Then Dr. C. Montague Cooke, a biologist whom she had met at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, showed up with two of his colleagues. They were on their way to collect land snails near Fitiuta, on the eastern end of Ta’u, and they invited Margaret to accompany them. The trip was a diversion—she had no reason to make it—but when the natives told her that Fitiuta’s chief had paid her the great compliment of crowning her Fusilelagi, a taupou name meaning “Flower-in-the-Heavens,” she accepted.
Margaret and the three biologists departed on February 20, trudging seven miles along a rough foot track that took them down “sharp descents into little canyons full of rocks” and through the kind of mud Margaret had only seen in “barnyards.” When they arrived in Fitiuta, they found a “charming village,” with houses spread out along either side of a high stone road.
Margaret and her party were greeted by the chief and she presented him with a case of canned salmon. In return the women presented her with a native dress to change into, and the youths of the village brought out ceremonial food offerings, including “platters of coconut leaves piled high with chickens and fish, land crabs, octopus and pieces of pork, all smoking hot from the oven.”
After the feast the entertainment started up.
A dozen men began to pluck their ukuleles, and one of the chiefs walked over to Margaret and pulled her to her feet. With scarlet cordyline leaves tied around her wrists and ankles and coconut oil smeared over her arms and shoulders, Margaret danced before the assembled crowd.
Later that night she played Sweepy (Casino) to the tune of several ukuleles and bantered with the untitled men while the girls of the household made up the beds and hung the mosquito nets.
She was disarmed by the hospitality, enthusing, “Fitiuta is a gold mine and I have the whole village at my feet with dozens of high chiefs.”
A few days later, when her friends from the Bishop Museum said it was time to return to Luma, she demurred, saying that she had more “ethnology” to do. The truth was she enjoyed being the center of attention. She wrote to Boas, “I haven’t merely watched these procedures, I’ve been them!”
Moreover, she’d made the acquaintance of two young Samoans who were providing some much needed information. While they were not the adolescent girls she was supposed to be interviewing, she decided she could used them as informants anyway.
One, whose name was Fa’apua’a, was the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a high chief and reputed to be one of the most beautiful girls on the island. A taupou herself, Fa’apua’a had the habit of holding herself so aloof that she seemed “swathed in a cloak of dignity.” The other was Andrew Napoleon, a twenty-two-year-old teacher at Fitiuta’s government school. “Napo” as Margaret called him, spoke fluent English and was forthcoming on many subjects, including the behavior of young Samoan men.
During the ceremonies, Napo stood by Margaret’s side, providing context for whatever she was observing. Much of what he said pertained to the sexual practices of married couples, possibly because he himself was a newlywed. One of his more far-fetched claims was that among young marrieds, he knew of “no impotence in any case nor of frigidity.” He asserted that on his island, couples had intercourse “several times in one night, sometimes as many as fifteen.” Napo was so informative that by the end of Margaret’s ten-day stay, he had given her enough material to fill a thirty-six-page journal.
When the visit ended, Margaret reluctantly tramped back to the dispensary. She told Ruth, “Doing straight ethnology is just fun and so easy once the people love you.” What excited her even more was that she’d finally heard stories that made it possible for her to tackle the question she’d been sent to investigate. On March 4 she wrote Ruth:
Getting the material was in a way what worried me most. I’ve got all the rest practically but Wissler and Ogburn both wanted the sex so much and it is so difficult to get at—and I doubted whether my results would have any point.
Clark Wissler, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, and William Ogburn, a sociology professor at Columbia, both had a vested interest in having Margaret prove the theory that adolescence was more heavily influenced by culture than by biology. She very much wanted to meet their expectations. She told Ruth, “But by lucky chance I’ve succeeded in getting enough so that it’s now merely a question of verification.”
The “lucky chance,” of course, had been Napo. Although not an adolescent girl, he had provided an enormous amount of pertinent information.
She wrote to Ruth that finally she had a “sense of command” over her “problem” and felt “clear going ahead.” She was ready to approach the adolescent girls she’d identified as informants—all sixty-six of them—hoping that they would confirm what she had already been told. She prepared her list of preliminary questions:
Approximate age, rank, and schooling in government and pastor’s school, amount of foreign experience, health and physical defect, date when puberty was attained, her training in etiquette, her skill in all of the domestic industries; her general personality traits, etc.
Margaret hoped that once acquired, this data would give her a better grasp of the “philosophical conflicts” that shaped a girl’s teen years, particularly when it came to sex.
However, the very next day, before she could start these interviews, another invitation arrived. Dr. Charles Lane, her “old friend” from Pago Pago, had received a temporary posting to the nearby island of Ofu. He sent word that he and Mrs. Lane were enjoying themselves immensely and hoped Margaret would come for a visit.
At dawn on the morning of March 8, the boat from Ofu arrived. As Margaret was gathering a few provisions to take as gifts, Fa’apua’a and her best friend Fofoa “came tumbling head over heels” into her room, and announced that they wanted to join her.
Manned by nine Samoan oarsmen, their fifteen-foot whaleboat set sail under a broiling sun. The girls were desperately sick. During the three-hour pull Margaret lay in the belly of the boat, resting her head on a burlap bag filled with canned goods. “The Samoans chanted and shouted; after a little it poured and we could not see land at all.”
By the time they reached Ofu the sun was setting.
Margaret joined the Lanes for a swim in the lagoon. Afterward, she attended a reception in the house of Misa, Ofu’s high chief.
With her were Fa’apua’a and Fofoa, acting as attendants, making speeches, and tending to her personal comfort. Margaret thought of them as members of her “court,” referring to them in letters as her “merry companions.” The girls were so high-spirited that when they went to do Margaret’s wash, “one carried the clothes but the other carried her ukulele.”
In the eyes of their hosts, a visit from three unmarried women, far from home and traveling alone, was unprecedented. The young men, in particular, were thrilled. They taunted the girls with lighthearted banter. The spirit was contagious and that night, at bedtime, as Margaret was climbing under the canopy of a mosquito net, Fa’apua’a playfully asked her if there was one of the men that she favored.
Laughing, Margaret did not answer.
After a few days on Ofu, Margaret and her merry companions journeyed over land to the tiny village of Sili, on the adjoining island of Olosega.
In honor of the white taupou’s visit, the villagers of Sili killed and roasted a pig. In the balmy night air, under a crescent moon, the high chiefs shared anecdotes about cannibalism in bygone times.
The next day the girls were ferried, one at a time, by outrigger canoe to the eastern end of the island. From there the three made their way along the southern coast of Ofu. “It was a long walk skirting the sea, at places racing the tide, or leaping between high waves from one wet rock to another.”
It was while they were on the trail, walking single file, with Margaret in the lead, and Fa’apua’a and Fofoa following behind, that Margaret worked up the courage to ask the questions she’d been too embarrassed to pose to any of her adolescent informants.
Directing her quest
ions to Fa’apua’a, she asked, “At night, where do you go?”
“We go out at night,” said Fa’apua’a with a mischievous smile.
“With whom?”
“We spend the nights with boys.”
Margaret heard both girls laugh. “With boys?” she asked. “What do you do with the boys?”
The girls were laughing too hard to answer.
They seemed to be insinuating that they’d been sexually adventurous.
Margaret had assumed both young women were virgins. She knew that like all the highborn girls on the island, they’d been raised at the knee of a Protestant pastor, a religious official who all but guaranteed that his charges remained chaste. What’s more, Fa’apua’a had been afforded the great honor of being named the ceremonial virgin of her village. But the way the girls were now acting belied everything Margaret thought she knew about them.
Was what they were saying the truth? Or were they playing a practical joke on her? Margaret wasn’t sure.
She knew that Samoans loved playing practical jokes, or what they called “hoaxing.” There were even several terms in their language—ula, tausa, and taufa’ase’e—that described this behavior.
Margaret was conflicted.
The fact was she’d come to Samoa with a preconceived idea—entertained by many Americans—that sensual enjoyment was a feature of life in the South Seas. This image had been fed by novels, travel literature, and the visual arts, and now the comments that Fa’apua’a and Fofoa were passing back and forth seemed to confirm everything that Margaret had heard. Besides, the notion that a young Samoan woman was free to enjoy carefree and casual lovemaking before marriage mirrored Margaret’s own ideal of “free love.” That ideal, when combined with Napo’s tales about the robust sex lives of married couples, was a depiction of Samoan life that Margaret wanted to believe was true.
It was also the report Dr. Boas hoped she would be able to make to the NRC.
The more she thought about it, the more she decided to take what the girls had told her at face value.
Before she left Ofu, Margaret wrote to Ruth:
I haven’t an ailment in the world except my arms and my eyes, to both of which I’m thoroughly accustomed—I can work all day with a will. And I’ve lost my dread of failure, with the conversations I’ve got what I was sent after.
For Margaret, succeeding in the eyes of Dr. Boas and Ruth was as important as it had ever been. To Ruth she said:
Once again my fear that you would decide however much you might love me that in science I was a bending reed, is stalled off. 40 years from now if I’m doing anything related to anthropology I’ll still be doing it for you and worrying about what you will think about it.
Back on Ta’u, and relying exclusively on what she had learned from Napo and her merry companions Fa’apua’a and Fofoa, Margaret set down her findings in a lengthy letter to Boas:
Sexual life begins with puberty in most cases. Fairly promiscuous intercourse obtains until marriage and there is a good deal after marriage. It is the family and not the community (except in the case of the taupou) which attempts to preserve a girl’s virginity—and this attempt is usually secretly frustrated rather than openly combatted by the adolescent.
In conclusion, she stated:
The neuroses accompanying sex in American civilization are practically absent, such as frigidity, impotence and pronounced perversions.
Convinced that she could substantiate her conclusions by writing up specific case histories, she added:
I feel absolutely safe in generalizing from the material I have. Aside from such matters, checking up my family cards, and getting a little more on individual sex experiences, I’m practically thru.
As far as Margaret was concerned, and she said as much to Boas, “my problem is practically completed.”
Later, when Margaret was to reflect on her experience in Samoa, she would say that she had succeeded only by “losing her identity.” Elaborating on her immersion into the life of the community, she singled out her walk along the trail with Fa’apua’a and Fofoa as the high point of the experience, saying that in this way she’d “been able to become acquainted with the Samoan girls, receive their whispered confidences and learn at the same time the answer to scientists’ questions.”
25
STRANGER FROM ANOTHER PLANET
Talking the old jargon is bringing it all back. Reo Fortune, this N.Z. boy, talks poetry, or radicalism or psychology—between the three I might as well be back with you all.
—MARGARET MEAD
May 1926
When Margaret left Pago Pago on May 7, 1926, she was setting out on a six-week ocean voyage that would end in Marseilles, France. The first leg was on the SS Sonoma heading to Sydney, Australia. From there, she was booked on the SS Chitral, a P&O luxury liner that was returning from its maiden voyage.
It seemed however, that all her carefully made plans were to be derailed. Within days of setting sail, the Sonoma encountered one of the worst storms to hit the South Pacific in decades. “Waves poured over the top deck and passengers went down like nine pins.” Delayed by nearly a week, Margaret was resigned to the idea that by the time she reached Sydney, the Chitral would have sailed without her.
Upon disembarking, she heard the news that a dock strike in England had triggered a ripple effect, disrupting routes and steamer schedules across three continents.
There was the Chitral, still sitting in the harbor. For Margaret it was a beautiful sight. Writing to her mother she exulted, “I’ve had the most marvelous luck with every detail of my trip! I even succeeded in getting the dresses out of the mail at Pago Pago before my ship sailed!”
The Chitral was the newest passenger liner in the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company fleet. During the last eighty years P&O ships had carved out routes that reflected the expansion of the British Empire, sailing to Egypt, India, Australia, and the Far East. As soon as Margaret boarded, she went to inspect her starboard-side, first-class cabin. A first-class cabin had been expensive and, as a gesture to Dadda, Margaret had promised to save money in other ways. Writing home, she said this wouldn’t be difficult. Each time the ship docked, while the other passengers disembarked to enjoy the port and its entertainments, she planned to remain on ship.
That first night in Sydney she did just that.
When the bell sounded for dinner, Margaret found herself waiting outside the grand salon, standing with a dozen other people, all, presumably like herself, anxious to economize. Doors opened to an enormous dining room, large enough to accommodate two hundred passengers at one sitting. At the far end of the room, assembled on a balcony, a small Dixieland jazz combo was playing “It Had to Be You.”
It was then that Margaret noticed, standing apart from the others and holding a book in his hand, a tall and lanky young man with a thick shock of black hair. When he glanced in her direction, she noticed that his eyes were almost as dark as his hair.
Curious to know what he was reading, Margaret edged closer. The book was Jude the Obscure, a novel by the British writer Thomas Hardy.
When the rest of her shipmates made no move toward the dining room, Margaret walked to a large round table and pulled out a chair. The others followed, all taking seats near her. The tall young man was the last one in, and he joined them at the table. Throughout the meal he sat with his book open next to his plate, reading.
After dinner, Margaret went to see the Palm Court, a vast conservatory that had been designed to resemble a Burmese winter garden. In deference to the ship’s colonial decor, great potted palms sat under openwork columns, and rattan easy chairs were scattered around small card tables. A lone bridge game was under way.
Margaret noticed the same boy sitting at one of the tables, nursing a cup of tea. His legs were stretched out in front of him in an insolent arc. His book was now lying facedown on his chest. He looked to be deep in thought. She took a moment to fluff up her hair and then, opening her bag, she fishe
d around for a pack of cigarettes. They were the special cork-tipped, tin-packed Pall Malls that she’d asked her mother to send. She advanced toward the boy’s chair.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Can I trouble you for a light?”
Lifting the book off his chest and slowing rising to his feet, his eyes meeting hers, he said, “Of course.” He towered over her. He bent down and struck a match.
Taking a drag of the Pall Mall she looked up at him and said, “I’m not smoking a lot, but when I do I like these.”
Reaching over to pull out a chair, he said, “Would you care to join me?” She sat down.
“Jude the Obscure,” she said, nodding toward his book. “That’s one of Hardy’s I haven’t read.”
“Not his best, I’m afraid.” He spoke with an accent that she couldn’t place.
A waiter brought more hot water for the tea and another cup.
When Margaret asked him where he was from, he said he’d been born in a village called Coromandel, a gold-mining boomtown on the North Island of New Zealand where his father, who had been a missionary in China during the Boxer rebellion, had settled to serve as the camp’s cleric.
“The industrial story of New Zealand,” he told her, “can be summed up in two words—wool and gold.”
His parents had named him Reo, which he pronounced as Ray. The word “Reo” in Maori meant “logos” or “the word.” His last name was Fortune.
He’d moved with his family four times before his father, at the age of fifty-two, had given up the holy orders and, with a personal capital of only forty pounds, had taken up dairy farming in the village of Paraparaumu, thirty miles north of the capital city of Wellington.
“Father was not one of those rich sheep farmers,” he said. “Country gentry they called themselves. Burned off the bracken, cut and burned the forests just so they could sow the cleared land with their English grasses.”
Coming of Age Page 26