Between Two Worlds (30 page)

Authors: Katherine Kirkpatrick

BOOK: Between Two Worlds

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Is it reasonable to suggest by the sketchy picture Henson paints that she had relations with at least one of Peary’s all-male crew? Again, the more provocative details are understandably left out of the historical account, including the half-Inuit son Henson fathered with the teenage Achatingwah, or Akitsinnguaq, fictitiously referred to in this novel as Tooth Girl.

Akitsinnguaq and the orphan boy Koodlooktoo, or Qaorlutoq, make frequent appearances in Marie Peary’s childhood diaries; aside from Billy Bah, they were her closest Inuit friends. Koodlooktoo is also mentioned in the published writings of Josephine and Robert E. Peary and of Matthew Henson. He took part in Peary’s final expedition in 1909.

Aside from the notes already described, there appears to be only one other biographical reference to Billy Bah, by the Danish explorer, Peter Freuchen. Freuchen would have known Billy Bah sometime between 1906 and the mid-1920s, when he lived among the Polar Eskimos. The following incident was recorded in an unpublished
manuscript by Sechmann Rosbach in 1934, and translated from Inuktitut to English by Kenn Harper and Navarana Harper [now Sørensen]:

When she returned to Greenland, Eqariusaq had refused to tell anyone about her trip. When asked, she said only that she could not remember, or did not feel like talking about it. Once, while on a sled trip bound for one of the distant Danish colonies in a more southerly part of Greenland, Freuchen and Navarana [Freuchen’s Inuit wife] had passed a few days at Cape Seddon with Eqariusaq and her husband, Miteq. Navarana had never been south of Melville Bay and was looking forward eagerly to the trip. One afternoon she and Eqariusaq took a stroll on the ice. Suddenly Eqariusaq turned to Navarana and said, “When you go to the white man’s country, be careful not to absorb too much of their spirit. If you do, it will cause you many tears, for you can never rid yourself of it.” When Navarana told him this, Freuchen felt that he finally understood the young woman’s reticence to speak of her year in America. “Poor woman!” he wrote. “I understood then that it was a desperate, hopeless longing that stilled her voice
.”
⁸

This intriguing account suggests that Billy Bah may have longed for at least a few aspects of the life she’d known in America. Perhaps so. Or another interpretation is that Billy Bah was haunted by sad memories. In any
case, I do not believe that Billy Bah regarded herself as a victim. She may not have completely understood how the white men’s involvement in her community brought about certain hardships for herself and others. Or, if she did, she was extraordinarily forgiving and generous.

Readers who are familiar with the story of the orphan boy Minik will see how very different his story is from that of Billy Bah. Minik lived in America for twelve years—long enough that he could read about himself in newspapers, discuss moral issues in Sunday school, and articulate to journalists the ills of civilization. After a brief and unhappy attempt as an adult to readjust to the native ways of Greenland, he returned to drift as a misfit in America. Billy Bah lived in America for only one year, rejoined her Polar Eskimo community while still a child, and apparently picked up life where she left off (almost).

The date of Billy Bah’s death is not known except that it was prior to Marie Peary Stafford’s visit to Greenland in 1932.

Itta, memorialized as Etah on modern maps, is now an abandoned village. It lies near Qaanaaq (formerly Thule), the largest town of the Polar Eskimos in Northwest Greenland.

In 1993, nearly a hundred years after Billy Bah’s parents and others in their group died in New York, the American Museum of Natural History returned their remains to the people of Qaanaaq.

Endnotes

1.
The Inuit people of the polar region in and around Qaanaaq, West Greenland, call themselves “Polar Eskimos”; to them, the term “Eskimo” is no longer considered derogatory.

2.
Josephine Diebitsch Peary,
The Snow Baby: A True Story with True Pictures
(New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, Publishers, 1901), pp. 37–44.

3.
Navarana Sørensen, native speaker of Inuktun, and a professional translator in Qaanaaq, served as my language consultant. The dialect of the Qaanaaq polar region has never been recorded and varies slightly from other dialects of Inuktun, which in turn are very different from the official, standardized orthography of Kalaallisut, or West Greenlandic, that is used throughout Greenland. To give readers a flavor of how Billy Bah would have talked, I asked Navarana to write down some words and phrases from the Polar Eskimo dialect. But, unfortunately, for the sake of readability, only a few of the simplest words made it into the final version of the novel; the nature of Inuktun, with its long words strung together with roots and suffixes, came across as confusing and hard to pronounce, for example:
takuleqangakkit nuannaartunga
(I am happy to see you),
nuannaanngitsunga
(I am sad),
pinnaatoorruatit
(you are greedy). Navarana helped me recast names recorded by the Peary family to present them in a way that would be familiar to an Inuktun speaker. When I needed to create characters’ names, Navarana suggested names commonly used by Polar Eskimos today. Interestingly enough, the modern-day names often mirror the older ones from Peary’s time, perhaps on purpose; Navarana herself is named for her famous ancestor, the wife of Peter Freuchen.

4.
Josephine Diebitsch Peary, ibid, pp. 37–44.

5.
Marie Ahnighito Peary,
The Snow Baby’s Own Story
(New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1934), pp. 32–33.

6.
Marie’s childhood journals are housed at the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England, Portland, Maine.

7.
Matthew A. Henson,
A Black Explorer at the North Pole
(New York: Walker and Company, 1969), pp. 151–152 (originally published in 1912 under the title
A Negro Explorer at the North Pole
).

8.
Harper, Kenn,
Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo
(South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2000), p. 190.