The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (35 page)

Imagine the impact of the betrayal, the trauma experienced by the boy who thought his father had been treated like the legendary warriors of his homeland.

"Mene was face-to-face with his father's skeleton, which had been mounted and hung in a glass display case in the museum."

29

"The young man fell to his knees and wept."

"How did something like that ever happen? How could they have deceived the child that way?"

Mike tried to break the tension. "He's lucky they didn't stuff his father."

Clem's glance was dead sober. "The way Mene told the story, he was never sure. Next to the hanging skeleton was a life cast of Qisuk."

"What's that?"

"The museum has an entire collection of them in the anthropology department. Workers would make molds, applying paraffin to the face of the dead person--sometimes to their entire bodies. Completely lifelike. Mene looked up and saw the melancholy face of his beloved father. He was sure they had skinned and preserved him, just like an animal."

"He wasn't right about that part, was he?" I asked. "Try finding the records. See ifyou can get an honest accounting. Franz Boas, the great anthropologist, kept a diary--and mind you, he thought the whole charade was entirely appropriate. In his writings, he claims the museum officials staged the fake burial to placate the young child, so he wouldn't think his father's body had been picked apart by the scientists."

"What was actually under the animal skins the night they pretended to bury Qisuk?"

"A log. A piece of wood the size of a man."

"But surely--"

"If you think I'm making any of this up, Alex," Clem said, patting a notebook that she had brought with her and placed on the small desk next to her glass, "there are newspaper clips that tell the whole story. The fight for Qisuk's body--"

"Fight? Between whom?"

"He died at Bellevue Hospital. The doctors there wanted to autopsy him, but the museum wanted the same privilege."

"Was there a winner?"

"An agreement was reached between the two institutions. The poor fellow was to be dissected at Bellevue, and then the museum would be allowed to preserve the skeleton. Famous phrenologists inspected his brain and took measurements of his skull."

"Why the skull?"

"The idea was that the low cultural level of more primitive people was a factor in their receding foreheads. Not enough room for mental development. Just part of the racism intrinsic to the anthropological theories of the day."

"So what's to study?" Chapman asked.

"I hesitate to call the scientists bigots. After all, those were the Euro-American tenets of the nineteenth century. They were intrigued by the Eskimos, Mike. How did this nomadic, uneducated little tribe thrive in one of the earth's most inhospitable climates? It was worthy of scientific study, don't you think?"

Clem looked at Mercer, knowing he didn't need this lecture on the narrow-mindedness that had been pervasive not just in society, but within the well- educated scientific community. "The world's fair in St. Louis, 1904. Ever hear of it?"

"Judy Garland, Leon Ames, Mary Astor, Margaret O'Brien," Mike snapped back. "Meet me in St. Louis, Louis. Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings."

"That's the charming side. While Judy was finding romance on the trolley, Qisuk's brain was one of the freakier exhibits. On loan from the museum."

"And all this went on while Mene was growing up, but he knew nothing about it? That his father's pickled brain was carted off to a world's fair? Is it possible that Wallace participated in this cruel charade while the boy was living in his home?"

"You'll never guess what Mene's adoptive father was doing as a side business, at his farm upstate."

"You're way ahead of us."

Clem sat on the arm of the sofa, flipping through yellowed clippings as she talked, showing me pictures of the young Mene with his adoptive family on the farm in Cold Spring.

"Have you ever heard of a macerating plant?"

None of us answered.

"It's a bone bleacher."

I shivered instinctively, thinking of what Zimm had described to us last week--one hundred years later-- as the museum's new degreasing machine.

"Back of the house was a running stream, so Mr. Wallace convinced the museum to let him set up his own operation there. A cheap way to clean the animal specimens. He just parked the dead carcasses in the running springwater until they were naturally washed and bleached."

"And Qisuk?"

"Mr. Wallace was personally responsible for bleaching the Eskimo's bones, so that the anthropologists could get on with mounting the skeleton. He did it in his own backyard, while Mene was living in the house and playing on the grounds of the old farm."

"It's unthinkable."

"On top of that, William Wallace lost his job at the museum--nothing having to do with Qisuk's phony funeral, which all the officials thought was fine--but because of financial irregularities. An early scam in which he was charging the museum for animal work he was doing for circuses and zoos. Billed the trustees for an elephant he had bleached for some circus troupe performing in the old Madison Square Garden."

"So who supported Mene? The museum president? Or Robert Peary?"

Clem laughed. "Peary had long before given up his interest in his Eskimo specimens."

"But the president of the museum, did he just abandon the child, too?" "Pretty much so. Morris Jesup. He didn't put his money where his mouth was either. When Jesup died, in 1908, his estate was valued at thirteen million dollars. He didn't leave the child a nickel in his will."

"What did the kid do?"

"Mene? He was still just a teenager, but he began the battle that would last him a lifetime."

"Who did he fight?"

"The museum, its administration, its trustees." Clem licked her finger and scanned through the plastic- covered sleeves in her notebook. When she found the newspaper article she had been searching for, she turned the book around so that the headline was facing me.

I read aloud from the January 6, 1907, edition ofThe World, which pictured an imploring Mene on his knees, in front of a sketch of the massive museum facade. Above the entrance was the bold black print that shouted his plea:GIVE ME MY FATHER's BODY!

"All the boy wanted," Clem said, "was to take his father's remains home to Greenland for a proper funeral. To be given his kayak and hunting weapons to bury with him there."

"What did the museum do?"

"Not what you might think. They gave him nothing. But it didn't take very much media heat, even in those days, to cause them to dismantle the display case."

"And do what with it?"

"Put it in a coffin, if you can call it that. A large wooden box with a piece of glass on top, so the skeleton was still visible within it. Moved it upstairs to the workroom where other skeletal models were assembled."

"But did they return it to Mene?"

"There was a new president by this time, a zoologist named Carey Bumpus. His view? We've got hundreds of skeletons here. How the hell do I know which of these bones is your father?"

"And Mene?"

"A very difficult life, never quite comfortable in America. When he was almost twenty, he finally got some of the Arctic explorers to take him back home."

"Did anyone know him there?"

Clem smiled at me. "A tiny place like that, a dozen years after the white men took six of the tribesmen away? Certainly. These people have no written language, only oral history. But the story of Qisuk and Mene had been told many times. And he still had aunts and cousins there. In a sense it got worse." "But why?"

"Like a man without a country. Now he could no longer speak the Eskimo language."

"Did he stay?"

"Not for long. The loneliness there was as profound for him as it had been in New York City. He came back to America, wandering around New England until he finally settled in a town in New Hampshire, where he found a job in a lumber mill. But it was all shortlived. Mene died in the Spanish influenza epidemic that swept the country, before he was even thirty."

I turned the pages of Clem's book of documents, looking at photos of this young outsider throughout his life. There were images in which his velvety brown eyes seemed to express all the joyous promise of every childhood, but far many more in which the pain of his isolation dimmed the gaze as he grew into an adolescent and young adult.

"Before he died, though, was he able to arrange for his father's body to go home with him?"

"Never. It was one more broken promise."

I hesitated to ask. "To this day, has Qisuk's--?" I stopped, not knowing how to refer to the remains. It certainly wasn't an intact body. "Natural History accession number 99/3610? That's all Qisuk was to the museum leaders."

The dead man bore the same kind of identification tag as a stuffed moose or prehistoric fish.

Clem went on. "Yes, in 1993, more than a century after the six Eskimos left their homes, their bones were returned to Greenland for burial. I told you, didn't I, that my father was born in the same village? It's called Qaanaaq."

"Yes, you did."

"My family was there at the time, in the beginning of August, when the funerals were held. I was at university in London, back for a visit, and we had gone north to see my grandfather. I'd been studying to be a librarian until then. It was learning the story of these ancestors, and the journey of Qisuk's bones, that changed my path. That's when I decided what I wanted to do was be an anthropologist."

"Did you go to the ceremony?"

"Oh, yes. A very traditional one. Quite moving, actually. They were buried on a hilltop near the water, with a pile of stones on top of the grave. And a marker with a simple inscription:THEY HAVE COME HOME ."

She paused with her eyes closed, as if remembering the scene. "And this story you've told us," Mike asked, "you think this has something to do with the murder of Katrina Grooten?"

"Most definitely."

"Why?"

It all seemed so obvious to Clementine. "When Katrina started coming to the Natural History Museum to work on the joint show, she was amazed at all the skeletons that were there. She'd never given any thought to where they came from."

Neither had I. I had always assumed that they were thousands of years old, specimens found in remote desert areas, abandoned caves, archaeological digs.

"Guess she never sawThe Flintstones, " Mike said.

Clem was not put off by Mike's humor. She had a story to tell and was determined to do it. "It was Native Americans who really rattled the cages. While Robert Peary and his cohorts were studying my people, anthropologists were doing the very same thing with American Indians out West. Not just collecting their artifacts and tools, but digging up skulls from graves and hauling them back East to study, too."

"What became of them all?"

"Until a decade ago, the remains were in the collections of more than seven hundred museums, large and small, throughout your country. The bones of more than two hundred thousand American Indians arestill sitting in wooden boxes and drawers at these institutions. But your native people had an advantage that mine didn't have, in terms of their numbers and their ability to organize."

"What'd they do?"

"Demonstrated, agitated, got new laws passed."

"Legislation?"

"Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990. Guess if your ancestors' brains had been diced up and studied, Mike, you'd have known about it, too."

"Slim pickings, ma'am. Well preserved in alcohol, but very dense matter inside thick skulls."

"You're not telling me every skeleton can be linked to a tribe?" Mercer asked.

"No, no. That's one of the biggest problems. Some of these museum collections are hundreds of years old. They're not matched to any tribe or cultural affiliation. Never will be."

Mike was still stuck on the Eskimos. "So if this law was passed here in 1990, how come your people-- Qisuk and the others--still didn't get home for a few more years?"

"The legislation only applied to Native Americans. Museums were required to repatriate all the Indian bones that tribes asked for, but that didn't help my Eskimos a damn bit."

"Why did Katrina care?"

"Take this girl whose scholarship field was funerary art, Mike. For the first time in her life she came face- to-face with the reality experienced by most cultures of color, all over the world. No churchyards, no headstones, no marked graves. Our ancestors are sitting in cardboard boxes, collecting dust on museum shelves."

"In the name of science."

"I got under her skin at first. How could she have been so blind to this? Think of what the situation was in South Africa, where she grew up. I told her Mene's story, which mesmerized her. I told her about my own great-grandmother being shipped to the United States in a barrel. That got her riled up. Then she focused on the American Indians. I practically had to club her over the head before I could get her to understand her own country."

"The skeletons found there?"

"Foundthere? Hey, Mike, I'm not talking aboutPithecanthropus erectus and the missing link. Those guys walked the earth thousands of years ago. Their remains werefound . The ones I'm referring to, like my own relatives, werestolen. "

Mercer was standing behind Mike, with his enormous hands wrapped around Mike's forehead. "His skull doesn't slope quite as obviously as you'd think, Clem. It's just impenetrable."

The detective in Mike was skeptical when he heard Clem refer to human remains as stolen. "Explain that. The story of your Eskimos is a very unusual one. That's not how all these bones got into collections."

"Maybe you don't want to hear me, but my colleagues and I have all the documentation to prove this." Clem didn't need a notebook to call up the facts she had mastered. "I told Katrina what had been happening all over Africa. In 1909, a black man named Kouw was dismembered and boiled just four months after he died. His widow and children watched and wailed, but the scientists won. Off to a museum with him. The diary of a famous anthropologist described how she kept vigil over a sickly woman till her death, in the 1940s, waited for her tribesmen to bury her, then dug her up and took her back to Cape Town."