An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir

Henrietta

151 Henrietta i knoW henrietta’s story from the witnesses I met at the trial of her killer. I will not say “murderer.” That boy was neither a wild Apache nor a civilized American. He did not know into what an impasse life had led him, so he cut his way out. I never knew him, so I must begin with Henrietta. • We all knew that Henrietta Schmerler came from a strict Jewish family in Brooklyn.* She was not used to gay and informal young people, and perhaps, for her, there was a glass wall. Her loud laughter, her overcordial moves toward acquaintances, caused us to withdraw, even the Jews in the class. I know that she sat at the feet of Margaret Mead, literally and figuratively, and perhaps Margaret did not even know it. Margaret had investigated sex in Samoa. No one had done the like with American Indians, and why should not Henrietta? She asked sex questions of all us older women, and I think we answered brusquely, telling her to go to the books. Instead she went to the Apache. I did not know Henrietta well. She was an earnest, determined girl from a very different background. Where I had been enjoying the militant informality of Greenwich Village, she had lived as the protected daughter of an Orthodox Jewish family. She knew nothing * Underhill’s account hews quite closely to others while adding insights to both the tragic events and Underhill’s own views on the struggles of gender and fieldwork and the cultural prodding that goes into the ethnographic endeavor. See: Parezo, Nancy J. 1993. Conclusion. In Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest. N. J. Parezo, ed. Pp. 334–367. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Pp. 361–362; Wood, Nathalie F. S. 1986. Past is Present: “Adventure” in Anthropology. Anthropology News 27(6):3; and the resulting letters to the editors in Anthropology News of November 1986, January 1987, and May 1987. There are also multiple newspaper accounts, such as: U.S. Orders Report on Murder of Coed. 1931. Washington Post, 28 July: 3. Becoming an anthroPologist 152 of nightclubs, of jocular flirtation, to be taken only as an evening’s entertainment. She knew nothing of my attitude, which regarded everything in the world as joking material as long as the joke was clever and, if possible, erudite as well. So I exchanged very few words with her. I understood that she was a devoted disciple of Margaret Mead, who had just come back from the South Seas with her husband, Reo Fortune. Together, they held court in a downtown apartment where the innocent, middle-class young could hear about the sex mores of primitive people and about how Reo had mingled with them clad only in a loincloth. To adults, this would have been merely an addition to knowledge, as I am sure Margaret and Reo meant it to be, but Margaret was young, far younger than I. Her study of primitives had not included the young of a Brooklyn congregation, bound by taboos quite as strong as those of Samoans but different. I should not speak of these South Sea sessions, for I did not often attend them. Margaret and Gladys Reichard, my enthusiastic helper in the new world, had somehow got smeared with repellant. Was there some bitterness connected with the warm regard Boas had for both of them? He had found positions for both when employment of women was rare in anthropology, and there was plenty of talk about the use of Gladys as a lecturer and Margaret as a museum worker when most people thought the positions should have been reversed. Margaret was a true intellectual, a maker and investigator of theories. Gladys was a lusty day-by-day worker who enjoyed people as comrades. Her language, with its Pennsylvania Dutch overtones, was somewhat crude and simple, but a good friend she was. What a companion. I, swimming uncertainly in new waters, was touched to the heart by her generosity to me. If a friendship with Margaret would seem to her like “whoring after strange gods,” I was willing to forego it.* Henrietta saw enough of Margaret to glimpse a stupendous new world, swirling with customs and problems hitherto unguessed. I am sure that she made up her mind to be a revealer of such problems, just as Margaret had been. So our first winter, not of discontent, but of initiation and revelation, came to an end...