The Family Tabor. Cherise Wolas
she says sternly, silently, no more, just swim.
ON CAMILLE TABOR’S THIRTEENTH birthday, when her breasts were just budding, her mother gave her a book written by a woman who had journeyed to the South Pacific to discover whether adolescence was a universally traumatic and stressful time, or whether the adolescent experience depended on one’s cultural upbringing. Camille, a voracious reader, especially liked stories set in faraway places featuring the kinds of people never seen in Palm Springs.
After she unwrapped the present, her mother said, “A little explanation. The book is a vivid account of Samoan adolescent life and was incredibly popular, although eventually Margaret Mead and her research methods came under harsh attack. She was smack in the middle of a scholarly-scientific wrangling that began in the mid-1920s and has yet to be conclusively determined, the nature-versus-nurture debate. To what extent are human personality and behavior the products of biological factors, like the genetics you’ve inherited from Daddy and his ancestors and from me and mine, or are products of cultural factors, like where you live, how you’re being raised, the school you attend, the music you listen to, the television shows you watch, the friends you have. You are now a teenager and it’s important you learn to distinguish between the two so you can make thoughtful decisions from your head, rather than automatic ones, perhaps from your heart, whose underpinnings are harder to understand.”
Her mother was a prominent child psychologist and often said to her children, “You can do anything you want if you have thought it through and are capable of articulating your reasoning. In other words, so long as you can show your work.”
What Camille had already determined was that she wanted a life that was anything but quotidian, ordinary, middling, mediocre, words she knew and never wanted used to describe the life she would have, the person she would become. At home, she wasn’t at all surrounded by the quotidian, but the fear was so deep, she was sure she’d been born with it. Who she would actually be and what she would actually do was all hazy in her head, until she devoured Coming of Age in Samoa by the redoubtable Margaret Mead.
She read that birthday book many times, but it was the first reading that set her on her path, when Camille knew she would become a social anthropologist, studying exotic tribes in exotic places, researching their rules of behavior, their interpersonal relations, their views on kinship and marriage, their motivations and ambitions, their language, customs, forms of currency, music, stories, and material creations, their taboos, ethos, moral codes, the nature of their self-governance, their notions and beliefs about the communal world in which they existed, the gods they prayed to, the visions that manifested in their dreams.
By the time she delivered her valedictory speech to her graduating class at Palm Springs High, she had stormed through all the ethnographies, memoirs, autobiographies, collected correspondence, and biographies by and about every female social anthropologist she could find. They became Camille’s personal heroines.
She entered the University of Washington, thrilled to be facing a lengthy and arduous education. She thought fortitude should be required to become an expert in the rarest field, so temporally and spatially expansive it touched on everything in the world.
At nineteen, light-years ahead of her fellow collegians who hadn’t any idea what interested them, she knew she intended to spend her life in unruly, woolly places beyond the pale, engaged in on-the-ground research, discovering, analyzing, reflecting, and publishing her own important ethnographies, adding to the understanding of humanity.
She was a natural, cruising through the intro and second-level anthropology courses, through biology, statistics, research methods, data analysis, and chose Polynesian as her first foreign language, because of Margaret Mead. She declared her major early, was admitted to the university’s highly competitive and selective Anthropology Honors Program, took the 300- and 400-level courses, accomplished her yearlong honors project in ten months, graduated first in her class with a BA.
Then on to her master’s, with its first-year core curriculum and evaluation, its second-year sequence of courses in ethnographic methods and research design, and the completion of a research competency paper.
Then on to her PhD, demonstrating her fluency in Polynesian and, by then, also in Abo, a Bantu language spoken in the Moungo department in southwestern Cameroon, and in Kilivila, spoken on the Trobriand Islands. She passed the general exam, acquired training and experience in teaching at the university level, and finally, nearing the summit of the mountain she’d been climbing all those years, the creation of her own research project, which, like her heroines’, would birth new ways of understanding one tiny world, and, through extrapolation, the great big one.
It did not affect her that her friends, colleagues, and siblings, scholarship completed, had begun making serious salaries, were renting large and lovely apartments, acquiring the trappings of burgeoning achievement, because no matter what they accomplished, their lives were known, while hers would always be of breathtaking mystery, and that was the barometer by which she measured her personal success. The university gave her a stipend for teaching. Her tiny apartment, where she’d been since her junior undergraduate year, had an aura of impermanent student lodging warmed up with walls she frequently repainted in cheery colors, and, doing her part to reduce the rampant waste of fickle people, she filled with discarded furniture that was perfectly usable, stenciling on quaint polka dots and stripes when her brain required a break. It was home with a very small h and all that she needed.
And new in her life then was Valentine Osin, her Russian-Jewish lover, the two of them burning for each other from the first moment they met at the university’s omni-anthropology cocktail party for doctoral candidates. She had never before been so spontaneously attracted to a man, and never to a man who was all heavy beard and worn denim. But there was an intensity between them she had never experienced, and never thought of denying. She’d had bad luck dating nonanthropologists, and that Valentine Osin was a physical anthropologist of the Leakey variety only further increased his mammoth appeal.
That he was Jewish was irrelevant—she didn’t believe in any of it—she was sold, instead, by his accent, trimmed away and smoothed over, but retaining the hint of otherness she preferred, and by his upbringing in a town on the outskirts of a forest, and by their deep conversations, and by their impassioned sex, his swiftness, his directness, the way he could shake her up with the slightest touch, the way he stared at her as if she were a greater achievement than his eventually winning the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Award. They were equally matched, in restless and driven natures, the desire to live unparalleled lives.
Their insistent love was only six months old when she began thinking about where she would go for her doctoral research. Her heart had pounded and her fingers had trembled when she pulled from the pages of Coming of Age in Samoa, the list she had maintained since the age of thirteen, of tribes who dwelled in untamed places. A precious list she had amended and revised, that grew smudged and torn, that reflected changes in her handwriting, the list from which she would find a people she could call her own for a while, in a place where she would put down temporary roots.
She quickly crossed out the isolated Amazon tribes. Interaction with them, the study of them, was prohibited by non-engagement policies at last put into place, to preserve their isolation and their lands; a safeguarding with the dual purpose of resisting further exploitative encroachments into the rainforest and protecting it for the environmental health of the entire planet.
But there was serious anxiety when she began crossing out contactable tribes already claimed by others.
Then near panic, until she found the name of one virginal tribe she had scribbled in pencil: the Sentineli, a Stone Age tribe on the Andaman Islands, in an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, between India and Myanmar.
In the anthro library, she found scant research on them, which impelled her hope. All she could learn was that they were an uncontacted people who spoke an unclassified language, who used arrows for hunting, harpoons for fishing, and untipped javelins for shooting at those who dared to encroach. They had been fending off researchers