In 1869, a farmer, William “Stubb” Newell, digging a well on his land in upstate New York, unearthed what appeared to be a petrified giant, at least ten feet tall, proving the biblical claim (Genesis 6:4) that giants once walked the earth. In 1912, an amateur archaeologist, Charles Dawson, uncovered the remains of a man whose skull was distinctly humanoid and whose jawbone was distinctly simian, a discovery that would have provided the missing link in Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 1953, on a highway in rural Georgia, three young men claimed to have nearly careened into a flying saucer, and had hit one of the aliens left behind with their car, the body of which, two feet tall, hairless, and alien in appearance, they turned in to the authorities. The jawbone turned out to be nothing more than the jaw of a modern orangutan, antiqued for effect, and the petrified giant was quickly found out to be a hastily carved statue — fresh chisel marks were a dead giveaway — buried by a tobacconist and atheist, George Hull, who hoped to make a mockery of a Methodist reverend who had argued in favor of a literal reading of the Bible. And the space alien? A store-bought capuchin monkey, lethally drugged, shaved, and de-tailed, over a drunken bet made by one of the young men, a barber named Edward Watters, that he could get himself featured in the local news within a week. It seems that men and women, though mostly men, have engaged in such hoaxes — scientific, historic, literary, political, mathematical — from time immemorial, whether for fame, notoriety, money, to bolster a deeply felt belief, or as nothing more than an elaborate joke. As to what personally drove Hammond and Grant to construct this particular, elaborate, and exhaustive hoax, it is uncertain whether anyone will ever know, though it sometimes seems to be one of the only questions left that Denise still wants answered.
IV.
When he was six years old, Marcus Alexander Grant began painting murals on the walls of his parents’ house. These were, judging by the photographs that I’ve seen, childish images, but of vibrant color and surprisingly mature technique. When he was nine, he began making and then mixing his own paints. As he grew older, he demonstrated a good eye for color and a talent for the older arts — frescoes, mosaics, designing and firing and painting pottery. With his blue-black hair, dimples, and soft black eyes framed by simple, steel-rimmed glasses, Grant was often remembered as everyone’s favorite of the two anthropologists. Relaxed and nonchalant, he dressed in jeans, work pants, old pullovers, workman’s boots. His was a wardrobe suited for fieldwork, for the outdoors. While teaching at Yale, he refused to wear a necktie and drove to and from campus in a battered orange Chevrolet C-10 Fleetside pickup truck. From the ceiling of the truck hung a bent straw cowboy hat, which he claimed had been given to him by a migrant worker he had met while picking avocados in upstate California.
Grant spent the first ten years of his life in Chihuahua, Mexico. His grandfather had owned acreage in Texas, ranchland used for raising longhorn cattle, but when the cattle had to be put down and the ranch sold, Grant’s father, Alexander, left home for northern Mexico, where he worked as a ranch hand and became enchanted with the country, the countryside, and its people. He met and married Maria Martinez in 1942, and two years later, Marcus was born. In 1954, with the death of Marcus’s grandfather, the family moved back to Texas, where they settled in Lubbock and where Grant’s father found work as an electrician repairing radio sets and television sets, and Grant’s mother earned money cleaning houses and occasionally waiting tables.
Grant’s father, who hated working with electronics, hated the small, crowded workshop covered with wires and transistors and cathode-ray receivers, had, for twelve years, been pulling together his and Maria’s earnings in order to place money on a piece of land, with any luck the same land originally owned by his father. Whether Maria convinced him otherwise or whether Grant’s father came to the decision himself, land was never purchased and the money was used instead to send Marcus to Texas Tech University, where he studied the visual arts. According to school records, his first two years were abysmal, and in his third year Grant left the visual arts department and changed his major to anthropology.
V.
Excerpted from “The Drameção Rituaclass="underline" Silent Conflicts of the Sebali Prepubescent Male”:
After a Sebali boy completes his tenth year, his life becomes quiet, for between his eleventh and thirteenth years he is, according to tribal tradition, no longer permitted the use of language. Or rather, language is taken from him. It is done so bodily, in the ritual of drameção.
Symbolic in nature, the ritual involves the “removal” of the boy’s tongue. The symbol of the boy’s tongue — oftentimes the tongue of a wild boar tied once around with a lock of the boy’s hair — is then placed in the center of a bonfire, which is kept constantly ablaze. The tongue is placed next to other tongues symbolizing the language and manhood of other boys of the tribe, and each tongue will remain inside the ring of fire until its respective owner, through meditation, study, and prayer, retrieves it, thereby retrieving the tribe’s language. During drameção, the boys are not permitted to speak with anyone else of the tribe. Nor is any member of the tribe — elder, mother, father — allowed to speak to any boys in the midst of drameção.
The ritual, however, extends beyond the symbolic. After speaking with the elders of the tribe, and after lengthy discussions of drameção with boys of the tribe who had just completed the ritual and retrieved their “tongues,” we came to understand that the tribe’s language is not merely prohibited, but that literally the tribe’s language is, for a time period ranging from two to three years, forgotten.
The article goes on to explain the existence of marleh root, a soft root similar in shape to a carrot but the color of dried parchment. According to ritual, marleh root is boiled for two days before the beginning of the ritual, just long enough for the marleh root, which is tough and fibrous, to disintegrate, and the entire concoction is reduced to a syrupy stock which is then presented to the boy just before the “removal” of his tongue. Each boy is required to drink the same amount of the marleh stock, just under one cup, every seven days “for a time period equal to one month,” and, according to the findings of Hammond and Grant, it is this juice that, when drunk, causes a temporary loss of language memory, and “the juice’s potency is increased exponentially with each subsequent ingestion.”
Furthermore, the root itself is inconsistently potent, though Hammond and Grant speculate that the greener roots are the more potent roots. This inconsistency isn’t accounted for in the somewhat arbitrary recipe, so that it is possible that by the time the boy drinks his fourth cup of the syrup, he will be drinking a potion nearly twenty times as potent as that drunk by his brethren, a potency strong enough to make him lose memory “not just of his language, but of himself and who he is supposed to be.”
VI.
Denise began her studies at Boston University in 1978, the year people first began to suspect that some dark fate had, perhaps, driven Hammond and Grant off course, and, like most other anthropologists and ethnologists at the time, Denise became swept up in the fervor and the lingering buzz surrounding The Sebali Continuum and the Sebali tribe, only made more interesting by early speculations of the disappearance and possible deaths of Hammond and Grant. Then, almost two years after the disappearance, a modest group of friends and colleagues, five of them in all, left for the small Pacific island where the Sebali lived in hopes of finding the lost anthropologists, or, if not the two of them, at least a sign of what had happened to them. The company was made up of two Yale professors, a language specialist (who had learned the language of the Sebali people from Hammond himself), and two good friends. They returned, months later, empty-handed but for a shocking report that the entire Sebali people had disappeared, apparently and inexplicably wiped out.