Coming of Age

by Deborah Beatriz Blum

  Once alone in her hotel room, she dumped the letters on her bed. There were seventy to eighty of them. “The emotional effect,” she said, “of having all one’s news spread out on the bed … was very curious.”

  The manner in which she absorbed the tidings from home soon developed into a ritual. She read the letters that weren’t important to her first, saving the ones she cared most about for last.

  At some point she realized that the sequence never varied.

  Among those closest to her, her mother’s letters came first. They usually centered on practical considerations, from matters of wardrobe to steamer schedules.

  Luther’s were next.

  Invariably his letters contained reports of his tentative forays into London’s cultural life and planned sightseeing tours of the continent. Only occasionally would he permit himself to express his gnawing doubts about the future.

  Then Ruth’s letters, which were a soothing balm.

  They reflected an awareness of how isolated one could feel, working in the field. Ruth had concocted a scheme to help Margaret—and herself—withstand these bouts of loneliness. The idea was that their separation, while painfully real, was physical and not mental. Distance could be bridged by a leap of the imagination:

  Today was one of the days when I took the next boat from San Francisco to satisfy myself that you were all right. Nothing would do but to overtake you. Sweetheart, if I did, I know you wouldn’t know any more than you know now the love that folds you round always—but it would be a comfort to look upon you.

  And then there was the way Ruth dealt with sexual desire. Letters were, at the moment, the only way she had to make love to Margaret, but letters could fall into the wrong hands. Anything that bordered on the erotic had to be communicated in code, their own special code. Images that would seem innocuous to one pair of eyes held a secret meaning for Margaret, like when Ruth referred to having “my fingers tangling in your hair.”

  At other times Ruth found the urge to communicate her longings was too powerful to mask and she dispensed with the code:

  I’ve been lying awake making love to you and I’ve turned on the light so that I can satisfy my foolish senses which think that you know better when what I write is for you than when I love you all to myself.

  Then there were Edward’s letters.

  His were the ones Margaret designated for last, the ones left to savor—and sometimes to fear. She hadn’t consciously planned it that way, it was just something that happened on the first Steamer Day, when she saw the slant of his handwriting across an envelope.

  He wrote as if he were having a conversation with her.

  “Margaret,” he’d say, “if you were here, your eyes and hands would tell me much.” And in another, “Margaret, don’t you think we should have a child together?”

  She could hear his voice, gently mocking her, or himself. He’d have her laughing out loud. At times like these, the seventeen years that separated them seemed inconsequential. Then at other times, when his mood darkened, the distance between them was vast. His maturity, the years he’d spent watching Florence die, the children who were “growing up like weeds without a mother,” all this put him on a different trajectory than the one she was on. At these times he’d turn against her, consumed with jealousy, demanding obedience. In one rant he suggested that she’d devised a “water-tight system of rationalizations that only succeeded in hemming her spirit in and giving her chronic fatigue,” and in another he told her she had a “prostitution complex,” which stemmed from “a compulsive desire to make others happy by way of sacrifice of self.” After she soaked up his criticism she was so shaken she told Ruth that she felt “cowardly and contemptible,” and could get “no stronger in dealing with it.”

  She found she was only able to recover her self-confidence by revisiting Ruth’s letters.

  Ruth’s words spread over her like a “benediction.” Margaret told her, “The gifts you bring me are too heavy for my hands, some fall out and I have the added joy of stooping to pick them up, kiss them tenderly all over again.”

  * * *

  A few weeks after her arrival in Pago Pago, Margaret received a much coveted invitation to attend a Saturday night dinner party at the home of Commander and Mrs. Mink. Dr. Owen Mink was the station’s chief medical officer and the most powerful government official living permanently in Pago Pago.

  Margaret wore a pale blue crêpe de chine gown with three-quarter-length sleeves. When a horn beeped outside her window, she pulled on her gloves and descended the stairs. Miss Hodgson was waiting for her in the backseat of an old rusted black Ford.

  The Minks’ house was one of only a handful of two-story structures on the base. Inside it was filled with polished mahogany furnishings and porcelain bric-a-brac. A large metal fan hung from the ceiling, turning slowly through the heavy air.

  As soon as Margaret and Miss Hodgson were inside, Mrs. Mink assailed them. “Dinner is delayed,” she cried, taking Margaret’s arm. “Jopani, our cook boy, had to leave. He ran home to provide for his pig, which was shot at for invading the fita plantation.”

  “Jopani, that scoundrel,” said Dr. Mink, “has got my wife wrapped around his little finger.”

  During dinner Margaret found herself subjected to endless comments about the price of embroidery, where to buy the best rugs, and, of course, servant troubles. By the end of the evening she felt that if the boredom didn’t kill her, the catty looks would.

  She told Ruth,

  This sweet little group of gossips are just seething with speculation as to why I “left my husband.” Of course they are sure I have. And I know I oughtn’t to mind, but it’s so depressing to be greeted with suspicious unfriendly glances.… It’s curious how this remote insular living develops as much rigidity of social standards among the whites as among the natives.

  As much as Margaret wanted to distance herself from the navy people, she had the good sense to understand that the success of her project might just depend on how well she was able to negotiate the shoals of station etiquette. Toward this end, she was prepared to demonstrate that she was a lady who was very much at home in upper-class company. Judging others by their social rank was what made these officers and their wives tick and, if truth be told, class was important to Margaret, too. Writing home, she said, “I’ve learned that if people lack both personality and brains it’s a comfort to have them well-bred.”

  * * *

  A few days later, on the morning of September 24, Margaret waited with Dr. Charles Lane and his wife under the awning that extended over the porch of the Officers’ Club. She’d already concluded that most of the “ladies of the station” were empty-headed. They knew just enough to put “rose petals in their finger bowls and complain that their nurse girls were not respectful.” The only exception was Mrs. Lane, “who although mightily spoiled and childless,” had a certain “savoir faire and magnetism that was a life saver.”

  Their destination that morning was the Atauloma Boarding School for Girls of the London Missionary Society. The school was one of many run by evangelical Protestants who had come to Samoa in the mid-nineteenth century and were now “heavily entrenched” all over the islands. It would be Margaret’s first malaga (ceremonial visit) beyond the confines of the naval station.

  When they arrived at Atauloma, Margaret found that an elaborate feast had been prepared. She and the others were enjoined to sit at a table that had been erected beneath a narrow arbor “heavily freighted with strings of flowers.”

  Their hosts brought out platters consisting of baked taro, “almost raw pork,” and “boiled bananas.” Then the entertainment began. The girls of Atauloma sang and danced the siva in their “neat, ill-tailored white muslins, which hit their knees in just the wrong place,” followed by three of the school’s teachers, who made seemingly endless speeches full of Christian platitudes.

  Margaret fought to stay awake. It was clear that these teenagers were being inculcated with the same valu
es as any good Christian girl. It seemed that physical chastity for an unmarried young woman was the unquestioned and sole requirement of an education. By the end of the performance she was relieved to say good-bye and slog back to the car.

  Back in her hotel room she wrote to Ruth, saying she felt “boxed up beside a sullen sea.” She was feeling sorry for herself:

  This is a lonely job and I do value having a decent meal occasionally and talking something—not much, it’s true, but something. I’m too weak minded to face real dislike in the eyes of a pussycat. But where there isn’t a living soul who’d give a pewter platter whether you live or die at least friendliness is welcome.

  The next morning—as she did every day—Margaret’s tutor, G. F. Pepe, arrived to give Margaret a language lesson before she continued on to her job as a nurse at the naval hospital. Twenty-nine years old, “of chiefly family and a cousin of Tufele’s,” Pepe had graduated from the Atauloma Boarding School and was one of only a handful of Samoans who had learned to read and write in her native language.

  Margaret described their routine in a bulletin: “She dictates to me in Samoan and then I try to give it back to her with the correct pronunciation, phrasing and cadence.” The work was tedious and progressed slowly. Margaret complained, “It is remarkable how difficult it is to accomplish anything here.” And it wasn’t just the language instruction she found frustrating. Pago Pago had been “overrun with missionaries, stores and various intrusive influences”; it hardly offered an unspoiled environment in which to study adolescent girls. There was little doubt that she was going to have to distance herself from this naval enclave, which meant leaving the island of Tutuila. Only in an isolated location could she effectively investigate the subject Boas had sent her to study: How did teenage girls mature into women? In Samoa, as in Western cultures, was this transition a time of conflict?

  The success of this investigation depended on Margaret’s ability to establish an intimacy with her informants and this required a fluency in their language. Just thinking of this left her seething with envy at Edward Sapir. If he were here, he’d already be fluent in Samoan.

  That night she told Ruth: “I’m in a state of despair at present. There is a limit to the time one can spend on the language per day without useless satiety.”

  She looked at a map that showed her location in Pago Pago in relation to the other neighboring islands that constituted American Samoa. There was a myriad of possibilities, but as she contemplated spending the next few months going native in an isolated setting, the potential problems seemed to multiply. She dreaded “the nerve wracking conditions of living with a half-dozen people in a house without walls.” She was only half joking when she told Ruth, “Next week I’m going to start sleeping on the floor for practice.” Even worse was the thought of eating the food. Boiled taro, “a putty-tasting, soap textured” glob of gray, was “too starchy” to live on.

  She rubbed her arms. They hurt “frightfully”:

  At present this whole task seems utterly fantastic and impossible. How in Heaven’s name am I to learn the language and the psychology of a people in a year. Not even a year—9 months. It suddenly seems completely absurd.… What mind folly ever made me want to pick something as difficult as this?

  21

  THE TELEGRAM

  Margaret is a far more typical woman than either she or you know. And there is no shadow of doubt that Margaret loves me—why God only knows.

  —EDWARD SAPIR

  October 1925

  Margaret was aware she’d reached a pivotal moment in her fieldwork, though she hadn’t even started it. What she would decide now would determine the rest of her time in Samoa.

  Her new friend Miss Hodgson had suggested an approach to her research, one that she had not considered. It involved leaving the naval base in Pago Pago and relocating to a small medical compound on one of the more remote islands.

  Miss Hodgson told her that Ruth Holt—Mrs. Ruth Holt—currently residing in the maternity ward of the Pago Pago naval hospital, was waiting to give birth to her second baby.

  “Her husband is Edward Holt. The pharmacist’s mate at the dispensary on Ta’u,” said Miss Hodgson, referring to one of the three islands in the Manu’a group, over sixty miles away. “She’ll be returning there after the baby’s born, in about three weeks. If you are ready to travel you could go with her.”

  If she went to Ta’u, Margaret could live in the naval dispensary with the Holts, within immediate proximity to the village of Luma. This would give her access to 251 natives in an unspoiled setting.

  However, in order to effectuate this plan, Margaret would have to set the wheels in motion immediately. In order to relocate to Ta’u, she needed Dr. Owen Mink’s consent.

  But Margaret was uncertain. Maybe such a move was premature or, worse, wrongheaded. After all, she hadn’t yet grasped the most rudimentary language skills. Nor was she persuaded that living with an American family rather than a Samoan one was the right way to approach her fieldwork.

  If only she could ask Boas for his opinion, or at the very least, confer with Ruth. Even though her letter would not reach the United States for another month and there was no hope of receiving a timely response, that night she wrote to Ruth:

  Oh how terribly I need your loving arms! How used I am to turning to you in every emergency in every need—Sweetheart! Sweetheart! And so much has happened even in this interval of muddle-headedness.… I don’t see how I can manage.

  Confused as she was, something was telling her that living with Americans—while it would never win a “purist’s” approval—was the most efficient way for her to accomplish her goals.

  * * *

  At the beginning of October, Margaret pushed forward with the idea of relocating to Ta’u. She made the acquaintance of Mrs. Holt, who agreed, pending Dr. Mink’s approval, that Margaret could return with her when she caught the boat back to the medical dispensary.

  Knowing that Dr. Mink had received orders to “do everything possible to facilitate the success” of her project, Margaret was optimistic. She reported to Ruth, “having just told you I could never learn the language I suddenly decided that I knew quite enough of it to go out into the country at once. And I’ve decided on Manu’a because it’s not difficult to get to.”

  Her change of heart had been so sudden she felt she needed to justify it, even to Ruth.

  It’s also optimum from an ethnological standpoint for we have no information from there at all. It’s practically unspoiled by such things as mores.… There are 3 little islands, 2 connected at low tide and about 2,000 people in the three islands. I’m going to the disconnected one, Ta’u. A boat comes over from there about once a month. There are three white people on the island. The navy dispensary man, his wife and a corps man.

  Heartened that her stay in Pago Pago would soon be at an end, Margaret pressed forward with renewed energy. She arranged to interview Mrs. Helen Ripley Wilson, a “half-caste” woman educated in Honolulu, and a special friend of G. F. Pepe, her language instructor.

  On October 10, Margaret traveled to Mrs. Wilson’s house in the village of Leone, riding in a “rattletrap” of a bus that was packed with the locals, carrying “baskets of food, ice, pigs and chickens in sacks.” Margaret’s chief purpose in making the acquaintance of Mrs. Wilson was to learn more about the upbringing of teenage girls.

  For the interview, Margaret took with her a list of twenty-five typewritten questions. As she worked her way down the list she heard, once again, how much value the Samoans placed on physical chastity. Throughout the islands the Samoans practiced a custom that underscored its importance. In each village the ali’i (titular chief of high rank) had the right to confer on one of the sexually mature virginal girls of his family the rank of taupou (ceremonial virgin). Usually the girl chosen would be one of the chief’s own daughters. As a taupou the girl belonged to the whole village and was required to travel in the company of an older woman wherever she went. Margaret l
earned that, in fact, even “girls of common families” were never sent from village to village without a chaperone, as this was considered a necessary safeguard of their virginity.

  By the time that Margaret finished her interview with Helen Wilson, she understood that, for unmarried females, virginity was an absolute requirement.

  This attitude toward chastity was not so different from the way Margaret herself had been brought up.

  * * *

  Edward Sapir sat at the desk in his Ottawa office, barely conscious of the men in overalls who were labeling his boxes of books and stacking them on a dolly. His focus was on a letter to Ruth:

  Ever since Margaret and I found ourselves, nothing else has seemed capable of entering into my head and heart. Summer school, museum, Chicago, all pass by on the merest periphery of my consciousness. My office looks very bare. My books and papers have all been packed and they’re marking the Chicago address on them. I am hoping to sell all the furniture.

  Two weeks earlier Edward had wrapped up his summer courses at Columbia and returned home. Now he was closing out the Ottawa chapter of his life—his marriage, the birth of his three children, and the prime of his manhood. It had lasted thirteen years. He looked around. Dull yellow rectangular stains showed on the walls, marking the place where framed pictures of his family once hung.

  Yesterday he’d taken the children and his mother to the Immigration Office to have photos taken for their passports. His mother, while well-intentioned, was of little help; with her health failing, she had turned into yet another problem.

  He continued with his letter, making reference to his new boss, Fay-Cooper Cole:

  Cole has taken an apartment for me and I have already paid the October rent. Are these details interesting? But they show that I am soon to be a Chicagoan. But then how am I ever to see Margaret? A permanently absent love is too cruel. I could never bear it.