The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  “And after?” Bowser says.

  “Based on personal observations and on notes made by Mr. George Hunt.”

  “Now please turn to the preface and read that section of the first page which is underlined.”

  “‘The great body of facts presented here were observed and recorded by Mr. George Hunt, of Fort Rupert, British Columbia, who takes a deep interest in everything pertaining to the ethnology of the Kwakiutl Indians and to whom I am under great obligations. I am indebted to him also for explanations of ceremonials witnessed by myself, but the purport of which was difficult to understand, and for finding the Indians who were able to give explanations on certain points.’”

  “Mr. Hunt,” says he, “are you a cannibal?”

  “I most certainly ain’t.”

  “Are you, in fact, a man of science, an ethnographer and researcher working with other scientists, such as the famous professor Franz Boas, in the study of that people called in this book the Kwakiutl?”

  “I guess I am just that,” says I.

  The atmosphere in the courtroom sank down with every word we spoke. I was, indeed, a most profound disappointment to all those present. I was not at all the thing. Not at all what they had come hoping to see. I was that most awful of categories: an ordinary man. Strange though it might sound to say, when Bowser did finish his examination of me, and turning to the jury, held up the book and shrugged, before walking over to place it before the judge—well, in that moment, I felt every bit as disenchanted by myself as did they.

  PART IV NEW YORK

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK THIS MORNING, Professor Boas’s secretary, Miss Andrews, was waiting for me in the foyer of the hotel what they had arranged on my behalf, and where, late the night before, I had come to off the train.

  She looked me up and down with a direct and a discriminating eye. “You are all I expected, Mr. Hunt,” says she with a bright enough smile. She had small teeth, a wide gap between the front two. She held out her hand and I took it, a tiny bird’s claw I might easily crush. Her hair was pale brown, just on the turn to grey, and drawn tight back into a bun, thin shoulders inside what looked almost a man’s tan coat, with a thick ruff I saw to be the winter fur of a fox.

  “How do you do?” says I, feeling a rawbone idiot, and when she asks if I did sleep well after such a trip, I tells her, “Like a babe all night,” though I had not slept a wink.

  “The whole continent traversed in a week!” she says. “We live in remarkable times. Still, I am become accustomed to such things, working for the professor.”

  I followed her through the streets. She was always a step ahead, her hands waving at some feature or other, explaining it all to me in words I couldn’t hardly hear above the city’s din. She shouted out for a cart to slow so that we might cross a wild street. She ordered a gang of rough, barefoot boys from our path. The tallest flipped his felt cap to her in mock salute.

  The high buildings loomed to either side. All was still in shadows, though I knew the sky to be cloudless overhead after the rain in the night. Above the shop awnings, rickety old iron balconies trailed sheets and shirts and other laundry. It was as if I walked in some steep canyon what had walls all broken up by foliage.

  Thick dust rose out of the many sites of construction. There was more people even than in Vancouver. From the roof of the hotel, I had seen their numbers grow in the early morning. Now they called out from the vegetable stalls they had set up along the road. Miss Andrews shook her head and laughed, undaunted, as an old woman wearing a smock out of some previous age of the world waved a cabbage in her face.

  Men was smoking on the backs of carts, or rubbing down their horses with sacking, their jackets fat with grime and the sweat of their animals.

  The carts was loaded with old pieces of furniture, cheap clothing, coal, lumber, basketry. Two little girls scampered past, shrieking with laughter, chasing a purple hoop as it wobbled drunken down the pavement.

  Maybe it was that first experience of Vancouver which guarded my senses from the overpowering scale of this city. Such experience and the days what have followed the trial, the long hours of the past night, pacing up and down in my hotel room till I was ready to rip my way through the window to freedom, even be it five floors down to a hard end. The din and bustle of the streets seemed far away. I was rough-eyed with tiredness.

  “And so we come to softer climes.” We turned a corner and came into a wide thoroughfare. Motor vehicles and horse-drawn carriages of all kinds was moving down the centre of the road, the shopfronts huge, glassfronted affairs with mannequins dressed in many fine fashions in the windows. The men and women what stared in at them wore black suits and cravats, their ladies had grand, wide-brimmed hats, white shirts, and thick, flowing skirts in different designs. “All the great and the good of our fair city,” says Miss Andrews and she throws me a look what I might name as ironical.

  We arrived to a heavy door at the corner of a massive building. “The back entrance,” says she, “though not, I assure you, the tradesmen’s.”

  We passed down several corridors. “A maze for swallowing the wayward,” Miss Andrews says. At last we came to a small anteroom, windowless, lined with cabinets all about—“My lair!”—and then I was conducted straightways into the professor’s office.

  The room was strewed all about with paperwork, piles and piles in yellowing heaps, books stacked on shelves and on the floor. There was a mask of the bear on a wall, that I myself did pack and ship some years back. Two small funerary men with outsize oval heads was standing there on the desk. Boas himself was sifting through a sheaf of typewritten transcripts. His phone was ringing beside him, but he ignored it, jumped up, and I saw he was sprightly still in his thin frame, as he came round the table to greet me.

  My first thought was that this was not the man I knew, that alwayscomposed, always-smiling character I did recall so well from his visits to Rupert. Now, his broad dome of a forehead was all cracked with tension, his small mouth thin-lipped under his thick, silver moustache.

  “Yes, yes, welcome, my good friend,” says he, and takes my hand most warmly, and he looked up at me with such affection that I was quite unable to respond. “So very pleased to see you here safe and well. And come so soon, after all! But I am about all sorts of things this morning. Forgive me if I am curt. We shall meet for lunch and after we can talk. I have set the whole afternoon aside for us. Dilly-dallying. Low-level politics. Oh, I am encumbered by nonsense.” He clapped both hands to my shoulders, says, “Yes, yes,” and turned back to answer his phone.

  Miss Andrews escorted me out. She gave me five dollars and had me sign a paper chit. “Take a coffee in the museum and then wander round. Get some feeling for the place,” says she.

  “Miss Andrews, please!” Boas calls out. So I left her to scurry back into the professor’s office, and I walked along the darkly wallpapered hall. I took a couple of turns at random, having no idea now where I was. Then, opening a door, I stood in a long gallery with high windows what was filled with artefacts entirely strange. They was boxed in glass, or hanging from the walls. Peru, I read, and Mexico.

  I walked through them, trying to understand what stories they might represent—the carved heads of fanged men in flat-topped hats, skull faces like those drawn by children, skeleton figurines made out of wood and paper, and great tapestries in brilliant colours.

  Then I came into this gallery what houses the artefacts of the people. And here I am. I look into those black eyes of the mannequin on which Big Mountain’s suit of armour is hung, and I don’t see anything at all. Not life, nor pity, nor mercy. Just the skin of wax and two glass beads.

  “A magnificent piece.” Boas is standing beside me, though I had not noticed his arrival. He runs his fingers along the Sisiutl. “He is coiled beneath the world and we walk upon him. May our feet tread lightly. Have you ever sent us such a treasure?”

  “Did you finish already?” I says.

  “It is early afternoon.”

&nb
sp; “I lost the time.” I realize I am worn and hungry, my one good eye strained from squinting.

  “Yes, yes,” Boas says. “Come, then. We shall walk through Central Park, take lunch at the Pavilion, and you may tell me all your news.” We go out through the vast main entrance. We cross the wide road out front towards the trees and the parkland on the far side. I look back at the red-tinged granite of the museum’s front, at the twin towers and the turrets and, far above, the turrets’ conical roofs.

  “It has almost a martial air,” says Boas, but I have no opinion to offer of such magnificence.

  We sit at a table outside what is called the Mineral Springs Pavilion. “In the Moorish style and quite without taste of any sort,” Boas says. All about us are men what speak mostly in a foreign tongue. “It is where the Germanic Jews gather. The Times has suggested it is akin to Kissingen or Carlsbad.” Boas shakes his head. “The comparison lacks all foundation.” He removes his hat and draws his fingers up across his high forehead and through his thinning hair. “Now,” he says, “I am quite ready to hear your story. Will you tell me of your tribulations? In full, mind! I wish them in full.”

  So we eat together, and I tell him my story. At first I trip over my words and it is hard to keep a clear mind. But I am a storyteller. That, at least, I know myself to be. So my fervour rises till I speak out almost in defiance, and I see that there are those on tables nearby who eye me and speak of me. Boas takes pleasure all the more for the attention we bring, raising his eyebrows to those people who are watching, lifting up his own arms and exclaiming, beating his fist at times upon the table with relish. I speak lower when I relate that part where I did take the head of the dreamer—for I tell him all—and he leans forward and his eyes are afire, though his face stays solemn.

  Eventually, the sun falls behind the great buildings that line the park. I pour the drinks down my gullet which Boas orders, hardly noticing them, Boas barely interrupting now. It is another hour still before I am done.

  “I am a man of science, I was saying to myself. A brown man of science. Let them answer that. Let my prosecutors counter that.” I draw long breaths. My sweat cools in the early-evening air. “And I was right, for they did acquit me.”

  I swing about and stretch out my legs. I think on the cold glass cases and the artefacts in the museum. The peoples’ lives froze out of time, like swift-fading photographs, worn now at their edges and curling yellow, gleaning nothing but dust from the furious motion of the world.

  I draw up my eye patch, open that bad eye and close the other, and then I do the same in reverse, and again. Sheep are grazing in the small meadow out front, ridiculous with the grand towers of the city behind. Through my bad eye, the sheep are phantoms, the light inverted so that dark is light and light dark, all colour drained. I fancy I can see other figures moving at the edge of my vision. I fold the eye patch down once more.

  Boas lifts a tiny, thin-stemmed glass to his lips and sips at his brandy, then holds it up against the streetlights what is twinkling nearby. He turns it slowly in his fingers. “A long tale in the telling,” he says, “but remarkable. Remarkable! And then you leapt straight on a train to be here.”

  “Charley took word back home for me. Truth is, Mr. Spencer will not give me work after all that has happened, and you are now my one sole employer. I ain’t got two pennies worth rubbing and no way to come up with more. Grace and Francine make a better job of most of our affairs than I do anyhow, if but they’ll curse me some for coming straight here as I did. And Harry will take care of things, once he is back home, which soon enough he’ll be. They’ll do well enough without me for these few months.”

  “You must write up all the rituals you have spoken of.”

  I remember the joke about Boas among the people. They don’t mind him sitting there beside them taking notes, hour after hour. They don’t mind when he follows them to bed. But they do mind when they wake the next morning and he’s still right there, pen ready, watching their every move.

  “You run, my friend,” says Boas, “as deep as the end of vision. A real headhunter, here before me! I am gratified you chose to confess. My ethnological blood fair courses through my veins.” He is quiet for a moment. “You can see a little through your injured eye now, then?”

  “Each day more light comes into it.”

  “For that I am extremely pleased.” He drinks down the last of his brandy. “Come!” He rises to his feet. “I’ve something to show you.”

  We pass around the sheep meadow and bear right beside a lake. The cold northerly of the earlier part of the day has gone, and it is a warm evening for the time of year.

  As we walk, Boas speaks of all we have to do: developing the Northwest Coast Hall in the museum, the naming and describing of those things I have already seen. And there are countless others in the storerooms as well.

  “There is a shipment from Dr. Newcombe in Victoria which I have hardly had time as yet to open, though I hear there are some magnificent items, a brilliantly carved staff of the Sisiutl among them. You may go through it first. See what it contains. And then we must edit the writings you have been sending me. I have so many questions from their reading.” He throws his hands into the air and sighs affectedly. “With my teaching, my curatorial responsibilities, the journals I administer, the people I have in the field, the damnable administration and the oafs that I must deal with, it is almost beyond me sometimes to cope at all.” Yet he strolls on at a leisurely pace.

  “Have you had more news of your family’s property that was taken?” “No,” says I. “Halliday still voices promises of their return. But I worry they’ve been sold on.”

  “Some stories take forever to conclude, and some never do, I fear,” says Boas, rolling his cane in slow circles as he walks. “I shall trust for their return.”

  Two young women riding bicycles approach, all smiles and lace and easy laughter.

  “What do you think of our city?” says Boas.

  “It’s a fair place. Though I wonder that people must live one on top of another, instead of side by side.”

  Boas snorts. “A reasonable point.” He puts a hand to my shoulder. “You and I, we stroll here at the very heart of the modern world.” He speaks with a certain mockery. But yet there is fire in his voice. “Along the aisles of the great Church of Reason itself, if you like.”

  “Well,” I says, “seems I have joined the congregation of that church.” But to that, Boas makes no answer.

  We have come now to a wider thoroughfare with formal trees along its edge. Here, high-backed victorias with high-trotting horses parade up and down the lamplit promenade, their occupants bundled in fur collars and high hats against the cold.

  We pass by an iron-cast bandstand around which is gathered a few old men and women, perched on the chairs what have been made available there. A poorer-looking woman with a shawl about her head smokes a pipe. Some ragged men are here and there stretched out on the grass, or sitting with their backs against the trees, chewing and spitting tobacco juice upon the ground. Two shabby boys dig dandelions in a flowerbed, until a police officer in a tall hat, swinging a billy club, shouts for them to clear off.

  Further along, we wait whilst a boy of maybe twelve steers a miniature carriage pulled by a team of goats. Two well-dressed children sit within. An overweight woman, dowdy in black, follows, breathing heavy, despite the slow tread of the goats.

  We come to the end of the boulevard. Here there is high wire fencing, and a sign above a turnstile reads New York City Zoo.

  Boas says, “We must visit the chimpanzees. But some other day.” He points forward. “Now, here we are.”

  We are standing at the edge of a small field which borders on the park. Across the wide road at its far side is a huge construction site, where a building rises up already fifteen storeys or more, clad all about in wooden scaffolding, great booms of hammer blows, men crying out, roiling clouds rising from the whole into the evening sky as if the very stone is sweating in
its labours.

  On the field itself is placed a marquee coloured in orange and yellow and blue, thirty feet tall, and twice that in length. A banner strung above its entrance proclaims The Fabulous Circus of Grotesquery, and beneath is written The Greatest Cornucopia of Human Freaks That Ever Was Brought Together, and Other of the Strangest Oddities from All Around the World.

  A man stands upon a dais outside in a top hat and a bow tie, with a longtailed coat. He is grizzled in appearance, as if once he might have been a prizefighter. He holds to a chain that is strung about the neck of a shaggy woman beside him.

  “Step along now, friends. You never saw more hideous wonders. Worse even than the terrible wild woman I is but barely clinging to the restraints hereof.” The woman takes a dutiful step away so the chain tightens. “Twenty-five cents will purchase you such primordial awe as you ain’t never saw before.” He holds his arm high in the air and waves his finger behind him as he speaks. “Here … in this un-hallowed home to human horror!”

  “I saw, in this regrettable place, that which may indeed make you wonder,” Boas says. “If only for a time.”

  When first I see the shaggy woman, I cannot properly comprehend what I am looking at. She is so lofty and thick set, so completely hairy over all her body, with a long beard what sweeps down off her face, that I only know her to be female by the heavy, swinging tits inside the ragged material of her shift, and by the words the carnival talker speaks. I stare like some hayseed idiot. I see a lumbering female figure in the forests of my childhood nightmares.

  Boas pays and we walk on inside the tent. I wonder then if I have fallen into some vision, or if I lie still in my hotel and all the day so far has been a dream, or the drumming of the train on its route across the continent has drawn me off into sleep again. Or, yet, if I have left my home at all to travel so far and come to this place, in the middle of this park, in this city at the very centre of the world.