The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (22 page)

IV.

When he was six years old, Marcus Alexander Grant began painting murals on the walls of his parents’ house. These were, judging by the photographs that I’ve seen, childish images, but of vibrant color and surprisingly mature technique. When he was nine, he began making and then mixing his own paints. As he grew older, he demonstrated a good eye for color and a talent for the older arts—frescoes, mosaics, designing and firing and painting pottery. With his blue-black hair, dimples, and soft black eyes framed by simple, steel-rimmed glasses, Grant was often remembered as everyone’s favorite of the two anthropologists. Relaxed and nonchalant, he dressed in jeans, work pants, old pullovers, workman’s boots. His was a wardrobe suited for fieldwork, for the outdoors. While teaching at Yale, he refused to wear a necktie and drove to and from campus in a battered orange Chevrolet C-10 Fleetside pickup truck. From the ceiling of the truck hung a bent straw cowboy hat, which he claimed had been given to him by a migrant worker he had met while picking avocados in upstate California.

Grant spent the first ten years of his life in Chihuahua, Mexico. His grandfather had owned acreage in Texas, ranchland used for raising longhorn cattle, but when the cattle had to be put down and the ranch sold, Grant’s father, Alexander, left home for northern Mexico, where he worked as a ranch hand and became enchanted with the country, the countryside, and its people. He met and married Maria Martinez in 1942, and two years later, Marcus was born. In 1954, with the death of Marcus’s grandfather, the family moved back to Texas, where they settled in Lubbock and where Grant’s father found work as an electrician repairing radio sets and television sets, and Grant’s mother earned money cleaning houses and occasionally waiting tables.

Grant’s father, who hated working with electronics, hated the small, crowded workshop covered with wires and transistors and cathode-ray receivers, had, for twelve years, been pulling together his and Maria’s earnings in order to place money on a piece of land, with any luck the same land originally owned by his father. Whether Maria convinced him otherwise or whether Grant’s father came to the decision himself, land was never purchased and the money was used instead to send Marcus to Texas Tech University, where he studied the visual arts. According to school records, his first two years were abysmal, and in his third year Grant left the visual arts department and changed his major to anthropology.

V.

Excerpted from “The Drameção Ritual: Silent Conflicts of the Sebali Prepubescent Male”:

After a Sebali boy completes his tenth year, his life becomes quiet, for between his eleventh and thirteenth years he is, according to tribal tradition, no longer permitted the use of language. Or rather, language is taken from him. It is done so bodily, in the ritual of drameção.

Symbolic in nature, the ritual involves the “removal” of the boy’s tongue. The symbol of the boy’s tongue—oftentimes the tongue of a wild boar tied once around with a lock of the boy’s hair—is then placed in the center of a bonfire, which is kept constantly ablaze. The tongue is placed next to other tongues symbolizing the language and manhood of other boys of the tribe, and each tongue will remain inside the ring of fire until its respective owner, through meditation, study, and prayer, retrieves it, thereby retrieving the tribe’s language. During drameção, the boys are not permitted to speak with anyone else of the tribe. Nor is any member of the tribe—elder, mother, father—allowed to speak to any boys in the midst of drameção.

The ritual, however, extends beyond the symbolic. After speaking with the elders of the tribe, and after lengthy discussions of drameção with boys of the tribe who had just completed the ritual and retrieved their “tongues,” we came to understand that the tribe’s language is not merely prohibited, but that literally the tribe’s language is, for a time period ranging from two to three years, forgotten.

The article goes on to explain the existence of marleh root, a soft root similar in shape to a carrot but the color of dried parchment. According to ritual, marleh root is boiled for two days before the beginning of the ritual, just long enough for the marleh root, which is tough and fibrous, to disintegrate, and the entire concoction is reduced to a syrupy stock which is then presented to the boy just before the “removal” of his tongue. Each boy is required to drink the same amount of the marleh stock, just under one cup, every seven days “for a time period equal to one month,” and, according to the findings of Hammond and Grant, it is this juice that, when drunk, causes a temporary loss of language memory, and “the juice’s potency is increased exponentially with each subsequent ingestion.”

Furthermore, the root itself is inconsistently potent, though Hammond and Grant speculate that the greener roots are the more potent roots. This inconsistency isn’t accounted for in the somewhat arbitrary recipe, so that it is possible that by the time the boy drinks his fourth cup of the syrup, he will be drinking a potion nearly twenty times as potent as that drunk by his brethren, a potency strong enough to make him lose memory “not just of his language, but of himself and who he is supposed to be.”

VI.

Denise began her studies at Boston University in 1978, the year people first began to suspect that some dark fate had, perhaps, driven Hammond and Grant off course, and, like most other anthropologists and ethnologists at the time, Denise became swept up in the fervor and the lingering buzz surrounding
The Sebali Continuum
and the Sebali tribe, only made more interesting by early speculations of the disappearance and possible deaths of Hammond and Grant. Then, almost two years after the disappearance, a modest group of friends and colleagues, five of them in all, left for the small Pacific island where the Sebali lived in hopes of finding the lost anthropologists, or, if not the two of them, at least a sign of what had happened to them. The company was made up of two Yale professors, a language specialist (who had learned the language of the Sebali people from Hammond himself), and two good friends. They returned, months later, empty-handed but for a shocking report that the entire Sebali people had disappeared, apparently and inexplicably wiped out.

As far as I can understand it, as it was explained to me by Denise and a few others in the field, the phenomenon surrounding the Sebali tribe stemmed not from the extensive and comprehensive documentation of the tribe by Hammond and Grant, which was remarkable, but from the purity of the tribe, which had survived, unmarred by anything outside of its very small chain of islands, longer than any other group of people. “The Sebali people,” Denise told me, with a hushed urgency that bordered on wistfulness, “were aboriginal in the truest sense of the word. Untouched. For a millennium, maybe longer. Consider,” she then went on to explain, “a group of people removed to an island and that island placed inside a box and that box sealed off from the rest of the world for one thousand years. Remove that island from its box, and what you have then is Hammond and Grant’s Sebali people. That the tribe even existed—had not been wiped off the face of the earth through starvation or by disease or by too much inbreeding—overshadowed the fact that they were discovered by two unheard-of amateurs, barely out of school, who had recorded faithfully their daily routines and rituals down to the tiniest detail, and had managed to do so without disrupting the tribe’s social structure.” She paused, a look of disbelief on her face, and then continued: “I mean, how could we have believed that they ate and slept and hunted with these people, wholly foreign people, without once tarnishing their society?”

Before the truth about the tribe had been revealed, a few scientists had originally conjectured that, perhaps inadvertently, Hammond and Grant had caused not only their own disappearance, but the disappearance of the Sebali people as well, which led to a minor resurgence of an ongoing debate in anthropology and sociology concerning the ethics of fieldwork. Not a few cultures have been irrevocably altered through the intrusion of science and anthropologists, and there have been some cases of anthropologists tampering with small tribal communities—falsifying observations or, worse yet, guiding tribal thought toward more and more exotic rituals and ways of life—in order to achieve the kind of shocking evidence that most people have come to expect of a relatively untouched tribe of aboriginals such as the Sebali. Most, however, considered these accusations, at least at the time and in light of the disappearance and possible deaths of Hammond and Grant, unfounded and somewhat inappropriate.

“There have been times,” Denise explained to me, “when it seemed that a people have disappeared, vanished, as if the earth had opened up, swallowed them whole, but once research is done, a good explanation, nine times out of ten, clarifies what happened.” Like everyone else studying or working in anthropology at the time, Denise wanted to figure out what happened to Hammond and Grant with the hope that this might help her understand what had happened to the Sebali.

The scouting party, while searching the remains of the Sebali tribe for signs of Hammond and Grant, took a number of photographs but did not bring home physical samples, leaving the site untouched, instead, for a future, more extensive research party. Denise was able to study reprints and enlargements of the photographs, consisting mainly of pictures of emptied-out huts, littered with broken pieces of pottery, dried pieces of meats and fruits scattered on the dirt floors, as well as huts that appeared untouched, the rooms clean and appearing like a home just recently vacated by a family that planned to return in a matter of moments, but she found the photographic evidence difficult to work with. Photographs, though they are indispensable to sharing discoveries, testing theories, and publishing articles, cannot, according to Denise, replace firsthand observation, fieldwork, or simple legwork and research.

Boston University, in collaboration with Tufts University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, received funding to begin a summer program that would allow students of anthropology to work together with professors and field specialists in cataloging the remains of the Sebali tribe and looking for clues as to what caused the tribe’s disappearance. Denise, however, was then only a first-year graduate student and was not chosen to participate in the program. Instead, after examining the photographs brought back by the original scouting party, she contented herself with spending her time researching a paper she planned to write, a biographical piece on the lives of Hammond and Grant and their contributions to the science of anthropology, which, she hoped, would provide her with some clues as to what had happened.

Denise began her research close to home, at Harvard University, where Joseph Hammond taught a course on untouched civilizations, and where he himself had gone to school from 1960 until 1964. While involved with her research, however, she struck a wall.

She had no problem finding information on Hammond after 1975. “I had interviews, articles published by him and about him, his course work, his lecture notes, his slide presentations, his test papers. But when I wanted to go back as far as his years as a student, I couldn’t find anything.” Denise checked official school records through the Registrar’s Office and then through the office of Alumni Affairs and Development, but was unable to locate student records, grades, class schedules, thesis papers, immunization records, financial statements, or anything else that would connect Hammond to Harvard.

“At first,” she explained, “we thought that maybe his files had been misplaced, or that maybe some fanatic had somehow gotten his hands on these records, but we couldn’t believe that anyone could be so thorough. Most of these records are kept in separate files, such as his immunization records, which would have been kept in the Health Services office, and his high school transcripts, kept with the Registrar’s Office.”

Frustrated, Denise went in search of professors in anthropology or sociology who had been with the college long enough to have perhaps taught Hammond and who might remember him.

“That’s how I found Dr. Stephens,” she said. An associate professor in 1962, Dr. Stephens taught in the Department of Anthropology for four years before leaving to teach in Chicago, but who had just recently returned to Harvard. “I asked him about Hammond, but he had no idea, didn’t remember him at all, not from back then, couldn’t remember ever meeting him.” Stephens went on to explain to Denise that he had come back to Harvard, in fact, to take over the one or two classes Hammond usually taught, but Hammond left before Dr. Stephens’s arrival, and so the two had, to Stephens’s knowledge, never met. Denise left Dr. Stephens’s office more confused and frustrated than before. Unsure of how to continue her research, she took a long walk, walking from Harvard Square across the Charles River into Boston proper, and from there continued walking until she finally reached her apartment, a walk of nearly five miles, and by which time the sky was dark and her feet a little sore. “Exhausted and cold and uncomfortable,” she told me, “I considered on my walk home dropping the project, leaving the Sebali tribe, Hammond, and Grant to someone else, moving into an area more interesting, more generous, and I cannot say that, if I had not found the message stuck to the refrigerator that Dr. Stephens had called and that I should call him back as soon as I could, I would not have given up, but the message was there, and so I called him.”

After Denise left his office, Dr. Stephens, himself intrigued by the mystery of Joseph Hammond, found an old photo album that contained photographs taken at a 1963 department mixer, one of which captured the entire department, department head, professors, associate professors, and students—graduate and undergraduate—their wineglasses raised, the kind of photo taken toward the end of a party in which everyone is leaning against everyone else in order to remain standing up. Joseph Hammond, Stephens told her, was not in that photograph, nor any of the other photographs, which, by itself, wasn’t damning or interesting evidence, but then Hammond wasn’t in the mixer photographs for 1962, either, or 1961, or 1964, which Stephens found altogether a little too strange. It was this final bump in the road that caused Denise Gibson to change course.