Coming of Age

by Deborah Beatriz Blum

  Ruth tore open the envelope and pulled out a thick wad of folded pages, twelve in all.

  “Dear Mrs. Benedict, I read your paper yesterday in one breath, interrupted by supper, most necessary of distractions, only,” it began. “Let me congratulate you on having produced a very fine piece of research. It makes a notable addition to the body of historical critiques that anthropology owes to Boas.”

  This validation, coming from a total stranger, and one who stood at the pinnacle of their profession, was the most meaningful acknowledgment Ruth had ever received. Although much of its content was a running monologue that allowed Sapir to demonstrate his own brilliance, Ruth still felt as if he was granting her admission into an elite fraternity. His praise, and the conspiratorial tone he adopted, seemed to say they were on equal footing.

  Over the next weeks and months, Ruth did everything she could to learn more about Edward Sapir. She read his books, sought out his essays, made inquiries about his marriage, and learned that, from time to time, he made trips to New York, the city where he had been raised.

  He was, according to rumor, the man who was destined to take over the department when Boas retired.

  Then, right before Christmas break, Esther Goldfrank gave her the news that, sometime in January, Edward Sapir would be coming to New York.

  * * *

  As Ruth walked through the museum hallway, lost in thought, a voice jolted her out of her reverie.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Benedict.”

  Ruth turned around.

  “Mrs. Benedict,” said the girl, “I hope you’re going to tell us more about the Sun Dance?”

  Ruth stared back. It was Margaret Mead, the small girl who was always trying to demonstrate that she knew more than the others. Next to her was a quiet dark-haired girl whose name she couldn’t remember.

  “Actually,” said Ruth, “I have something for you,” and she undid the clasp of her briefcase. Reaching inside, she pulled out a reprint of her article from the American Anthropologist.

  “Have a look at this,” Ruth said.

  She handed Margaret the reprint. It was the first time she’d shared her scholarship with a student.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Margaret, exchanging a glance with her classmate. “I’ll read it tonight.”

  Ruth walked off quickly, leaving the two girls to ponder the meaning of the special gift she’d bestowed on Margaret.

  5

  THE PROMISE OF HIS BIRTH

  Sapir … is by far the most brilliant among the young men.

  —FRANZ BOAS

  January 1923

  An agitated Edward Sapir, fresh off the train from Ottawa, led his wife, Florence, through Penn Station. Even though he’d splurged and purchased first-class tickets, their bunks had been exceedingly uncomfortable and the sound of Florence’s wet cough, punctuating the darkness in unpredictable spasms, had kept him awake for hours.

  As they made their way through the crowded station, the sight that greeted him was disconcerting. Right in front of his eyes, as tall as a full-grown man, was a placard that warned: “SPIT SPREADS DEATH.” The letters, all in caps, in a stark and leering black font, emphasized the gravity of the message. Other signs, “Offenders Are Liable for Arrest,” were posted everywhere.

  Ever since medical science had established that tuberculosis was a highly contagious disease, TB patients had been exiled to a life of quarantine within the four walls of the sanitarium. However, many of the chronically ill resisted treatment, either because they couldn’t afford it or they didn’t want to leave the home they shared with loved ones. These sick still circulated among the healthy, hiding their telltale cough and dodging the accusing stares of suspicious strangers.

  So far no qualified physician had officially diagnosed Florence as tubercular. A doctor in Ottawa, whom Edward distrusted, had said he thought he heard it in her chest, but Edward had rejected his opinion. Now that they’d arrived in New York, where medical care was more advanced, they were sure to receive a reliable diagnosis.

  Once out on the street, Edward’s ears filled with the noisy racket of foreign tongues, the shouts of newsboys and vendors, the familiar sights and smells. He was thrilled to feel the dullness of Canada dropping away. Glancing over at Florence, seeing her face coming alive, he knew that she felt that way, too, and with that understanding came a resounding wave of guilt.

  Suddenly, feeling as though he bore a heavy responsibility for Florence’s ill health, all he wanted was to escape. He wanted to run from her sickness, the melancholy that surrounded her, the defeat they were forced to confront in every doctor’s office. He wanted to rush off to a café, to sit over coffee, listen to the latest gossip, engage in conversation with a colleague who had half a brain. He wanted to talk about books or politics or psychotherapy. He was sick to death of the endless platitudes, the limp niceties that passed for conversation in Ottawa.

  What Edward wanted was, for the moment, secondary. Tomorrow was Florence’s appointment with the vaunted Dr. Howard Lilienthal, chief of Thoracic Surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital. It had taken Edward nearly two months to secure this consultation, and he’d only managed to do so because Franz Boas had been able to pull some strings.

  Lilienthal was going to look at the X-rays, examine Florence, listen to her chest; certainly he would be able to prescribe the correct course of treatment.

  * * *

  Edward Sapir had been born in 1884, in the village of Lauenburg, Prussia. His parents were Lithuanian Jews who conversed in Yiddish and German. At age seven, Edward was expected to learn to read Hebrew, which he did by sitting at his father’s side while the older man translated the Old Testament, pointing to the letters with his finger as he intoned the words in a melodic voice.

  Edward’s father, Jacob, may have taught him Hebrew, but he did so not because he was religiously observant, but because of he was fascinated by the musicality of the ancient language. Jacob’s passion was the sound of the human voice. His own singing voice was so pure, and his love for the operatic compositions of Mozart and Verdi so strong, that he auditioned twice, both times without success, for the Berlin Opera. In 1889, joining the wave of Jewish immigrants leaving Germany, Jacob came to America, where he found work as an itinerant cantor.

  It was music, banged out on the piano, written down as a fanciful composition, or expressed by the voice, that shaped the young Edward’s mind. As a boy he was never forced to practice, but was allowed to come to music on his own, which he did because his father made it fun. Edward reveled in sound, which even when expressed as the mathematical patterning of notes on a page was a composition he could hear. Later, Edward would credit much of his success to music, saying that it had produced in him a gift for mimicry, and had turned him into an “auditory learner,” the trait that enabled him to shine in the classroom.

  In the academic sphere, Edward’s achievements were near legendary. On New York’s Lower East Side his mother and father were known not by their own names, but as the “parents of Edward Sapir.” At age fourteen he won the citywide Pulitzer competition, which awarded him entrance into the prestigious Horace Mann High School. Instead, he completed grades eleven and twelve at a public high school and used the prize money to pay for his undergraduate studies at Columbia University.

  Edward was a good-looking young man who wore his thick dark hair swept back and a trifle too long. Dressed in clothes that were expensive but rumpled, he projected the aura of a Jewish intellectual of the bohemian sort. Pale eyes danced behind a pair of rimless glasses, seeming to say he was concentrated on lofty thoughts, and yet, despite his reputation as a genius, he did not seem to take himself seriously. His laugh came easily, often at his own expense. It was this habit of self-deprecation that most endeared him to family, friends, and women.

  While at Columbia the list of languages that Edward mastered was long and varied, and included Middle High German, Old Saxon, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Icelandic, Persian, and Sanskrit. He was fond of saying when introdu
ced to a foreign tongue, he felt compelled to conquer it. He enjoyed sounding out new accents, rolling the music of them around in his mind, then speaking them out loud, making them his own. Like his father, he had a rhythmic voice, which he “modulated in pitch and loudness with great effectiveness.” It wasn’t long before his effortless grasp of a new language equaled that of a native speaker’s, leaving many in his classrooms, including his professors, green with envy.

  * * *

  It was in the fall of 1903, that Edward first learned of a seminar in American Indian Languages that was to be taught through the Department of Anthropology. What most intrigued Edward was that the class promised to introduce him to a family of unwritten languages. While he had been vaguely aware that some primitive tribes still communicated only through speech, never developing a system of writing, he had never thought it possible to study one of those exotic tongues. He suspected that, for him, picking up the sounds and syntax would not be difficult.

  The first class of the semester met at the home of Dr. Franz Boas, who lived on West 82nd Street. For Edward, it would be the first time he would be attending a class inside a professor’s house.

  Edward rang the bell and found himself face-to-face with a typical-looking German housewife of his mother’s generation. She introduced herself as Marie Boas and led him into a dimly lit parlor. A brocade-patterned wallpaper lent the room a formal feeling. Edward noticed an upright piano in the corner with sheet music open on the music rack. He thought of sitting down to play, but resisted the impulse. When the others arrived, Dr. Boas invited them to join him at the oval-shaped dining table. A plate of apfelstrudel, neatly divided, sat at its center. Edward helped himself to a slice. The young man seated next to him grinned. Edward turned in his direction and the man introduced himself as Frank Speck.

  Edward said, “Do you like puns?”

  “If you’re thinking about my name,” said Frank, “there’s not a single one I haven’t heard.”

  Edward liked him immediately.

  When Boas began speaking he said, “It’s only a question of a few years, when everything reminding us of America as it was at the time of its discovery will have perished.” He went on to tell them about the Vanishing Tribes Project.

  If Edward thought he’d be learning the grammar or syntax of an ancient tongue, he was mistaken. Boas was stressing the urgency of their work as young “anthropologists,” telling them that the tribes spoke languages that had been brought to their “polished and idiosyncratic perfection without the benefit of pen on paper.” He explained that these living languages were orally learned and transmitted. Because they were languages that had no written form, they were destined to die with their last speakers.

  Edward thought about his own childhood, how he’d sat next to his father and read the Torah in a language that was several thousand years old. His Hebraic ancestors had developed a written language at a time when their enemies, the Philistines, had not. Consequently the Jewish people had been able to leave their side of the story for posterity. The Philistine side had never found representation. This same thing was about to happen in the struggle between the white man and the Indian.

  “The time is late, the dark forces of invasion have almost done their ignorant work of annihilation,” said Boas. He told them he’d seen “with his own eyes” what the construction of the railroads and the inexorable push of settlers heading west had done to the natives.

  The young men sitting around the table took in the gravity of the situation.

  “Your generation may be the last that will be able to collect the data which will form the basis of the early history of America.” Boas passed around a typed sheet that listed the eleven western states and the ninety-five tribes that demanded attention.

  Later, as he made his way to the streetcar, Edward was exhilarated. Boas had told them of his own youth, of the year spent with the Eskimos on Baffin Island in the Arctic Circle, of subsisting on seal meat and sleeping in igloos. These fantastic tales, Edward reasoned, were what the life of an anthropologist was all about. Suddenly the possibility of a career that held more than earning a doctorate in Indo-European languages and teaching college-level German had been opened. Edward—like the other young men who had sat around the table—felt himself swept up in a heroic endeavor.

  He didn’t know that the career of Dr. Boas had been marked by great struggle, that for years, his professor had been forced to suffer any number of deprivations, including the delay of marriage and family, constant job insecurity, and the restrictions of living within a greatly reduced budget. Edward was unaware that the discipline that Boas now promoted—North American anthropology—would subject him to the same struggles.

  * * *

  Two years later, in June of 1905, Professor Boas gave Edward his blessing to make his first trip into the field. Boas choose the destination, an Indian settlement close to The Dalles, along the Columbia River Gorge. This area, known for its abundant salmon runs, had been an important Native American trading post for hundreds of years. That was before the fur traders, Methodist missionaries, and settlers brought with them a wave of unknown diseases and decimated the population. In 1855, the U.S. government forced the local tribes—the Wasco and the Wishram Chinook—to sign treaties ceding their land, and resettled them onto the Yakima and Warm Springs Reservations.

  During his first week on the reservation Edward identified an informant, a seventy-year-old Wishram named Louis Simpson, who although “impatient and somewhat self-willed,” had a lovable personality, “owing chiefly to his keen sense of humor.”

  All had gone well until Edward made an attempt to use the contraption Boas had foisted on him—a new mechanical device called the phonograph. Boas had told him the phonograph would provide something amazing—an audio recording of a language that would soon be lost.

  The phonograph player weighed thirty-five pounds and resembled an enormous metal conch shell. From the moment Edward set eyes on it, he knew that using it would be a nightmare. He was forced to lug the damn thing nearly two miles through the reservation, down narrow rutted lanes that were littered with rotting fish heads and broken bottles. When he arrived at Louis’s shack, he had trouble getting it started.

  Finally, he was ready for Louis to tell his tale:

  A certain old man was sitting in the trail with his penis wrapped around him just like a rope. And then Coyote passed on by him and went on, a little beyond. He saw some women jumping up and down in the water. And then he thought, “I shall borrow from the old man his penis.” Coyote went over to him and said, “Friend, would you not lend me your penis…?”

  Suddenly Edward was aware that the cylinder, revolving in its box, didn’t sound right. He motioned to Louis to stop. When he cranked the cylinder to listen to the recording he heard only static.

  For the next hour Edward tried to get the phonograph to work. The holder and the needle inside it were broken. In retrospect, perhaps he’d jarred the mechanism when he set the case on the ground, or maybe when he fumbled with the needle he’d knocked it out of alignment.

  Two hours later, sitting on the banks of the Yakima River, Edward considered what to do. He’d have to request replacement parts, which would take months to reach the reservation. He had no choice but to write to Boas, to explain why there would be no recordings of Louis Simpson reciting his Coyote tales, in a language that would soon be gone.

  By the end of the summer, Edward had developed a great fondness for the Wishram Chinook. He appreciated their bawdy sense of humor. He’d filled many notebooks with their Coyote tales. In spite of the fiasco with the phonograph, Boas congratulated him for “getting such good information out of the few people who are left.”

  * * *

  By 1907, Edward had completed his course work, and the time had come for Dr. Boas to exert his full efforts to help his star pupil find work. However, in a field that promised adventure and status, the competition was fierce. It was two years before Edward received an offer f
or permanent employment.

  Thanks to Boas’s recommendation, Edward was made the chief of anthropology within the Geological Survey of Canada. At the age of twenty-six, he was in charge of ethnology, archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics for all of Canada. He set about remaking the department. In an academic world where employment opportunities were scarce, he suddenly found himself in the enviable—and often difficult—position of doling out jobs to his friends. Talented colleagues such as Paul Radin, Alexander Goldenweiser, and Frank Speck were among the recipients of plum freelance assignments. By populating the drafty corridors of Ottawa’s Museum of Man with like-minded friends, he created an island of New York intelligentsia.

  One of his Canadian colleagues was not pleased. Marius Barbeau, who had been hired prior to Edward’s arrival and had been assigned to work directly under him, derisively referred to this spate of hiring as “Sapir’s Jewish period.” Barbeau went even further, saying, “When you have a Jew you have something like a blot of oil, you see it spreads.”

  * * *

  It was hardly unexpected, but Edward’s ascendance to a position of power in Ottawa changed his life. The first thing he did was bring his parents to Canada. He then began to think about establishing his own household. In 1911, he fell in love with Florence Delson, a striking brunette who combined a European sophistication with a flirtatious nature. She also happened to be his second cousin.

  Frank Speck, a friend accustomed to enjoying Edward’s full confidence, was stunned when he heard that Edward had eloped. He wrote to Edward, demanding details.

  A few weeks later, Frank received the following response:

  As to your well meaning attempt to find out whether I am really in love, I suggest that you leave the whole matter in my hands. I shall only say that Florence Delson is absolutely penniless, much to my delight. Someday, when you have learned how to behave, I may try to have you see her.