feeding on the bank, she disappointed him by not being surprised. She had been told she would see elephants, and here they were. What was the surprise in that? Still, she followed the elephants eagerly through her father’s field glasses, and stared at the hippos that came swimming around the boat and the crocodiles sunning themselves on the banks. When Akeley and Herbert Bradley fired guns into the air, the birds flew up in thousands from the trees that lined the river while Akeley filmed the scene. The adults also took potshots at the crocodiles, to make the river safer, they said. A Belgian steamer captain had been pulled under while swimming near his boat the week before.

After five days on the Lualaba they disembarked at Kabalo and took another train to the shores of Lake Tanganyika. There they camped on a windy hillside overlooking the vast blue lake, 450 miles long, with rough waters lapping a wide beach of golden sand. After a week of waiting they were picked up by the lake steamer Baron Dhanis. Crowded among missionaries and Belgian administrators, all of whom made much of Alice, they steamed north for five days to Usumbura (now Bujumbura in Burundi) at the northern tip of the lake, with a layover at Kigoma on the eastern side. There the Bradleys made an excursion to the place where Stanley had met Livingstone—not in some dark and damp African forest as Mary had always pictured it, but in the busy lakeside trading town of Ujiji, a place of sunshine and dancing waves.

At Usumbura, a center of Belgian administration, they hired more boys, and the Belgian officials sent out a request to the nearby chiefs for porters. Beyond this point they would have to go on foot.

By this time the delays were getting on Akeley’s nerves. Alice later recalled Akeley as a genius, but also a difficult, cantankerous man whose crabbiness moved her parents to great feats of tact and polite denial. (She learned from this, she said, that survival depended on not speaking one’s mind.) Alice helped by being a sweet little girl: with her childish playfulness, she could cheer Uncle Akeley when the adults could not.

Fortunately, Herbert was calm and persistent, supervising the camp, negotiating with Belgian officials, keeping their luggage moving and their papers in order, while Mary’s charm had a good effect on the local officials. On October 14, a month after they’d left Elisabethville, the porters finally arrived. At last their real travels could begin.

*   *   *

In the Congo, the Eastern Congo, Mary wrote, you sit upon a mountain peak and gaze out to other mountain peaks, like pastels with distance, and you do not wonder how you are going to those other peaks—you know. You walk.

And their baggage walked with them. It took two hundred men, each with forty to sixty pounds on his head, to carry everything they had brought: tents, cots, guns, folding bathtubs, formaldehyde, medical supplies, Mary’s typewriter, sixty-five boxes of food, four porter loads of glass-plate negatives, and the evening clothes they would need again in British East. (To future safari-goers, Mary dryly recommended lace […] and heavily beaded georgette—the beads weight down the wrinkles.) On a traditional safari the whites themselves were carried in chairs on poles, but Akeley and the Bradleys mostly preferred to walk. Alice sometimes rode on a bicycle with a jerry-built child seat, pedaled by her boy Mablanga, but more often she was carried in a hammock, lying down, barely able to see out over the sides. As they changed porters along the way, Alice kept learning the local words for Put me down! and using them loudly.

At a rate of fifteen miles a day, this long string of porters and explorers followed the Ruzizi River north toward Lake Kivu, through a fertile, green country of villages and fields on the border between Rwanda and the Belgian Congo. Again, Alice had a calming effect, this time on the people they met, who were less suspicious of a traveling party with women and a child. Mary said the natives generally assumed that she and Alice were Herbert’s favorite wife and child, traveling with him for safety’s sake. Herbert’s other wives might have poisoned them out of jealousy if they had stayed home.

This country, now a war zone, seemed to Mary then as peaceful as a park. Yet it was here, near Lake Kivu, that Alice had her first experience of death. On their march they came across elephants, and Martha Miller shot one. That night their porters and the local villagers feasted on the meat. The next day the porters refused to march and went off instead to hunt antelope. When they returned they had with them a prisoner, who they claimed had attacked and wounded one of their party. Akeley ordered the man held until they could turn him over to the Belgians. But that night the Bradleys heard screams, and in the morning the man was gone. The porters and villagers said he had escaped, but one of the boys told them he had been killed and eaten. In the tent she shared with her governess, Alice lay awake and heard the whole thing.

It was presented to Alice as a cultural difference rather than a crime, which confused and upset her: in Chicago her parents had absolute ideas about morality. There were more frightening stories. At Ujiji, Mary had explained to Alice for the first time about slavery in America. It was too big a problem for a six-year-old to worry over, so Alice’s mother soon started her talking of something else, Mary wrote in Alice in Jungleland. But Mary underestimated Alice’s capacity for worry. If death was Mary’s African theme, human cruelty would be Alice’s.

*   *   *

Lake Kivu is 5,000 feet above sea level and 1,500 feet deep. It divides Rwanda on its eastern shore from the Congo on the west and is surrounded by green, fertile hills. An African Switzerland, Mary called the setting, with wide-horned African cattle grazing on grassy slopes and the Virunga range towering above the lake’s northern end. The three tallest mountains of the Virungas, Mikeno, Karisimbi, and Visoke, are the home of the mountain gorilla. Two others of the range are active volcanoes, and at night they could see the crater of Nyamlagira, or Nyamuragira, lighting the sky above the lake’s northern edge. Every night Alice begged to be allowed to stay up until she could see the volcano glow.

The lake had first been seen by whites less than thirty years before; the Akeley party were the first Americans to reach its shores. In this pristine landscape, the little Belgian outposts, run by one or two white officers and their wives, seemed to Mary like a stage setting waiting to be filled with the actors. She wasn’t picturing refugee camps and armies, but perhaps an artists’ colony settled along the lake’s cool and pleasant shores.

Gisenye, near Goma, at the lake’s northern end, was their destination, and they arrived there at the end of October, nearly two months out of Cape Town. There Mary and Akeley both came down with malaria, so they waited, and then waited again for porters. After she recovered, Mary continued her work of buying native baskets, bags, and ivory carvings—her own form of the men’s museum collecting. Sometimes she used Alice as a trade object. When she asked to buy an ivory bracelet directly off a chief’s arm, he said he would not sell even for the price of two wives. But Mary produced Alice, and for the sake of the white child he accepted Mary’s francs. At other times Alice played gorilla hunter on the beach, attacking the bushes with a native spear.

As soon as he could, Akeley took thirty porters and left on his hunting expedition. Shortly afterward the Bradleys left Alice and Priscilla Hall at a nearby Catholic mission (where a joke of Herbert’s about sex between African women and gorillas got them a cool reception), and with Martha Miller followed Akeley into the steep, wet, densely forested, magically beautiful, and nearly impassable mountains.

Afterward, Alice loved to hear the stories from the hunt: how Akeley had fired at a gorilla above him on the hillside and was nearly crushed by the body as it fell; how they stalked Herbert’s great silverback male through the bushes, crawling on hands and knees. When the silverback’s body came to rest against a tree, with Mount Nyamlagira glowing behind it in the distance, Akeley said he would like to be given such a funeral pyre. Yet as the hunt went on, the adults began to be troubled by the gorillas’ human faces. After Akeley shot a female, a guide speared her four-year-old son, and Akeley saw in the young animal’s eyes a heartbreaking expression of piteous pleading. […] He would have come into my arms for comfort. They had a license to kill ten gorillas but were grateful to stop after they had taken five. Instead they used Akeley’s new camera to shoot the first films ever made of gorillas.

There on Mount Karisimbi, the beauty of the landscape and the gentle strength of the gorillas touched something in Carl Akeley. Over the next few years, the former hunter worked hard, and successfully, to persuade King Albert of Belgium to set aside the area as a national park and wildlife preserve. In 1926, he returned to the Virungas to survey the park and study gorilla habitats, while an artist made sketches for the diorama in the African hall. There Akeley died of fever and exhaustion, five years to the day after he had watched Herbert’s silverback fall and had envied the gorilla his funeral pyre.

Akeley became an important transitional figure in a changing relationship between humans and animals. The Akeley camera was used by his friends Martin and Osa Johnson to make their pioneering East African wildlife documentaries. Film replaced taxidermy as the way ordinary people learned about wild animals. And Akeley’s push for preservation made him a forerunner of the great twentieth-century naturalists—Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, George Schaller, Shirley Strum—who went to Africa not to hunt but to sit quietly and observe.

Alice received all of this mixed together: hope for progress, sadness about the passing of the old, the need for conservation, the longing for the bravery of the hunt. Asked to embody peace, Alice absorbed both the lamb and the lion. Among the conflicting currents in her writing are fantasies of peaceful societies (which she associates with the feminine, motherhood, and weakness) and a counter-yearning for a powerful, forbidden violence.

*   *   *

The party arrived back at the mission just in time for Thanksgiving, which they celebrated with the local pygmies. Offering payment in salt, they persuaded a group of Batwa to come to the mission to dance, telling Alice they were little people.

Am I a Batwa? philosophical Alice asked Mablanga. I’m little. No, Mablanga answered.

Did you ever see Batwa, Mablanga?

No, Baby. No Batwa in my country.

Then how do you know I’m not a Batwa?

She watched the Batwa dance for hours until she was tired of them and glad they left.

The travelers moved on, with the porters now carrying the skins and bones of the gorillas they had shot. (The remains of the four-year-old were stored under Alice’s cot every night, filling her tent with the stink of formaldehyde.) On the way north, the adults briefly explored Mount Nyamlagira and camped in its glowing crater. Then they went on to the savanna to hunt lions.

*   *   *

Next to their camp on the Ruindi Plains near Rutshuru stood a pile of rocks with a cross: the grave of an unlucky young English lion hunter. Because of baboons and leopards, Alice wasn’t allowed out of the camp. When the adults left on a hunt she shouted after them, Good luck—get a lion! But she later wrote, "It was early impressed on me that I was viable only within the sheltering adult group, that the outside was dangerous and beyond my strength. […] I never was allowed to learn to combat it; I lived helplessly inside, watching, learning the adult lore, wondering how I could meet each horrible challenge, and never getting a chance to practice."

Mary got her lion on the Ruindi Plains. They stalked the young male through the grass: a risky way to hunt, but they got a bead on it from perhaps twenty feet, and the men let Mary take the first shot. She aimed at the head, fired, and the lion fell. Then she posed for pictures with its head in her lap—until the lion, only stunned by Mary’s bullet, came to and started to roar. Mary jumped up, grabbed her gun, and this time shot it through the heart.

A few days later they received a message by runner that Mary’s mother was ill, and on New Year’s Day, 1922, they began the trek out. They crossed the unmarked border into British East Africa at what is now the southwestern corner of Uganda, then crossed Lake Bunyonyi in log canoes. Within a few days they reached Kampala, and their safari was over. Counting the ground they had covered hunting elephants and lions, Mary estimated she had walked a thousand miles.

Kampala was movies and formal dinners, shops and hotels and clubs and telephones and ice tinkling in tall glasses. They unpacked their dress whites, and were invited to play golf and tennis when the sun was low. Herbert saw to the crating of the trophies and souvenirs: the buffalo heads and elephants’ ears, the tusks, horns, and lion skins, the baskets, spears, and canoe paddles, the otter skins Mary had bought to make a coat for Alice.

In Kampala they visited another tourist site, the tomb of King Mutesa. Sixty years before, Mary wrote, Mutesa had held court here, having his enemies tortured or his friends killed on a whim. Now his house stood empty, and elderly beggars gazed out with a flash of wonder at the little white girl with the fair curls who came to look at the tomb of their dead king, and then danced so fearlessly out into the spaces where once it had been death to approach.

In Mary’s story, Alice is full of life and joy. The little girl had peaked and pined [her] last year at home on all the sensible routine of her nursery fare, but in Africa she was as hearty and healthy as a child could be. […] Life was a continual excursion, an everlasting picnic.

Alice was happy and excited, but she was also frightened, and because the trip depended on her happiness, she couldn’t tell anyone how scared she was. Toward the end of her life she wrote, I think you could say that one of my hobbies is recovery from the status of Marginal Man—with no place to recover to except being my parents’ dear little yellow-haired darling with its head full of Death…

CHAPTER 3: CHILDHOOD

The mother-child interaction is the logical place to postulate the origins of human speech [and] empathy. […] You can see mothers and children murmuring to each other, learning to understand each other’s noises in a way and with a necessity that obtains in no other human relationship—if mother and child don’t understand each other the child doesn’t survive.

—ALLI SHELDON

You can understand why a system would seek information—but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?

—JAMES TIPTREE, JR.

The Bradleys came back to Chicago in March 1922. Their return made national news. The New York Times ran a picture of Alice captioned Youngest Explorer of Darkest Africa […] the First White Child Ever Seen by the Pigmy Tribes. (Ordinarily the white explorers do the seeing, but again Alice was not the viewer but part of the view.) For the Chicago papers, they staged a photo session in the roof garden: beside a low table spread with a leopard skin, Herbert and Mary watched admiringly as Alice, with a look of sullen intensity, poured tea.

In New York, Carl Akeley mounted the five gorillas for a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. He mounted Herbert’s gorilla standing upright, its two fists at its breast; its image was reproduced everywhere from encyclopedias to comic book covers until it became Americans’ idea of how gorillas look. Herbert had hoped their film footage, showing gorillas feeding peacefully, could be released commercially. But audiences for early wildlife films wanted charging elephants and cannibal chiefs. They weren’t ready for an unstaged, nonviolent wildlife documentary.

Mary Bradley put her notes together and started to write. On the Gorilla Trail ran serially for ten weeks in the Chicago Tribune and was published in book form that same year, 1922. When Mary spoke at the women’s society of her mother’s church, her tales of safari life found an eager audience: a reviewer said the listeners were thrilled to the finger tips by this fascinating little lady looking every inch the society gentlewoman. At home the Bradleys uncrated their tusks, skins, spears, and baskets and put them on display in their penthouse, which they now called the African Room. Almost immediately they started planning a second trip.

Mary was able to be both women, the lion hunter and the society gentlewoman; to Mary, Africa existed alongside Chicago and enriched it. But for Alice, Africa opened a deep rift in her life, between her ordinary self and herself on safari. Africa made Chicago seem unreal, while in Chicago, the girl she had been in Africa, in khakis, boots, and a pith helmet, wielding a spear, was not permitted to exist. A photograph of Alice at about seven, roller-skating in a dress on a city sidewalk, shows her more uncertain than the girl of the year before—despite, or because of, the parental presence, the shadow of the photographer that falls across her