If you were to ask her, as I did, how it felt knowing that she had helped uncover the Sebali tribe hoax, she might shake her head and smile, somewhat ruefully, and say, “I hardly did a thing about it, really.” She might then ask you where you’re from, if you’d had a nice trip, if you needed another cup of coffee, if you’d ever been to Boston before, if you’d made a visit to the Common yet, “which is really much nicer in the spring and early summer,” she might go on to say, “but we just had a good snow, and you should really go see the park before too many other people go tramping through it.” And then she might mention Frederick Law Olmsted, who, she will explain, is best known for his design of Central Park in Manhattan, but who also designed a series of parks joining the Boston Common to its outlying neighbors, which is called the Emerald Necklace, and then she might suggest that you visit Jamaica Pond, a component of the Emerald Necklace, located in Jamaica Plain, “which hardly anyone ever goes to anymore,” she will continue, “because the neighborhood’s been run down a bit, but it’s a nice park, really, and if you go at the right time, it’s quiet and empty, and you can sit on a bench and look out over the pond that is there and sometimes see a goose or a swan or a cormorant, even. But if you go there, then you’ve got to visit El Oriental for lunch, and since the thought of anyone else going to El Oriental only makes me want to go there, too, then I just might have to join you,” which is how I eventually found myself sitting with her, one recent afternoon, in a small Cuban restaurant (El Oriental de Cuba) in Jamaica Plain, a Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban neighborhood located on the south side of Boston. While she finished with great relish her lunch and I sipped on a small, Styrofoam cup of café con leche, I tried my best to figure out how this small, unassuming young woman from Abilene, Texas, uncovered the truth behind one of the largest anthropological scams of the past fifty years.
III.
Joseph Hammond was born in 1942, the third of eight children. He was born Joseph Farrow. The name Hammond was his mother’s maiden name. The family lived in Salina, Kansas, where Joseph’s father worked as a salesman, trading in brushes, shaving kits, aftershave lotions, makeup, hair dyes, and other such items. His mother worked as an occasional housekeeper, but spent the majority of her time at home, raising her children. Most of his family members — those few I could track down — refused to return my phone calls. And when they did agree to speak to me, they would not comment further than to reaffirm certain biographical information already publicly known and now assumed mostly false.
The only information I was able to confirm was that Joseph left home at the age of fifteen and that he was not heard from again for almost three years. Little is known about what actually happened during those years. According to Hammond’s own account, he spent them traveling by railroad from Dallas through the Southwestern states until he reached California, where he spent one year at the Anthropology Library on the UC Berkeley campus. There he read such works as Liden’s The Living Earth and Kelley’s Studies in Javanese Paganisms. After a year, he left California, again by railway, and traveled to Alaska, where he worked for two years on a fishing boat, netting Alaskan king salmon. Within days of his arrival in Alaska, Hammond met an Inuit couple with whom he quickly became friends. Most of his time was spent on the fishing boats, and any time off the boats Hammond then spent with the Inuit at their home, among their neighbors, observing their daily lives and learning their customs. In a short, unpublished essay — what some believe to have been the beginnings of a memoir — Hammond recounts the times that he went “in the icy, choppy waters, using only handmade canoes… fishing with Prepayit for seal and walrus, with sharp and hardened spears, tipped, sometimes, with our own blood for good luck.”
It was during this time, again according to his own accounts of his life, that Hammond decided to pursue full-time studies in the fields of anthropology and sociology. It was also during this time, according to an interview with LIFE magazine, that Hammond decided to apply to Harvard University:
And you were accepted?
Yes. They accepted me, but I didn’t know about it for almost three months. I had left for another fishing trip, my last one, and the acceptance letter arrived on the day after I left. It was quite a shock coming home to that letter.
Why was that?
Well, on that trip, I almost didn’t come home at all.
Because you almost drowned?
Right. A buckle or a clasp from my overalls caught on the net as it was dropped into the water, but nobody — not even me — noticed it until it was too late. It was June, but even then, the water doesn’t get much over forty, and there I was in the water. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swim, couldn’t see, and I didn’t know what was holding me down. Fishing expeditions are dangerous all over, but I think they’re worst in Alaska. The water’s rough, and it’s always cold, and someone was always losing a finger or a hand or was knocked overboard. I was lucky, though. One of the new guys, someone I’d only talked to once or twice, he jumped into the water and he had the sense of mind to bring a knife with him, and he swam down in there and just cut me out of the net. Now he’s my best friend. In the end, I was able to go to Harvard all thanks to Marcus.
The 1975 November — December issue of Harvard Magazine contains a photograph of two men standing side by side on a boat at sea. One of the men is holding in his hands what could be a salmon. The photograph is cropped in such a way that one can tell that the two men are on a boat, and that the boat is at sea, or, at the very least, on water, but little else. The men in the photograph are said to be Hammond and Grant, in Alaska on a fishing boat, some time during the last trip Hammond took before leaving Alaska for Cambridge. The photo, submitted to the magazine by Hammond shortly after he and Grant had accepted their respective teaching positions, is accompanied by a short paragraph, titled HARVARD AND YALE TO CALL TRUCE AT LAST? about the two good friends who had found themselves teaching at rival schools, in which Hammond is quoted: “Whether he saved my life or not, come football season, all manner of friendship between Marcus and me will have to end.”
The second time we met, I showed Denise a copy of the magazine and the photograph. She shook her head and said, “Who has time for this kind of thing? Who has the time or the energy to rent a boat, and, apparently, a fish, because, frankly, at this point, I doubt that’s even their fish, and who knows if they even left the dock? The frame’s so tight, you can’t tell how far out they are, or where they are. All to take a fake photograph to submit to the Harvard alumni magazine, just to corroborate a fake story of how they met. And for what? Why go to the trouble?”