The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (21 page)

The Disappearance of the Sebali Tribe

I.

In the summer of 1974, two young anthropologists, Joseph Hammond and Marcus Alexander Grant, published, to very high praise, an article in the journal
Dialectic Studies in Anthropology
entitled “The Drameção Ritual: Silent Conflicts of the Sebali Prepubescent Male.” Through the success of this article, and based on proposals for continued research on the Sebali tribe, Hammond and Grant received research funding from the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, and the two young men were each offered positions teaching anthropology and sociology, Grant at Yale University, and Hammond at his alma mater, Harvard University. The article and their subsequent findings were then published as a book,
The Sebali Continuum
, which included color and black-and-white photographs of the tribe as well as detailed observations and analyses of the tribe’s history, its health and system of caring for the sick and the old, religious beliefs, mating rituals, community mores and taboos, agricultural practices, the birth and death rates of the tribe, the passage of the tribe’s collective memory (through oral history, storytelling, and pictographs), and the rituals for burying tribal leaders once they have died. The book became an immediate success. Grant was thirty-two years old and Hammond was thirty-four, and together they had been studying the Sebali tribe for five and a half years.

One year later, they both disappeared.

At the time, the two young men had been planning a last extended visit to the small South Pacific island where the members of the Sebali tribe lived. After their departure date came and went, it was assumed that the two—commonly absentminded—had left without saying good-bye. When, after some months had passed, no one had yet heard from them, friends and colleagues began to worry that something might have happened to them both. A year passed without word, and many speculated that the two had been killed, either en route to or while with the Sebali tribe.

Their disappearance caused a furor, and search committees were formed and papers were published, and a rift formed between those who, as delicately as they could, implied that Hammond and Grant got no less than they deserved and that there had been a long line of anthropologists who had meddled or “gone native” to bad and sometimes fatal effect, and those who argued that Hammond and Grant died honorably in the service of their science and for the betterment of our understanding of our place in this world and its history.

Such arguments and speculations continued for another three years until it was proven almost single-handedly by a twenty-four-year-old actor turned anthropologist, Denise Gibson, that Hammond and Grant were fakes, that the Sebali tribe did not exist and had never existed other than in the minds of its creators. This discovery left suspicions that linger in the anthropology community even today, and raised questions, for those close to Hammond and Grant, for their friends and colleagues, as to who Hammond and Grant really were and what they had hoped to gain.

II.

Denise Gibson has lived in Boston for the past five years. She is now a graduate student in the Boston University anthropology department, although when she first heard about Hammond and Grant, their work on the Sebali tribe, their book, and their disappearance, she was an undergraduate student. She is small and attractive, with a soft voice and blue eyes that often look, during the overcast months of a New England fall or winter, gray. She has short brown hair, and though I only saw her wearing them once, she sometimes wears glasses, and when I picture her, I picture her in those glasses. Born in Texas (when I asked her if she thought it odd that she and Grant hail from the same state, she smirked at me in a way I have found particular to Texans and said, “It is a big state, you know”), Denise had plans of becoming an actress, attending, for the first two years of college, the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied theater. After two years, however, she applied to be and was accepted as a transfer student at BU, where she began her career as a student of anthropology. When pressed, she will admit that there are universities and colleges in Texas that have decent anthropology programs, but that she left because she felt, after a lifetime spent in Texas, the place had become suddenly small, and that she needed a change.

Though a keen observer of people, a skill I am sure good actors should possess, she has a studious, shy, quiet quality about her, and an ability to focus her attention that seems better suited to scholarly work. The first time we met, I found her sitting at a table reading an issue of the
Annual Review of Anthropology
, so enrapt in her article that I had sat down with my coffee and cake, and cleared my throat, only to go unnoticed by her. Unwilling to interrupt someone quite so deeply involved in anything, I waited a few more moments until, as I watched as the hour we had arranged for the interview slipped effortlessly by, I scraped my chair against the floor, banged my coffee mug onto the table, and said, rather too loudly, “So you must be Denise.” At which point she looked up from her journal, smiled at me, and said, “I was beginning to worry you weren’t going to show.” Many people, when they find out Denise once aspired to be an actor, will ask her to perform impressions, which, she informed me early into our interview, are the domain not of actors but of stand-up comedians. “I will give you the benefit of the doubt,” she told me, “and assume you weren’t going to ask me to do my best Katharine Hepburn.”

If you were to ask her, as I did, how it felt knowing that she had helped uncover the Sebali tribe hoax, she might shake her head and smile, somewhat ruefully, and say, “I hardly did a thing about it, really.” She might then ask you where you’re from, if you’d had a nice trip, if you needed another cup of coffee, if you’d ever been to Boston before, if you’d made a visit to the Common yet, “which is really much nicer in the spring and early summer,” she might go on to say, “but we just had a good snow, and you should really go see the park before too many other people go tramping through it.” And then she might mention Frederick Law Olmsted, who, she will explain, is best known for his design of Central Park in Manhattan, but who also designed a series of parks joining the Boston Common to its outlying neighbors, which is called the Emerald Necklace, and then she might suggest that you visit Jamaica Pond, a component of the Emerald Necklace, located in Jamaica Plain, “which hardly anyone ever goes to anymore,” she will continue, “because the neighborhood’s been run down a bit, but it’s a nice park, really, and if you go at the right time, it’s quiet and empty, and you can sit on a bench and look out over the pond that is there and sometimes see a goose or a swan or a cormorant, even. But if you go there, then you’ve got to visit El Oriental for lunch, and since the thought of anyone else going to El Oriental only makes
me
want to go there, too, then I just might have to join you,” which is how I eventually found myself sitting with her, one recent afternoon, in a small Cuban restaurant (El Oriental de Cuba) in Jamaica Plain, a Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban neighborhood located on the south side of Boston. While she finished with great relish her lunch and I sipped on a small, Styrofoam cup of café con leche, I tried my best to figure out how this small, unassuming young woman from Abilene, Texas, uncovered the truth behind one of the largest anthropological scams of the past fifty years.

III.

Joseph Hammond was born in 1942, the third of eight children. He was born Joseph Farrow. The name Hammond was his mother’s maiden name. The family lived in Salina, Kansas, where Joseph’s father worked as a salesman, trading in brushes, shaving kits, aftershave lotions, makeup, hair dyes, and other such items. His mother worked as an occasional housekeeper, but spent the majority of her time at home, raising her children. Most of his family members—those few I could track down—refused to return my phone calls. And when they did agree to speak to me, they would not comment further than to reaffirm certain biographical information already publicly known and now assumed mostly false.

The only information I was able to confirm was that Joseph left home at the age of fifteen and that he was not heard from again for almost three years. Little is known about what actually happened during those years. According to Hammond’s own account, he spent them traveling by railroad from Dallas through the Southwestern states until he reached California, where he spent one year at the Anthropology Library on the UC Berkeley campus. There he read such works as Liden’s
The Living Earth
and Kelley’s
Studies in Javanese Paganisms
. After a year, he left California, again by railway, and traveled to Alaska, where he worked for two years on a fishing boat, netting Alaskan king salmon. Within days of his arrival in Alaska, Hammond met an Inuit couple with whom he quickly became friends. Most of his time was spent on the fishing boats, and any time off the boats Hammond then spent with the Inuit at their home, among their neighbors, observing their daily lives and learning their customs. In a short, unpublished essay—what some believe to have been the beginnings of a memoir—Hammond recounts the times that he went “in the icy, choppy waters, using only handmade canoes . . . fishing with Prepayit for seal and walrus, with sharp and hardened spears, tipped, sometimes, with our own blood for good luck.”

It was during this time, again according to his own accounts of his life, that Hammond decided to pursue full-time studies in the fields of anthropology and sociology. It was also during this time, according to an interview with
LIFE
magazine, that Hammond decided to apply to Harvard University:

And you were accepted?

Yes. They accepted me, but I didn’t know about it for almost three months. I had left for another fishing trip, my last one, and the acceptance letter arrived on the day after I left. It was quite a shock coming home to that letter.

Why was that?

Well, on that trip, I almost didn’t come home at all.

Because you almost drowned?

Right. A buckle or a clasp from my overalls caught on the net as it was dropped into the water, but nobody—not even me—noticed it until it was too late. It was June, but even then, the water doesn’t get much over forty, and there I was in the water. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swim, couldn’t see, and I didn’t know what was holding me down. Fishing expeditions are dangerous all over, but I think they’re worst in Alaska. The water’s rough, and it’s always cold, and someone was always losing a finger or a hand or was knocked overboard. I was lucky, though. One of the new guys, someone I’d only talked to once or twice, he jumped into the water and he had the sense of mind to bring a knife with him, and he swam down in there and just cut me out of the net. Now he’s my best friend. In the end, I was able to go to Harvard all thanks to Marcus.

The 1975 November–December issue of
Harvard Magazine
contains a photograph of two men standing side by side on a boat at sea. One of the men is holding in his hands what could be a salmon. The photograph is cropped in such a way that one can tell that the two men are on a boat, and that the boat is at sea, or, at the very least, on water, but little else. The men in the photograph are said to be Hammond and Grant, in Alaska on a fishing boat, some time during the last trip Hammond took before leaving Alaska for Cambridge. The photo, submitted to the magazine by Hammond shortly after he and Grant had accepted their respective teaching positions, is accompanied by a short paragraph, titled H
ARVARD AND
Y
ALE TO CALL TRUCE AT LAST?
, about the two good friends who had found themselves teaching at rival schools, in which Hammond is quoted: “Whether he saved my life or not, come football season, all manner of friendship between Marcus and me will have to end.”

The second time we met, I showed Denise a copy of the magazine and the photograph. She shook her head and said, “Who has time for this kind of thing? Who has the time or the energy to rent a boat, and, apparently, a fish, because, frankly, at this point, I doubt that’s even their fish, and who knows if they even left the dock? The frame’s so tight, you can’t tell how far out they are, or where they are. All to take a fake photograph to submit to the Harvard alumni magazine, just to corroborate a fake story of how they met. And for what? Why go to the trouble?”

In 1869, a farmer, William “Stubb” Newell, digging a well on his land in upstate New York, unearthed what appeared to be a petrified giant, at least ten feet tall, proving the biblical claim (Genesis 6:4) that giants once walked the earth. In 1912, an amateur archaeologist, Charles Dawson, uncovered the remains of a man whose skull was distinctly humanoid and whose jawbone was distinctly simian, a discovery that would have provided the missing link in Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 1953, on a highway in rural Georgia, three young men claimed to have nearly careened into a flying saucer, and had hit one of the aliens left behind with their car, the body of which, two feet tall, hairless, and alien in appearance, they turned in to the authorities. The jawbone turned out to be nothing more than the jaw of a modern orangutan, antiqued for effect, and the petrified giant was quickly found out to be a hastily carved statue—fresh chisel marks were a dead giveaway—buried by a tobacconist and atheist, George Hull, who hoped to make a mockery of a Methodist reverend who had argued in favor of a literal reading of the Bible. And the space alien? A store-bought capuchin monkey, lethally drugged, shaved, and de-tailed, over a drunken bet made by one of the young men, a barber named Edward Watters, that he could get himself featured in the local news within a week. It seems that men and women, though mostly men, have engaged in such hoaxes—scientific, historic, literary, political, mathematical—from time immemorial, whether for fame, notoriety, money, to bolster a deeply felt belief, or as nothing more than an elaborate joke. As to what personally drove Hammond and Grant to construct this particular, elaborate, and exhaustive hoax, it is uncertain whether anyone will ever know, though it sometimes seems to be one of the only questions left that Denise still wants answered.