In 1974, Rocha left his parents’ house and moved to Mexico City. From there, he moved to the state of Chihuahua, where he worked intermittently for carnival acts, training dogs and elephants and jungle cats. In the late spring of 1979, he got word of a public zoo in need of a keeper whose duties also involved light veterinarian work. By May, Rocha had taken the position, and in a few days found himself obsessed with the gorillas.
Rocha, having never seen a gorilla before, knew little of their behaviors and nothing about their habitats. Through study of their personalities and through close observation of their physical characteristics, Rocha determined that the zoo owned one male western lowland gorilla and one female western lowland gorilla. He spent his days at the zoo caring for the animals, and the nights he spent in his room or at the library, studying their behavior. He went to great lengths to acquire the bamboo shoots, thistles, wild celery, and tubers that they ate. He constructed a realistic environment similar to the western African lowlands in design and humidity and greenery, and he gave them grasses and branches with which to build nests.
Once the two gorillas were settled, he made his first steps toward establishing a line of communication. Witnesses reported that when Rocha entered the habitat screeching and hooting and clicking to get the animals’ attention, the gorillas began to squawk and let out a high piercing keen. The animals charged at him, running on their hind legs, “like people,” with surprising dexterity and swiftness. They worked as a team, flanking and herding Rocha into a corner, and once he was trapped between the two, they began to kick and punch him in the back and in the head. Three men, groundskeepers who had been standing by to watch the animal trainer, finally managed to pull him out of the habitat, by which time Rocha had suffered a minor concussion and two broken ribs.
Rocha did not give up. Over the next six months, he entered the gorilla habitat no fewer than ten times, and the animals continued to greet him with the same volatility and aggression. The gorillas took the food he offered them, lived in the habitat he created for them, and in that habitat they were peaceful. Once he entered their world, however, as if they had been trained for it, the gorillas circled him, trapped him, ignored him as he spoke, and then beat him. After five or ten minutes, Rocha needed to be pulled from the cage, with a broken arm, broken fingers, broken ribs, badly bruised skin, cuts, contusions, abrasions, or minor concussions.
When the fire started, Rocha was with the gorillas, standing outside their habitat talking to them, as he often did, from a safe distance. He hooted and chirped and howled at them for a full fifteen minutes before leaving to attend to the other animals in the park. By the time help had arrived and the other animals had been freed from their cages and environments, the fire raged out of control, burning until dawn, when the last embers snuffed out and all that was left — the zoo, the howler monkey, the chimp, and the gorillas — was ash.
The Disappearance of the Sebali Tribe
I.
In the summer of 1974, two young anthropologists, Joseph Hammond and Marcus Alexander Grant, published, to very high praise, an article in the journal Dialectic Studies in Anthropology entitled “The Drameção Rituaclass="underline" Silent Conflicts of the Sebali Prepubescent Male.” Through the success of this article, and based on proposals for continued research on the Sebali tribe, Hammond and Grant received research funding from the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, and the two young men were each offered positions teaching anthropology and sociology, Grant at Yale University, and Hammond at his alma mater, Harvard University. The article and their subsequent findings were then published as a book, The Sebali Continuum, which included color and black-and-white photographs of the tribe as well as detailed observations and analyses of the tribe’s history, its health and system of caring for the sick and the old, religious beliefs, mating rituals, community mores and taboos, agricultural practices, the birth and death rates of the tribe, the passage of the tribe’s collective memory (through oral history, storytelling, and pictographs), and the rituals for burying tribal leaders once they have died. The book became an immediate success. Grant was thirty-two years old and Hammond was thirty-four, and together they had been studying the Sebali tribe for five and a half years.
One year later, they both disappeared.
At the time, the two young men had been planning a last extended visit to the small South Pacific island where the members of the Sebali tribe lived. After their departure date came and went, it was assumed that the two — commonly absentminded — had left without saying good-bye. When, after some months had passed, no one had yet heard from them, friends and colleagues began to worry that something might have happened to them both. A year passed without word, and many speculated that the two had been killed, either en route to or while with the Sebali tribe.
Their disappearance caused a furor, and search committees were formed and papers were published, and a rift formed between those who, as delicately as they could, implied that Hammond and Grant got no less than they deserved and that there had been a long line of anthropologists who had meddled or “gone native” to bad and sometimes fatal effect, and those who argued that Hammond and Grant died honorably in the service of their science and for the betterment of our understanding of our place in this world and its history.
Such arguments and speculations continued for another three years until it was proven almost single-handedly by a twenty-four-year-old actor turned anthropologist, Denise Gibson, that Hammond and Grant were fakes, that the Sebali tribe did not exist and had never existed other than in the minds of its creators. This discovery left suspicions that linger in the anthropology community even today, and raised questions, for those close to Hammond and Grant, for their friends and colleagues, as to who Hammond and Grant really were and what they had hoped to gain.
II.
Denise Gibson has lived in Boston for the past five years. She is now a graduate student in the Boston University anthropology department, although when she first heard about Hammond and Grant, their work on the Sebali tribe, their book, and their disappearance, she was an undergraduate student. She is small and attractive, with a soft voice and blue eyes that often look, during the overcast months of a New England fall or winter, gray. She has short brown hair, and though I only saw her wearing them once, she sometimes wears glasses, and when I picture her, I picture her in those glasses. Born in Texas (when I asked her if she thought it odd that she and Grant hail from the same state, she smirked at me in a way I have found particular to Texans and said, “It is a big state, you know”), Denise had plans of becoming an actress, attending, for the first two years of college, the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied theater. After two years, however, she applied to be and was accepted as a transfer student at BU, where she began her career as a student of anthropology. When pressed, she will admit that there are universities and colleges in Texas that have decent anthropology programs, but that she left because she felt, after a lifetime spent in Texas, the place had become suddenly small, and that she needed a change.
Though a keen observer of people, a skill I am sure good actors should possess, she has a studious, shy, quiet quality about her, and an ability to focus her attention that seems better suited to scholarly work. The first time we met, I found her sitting at a table reading an issue of the Annual Review of Anthropology, so enrapt in her article that I had sat down with my coffee and cake, and cleared my throat, only to go unnoticed by her. Unwilling to interrupt someone quite so deeply involved in anything, I waited a few more moments until, as I watched as the hour we had arranged for the interview slipped effortlessly by, I scraped my chair against the floor, banged my coffee mug onto the table, and said, rather too loudly, “So you must be Denise.” At which point she looked up from her journal, smiled at me, and said, “I was beginning to worry you weren’t going to show.” Many people, when they find out Denise once aspired to be an actor, will ask her to perform impressions, which, she informed me early into our interview, are the domain not of actors but of stand-up comedians. “I will give you the benefit of the doubt,” she told me, “and assume you weren’t going to ask me to do my best Katharine Hepburn.”