The Bone Lady: Life As a Forensic Anthropologist

Introduction

INTRODUCTION "The Bone Lady" is the nickname I acquired from law enforcement personnel while working with authorities from most of the sixty-four parishes in Louisiana, several counties in Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi , and various agencies across the country. In more formal terms, I am a forensic anthropologist and bioarchaeologist, a scientist who works with human bones in a medico-legal context and who sometimes digs them up. The idea for The Bone Lady started years ago when I began to notice and appreciate the widespread interest the general public has in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology. My purpose in writing this book was to share my passion for anthropology with others while telling the human stories behind my cases, stories that are often fragmented and incomplete. Though a scientist by trade, by birth and "ascribed status," as we anthropologists say, I am also a storyteller. I come from the hills of southwest Arkansas and northwest Louisiana, where my life revolved around stories. A friend once said THE BONE LADY to me that he felt the reason that I was successful in later years as a college teacher was that I was able to weave a story into every lesson I taught. The desire to share stories goes back to my childhood when my family would spend hours around the fireplace, just inside the ring of light, listening to the storytellers. My favorite tales were those told by my mother and my Aunt Penny. Memories of those stories come to me at the oddest of times. I find them comforting. Stories, myths, legends, memories of the past—all are part of what makes us who we are. They give us a sense of place. "Place" for me is in those hills. From there I recall the stories of my youth and, consciously and unconsciously, incorporate them into who and what I am. My past in the hills is woven into this book, sometimes in fond remembrance, and other times, in joy, that it is just that, the past. I was born in those hills on the blustery winter solstice of 1943—"on the cusp," as astrologers say—and, as with all but two of Mama's ten children, at home. My father's one lung and skill at pumping sand from the Red River kept him stateside during World War II and brought me into this world. I was a "war baby," not a "baby boomer," those babies born after the war was over when soldiers returned home. I have no real memories of "the last good war," but I do remember clearly my brief years in my hometown. For the first seven years of my life, we lived in three rooms of the old "company hotel" on the outskirts of Lewisville, Arkansas, at the railroad switchyard. We shared the first floor with Mama's sister, Pearl, and her family. The hotel's abandoned second floor, where we often played, contained nooks and crannies filled with dusty, broken furniture . When a train rumbled through the switchyard, all the windows shook with an eerie, death-rattle sound. Following the war for a brief period of time a few sick men in beds lived on the second floor of the hotel. I would cling to Mama's skirts as she walked back and forth talking to them and feeding them. I don't know who they were. 2 INTRODUCTION Author with brother Buddy (left) and cousin Danny (right) at railroad switchyard The trains brought strange men to our door. They were always hungry. Mama said their numbers increased after the war. She never let them in the house but she never turned one away. She made every one a plate of food from whatever she had, and he sat on the side steps to eat his meal. I peeked at these men from a safe distance as they 3 THE BONE LADY licked their fingers and sometimes even their plates. Occasionally, I also watched one hop another train when it slowed or stopped at the switchyard, waving a faint good-bye. My father's three brothers and three of Mama's brothers went to the war. They all came back, a couple of them coming to visit us. I remember racing down the dirt road with my brother and sister to meet them, looking so serious in the dark, scratchy uniforms they wore long after the war was over. I could...