My mind has circled back again to that conversation with Helen on the steps of Schermerhorn about how each culture has a flavor. What she said that night comes back to me at least once a day. Have I ever said anything to anyone that has come back once a day for 8 years? She had just returned from the Zunis and I had never been anywhere and she was trying to tell me that nothing we’re taught will help us to identify or qualify that unique flavor that we need most to absorb and capture on the page. She seemed so old to me then—36 she would have been—and I thought it would take me twenty years to learn what she meant but I knew it as soon as I got to the Solomons. And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages? Why are you thinking about the common man? Bankson asked me the second night. What does he have to do with the nexus of thought & change? He turns his nose up at democracy. When I tried to explain that my grandmother was my imagined audience for Children of the KK, I think he was embarrassed for me. These conversations with B keep coming back. Perhaps because Fen doesn’t enjoy talking about work with me anymore. I feel him withholding, as if he thinks I’ll use his ideas in my next book if he says them out loud. It’s wretched now to think of our months on that ship home—the freedom of our talk, our lack of self-consciousness and restraint. It all goes back to this idea of ownership again. Once I published that book and my words became a commodity, something broke between us.
So I play what B & I said to each other in my head like phonograph records. He has been stuck in that brittle English structuralism & head measuring & ant colony analogies, with so little decent field training about how to extract what you need. I fear he has been talking to the Kiona about the weather all these months. He seems to know a great deal about the rains. Which have been mild so far, little more than splatters. I don’t like it when they hold back like this. It sets things on edge. Oma muni. It bodes ill. Malun taught me this today. But she was talking about a particularly crooked yam.
2/4 I have gone through all the mail now. Lush delightful letters from Mary G & Charlotte. Perfunctory ones from Edward, Claudia, & Peter. Boas made me laugh, saying that missionaries are now rushing in droves to the Solomons to convert their wicked souls. I feel in a daze. Lindbergh baby investigation & the maid swallowing silver polish, Hoover evicting the Bonus Army, Gandhi hunger striking again. And then the book stuff. If I were married to a banker would I be able to relish this success more? Would I be able to show him the letter from the director of the American Anthropological Association or the invitation from Berkeley? All the downplaying I must do starts to rub off on me so that I don’t even allow myself a few minutes of private pleasure before the squelching kicks in. But then he surprises me, plucks out the letter from Sir James Frazer and says ‘Good onya, Nelliecakes. We’ve got to frame that one.’
53 letters from readers. Fen read some in funny voices. ‘Dear Mrs. Stone, I find it rich irony indeed that you purport to “liberate” our children with your graphic descriptions of behavior, the very reading of which will imprison them in eternal hellfire.’ Fen’s expression on the word hellfire had me in tears of laughter—it was Mrs. Merne from the ship who tutted about our behavior all the way across the Indian Ocean until she finally got off in Aden. We do well when things are brought round to the ship. Is it always that way with men, that first burst of love or sex the thing that binds you? Do you always have to harken back to those first weeks when just the way he walked across a room made you want to take off all your clothes? So different with Helen. Desire came from somewhere else, at least for me. Someplace deeper? I don’t know. I do know I can lie awake all night and it feels as if someone is cutting out my stomach the pain of having lost her is so awful. And I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn’t want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. It was unfair, the way I had to decide one way or another in Marseille. Perhaps I made the conventional choice, the easy way for my work, my reputation, and of course for a child. A child that does not come. False alarm this month.
2/8 In our own house now. With all our stuff & routine & the smell of fresh wood. I am like an old Victorian lady, receiving my visitors in the morning & going out to the women’s houses in the afternoon to do my own calling. My mind slips too easily and often from the children I am meant to study to the women here who are such a contrast to the listless Anapa & coarse but powerless Mumb. women. These Tam women have ambition and make their own money. Yes they give some to their husbands for new wives, or to their sons to pay a bride price but they keep the rest. They do the trading, even of the men’s ceramics. And they make their own marital choices, the young men prancing around them like sorority girls. Everything hinges on the decisions the women make. I see fascinating reversals of sex roles here. Fen (surprise, surprise) disagrees.