Coming of Age
Page 21
* * *
That evening they said good-bye at the depot in Williams, Arizona. They were bound for different destinations, in distant corners of the globe.
Ruth’s journey was short. She was headed back to Gallup to catch a mail wagon that would take her to the Zuñi pueblo.
Margaret was riding the train to Los Angeles, then up to San Francisco, where she would catch a steamer bound for Honolulu.
Waiting, next to the platform, were two trains, their engines humming.
Once she’d boarded her train, Margaret went to her seat, but after a few minutes she stood, anxious and uncertain. She began making her way down the aisle. In a moment she was rushing, moving from car to car, looking out at the platform, hunting out Ruth, who she knew to be somewhere on the other train.
Later, her train speeding through the desert, Margaret took a sheet of paper out of her case and began a letter:
And then I get no further for my tears.… O Ruth seeing you, even thru a heavy screen where you couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t see you was far, far too precious to surrender a moment of.
Margaret stopped, thinking about that last glimpse she’d had of Ruth, while both their trains were pulling out of the station. This was the image she’d carry with her to Samoa:
… you and I were both moving, both moving fast—and as my train seemed to be rushing thru space you were always just opposite my window, a lovely wind blown figure.
Ruth, on her own train, was also writing of their parting:
I got on the train at eight o’clock and found the berth all made up—only this time I went to bed alone and lay awake for hours and hours. But darling, for all my loneliness I had the comfort of those very nights. I could have wept for joy—the precious thing in life. I kiss you Darling.
20
QUICKSILVER LOVE
Now the theory of polygamy that Margaret evolved (she uses the term herself) is a mere rationalization.… It had to be a “quicksilver love,” a modernly beautiful and noble and unfaithful “free” love to be truly love!
—EDWARD SAPIR
September 1925
Luther walked along the narrow streets of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Once a charming town, the Halifax docks had been blown to smithereens during the war when a French munitions ship exploded in the harbor. Now, eight years later, the docks were still heaped with rubble and much of the charred waterfront remained boarded up.
The sight was emblematic of how Luther himself was feeling.
A week earlier Luther had begun his own adventure, setting sail for England, steerage class. The ship had stopped in Halifax to pick up freight.
Luther was thinking about the last letter he’d received from Margaret. She had said, “I’ll not leave you unless I find someone I love more.” It was the first real suggestion that she might be considering such a step.
To make matters worse, Luther had lost his sense of direction. Ostensibly, he was going to England to make a study of how social institutions disseminate information about birth control to the urban poor, but really, he had only a lukewarm interest in this project. He’d confessed to friends that going to Europe was “far more a device to facilitate M’s Samoan plans than a carefully thought out educational program.” In a more fundamental sense, he no longer aspired to be a parish priest. Although he hadn’t yet acknowledged it, he was deeply depressed. Later he was to say, “It seemed to me sometimes that one of the options was suicide, and while it was more than a passing thought I was not at ease with it as a solution.”
* * *
Summer school was still in session but Edward’s enthusiasm for teaching had petered out. He freely admitted, both to himself and to Ruth, that he was “useless.”
On August 5 he wrote to Ruth:
I’m so sorry our visit together was so fleeting. You were gone by the time I turned to say, “How do you do?” And I know I wasn’t a bit polite—I was all involved in Margaret. Forgive me.
When last they’d met, Ruth had demonstrated an agreeable willingness to discuss any and all matters that pertained to Margaret. In Edward’s current state, there was nothing more he wanted than to unburden himself to a receptive and sympathetic listener:
I don’t understand Margaret’s point of view at all. It’s all words, arrangements, escapes, curiously involved relationships, elaborate duplicities, half gifts, and, if I mistake not, unconscious demands for dominance.
He kept coming back to the question that bothered him the most:
She seems to me to expect the impossible. She wants the very highest type of love relationship but that is not to affect her relationship to Luther one iota! The more she loves me, the more she loves Luther apparently. That’s glorious mysticism but I’m too weak to follow.
And now, with Ruth back on the mesa, he’d have to wait at least three weeks to get an answer from her.
When last he’d seen Margaret, she’d explained her theory of love, as she thought it should be lived. She called it “polygamy.” According to her, a “polygamous love,” unlike the more conventional “romantic love,” was not bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy, and undeviating fidelity.
The very notion that any personal conduct that valued monogamy should be construed as a negative left Edward bewildered. He had his own name for Margaret’s kind of love; he called it a “quicksilver love.” He told Ruth:
Now the theory of polygamy that Margaret evolved (she uses the term herself) is a mere rationalization. Having made of her erotic life a mere tentacle of the ego, she could not possibly allow herself to pay the price of love. It had to be a “quicksilver love,” a modernly beautiful and noble and unfaithful “free” love to be truly love!
What really galled Edward was that Margaret’s theory was based on lived experience. He simply couldn’t expunge from his mind the very graphic images of Margaret rolling around in bed with another man—with Luther:
She cannot give her body to another at the same time without defiling the love relationship. That is cardinal. I stand helpless before the intuitive certainty of it.
“Who the hell was Luther Cressman, anyway?” wondered Edward. A divinity student, an earnest young man, decent but dull. Based on his few brief encounters with him, Edward could tell that the man had no real sense of humor. What good was a man who did not make Margaret laugh?
When he’d written back to Margaret, vehemently objecting to her notion of simultaneous love relationships, and suggesting that they find a compromise, she dug in her heels, insinuating that their difference of opinion boiled down to a “generation gap,” that he simply didn’t understand the “New Woman.”
He was grateful that he could confide in Ruth, that she was willing to take on the role of go-between. He and Margaret had a strong passionate love and he was certain that would win out, that is, if he didn’t let his temper run away with him. On August 8 he wrote to Ruth:
Your letter from Williams Arizona cut me to the heart. It is not you who are cruel, it is I. I have been so inconsiderate, even brutal, in the things I have said to poor Margaret. Your letter disturbed me so much that I sent a wireless to the Matsonia to assure her that I loved her and that I needed her love.
He ended by saying,
You must stand by us both, dear Ruth. Each of us is both strong and weak, each has tangled psychic problems that are not clear to the other. Do all you can to assure Margaret of my love. Tell her to attach more importance to that than to anything I say in a moment of anger or in a helpless burst of jealousy. Will you do that? You are our well-beloved friend and we are brought nearer to each other by your love.
* * *
In 1925, Margaret Mead, at the age of twenty-three, still had strong ties with her immediate family. Prior to her departure for Samoa, she’d been in the habit of communicating with her parents and grandmother on a regular basis. She also had her hand in managing the many friends she’d collected while at Columbia. She was determined to keep on top of all these relationships.
From the very first these public dispatches sounded a note that was both upbeat and conspiratorial, as Margaret tried to take her audience along with her on the journey. Regaling them all with descriptions of personalities that were idiosyncratic, and encounters that could only be had on a transpacific steamer, her letters displayed a sense of humor her friends had rarely glimpsed:
My table has been fun. At first I sat with the three priests and a gay and pious Catholic lady. The conversation turned on various and minor ecclesiastical dispensations and her 21 Catholic first cousins … I play bridge with them [the priests] in the morning and I made a grand slam.… Tonight is the Captain’s dinner, balloons and full dress, I have been incredibly lazy for the whole trip, and this is a poor account but mine own, Sir.
On the morning the Matsonia was scheduled to arrive in Hawaii, Margaret woke at five to find that land was in sight. She stood on the prow as the ship rounded point after point of rugged clay-colored mountains. The landscape was blanched of color, with only occasional patches of green showing as gray. At first glance, the city of Honolulu seemed to be resting somewhere on the cliffs, while the wandering mists, which seemed extensions of the clouds themselves, covered the tops of the mountains, hiding all signs of industrial civilization.
After landing, Margaret was taken in hand by staff from the Bishop Museum. Among them was Dr. Herbert Gregory, the museum’s director, who showered her with hospitality, treating her to a daylong tour of the island in his open roadster.
Following along narrow winding roads for forty miles, they passed long stretches of green transparent rice fields interlaced with thick tangles of jungle foliage. Around each turn they encountered unexpected botanical enchantments, sometimes a banana grove, or a sugarcane plantation, or a pineapple plot. Margaret remarked, “The principle of this country is endless folds, folds of rock and folds of red soil, and perpendicular mountains that look like stiffly folded green velvet.”
But while the public persona Margaret was presenting in her bulletins was chatty and upbeat, her letters to Ruth were not:
Edward’s long letter … still is too much to read peacefully. Just reiteration of course, he will share me with no one, I would love too lightly, I am dominating and egotistical and selfish. One thing I know I can never bring thru this year, and that is self-confidence and self-respect. They will be riddled into net worth before it is over. He can think of so many terrible things to say, and I shall believe them, all of them. And how to live, accounted a parasite on love, and too ill to do decent or consecutive work?
* * *
After two pleasant weeks socializing with the staff of the Bishop Museum, Margaret left Honolulu, “weighed down with flower leis,” which she tossed from the stern of the SS Sonoma into the sea, as she watched Hawaii recede into the distance. The voyage crossed the equator. On the fifth day at sea she wrote in her bulletin, “It’s no use, dear friends, I just can’t write you a nice long descriptive letter on the ship; the darn thing rolls too much.” She was impatient to reach her destination: Pago Pago—a port on the island of Tutuila, the largest of the five islands that comprise American Samoa. Surely this harbor, which had been a coaling and repair station for the U.S. Navy since the turn of the century, would offer an exciting introduction to the primitive landscape into which she was about to set foot.
The ship arrived at dawn on a cloudy morning on August 31. The sun appeared sullenly for only a moment before it disappeared again, while the heavy surf showed white then green then white again against the sides of steep black cliffs. Dense woods spilled down to the sea, and the narrow beach was ringed with palm trees. Margaret noted that the navy, in deference to the native style, had constructed their buildings to look like the Samoans’ own green-roofed houses, many of which were clustered under the trees.
No one was waiting at the dock to meet her. As she walked along the crowded wharf looking for a welcoming face, what she saw was totally unexpected:
The presence of the fleet today skews the whole picture badly. There are numerous battleships in the harbor and on all sides of the island.… Airplane’s scream overhead; the band of some ship is constantly playing ragtime.
Finally she made herself known to a Mr. Walters, an official with the Bank of American Samoa, who offered to escort her to the one hotel in town.
On the way to the hotel, Walters told Margaret about life in Pago Pago. The station was primarily a supply base, which included coal sheds with a capacity of 4,500 tons and two fuel oil storage tanks of 55,000 barrels each, for vessels of the U.S. Navy. The station had sixteen officers and an enlisted complement of 147 men. It had a radio station that maintained “direct schedule” with Honolulu, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. All government quarters had sewerage, running water, and electric power from 6:00 a.m. until midnight. Provisions of all kinds, including meat and other cold storage supplies, could be purchased from the commissary. Motion pictures were screened several times a week, and there was even a “four-hole, five-green golf course on which nine holes were played.” What Walters did not say was that recently the island had entered a “period of unrest,” stirred up by the Mau, a Samoan opposition movement. Only the year before, this protest movement had reached the breaking point when a group of visiting New Zealand policemen opened fire on a procession of Samoans, killing a high chief.
In American diplomatic circles, Samoa was now recognized as a thorny problem. The question that circulated among officials was, “Do we navalize or civilize it?”
Mr. Walters deposited Margaret at her lodgings, a ramshackle two-story structure that sagged under a roof of corrugated iron. She was excited to hear that six years earlier Somerset Maugham had stayed in this same hotel, and had used it as the setting for his story “Rain.” As she was checking in the clerk told her that a Miss Hodgson, the head of the navy’s training school for nurses, had been there, looking for her. The news gave Margaret a moment’s pause as she thought wistfully of how Luther’s father had intervened on her behalf, contacting his old friend Admiral Stitt at a critical time, making sure that she could bring her dream to fruition.
While Margaret was unpacking she received a visit from the governor’s aide-de-camp who had come to deliver an invitation to that night’s dance on U.S.S. Seattle, which had recently arrived in port carrying Admiral Robert E. Coontz, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
That evening Margaret was thrilled to step out on the dance floor with Admiral Coontz himself. Later she made the acquaintance of Ellen Hodgson, who had heard all about her:
Surgeon General Stitt had the Superintendent of Nurses write Miss Hodgson asking her to help me. She’s going to let me put my evening dresses in her dry closet, which is the greatest help of all; otherwise they rot or get rust stains from cockroach bites.
As it happened, Ellen Hodgson, at the behest of Admiral Stitt, was working on accomplishing something even more important—language lessons. Having learned that the young anthropologist intended to stay in port until she had a rudimentary mastery of Samoan, Miss Hodgson was doing her utmost to secure a good tutor.
The next day, Margaret visited the parade grounds of the naval station, where she attended a celebration in honor of Admiral Coontz and the fleet. Here Margaret got her first glimpse of the people she’d come to study. Sami, the high priest’s daughter, was presented wearing a tuiga (headdress) that was made from human hair bleached a russet color. Sami danced a siva (ceremonial dance) accompanied by her retinue, all of whom were bedecked with flowers. Margaret found them “magnificent” but “too muscular to be pretty.” Then Tufele
, the district governor of the Manu’a group, made a “glorious speech” in broken English. He was “gorgeous in full regalia, a high grass headdress and elaborate grass skirt and naked above the waist with his body oiled till the skin glowed.” With his retainers behind him, all seated under black umbrellas, Tufele presented Admiral Coontz with an array of Samoan valuables, including a finely woven mat and freshly husked coconuts. Margaret learned that Tufele had been educated in Honolulu and that the Manu’a group consisted of a trio of tiny islands, sixty-eight miles away, all part of the territory administered by the U.S. Navy.
Margaret quickly understood that the Samoans gauged “a visitor’s importance by the rank of the naval officers with whom he or she associated.” She was, right from the start—thanks to her turn on the dance floor with Admiral Coontz and her indirect association with the surgeon general—conferred a high status. This she felt was fortunate. Certainly there was “nothing to be gained in Samoa by working in independence of the naval authorities.”
As for mixing with the local population, it was clear that in Pago Pago this was not to be part of the experience. Samoans were everywhere, but as far as the naval officers and their wives were concerned, they were to be treated as part of the servant class, or as exotic creatures to be held at arm’s length.
* * *
It was after two weeks in Pago Pago that Margaret heard that the mail ship was due to arrive. Writing to Ruth, she confided, “This last night of waiting for mail is dreadful. I can’t read, I can’t write coherently. I can’t sit still.”
On the expected day, after word of the ship’s approach circulated, Margaret and throngs of others walked to the dock to wait:
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of “Steamer Day” in these parts. Everything stops, that is, everything which ordinarily happens. Cook boys disappear, unless forcibly detained by their lavalavas and meals are most uncertain quantities.
The distribution of mail took place in a warehouse on the dock. Names were called and Margaret went up to receive her letters. Stuffing the bundle into a cloth bag, she departed, feeling much like she was carting off a treasure.