An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir

Columbia, Part 2

173 Columbia, Part 2 there Were feW additions to our graduate department my second year. Perhaps the shadow of Henrietta’s death was hanging over us, but it had to be forgotten as we plunged into the sea of new information and new ideas about Homo sapiens. By this time the “steadies,” those who meant to shoulder their way through to a doctorate, had been separated from those who had come merely to take a look, then drift off to marriage or a paying job. I could almost feel the tide take hold of me as when a ship leaves the waters of the harbor and is lifted by the first great swells of the Atlantic. The ship had a captain. A little stooping man, with a German accent and a scar on his face, but he knew exactly what the course was and how to keep on it. Now I knew what my life’s work was to be. Of course, I had not found what was the matter with the human race except being human, but you grow patient when you think of problems in terms of millennia rather than months. Sitting in my cubbyhole in the darkened library, I could picture the good old earth rolling along for billions of years with continents breaking up and floating away, mountains popping up and down, one species of animal after another making a trial run and then disappearing. At the beginning of the second year we all made speeches and told what we had been doing. Boas wanted to know very practical things, something about government and social development. How long had they been there? What was the attitude toward Spain? Lots of things like that. Ruth wanted to know: how did they feel? I told her a great deal about the marriage system and the bringing up of children because that was what I was interested in, too. Ruth became very enthusiastic about what I could provide because the other students did not have anything like that to provide. Ruth saw that I had some of the poet in me, which she had also. I guess Becoming an anthroPologist 174 she told Boas and he thought, “Well, perhaps this is something we’d better encourage.” Boas accepted what I had done. He did not praise me, but acceptance was enough. He even tried to get me to take on some of the work he was doing with one of the northern tribes. But I said I wouldn’t go to the northern tribes. They weren’t picturesque. I’d already sensed the poetry of the O’odham, and I wanted to stay there. He was very kind about it. He saw that I was deeply interested and didn’t interfere; he let me have the O’odham. It was all just a beginning, feeling your way at first, with them and with me both. I worked another nine months of classes and seminars. In that second year at Columbia, I was at home, busy as a robin pulling worms out of the wet soil. Anthropology was that soil, soaked and ready for me. Once it had looked impenetrable, and its worms—Bastian, Boule, Keith—had seemed not only sunk beyond my digging but probably indigestible.* Now, my beak yanked them out with gusto, chomped them into pieces, and stowed them in a notebook. Boas had no work for me that second summer, nor for anyone. We, among our books and our arguments—dug in like prairie dogs in our own particular burrows—were forced to become aware that the Depression was growling outside our doors. Such things as money and positions still seemed far away to most of us as we chased ideas through volumes of fact, wrote papers, grasped new concepts. I, for one, took my disappointment in stride. I had saved a little from my pay of $1,000. I would see more Indians and grasp more ideas by touring among the Navajo with Gladys Reichard. • * Bastian was noted previously. Marcellin Boule (1861–1942) was, during his day, an important French paleontologist and physical anthropologist. Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955) was also once a leading paleoanthropologist, having published in 1911 Ancient Types of Man, among other influential books. He was a principal advocate for the veracity of Piltdown Man, a series of fossils discovered near Sussex, England, in 1912 and which were thought by many to be the “missing link” between ancient and modern humans. Through...