The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories

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 Ritual: 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.”

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?”

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 Ritual: 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.

As far as I can understand it, as it was explained to me by Denise and a few others in the field, the phenomenon surrounding the Sebali tribe stemmed not from the extensive and comprehensive documentation of the tribe by Hammond and Grant, which was remarkable, but from the purity of the tribe, which had survived, unmarred by anything outside of its very small chain of islands, longer than any other group of people. “The Sebali people,” Denise told me, with a hushed urgency that bordered on wistfulness, “were aboriginal in the truest sense of the word. Untouched. For a millennium, maybe longer. Consider,” she then went on to explain, “a group of people removed to an island and that island placed inside a box and that box sealed off from the rest of the world for one thousand years. Remove that island from its box, and what you have then is Hammond and Grant’s Sebali people. That the tribe even existed — had not been wiped off the face of the earth through starvation or by disease or by too much inbreeding — overshadowed the fact that they were discovered by two unheard-of amateurs, barely out of school, who had recorded faithfully their daily routines and rituals down to the tiniest detail, and had managed to do so without disrupting the tribe’s social structure.” She paused, a look of disbelief on her face, and then continued: “I mean, how could we have believed that they ate and slept and hunted with these people, wholly foreign people, without once tarnishing their society?”

Before the truth about the tribe had been revealed, a few scientists had originally conjectured that, perhaps inadvertently, Hammond and Grant had caused not only their own disappearance, but the disappearance of the Sebali people as well, which led to a minor resurgence of an ongoing debate in anthropology and sociology concerning the ethics of fieldwork. Not a few cultures have been irrevocably altered through the intrusion of science and anthropologists, and there have been some cases of anthropologists tampering with small tribal communities — falsifying observations or, worse yet, guiding tribal thought toward more and more exotic rituals and ways of life — in order to achieve the kind of shocking evidence that most people have come to expect of a relatively untouched tribe of aboriginals such as the Sebali. Most, however, considered these accusations, at least at the time and in light of the disappearance and possible deaths of Hammond and Grant, unfounded and somewhat inappropriate.

“There have been times,” Denise explained to me, “when it seemed that a people have disappeared, vanished, as if the earth had opened up, swallowed them whole, but once research is done, a good explanation, nine times out of ten, clarifies what happened.” Like everyone else studying or working in anthropology at the time, Denise wanted to figure out what happened to Hammond and Grant with the hope that this might help her understand what had happened to the Sebali.

The scouting party, while searching the remains of the Sebali tribe for signs of Hammond and Grant, took a number of photographs but did not bring home physical samples, leaving the site untouched, instead, for a future, more extensive research party. Denise was able to study reprints and enlargements of the photographs, consisting mainly of pictures of emptied-out huts, littered with broken pieces of pottery, dried pieces of meats and fruits scattered on the dirt floors, as well as huts that appeared untouched, the rooms clean and appearing like a home just recently vacated by a family that planned to return in a matter of moments, but she found the photographic evidence difficult to work with. Photographs, though they are indispensable to sharing discoveries, testing theories, and publishing articles, cannot, according to Denise, replace firsthand observation, fieldwork, or simple legwork and research.

Boston University, in collaboration with Tufts University and the University of Wisconsin — Madison, received funding to begin a summer program that would allow students of anthropology to work together with professors and field specialists in cataloging the remains of the Sebali tribe and looking for clues as to what caused the tribe’s disappearance. Denise, however, was then only a first-year graduate student and was not chosen to participate in the program. Instead, after examining the photographs brought back by the original scouting party, she contented herself with spending her time researching a paper she planned to write, a biographical piece on the lives of Hammond and Grant and their contributions to the science of anthropology, which, she hoped, would provide her with some clues as to what had happened.

Denise began her research close to home, at Harvard University, where Joseph Hammond taught a course on untouched civilizations, and where he himself had gone to school from 1960 until 1964. While involved with her research, however, she struck a wall.

She had no problem finding information on Hammond after 1975. “I had interviews, articles published by him and about him, his course work, his lecture notes, his slide presentations, his test papers. But when I wanted to go back as far as his years as a student, I couldn’t find anything.” Denise checked official school records through the Registrar’s Office and then through the office of Alumni Affairs and Development, but was unable to locate student records, grades, class schedules, thesis papers, immunization records, financial statements, or anything else that would connect Hammond to Harvard.

“At first,” she explained, “we thought that maybe his files had been misplaced, or that maybe some fanatic had somehow gotten his hands on these records, but we couldn’t believe that anyone could be so thorough. Most of these records are kept in separate files, such as his immunization records, which would have been kept in the Health Services office, and his high school transcripts, kept with the Registrar’s Office.”

Frustrated, Denise went in search of professors in anthropology or sociology who had been with the college long enough to have perhaps taught Hammond and who might remember him.

“That’s how I found Dr. Stephens,” she said. An associate professor in 1962, Dr. Stephens taught in the Department of Anthropology for four years before leaving to teach in Chicago, but who had just recently returned to Harvard. “I asked him about Hammond, but he had no idea, didn’t remember him at all, not from back then, couldn’t remember ever meeting him.” Stephens went on to explain to Denise that he had come back to Harvard, in fact, to take over the one or two classes Hammond usually taught, but Hammond left before Dr. Stephens’s arrival, and so the two had, to Stephens’s knowledge, never met. Denise left Dr. Stephens’s office more confused and frustrated than before. Unsure of how to continue her research, she took a long walk, walking from Harvard Square across the Charles River into Boston proper, and from there continued walking until she finally reached her apartment, a walk of nearly five miles, and by which time the sky was dark and her feet a little sore. “Exhausted and cold and uncomfortable,” she told me, “I considered on my walk home dropping the project, leaving the Sebali tribe, Hammond, and Grant to someone else, moving into an area more interesting, more generous, and I cannot say that, if I had not found the message stuck to the refrigerator that Dr. Stephens had called and that I should call him back as soon as I could, I would not have given up, but the message was there, and so I called him.”

After Denise left his office, Dr. Stephens, himself intrigued by the mystery of Joseph Hammond, found an old photo album that contained photographs taken at a 1963 department mixer, one of which captured the entire department, department head, professors, associate professors, and students — graduate and undergraduate — their wineglasses raised, the kind of photo taken toward the end of a party in which everyone is leaning against everyone else in order to remain standing up. Joseph Hammond, Stephens told her, was not in that photograph, nor any of the other photographs, which, by itself, wasn’t damning or interesting evidence, but then Hammond wasn’t in the mixer photographs for 1962, either, or 1961, or 1964, which Stephens found altogether a little too strange. It was this final bump in the road that caused Denise Gibson to change course.

Regardless of the frustrations and obstacles concerning her research on Hammond, Denise still felt that by looking into the two anthropologists’ histories, she would find the solution to the puzzle of their disappearance. “I brought a healthy amount of suspicion with me when I looked to Grant, but then Grant’s life fell into place like dominoes, and then Grant led me right to Hammond.”

The now commonly held belief regarding Grant is that he merely wanted a chance to paint frescoes and make pottery and reinvent old techniques for creating art. Hammond, however, when compared to Grant, who could not bring himself to lie even about where he was from, who did not have the foresight to doctor school records or change his name, who just barely corroborated the story about saving Hammond from the icy depths off the coast of Alaska, Hammond is now considered nothing less than a highly skilled con artist whose main goal in the creation of the Sebali tribe was economic. Marcus Alexander Grant, as everyone now knows, never saved Joseph Hammond’s life off the coast of Alaska, but then again, no one believes that Hammond was ever in Alaska to begin with. While no one knows exactly what he did between the years he left home and the years he entered college, what we do know is that at the age of eighteen, Joseph Farrow enrolled at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He spent two years in Oklahoma before he left OSU (or was dismissed; no one is quite sure), after which he moved to Lubbock, Texas, where he enrolled into Texas Tech University as a transfer student. Originally a student of business administration, he changed his major to anthropology. Neither he nor Marcus Grant, however, completed their studies at Texas Tech, nor at any other American university. Farrow flunked out of school by the end of the fall semester of his senior year, and it was around this time, too, that he began calling himself by his mother’s maiden name. And when Hammond left, Marcus Grant left with him. Once Denise figured out the connection between Hammond and Farrow, it was not long before she came to the conclusion that the photographs, the artifacts, the rituals, and the degrees were fakes.

“Well,” she corrected me, “not fake. The artwork is real artwork, but the work is Marcus Grant, not Sebali.”

As soon as she felt she’d gathered enough evidence to explain the riddle of Hammond and Grant and the disappearance of the Sebali tribe, she called Dr. Stephens. “I told him that I thought the Sebali tribe never existed — that they were made up — and he was very quiet on the phone for a minute, and then asked, ‘What makes you say that?’ So I told him what I’d found out about Hammond, and then, once I’d finished, he told me that he’d get in contact with his colleagues on the island and tell them what I’d found out and that he’d make sure that, if I were right in this, that I’d receive full credit for my research here.” A few days later, Stephens called Denise. “They’re good forgeries,” he told her. “Damn good.” When she asked him what would happen next, he told her that everyone was coming home and that, once they’d returned, they’d put all of the pieces together and figure out exactly what happened.

VII.

To this day, however, nobody knows exactly what happened. The riddle of the Sebali tribe has been solved, but no one is sure why Hammond and Grant did what they did or, more importantly, what happened to them when they left the United States in 1977. In truth, no one knows if they even left. Their apartments, which have been searched more than once, failed to reveal any clues as to their whereabouts, and their things, left behind these many years, have since been confiscated by the FBI, and their old apartments cleaned out and rented. (Once it was revealed that the two had misused funds awarded them by federal agencies, the FBI joined the investigation, as did the Treasury Department.) Hammond and Grant have disappeared as cleanly as, so it would seem, the tribe they invented. There have been rumored sightings of Hammond, and Denise still finds herself looking closely at any old Chevy Fleetside pickup if she sees one at a rest stop along the New Jersey Turnpike, or parked behind Fenway, whether orange or green or blue. A few months before we met, Denise flew out to Akron, Ohio, after someone had sent her a clipping of an art sale advertisement that mentioned pieces of primitive pottery and stonework of the Sebali tribe for sale, but the works, ironically, turned out to be forgeries. Otherwise, aside from the interviews she has given me, Denise claims that she has done her best to put the mystery behind her, though even about this she seems at least faintly unsure.

I conducted one of our last interviews at her apartment. We had planned to meet at a local bar, but she had left a message for me with the bartender, who then gave me directions to her apartment, which was only three blocks away. She apologized when she answered the door. “I’m afraid I’m feeling a little fluish,” she told me, and I offered to reschedule, but she invited me inside instead. She offered me a drink, and we sat and we spoke about Hammond and Grant and about Texas and the anthropology program. I asked if she had continued to look for or wonder about the final whereabouts of the two men, and she was quick to say no. I was surprised by the swiftness of her reply, and perhaps the surprise, if not a measure of disbelief, registered on my face, because she then told me that a number of people, professors and colleagues and family, had expected her to continue to explore and then write about the Hammond and Grant episode, and had urged her to do so for some time. “It’s been kind of hard,” she said, “to get them all to drop the matter.” And then, for no other reason than that the question appeared fully formed in my head, I asked Denise if either of them — Hammond or Grant — had ever tried to contact her. “Not even a phone call,” she said with a bright and unaffected laugh. “Can you believe it? The nerve of those two.” And it was then that the phone on the table next to the sofa rang loudly, filling the apartment, and a startled look passed over her face before she smiled at me and quickly reached for the phone, and it was in that moment that I suspected that Denise was not quite free of Hammond and Grant, and that she might never be. It was her mother calling, and I sat quietly, waiting as she chatted amiably about her brother’s newborn baby girl, and after a few minutes, she said her good-byes and hung up and turned back to me. “Have you ever cooked a really big meal?” she asked. “Four or five courses? For a big party of people? You spend all day shopping for ingredients and then chopping and sautéing and roasting, and you’re excited about the meal, taking a bite here and there as you cook, and it smells great, and you finish it all and bring it all out to the table, and you’re proud of it, and everybody digs in, and they all love it. But you just spent all day cooking and running around and your back is sore from standing in a cramped kitchen for the entire afternoon, and you find that, all of a sudden, you just don’t have the appetite for anything you cooked. It looks good and smells good and you’re sure it tastes good, but you’re just not hungry anymore. That’s more or less how I feel about Hammond and Grant. No more appetite.”

“But sooner or later, you’re bound to get hungry again,” I said.

She laughed again and said, “Maybe some day.”

In May, Denise will graduate. When I last spoke to her, however, she was not yet certain what she would do after graduation. Princeton has offered her a postdoctoral position, and she has had two interviews with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. “I’m not sure, though,” she told me on my last day in Boston. We were walking along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. It was a bright, cold day. She stood staring quietly at the water as it moved sluggishly past. “I’m not sure what I want to do. Both of them — they’re both good opportunities, and my parents were happy to hear about them because, I think, in their minds, anthropology, when it comes to having a job or a career, isn’t any more promising than theater. But the academic world, it’s just… it’s so small, and now when people meet me, and at job interviews and job fairs, all they want to talk about is the Sebali thing. The more people talk about it, the more I think about what they did — Hammond and Grant — and what they’re doing now, whatever new con they’re playing now, and I find myself almost admiring what they did, the fact that they, by their own sheer force of will, invented a new life for themselves. And I’m beginning to think that, if there’s some way for me to do the same thing, I should maybe start working to find it.”

“Do you think they’re happy, whatever they’re doing now?” I asked her.

She was quiet for a moment before she looked at me and said, “If I ever find them, I’ll let you know.”