We Two Made One

Why did identical twin sisters decide to speak only to each other in a way no one else could understand?
Jennifer Gibbons Marjorie Wallace and June Gibbons
Jennifer Gibbons, Marjorie Wallace, and June Gibbons, March 11, 1993.Photograph from PA Images / Getty

Metaphors sustain us. I have always clung to the story in Plato’s Symposium of two halves meeting after a long separation in “an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy,” because the pursuit of this dream drives so many of us—or, at least, those of us who long to be irrevocably transformed by closeness. It lies at the core of the events that prompted the journey I’m taking now, which finds me sitting in a cold carriage on a fast train headed toward Haverfordwest, a small market town in southwest Wales. I am travelling into blackness, or, more specifically, blackness as a trope, blackness as it was defined and revised, espoused and abandoned, by two colored girls known as “the silent twins”—the identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons, who, living in Great Britain with virtually no education and no peers, developed brutal skills of self-invention and cleaved to their own ferocious intimacy, their continually “amazed” relationship with their other half. For most of their lives together, they refused to speak to anyone but each other—a refusal that led to their emotional exile, their institutionalization, and, eventually, to the misguided appropriation of their story by activists and theorists who used it to pose questions about the nature of identity and the strange birthright that twins are forced to bear.

It is a cold, gray day, the kind of day that Americans, reading English novels, imagine being far more picturesque than the reality. The long train hugs the coast, close enough for me to see the gray-green water rolling and lapping—almost close enough for me to reach out and touch it. As the train approaches the Haverfordwest station, I see June Gibbons, the only black person on the platform. She spots me, too, the only black person on the train, and she nods as I disembark. She is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and black boots and a large blue jacket, in which her thin frame seems to swim. She is accompanied by a pleasant white woman who works in the halfway house where June is living. June’s face—the face I have already studied in photographs—is long and narrow and fine. She smiles when I introduce myself, exposing sharp teeth stained by tobacco. Almost at once, she tells me, in a muffled, fast voice, that we should hurry into a taxi. Actually, it’s more of a command: “Get in the taxi!” I sit in the front seat, next to the driver.

“June would like you to come and have tea,” her companion says, with a bright smile.

We drive through the town: steep hills, shops, children in school uniforms shouting and jostling one another, housing estates where all the houses look the same—two-storied brown stucco with green or white or red doors and neat little paths and patches of wet green separating them from each other. The metal-gray sky hangs low, as smoke drifts from the brick chimneys. June asks about the title of the book I am carrying, “In Search of Wales,” by H. V. Morton. “Well, he’s found it, then!” she says quickly, to no one in particular. She laughs, but examines me with the eyes of someone who, while waiting to be seen, has learned how to watch closely.

June Alison and Jennifer Lorraine Gibbons were born at an R.A.F. hospital in Aden, in the Middle East, on April 11, 1963. June arrived first, at 8:10 a.m., but Jennifer, born ten minutes later, seemed to be the stronger twin, more alert and physically robust. Their parents were from Barbados: Aubrey, tall, handsome, and stiff, and Gloria, whose soft eyes gave her a gentle, yielding appearance. She relied on Aubrey to make decisions for her, just as June would later defer to Jennifer. In 1960, Aubrey, an Anglophile who had long dreamed of being a proper English gentleman, had decided this: he would make a life for himself and his family (a daughter, Greta, had been born in 1957; a son, David, in 1959) away from his homeland. He went to stay with a relative in Coventry and soon qualified as a staff technician for the R.A.F. Gloria followed, with Greta and David, several months later.

The Gibbons family was part of the postwar migratory wave of West Indians commonly called the Windrush generation, after a ship that carried large numbers of black island dwellers to the “mother country.” And, like all the other immigrants, Aubrey and Gloria hoped that in their new land they would become true Britons, with a solid home and the English ways they’d learned about at school—a reverence for the Queen and for cricket. Their dream included a pretty patch of green on which to raise their children. Instead, they moved from post to post, struggling to adapt to a culture that often found them ugly—or, at least, irritating in their difference, with their strange accents, dark skin, and oddly textured hair.

In late 1963, the family returned from the posting in Aden and settled at the R.A.F. base in Linton, Yorkshire. The twins—or “twinnies,” as Gloria called them—had round cheeks and bows in their hair and winning smiles, and soon they had a baby sister, Rosie, born in 1967, whom they adored. But even as toddlers they could barely speak: three or four words at the most. “When they first started their schooling, we knew they had the speech problem,” Aubrey said, in an unused interview for a BBC documentary, “The Silent Twin—Without My Shadow” (1994), written and produced by Olivia Lichtenstein. “In the home, they’d talk, make sounds, and all that, but we knew that they weren’t quite like, you know, normal children, talking readily.” In 1971, when the twins were eight, Aubrey was posted to Chivenor, in Devon. At their new school, the girls were taunted mercilessly about their skin color and their silence. “Eight or nine, we started suffering, and we stopped talking,” June told me when I saw her in November of 1998. “People called us names—we were the only black girls in school. Terrible names. They pulled our hair.” The twins soon stopped making eye contact with others, perhaps so as not to have to see themselves judged. They also stopped speaking to their parents and their older siblings, whose questions they had previously responded to. “We made a pact,” June explained. “We said we weren’t going to speak to anybody. We stopped talking altogether—only us two, in our bedroom upstairs.” Aubrey and Gloria could sometimes hear the girls chattering to each other in their room, in a patois that they couldn’t understand any more than they understood the girls’ silence.

In 1974, when the twins were eleven, Aubrey was transferred to Haverfordwest, and the family moved to a small house on the local R.A.F. housing estate. Grim and closed off, the Haverfordwest community was known for instances of spectacular racism. The twins attended the Haverfordwest County Secondary School, where they and their brother, David, were once again the only black students, and where the bullying was so severe that the girls had to be dismissed five minutes early every day, in order to give them a head start for the walk home. They walked slowly, and as they left the school their movements were always synchronized: one thin girl with long arms and legs following the other, heads bowed, as if in prayer.

The mother of Diane Williams, the girls’ only friend at the time, remembered them as “beautifully dressed, always clean and tidy” (a dubious compliment—the implication being that one expected them to be dirty). Perhaps Diane appealed to June and Jennifer because she was a romantic figure: sickly and sympathetic and religious. They were religious, too. “We had a ritual,” June told me. “We’d kneel down by the bed and ask God to forgive our sins. We’d open the Bible and start chanting from it and pray like mad. We’d pray to Him not to let us hurt our family by ignoring them, to give us strength to talk to our mother, our father. We couldn’t do it. Hard it was. Too hard.”

In 1976, John Rees, a school medical officer, came to Haverfordwest to vaccinate the students against tuberculosis. When he later spoke to Marjorie Wallace, the author of a 1986 book, “The Silent Twins,” which is out of print in the United States but remains the principal source of information about the girls, he described a parade of white arms and then, suddenly, a black one. He tried to prepare what he called “the little Negress” who stood in front of him for the sting of inoculation, but she seemed to be in a trance, nearly lifeless, doll-like. He rubbed a little alcohol on her upper arm and vaccinated her. Soon she was followed by an identical black girl, who also did not react to the needle. Rees was disturbed by their behavior and baffled by the school’s headmaster when he asked him about it: the headmaster didn’t seem to think that the girls were especially troubled. That is, they weren’t trouble, the only real barometer then for colored students’ behavior.

Rees referred the case to Evan Davies, the consultant child psychiatrist for the region. Davies tried to talk to the twins, but they would not respond. He was unable to tell them apart. “Treatment under these circumstances presents a considerable challenge which I am reluctant to accept,” he wrote to Rees. Instead, he referred the girls to Ann Treharne, the chief speech therapist at Haverfordwest’s Withybush Hospital, where they began treatment in February, 1977. They almost never spoke to Treharne or to each other in front of her, but they did agree to read aloud, onto tape, after she had left the room. Listening to the tapes, Treharne discovered that the twins’ “secret language” was actually a mixture of Barbadian slang and English, spoken very quickly. The girls had West Indian accents and were hampered by palatal fricatives—for the “s” sound they would say “sh,” for instance. When she was in the room, Treharne sensed that June wanted to speak to her and was stopped only by eye signals from Jennifer, who appeared to control June’s actions. (June called this form of communication “eye language.”) Jennifer “sat there with an expressionless gaze, but I felt her power,” Treharne told Wallace. “The thought entered my mind that June was possessed by her twin.”

Rees, working with Evans and Tim Thomas, an educational psychologist who had been recruited to the Gibbons case, decided that the girls should be transferred to the Eastgate Centre for Special Education, in Pembroke, eight miles away, where an instructor named Cathy Arthur was put in charge of them. Aubrey and Gloria did not interfere in the decisions that were made for their daughters; they felt they had to trust the British authorities, who presumably knew better than they did. “We were never, like, consulted at any time,” Aubrey told Lichtenstein. “At no time were we called and said, ‘Well, these children are not doing as well as they should,’ you know. Before we knew it, they were into Eastgate, and we just had to toe the line, as it were.”

At Eastgate, the girls fared little better than they had at their previous schools. They had therapy sessions with Tim Thomas, but they responded with the same stiffness and downcast eyes that had, by then, thrown a pall over their family dinners, where their muteness dominated everything and everyone and often drove their older sister, Greta, to tears. The twins attended Greta’s wedding, in 1978, but refused to join in the festivities. Thomas, in an interview for Lichtenstein’s documentary, said that when he first met the twins “there was a tremendous sort of novelty value” to them. But that interest quickly turned to anger. “ ‘Damn insolence’ was an expression that was once used in relation to the girls,” Thomas recalled. “It was understandable in the sense you’ve got people there sitting in front of you who say nothing—you are getting animated about a particular lesson and there is absolutely no feedback. It’s quite threatening, in a way.”

In late 1977, Thomas and Arthur, unable to come up with any productive form of treatment, proposed to their colleagues that the fourteen-year-old girls be separated: Jennifer would remain at Eastgate and June would be sent to live at St. David’s Adolescent Unit, thirty miles away, where Evan Davies was in residence. This was an aggressive measure, presumably intended to help the twins establish distinct personalities, and it caused a certain amount of disharmony among the Eastgate staff. “We were trapped, really, because if they went on as they were, what sort of future would they have—not being able to communicate?” Thomas told me. “There was one group of us that said we should separate them, because it would give them the opportunity to see if they survive. We felt it was an incredibly controlled situation, and we didn’t know who was exercising the control, June or Jennifer.”

The task of telling the girls about the plan fell to Thomas. Although the twins had toyed with the idea of separation before—sometimes writing notes asking for one of them to be sent to Barbados, one to America—the reality of it terrified them. Within moments, they were screaming and hitting each other. Jennifer dug her nails into June’s cheek. June pulled a chunk of hair out of Jennifer’s head. They chased each other out of Thomas’s office, shrieking, and had to be forcibly parted.

Suddenly, they could talk—or would talk. They telephoned Thomas and other staff members at Eastgate, promising to speak if they were allowed to stay together. “They talked to me on the phone for a long time, saying, ‘Everything will be fine. We’ll talk to you tomorrow.’ But nothing happened,” Thomas told me. “We would walk in the next day and nothing, not a flicker.” In March, 1978, the separation was carried out. But at St. David’s June fell into such despair that she stopped moving almost entirely. It once took two people to get her out of bed, and then all they could do was prop her against a wall; her body was as stiff and heavy as a corpse.

Virginia and Grace Kennedy (the subject of a powerful film-essay, “Poto and Cabengo,” by Jean-Pierre Gorin) were twins born in California in the nineteen-seventies, who developed a language that their social workers and speech therapists couldn’t understand. They were sent to separate schools as children and successfully “socialized.” But it was perhaps too late to teach the teen-age Gibbons twins any kind of existence other than the one now dictated by their imaginations. Even as they struggled to become themselves, they could not live without each other. “You are Jennifer. You are me,” Jennifer would say over the years, when she felt her sister pulling away from their bond. “I am June. I am June,” her sister would cry out in anguished response. “One day, she’d wake up and be me, and one day I would wake up and be her,” June told Lichtenstein. “And we used to say to each other, ‘Give me back myself. If you give me back myself I’ll give you back yourself.’ ” Needless to say, the separation was a failure, at least from the standpoint of “rehabilitation.” June was sent back to Eastgate, and by the winter of 1979, when they were sixteen, both girls had left school forever and were on the dole.

Back at home, up in their room, with bunk beds and a little window overlooking the housing estate, the smell of food clung to the walls, and the twins no longer came downstairs for meals. They spoke to no one but their younger sister, Rosie. When they did have to communicate, they did so by letter: “We want to see ‘Top of the Pops’ tonight at 7:00 P.M. Please leave living room door open.”

Although Aubrey didn’t mention it, he had clearly long since lost his dream of assimilation. He would come home every day, switch on the television, and wait for Gloria to serve him dinner. He was “just colored,” after all, a conscientious worker in a mid-level job with two daughters who had turned their backs on him, on the world. What could he say? David had left home. Greta rarely visited. June recognized her parents’ pain and bewilderment but was unable to acknowledge it. In her diary she wrote, “I worry about my mother. I see grief for all those years in her eyes. She is not young, but she is romantic, a child at heart.” In closing themselves off, the twins had lost their parents as wholly as their parents had lost them.

“Tend to be too content to do very little. They show very little initiative or imagination,” a teacher had once written about the girls. The teacher was wrong about this; their imagination transformed them and the narrow parameters of their room. Using dolls, they invented a family to replace the one they had excommunicated. Most of their doll children were twins and had elaborate names like Johnny Joshua and Annemarie Esther Kingston or Alma and Billy Hoe Haines. There was also a doll Gibbons family. They were Americans, mostly, from places like Philadelphia or Malibu. When one of the dolls died, Rosie, the official “registrar” of the doll world, would record the cause of its demise with relish:

June Gibbons: Aged 9. Died of leg injury.

George Gibbons. Aged 4. Died of eczema.

Bluey Gibbons. Aged two and a half. Died of appendix.

Peter Gibbons. Aged 5. Adopted. Presumed dead.

Julie Gibbons. Age 2 1/2. Died of a “stamped stomach”.

Polly Morgan-Gibbons. Age 4. Died of a slit face and Susie Pope-Gibbons died the same time of a cracked skull.

In 1979, for Christmas, Gloria gave June and Jennifer each a red, leather-bound diary with a lock, and they began to keep a detailed account of their lives, as part of a new program of “self-improvement.” They had pooled their dole money to enroll in a creative-writing correspondence course—registering as one person, Student No. 8201—and they prepared themselves to become famous authors.

That January, June began writing a novel called “The Pepsi-Cola Addict,” whose hero, Preston Wildey-King, a teen-ager from Malibu, fantasizes about living somewhere else (all quotations from Jennifer and June’s writing and diaries are taken from Marjorie Wallace’s book):

The tenement in which he lived was alternately too hot or too cold. The room remained suffocatingly hot with the contained heat of the day. Preston was thinking he was cold. His head felt neurotic and dizzy. It resembled ice. He thought he wouldn’t mind if he lived in Arizona, or even Hawaii; they lived on cool beverages, and didn’t care what you did. Sitting in his own pad and sipping 300 cans of Pepsi-Cola every day.

Preston is seduced by his schoolteacher. He takes up with a gang. A stint in jail follows, and an attempt at homosexual seduction. And, in the end, a return home to his mother and sister and an apparent death from an overdose of barbiturates.

Jennifer wrote two novels in a matter of weeks: “The Pugilist,” about a boy with a failing heart whose surgeon father implants in him the heart—and soul—of their boxer dog; and “Discomania,” the story of a group of urban youths who are controlled by their need for a disco beat. “I started my fabulous new novel ‘Discomania’ today,” she wrote in her diary, on June 8, 1980, two months after her seventeenth birthday. “Last night I spent the night doing the 14 plot points. It’s gonna be a knockout, I’m sure.”

June’s novel was published by a vanity press (she persuaded Jennifer to contribute her dole money to help pay for the publication), but Jennifer, who tried legitimate presses, met with nothing but rejection. She persevered, writing at an incredible rate, and she and June spent days taking “author photographs” of each other. They approached their diaries as literary works, too, often writing a first draft, then revising and rewriting to create a final version for posterity.

June and Jennifer at eighteen: the real world was beckoning. They longed for someone to see them, and they settled on Lance Kennedy, a fellow Eastgate student who had defended them against the abuse of their other classmates. Lance was American, and though they had not been able to acknowledge him then, they had stored away their memory of him. By the time the twins tracked down his family’s address—in Welsh Hook, ten miles from Haverfordwest—he had moved to Philadelphia. But he had three younger brothers who were still in Wales—Jerry, the oldest; Wayne, who was close to the twins’ age; and Carl, the youngest. (I have used the pseudonyms that Wallace invented for her book.)

In April, 1981, June and Jennifer took a taxi to the Kennedy house for the first time. When they arrived, it was empty. The door was unlocked. Inside, they made peanut-butter sandwiches, broke a bedroom door, swooned over the Kennedy boys’ clothes, and studied the photographs of Hawaii that were on the walls. The boys’ father and stepmother came home and discovered the girls trying to flee, but when they couldn’t persuade the twins to speak they felt sorry for them and let them go. June and Jennifer didn’t give up. They spent all their money taking taxis to Welsh Hook. Eventually, they met the other Kennedy sons and began seeing them regularly.

“They were American boys, white boys,” June told me. “Good-looking, like . . . do you know that boy Leo DiCaprio? We’d take a taxi, all in makeup and short skirts and high shoes and wigs and lipstick, like ladies, like film stars. We were trying to entice the boys, to make them like us. We wanted to be glamorized, so we got long brown wigs and sunglasses and chewing gum. We spent about three hours getting ready to go out.”

The girls also discovered drinking and drugs. “We needed to have a bottle to drink,” June told me. “Without the whiskey, we didn’t speak. We reckon that God told us to buy drink, and it worked. We sniffed glue and lighter fluid. We were different then, laughing and talking. We were so relaxed and laid-back.” Wayne bought pot, sniffed glue, and drank with them, but wasn’t interested in anything more. However, the youngest Kennedy, Carl, then fourteen, saw possibility in these strange black girls who wore wigs and mismatched outfits. “Dear Diary,” Jennifer wrote in June, 1981. “One of the best days of my sweet life. I’ve lost my beautiful virginity to Carl Kennedy. At last. It hurt a lot but it happened. There was lots of blood. We did it in church. Sorry God. Your friend. Jenny.” The church was near the Kennedys’ home; the three had got drunk, and June had watched as Jennifer and Carl had sex in the chancel. The pain this caused June found expression in her diary:

Something like magic is happening. I am seeing Jennifer for the first time like she is seeing me. I think she is slow, cold, has no respect and talks too much; but she thinks I am the same. We are both holding each other back. . . . There is a murderous gleam in her eye. Dear Lord, I am scared of her. She is not normal. She is having a nervous breakdown. Someone is driving her insane. It is me.

Thirteen days later, in the Kennedys’ barn, June lay down, drunk, to duplicate her sister’s experience. “I want your baby. I love you,” she called out in a paroxysm of pain and hopefulness, as the boy fumbled and groped. This was the first physical affection the girls had known. Though they were ignored, insulted, and sometimes even beaten up by the Kennedy boys, it was their summer, the first in which they were not living as dolls, in their room crammed with diaries and manuscripts. “Five weeks of fun, that was. Five weeks of fun. We were very happy,” June told me. “We had our wicked way with them, the boys.” Jennifer wrote in her diary:

My boy Carl, he doesn’t know how good he’s been to me. . . . I could feel the intense hotness of his eyes slowly studying my body. At that moment I felt like a very beautiful girl. I knew he was infatuated with me, my looks and my mysterious style.

But, according to Wallace, there was no real mystery for the Kennedy boys when it came to the Gibbons girls. The twins were no better than two barely tolerated dogs who sat at their feet, waiting for attention and the scraps of food that the Kennedys sometimes literally tossed into their mouths. Before the Kennedys moved back to America, at the end of the summer, the girls begged for talismans to remember them by. Carl gave them a dirty T-shirt; Jerry offered a photograph and two mismatched socks; Wayne sold June an old jacket.

Fall, 1981. With no one else to focus on, the twins began to take out their aggressions on themselves. They spent all their money on food. They gorged and purged and gorged and purged: more repetition, more boredom. They poured their emotional torment into their mercilessly frank and expository diaries. “I will gain control, control over my mind, my body,” Jennifer later wrote. “I must be at peace with myself. I will want death if I have no peace. And who will cry at my funeral? Teenager dies from diet, binge, life.”

June:

I loathe food which destroys my soul, my face, my body. Yet I go on eating out of duty, out of weariness. I bite into the body of my very enemy and as I chew my food will win. It can take dominion over my flesh, making me corrupt and depraved, exposing me to a plumpness of flesh, a fattening of the heart, over-healthy, rarely satisfied.

Every time the twins looked up and saw each other, they saw their own peculiar form of desolation staring back at them. They tried to change their looks, sending away to the West Indies for hair and skin creams. They tried magic. Jennifer wrote, “I now direct currents of my higher psychic mind to command my guardian angel to work through my skin and contact my healing powers so they may eliminate the scar on the bridge of my nose.” But they couldn’t work out who they were supposed to be for other people until they understood who they were for each other. “J. and I are like lovers,” June wrote. “A love-hate relationship. She thinks I am weak. She knows not how I fear her. This makes me feel more weak. I want to be strong enough to split from her. Oh Lord help me, I am in despair.” Jennifer: “She should have died at birth. Cain killed Abel. No twin should forget that.” June: “I’m in enslavement to her, this creature . . . who is with me every hour of my living soul.” Jennifer: “J. can’t be my real twin. My real twin was born the exact time as me, has my rising sign, my looks, my ways, my dreams, my ambitions. He or she will have my weaknesses, failures, opinions. All this makes a twin—no differences. I can’t stand differences.”

Soon they also began to direct their loathing at their surroundings. Rejected by a local gang, they formed a gang of two. They began stealing bicycles and glue, ringing people’s doorbells repeatedly. They broke into a training center for spastic adults and into a school. They smashed windows, stole books, drew graffiti on walls. They tried to break a pay phone, then called the police to confess to their crimes, hanging up and running away before the police could arrive on the scene. Eventually, the twins grew bored with the scale of their exploits and decided to escalate. “I’m planning on making petrol bombs,” June wrote. “A bottle, petrol and paper, then hurl it through the window. . . . I’m going to be the biggest arsonist around!” Fire was the ultimate statement of their anguish and their hope: it burned and destroyed and cleansed. On October 24, 1981, June wrote:

All this week I’ve wanted to burn down the tractor store in Snowdrop Lane. I burned it down today—with the help of J., of course. It was the biggest night of my life. We climbed over a barbed wire fence. The sky grew blacker and it started to rain. . . . All the while, my lovely glorious fire was licking its way through the roof, and the thick smoke filled the night sky. It was a picture which will live in my mind for ever—oh what a sinful, evil, selfish mind. I know the Lord will forgive me. It’s been a long, painful, hard year. Don’t I deserve to express my distress?

On November 8th, the twins smashed a window at Pembroke Technical College. A policeman patrolling the vicinity heard them, called for backup, and caught them on the point of lighting a fire. They were arrested. Their room was searched, and the diaries, filled with stories of fires and theft, were discovered. Two days later, the twins were sent to the Pucklechurch Remand Centre, ten miles from Bristol, where they remained for seven months while the judicial system tried to decide what to do with them.

“One of the things that are so provocative about the twins is that they absolutely challenged society to put them away,” the filmmaker Jon Amiel, who directed the 1986 BBC docudrama “The Silent Twins,” told me. We were sitting in a café, in Highgate, London, where I had stopped on my way to Wales. “I looked in their bedroom in Haverfordwest, and it was this tiny little army-barracks room—they slept in a tiny box of a room in two bunk beds. So guess what happens when they are put in jail: they are put in a tiny room with two bunk beds. What I am saying is that they re-created a place of safety for themselves. They were desperate to be caught, and, I think, desperate for the place of safety the imprisonment was. . . . What was fascinating about the twins was how voluntary and intensely aggressive their strategy was in the world.”

The twins’ social isolation seems to have had as much to do with their willfulness as it did with their outrageous misfortune. They occasionally tried to change—they once enrolled in a correspondence course called the Art of Conversation—but those small steps rarely led to larger ones. Their blind determination found its match in some of the people who had responsibility for them. Evan Davies, for example, attributed his failure to distinguish between the girls to the “cultural gap.” John Rees saw them not as desperate human beings but as “little Negresses” or “zombies.” When he visited Gloria and Aubrey and was confronted with their denial of the girls’ oddness, he settled for an easy explanation. According to Wallace, he had heard that West Indian families “expect strange behavior from twins, and he thought their lack of concern was probably cultural.” A report sent to Cathy Arthur by the Haverfordwest County Secondary School suggested that the girls’ speech could not be understood because they were speaking an “African” dialect. All this says less about prejudice than it does about the human ability to see only what one expects to see.

At Pucklechurch, the twins were confined together, and their bond became a torment. Neither could stand the smell, the sight, the thought of the other. Each began to desire the other’s death, to long to breathe singly in a twinless world. Just feet away from Jennifer in the cell they shared, June wrote:

One of us is plotting to kill one of us. A thud on the head on a cool evening, dragging the lifeless body, digging a secret grave. I’m in a dangerous situation, a scheming, insidious plot. How will it end? . . . I’m in enslavement to her. This creature who lounges in this cell, who is with me every hour of my living soul.

We have become fatal enemies in each other’s eyes. . . . We scheme, we plot and who will win? . . . A deadly day is getting closer each minute, coming to a point of imminent death like hands creeping out against the night sky, intentions of evil, blood, a knife, a mincer. . . . I say to myself, how can I get rid of my own shadow? Impossible or not impossible? Without my shadow would I die? Without my shadow would I gain life?

When they were together, they wanted to kill each other. When they were apart, they were so lonely they wanted to die. Then, when they were reunited, they were disappointed and imagined that they had felt stronger alone.

In the spring of 1982, a psychiatrist named William Spry was enlisted by the twins’ defense lawyer to evaluate their condition. “The first two visits, we didn’t get anywhere—they didn’t speak at all,” Spry told me. “After that, I asked them if they would talk to me on the telephone. I sat in another room, and I got the odd murmur from them. Then I eventually got them to agree to talk to me face to face. One having started to talk, they went into the most enormous fight between themselves. They were scratching each other, they were trying to tear each other’s eyes out. The nurse had to go and stop them.” Eventually, he diagnosed the twins as having a psychopathic personality disorder and proposed that they be sent to Broadmoor, England’s notorious maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. The twins were in need of treatment, he reasoned, and no other institution was willing to take on patients with a history of arson. “If we hadn’t found a hospital for them, they would have gone to prison, and I thought that was the worst possible thing,” he added.

Tim Thomas disagreed. “The youngest person at Broadmoor at that time was twenty-seven,” he told me. “They were putting a label on these children—that is what I thought they were—as psychopaths. How the hell can you decide that somebody has a mental-health problem as serious as that if you don’t communicate with them? Expediency. Had they been white and middle-class, the outcome would have been different.”

The girls were tried, in May, 1982, on sixteen joint counts of burglary, theft, and arson. They pleaded guilty, on the advice of their lawyers, and were ordered to be detained at Broadmoor indefinitely.

“The words kept on going round my mind,” June wrote in her diary, after the sentencing. She went on:

Spinning in circles. Sick. Mental. Psychopathic. Imagine how I felt. Me? A mental psychopath? . . . A dangerous, evil, ruthless criminal! Me! At last my torment, my self-consciousness, my violence is known. I am labelled! Ah! Now I know my fate! June Alison Gibbons, aged just 19, going down in history as a psychopath.

Looking ahead to their new life at Broadmoor, Jennifer wrote:

Please God! Don’t let me suffer as much in my new life as I have here. Let me be bold enough to speak openly. Let me trust the doctors and nurses and no longer be afraid of people. For the past seven months I have been a soul with no hope. Don’t let this disease paralyze me again, destroying my abilities, tying up my tongue like firewood.

For weeks, the girls had fantasized about Broadmoor, which doctors had described to them in terms more appropriate to an English Eden than to a prison hospital. “We wanted to get away from our life,” June told me. “We thought Broadmoor was going to be like paradise.”

I visited Broadmoor in the winter of ’98, travelling by train some thirty miles east of London to Crowthorne, a dismal little station with no ticket window or concession stand. No one who got off the train with me could tell me when there would be a return train. I called a cab and waited for it in front of a funeral parlor on what I took to be the town’s main street, which was about the length of a New York City block. I had arranged to meet Alison Farrar, Broadmoor’s head librarian, at the hospital library. She had silver hair and was wearing a dark cardigan, large glasses, and a determinedly chipper expression. She arrived a little late, and out of breath, and handed me a file that contained press clippings on Broadmoor’s more famous patients. There were articles about Ronald Kray, the legendary mobster; there were articles about murderers and serial rapists; and there were articles about June and Jennifer Gibbons, the girls memorialized in fading black-and-white newspaper images. When I had finished reading, Farrar drove me around the grounds in a little red car. After acres of farmland, grazing sheep, and low gray skies, she pointed to a field that had been tilled recently. “That was rhubarb planted over there,” she told me. “At one time, rhubarb was thought to clean the body, which led to a clear mind. Can you imagine?”

Tim Thomas had taken Aubrey and Gloria to Broadmoor for their first visit, in 1982. “That was horrifying,” Thomas told me. “All the doors opening and shutting behind you. They were—almost treating the people in there like exhibits. All the promises—like no drug therapy—those were overturned within weeks. I didn’t fight hard enough. Would I do it differently if I ever did it again? I’m not sure. I feel enormous sadness. It was a terrible, dark inevitability.”

Days after the twins arrived at the hospital, June slipped into a torpor. A few weeks later, she attempted suicide. Jennifer attacked a nurse. They were put in separate wards and were denied access to each other for a time. They were nineteen when they entered Broadmoor. Both girls had longed for marriage and children of their own. For a month, June wouldn’t speak at all; later, she would often respond to questions with an infuriating smile. When Jennifer tried to communicate, she was not understood. She was given regular injections of Depixol, an anti-psychotic drug that caused her vision to blur and made it hard for her to read or write. June was given other anti-psychotic medications. Their family rarely visited. “We are forgotten, faded away, never to be seen again,” June wrote. “J. and I are two twins of history; coloured girls. Life will go on outside, passing away. . . . Where are we now, they will say?”

Nearly twelve years passed, punctuated by flirtations with male inmates and games over who could eat more or less. The twins could not understand why they weren’t released after a few years of this “treatment.” But the doctors and social workers who reviewed their case every few years decided that they needed another year or two. “Juvenile delinquents get two years in prison,” June said. “We got twelve years of hell, because we didn’t speak. We had to work hard to get out. We went to the doctor. We said, ‘Look, they wanted us to talk, we’re talking now.’ He said, ‘You’re not getting out. You’re going to be here for thirty years.’ We lost hope, really. I wrote a letter to the Home Office. I wrote a letter to the Queen, asking her to pardon us, to get us out. But we were trapped.”

At times, Jennifer was overcome with despair. “She became really schizophrenic in there,” June told me. “She’d hear guns going off outside her window. She kept saying quotations from the Bible to me. She accused me of destroying her life, of plotting against her—‘You spiked my drink, didn’t you?’ After a while, they put us together on the same ward, to see how we’d get on, and that was a disaster. We were fighting for days, kicking and biting and scratching for eight months. They split us up, and she was crying then. Even though we were fighting, we loved each other. We were surprised at our actions: ‘I’m sorry I hit you, I love you, let’s start again, let’s call it quits, let’s have a heart-to-heart.’ ”

Marjorie Wallace, who was then a reporter for the London Sunday Times, was alerted to the twins’ story through a friend of Tim Thomas’s. She visited June and Jennifer at Pucklechurch, in 1982, after gaining the confidence of Aubrey and Gloria, who handed over the girls’ diaries and writing, still in the black garbage bags that the police had used to hold everything confiscated from the twins’ room. In those bags Wallace discovered far more than she had anticipated. “The twins had been sort of written off for being strange, almost of subnormal intelligence,” Wallace told me. “But I can still quote large passages—very powerful imagery. It was the poetry and lyricism that made me cry.”

Like heroines of the nineteenth-century novels they would have loved to write, the twins had no economic power, and therefore no freedom. And, as two of the most invisible members even of their own class and race, they seized on self-invention as an escape. Their strength as writers lies not in technical skill but in emotion, immediacy, and isolation—the lack of outside influence or guidance.

No contemporary author has described the process of colored girls looking at each other and struggling with, and against, what they are supposed to be more brilliantly than Toni Morrison. In “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison wrote about a black girl who is driven mad by rejection and imagines for herself what she cannot have: blue eyes—eyes through which the world will see her better, eyes that will separate her from her community. She looks in the mirror and becomes two people, who bicker and criticize and support each other, like twins:

How do you know nobody talks to me?

They don’t. When you’re in the house with me, even Mrs. Breedlove doesn’t say anything to you. Ever. . . .

Maybe she doesn’t feel too good since Cholly’s gone. . . . She probably misses him.

I don’t know why she would. All he did was get drunk and beat her up.

Well, you know how grown-ups are.

Yes. No. How are they?

Well, she probably loved him anyway.

HIM?

Sure. Why not? Anyway, if she didn’t love him, she sure let him do it to her a lot.

That’s nothing. . . . She didn’t like it.

Then why’d she let him do it to her.

Because he made her?

To be this frank about one’s humanity, sexuality, and racial characteristics is rare in the black community. One risks being considered “dirty,” “loud,” or disloyal to one’s “people.” The implicit message: Don’t be too colored! Never tell the white person who you really are! June and Jennifer, who did not speak out loud, tore that white tape off their mouths. Their stories, poems, and diaries are relentlessly searching and revealing, reminiscent of the work of the confessional poets, who drank, fucked, and killed themselves on and off the page with adolescent verve. George Sand once said that “writing a journal implies that one has ceased to think of the future and has decided to live wholly in the present.” The twins had nowhere to live but the present, with all its boredom, banality, and horror, and they cultivated what they had, drop by drop.

In the diaries, Wallace found nothing to indicate that the twins were psychopathic. She quickly became their most vocal advocate, and the chief custodian of their biographies. Through her articles, the twins, who had longed for publicity at their trial, became a cause célèbre in British mental-health and journalistic circles. They were widely touted as symbols: of the ineptitude and cruelty of the English judicial system; of racism in Britain; of many things other than themselves—not unlike the nineteenth-century black Siamese twins Millie and Christine McCoy, two singing ex-slaves who performed all over the United States under the billing “The Two-Headed Nightingale,” a sideshow meant to be seen and forgotten.

June and Jennifer were nearly thirty years old when they were released from Broadmoor, on the morning of March 9, 1993. They were being sent to the Caswell Clinic, a minimum-security institution in southwest Wales. On the bus, Jennifer rested her head on her twin’s shoulder and said, “At long last we’re out.” Less than twelve hours later, she was dead. Her heart had been weakened by an undiagnosed inflammation. That night, June wrote in her diary, “Today my beloved twin sister Jennifer died. She is dead. Her heart stopped beating. She will never recognize me. Mom and Dad came to see her body. I kissed her stone-coloured face. I went hysterical with grief.”

“We prayed for forgiveness, but, of course, He didn’t forgive us,” June told me. “He punished us for twelve years. He hated us. He didn’t listen to us. We suffered. And, at the end of it all, what does it mean, if she died?”

June was released from Caswell a year after Jennifer’s death. She takes medication every day, and is able to talk, though at times it is still difficult to understand her. When she is excited or amused, her speech is rapid and thick. She is thirty-seven. Every Tuesday, she visits her sister’s grave. “I was born a twin, and I’ll die a twin,” June told Lichtenstein. “That’s the way it goes.”

The halfway house she is living in when I visit (she has since moved to her own apartment) is like all the other houses on the street: two stories high, painted white, and surrounded by patches of damp green. She shares the small, tidy building with a number of other patients who are also living in that purgatory known as rehabilitation. She proudly shows me one of her drawings, hanging on the door to her room: a girl with braids and a dark face. Underneath the drawing is the name Alison spelled in different-colored letters. June tells me that she now prefers to be called by her middle name, because she has had so much bad luck under her first name: “That name brought me more than grief. Alison’s a fresh start, never suffering.” She opens the door to her bedroom with a flourish. “Here is my sanctuary,” she says. It’s a small room with a large window looking out onto a garden. The bed is large, with a cheap polyester spread covering it, and opposite is a brown easy chair. There is also a television, a wastebasket full of cigarette butts, and, against the wall, an electric keyboard. No books.

As I sit down, June moves about the room with deliberate slowness. She seems not to know quite how to navigate in a world that doesn’t involve walking beside, behind, or around her sister—or in one that requires her to accommodate visitors.

Over tea, she tells me what she wants out of life now: “What I want is to get married and have children. But it’s a bit late now. It’s funny. All my family are married to white people—David, Greta, Rosie. All the kids are mixed race. Kinky blond hair and pale skin. I want black kids. I want a Rasta man, with Rasta hair, like Bob Marley. My mum says, ‘Oh, no, they’re low class—they’re not decent people.’ But I like them.”

She laughs, covering her teeth with her lips and huddling over her teacup, which she holds stiffly in front of her. I realize that she is telling me a fantasy she had about me—and against which I come up short. I have close-cropped hair, no dreadlocks. I registered her slight look of disappointment when we met.

We talk about Broadmoor, and I ask her if she did a lot of reading there.

Her face lights up. “Oh yeah, my Lord, I read thousands of books in there. I read myself dry in Broadmoor. D. H. Lawrence, I like him; Oscar Wilde; Dylan Thomas; Emily Brontë; the woman who wrote ‘Frankenstein,’ Mary Shelley; all the classics. I wrote five books—manuscripts. They’re not very professional, though, they’re a bit all over the place.”

“Do you still write?”

“It seems to me that as I get older I don’t want to write anymore,” she says. “I don’t see the point in writing books now. I can communicate by talking now, can’t I? I stopped writing diaries way back. I’m a bit lazy now. Brain dead. I can’t be bothered to write books.”

I say, “I wish you would write more.”

Flirtatiously, she shoots back, “Maybe you’ll inspire me to write. I could write if I wanted to. I could see the dawn coming and get up and start writing. It’s hard work to be a writer, isn’t it? I want an easy job, an easy life. . . . Do you know something?” she interrupts herself suddenly. “I could sleep for ten days if I wanted to. I like dreaming. I see my sister in my dreams, talking to me.”

The name Jennifer means “white dove,” she adds. “I used to miss her,” June says. “Now I’ve accepted her. She’s in me. She makes me stronger. I accept the fact that she’s gone now. That took me five years of grieving, crying all the time. Now all my tears are gone, they all dried up inside my eyes. . . . I don’t get lonely now. I’ve got her, haven’t I?”

“Have you enjoyed your visit?” she asks before I leave. “Did you expect me to look different, with plaits in my hair?”

The next morning, I take a drive around Haverfordwest. My driver is familiar with the story of the twins. He knows that their parents, who now refuse all interviews, live in a section of the town known as the Bronx. (The nickname dates from years ago, when the neighborhood was home to much of the town’s unemployed population.) The Bronx is another row of identical low-ceilinged houses. It is not far from the graveyard, where I spend a few minutes at Jennifer’s grave. Cold dew and thick grass cover everything. A stone identifies Jennifer as a daughter and a twin, but doesn’t mention her three other siblings. It is also inscribed with one of June’s poems:

We once were two
We two made one
We no more two
Through life be one
Rest in peace.

An hour later, I’m back in June’s room. She wonders whether I’ve had trouble at my hotel. “They’re not used to seeing black people in Haverfordwest. Did they give you a nice room, or a horrible room because you’re black?” she asks. “They treat you second best. I’m used to it now. I go about my business.” She reminisces about a black boyfriend she had at Broadmoor. “We had a lot in common, me and Morris did,” she says. “Morris would sit in a corner, and he had dreadlocks. I liked him. I liked his face. [Jennifer] would say to Morris, ‘You’re not me. I’m June’s twin, not you.’ Jennifer thought I loved Morris more than her.” Morris is still in Broadmoor and phones her from time to time, June tells me. Then she shows me photographs of Jennifer and herself from those days. The girls wear a variety of costumes and hair styles—heavily rouged cheeks, lots of silver bangles in one, berets and turbans in another. Two young women making something of themselves in front of the camera. “You know what we were known as in there?” she asks, proudly. “The Queens of Broadmoor.”

When I get back to my hotel, the room is cold, the bedcovers stiff and uncomfortable. Somewhere in half-sleep, with the television on because I feel desolate with the wind blowing outside and the sea mist clotting the streets, I realize that the silent twins’ story has upset all my expectations. I feel not unlike the doctor in Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6” who, in trying to delineate his patients’ madness, must confront the issue of his own will and meaning. The twins are resolutely themselves, and the psychiatrists, social workers, and reporters (myself included) who believed they understood them seem misguided now that I view their ideas next to June.

All of us have a fiercely proprietary relationship to the twins as material. “The story has created conflict from the very beginning, really,” Tim Thomas told me. “It seemed to polarize people in a strange way.” Even the possession of the girls’ diaries and manuscripts is in dispute. Wallace, who is now the director of sane, a London-based mental-health charity, says that she returned the materials to Broadmoor. June didn’t receive them, and it’s likely that they were lost in transit or misplaced at the hospital. Wallace says she kept copies of some of the materials, and at one point she offered to show me some of the diary pages she’d transcribed, but she soon withdrew the offer. Wallace fell out with Lichtenstein, who is now a creative director at the BBC. And Judith Hackett, a young black documentarian who first proposed the idea of a film on the twins to the BBC, also fell out with Lichtenstein, who took over the project. Hackett had been compelled to make a documentary on the twins, she told me, because “I’d felt like that, growing up black in London, coming from the West Indies. I could really relate to their story.”

The twins’ uniqueness was astonishing. So was their universality. Their lives were the tale of a whole that divides and cannot be made one again. And that is—in the Symposium, and in the end—the story of any of us, attempting to be alone together. ♦