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think his father s body had been picked apart by the scientists.
What was actually under the animal skins the night they pretended to bury
Qisuk?
A log. A piece of wood the size of a man.
But surely
If you think I m making any of this up, Alex, Clem said, patting a notebook
that she had brought with her and placed on the small desk next to her glass,
there are newspaper clips that tell the whole story. The fight for Qisuk s
body
Fight? Between whom?
He died at Bellevue Hospital. The doctors there wanted to autopsy him, but
the museum wanted the same privilege.
Was there a winner?
An agreement was reached between the two institutions. The poor fellow was
to be dissected at Bellevue, and then the museum would be allowed to preserve
the skeleton. Famous phrenologists inspected his brain and took measurements
of his skull.
Why the skull?
The idea was that the low cultural level of more primitive people was a
factor in their receding foreheads. Not enough room for mental development.
Just part of the racism intrinsic to the anthropological theories of the day.
So what s to study? Chapman asked.
I hesitate to call the scientists bigots. After all, those were the
Euro-American tenets of the nineteenth century. They were intrigued by the
Eskimos, Mike. How did this nomadic, uneducated little tribe thrive in one of
the earth s most inhospitable climates? It was worthy of scientific study,
don t you think?
Clem looked at Mercer, knowing he didn t need this lecture on the
narrow-mindedness that had been pervasive not just in society, but within the
well-educated scientific community. The world s fair in St. Louis, 1904. Ever
hear of it?
Judy Garland, Leon Ames, Mary Astor, Margaret O Brien, Mike snapped back.
Meet me in St. Louis, Louis. Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings.
That s the charming side. While Judy was finding romance on the trolley,
Qisuk s brain was one of the freakier exhibits. On loan from the museum.
And all this went on while Mene was growing up, but he knew nothing about
it? That his father s pickled brain was carted off to a world s fair? Is it
possible that Wallace participated in this cruel charade while the boy was
living in his home?
You ll never guess what Mene s adoptive father was doing as a side business,
at his farm upstate.
You re way ahead of us.
Clem sat on the arm of the sofa, flipping through yellowed clippings as she
talked, showing me pictures of the young Mene with his adoptive family on the
farm in Cold Spring.
Have you ever heard of a macerating plant?
None of us answered.
It s a bone bleacher.
I shivered instinctively, thinking of what Zimm had described to us last
week one hundred years later as the museum s new degreasing machine.
Back of the house was a running stream, so Mr. Wallace convinced the museum
to let him set up his own operation there. A cheap way to clean the animal
specimens. He just parked the dead carcasses in the running springwater until
they were naturally washed and bleached.
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And Qisuk?
Mr. Wallace was personally responsible for bleaching the Eskimo s bones, so
that the anthropologists could get on with mounting the skeleton. He did it in
his own backyard, while Mene was living in the house and playing on the
grounds of the old farm.
It s unthinkable.
On top of that, William Wallace lost his job at the museum nothing having to
do with Qisuk s phony funeral, which all the officials thought was fine but
because of financial irregularities. An early scam in which he was charging
the museum for animal work he was doing for circuses and zoos. Billed the
trustees for an elephant he had bleached for some circus troupe performing in
the old Madison Square Garden.
So who supported Mene? The museum president? Or Robert Peary?
Clem laughed. Peary had long before given up his interest in his Eskimo
specimens.
But the president of the museum, did he just abandon the child, too?
Pretty much so. Morris Jesup. He didn t put his money where his mouth was
either. When Jesup died, in 1908, his estate was valued at thirteen million
dollars. He didn t leave the child a nickel in his will.
What did the kid do?
Mene? He was still just a teenager, but he began the battle that would last
him a lifetime.
Who did he fight?
The museum, its administration, its trustees. Clem licked her finger and
scanned through the plastic-covered sleeves in her notebook. When she found
the newspaper article she had been searching for, she turned the book around
so that the headline was facing me.
I read aloud from the January 6, 1907, edition ofThe World, which pictured an
imploring Mene on his knees, in front of a sketch of the massive museum
facade. Above the entrance was the bold black print that shouted his plea:GIVE
ME MY FATHER s BODY!
All the boy wanted, Clem said, was to take his father s remains home to
Greenland for a proper funeral. To be given his kayak and hunting weapons to
bury with him there.
What did the museum do?
Not what you might think. They gave him nothing. But it didn t take very
much media heat, even in those days, to cause them to dismantle the display
case.
And do what with it?
Put it in a coffin, if you can call it that. A large wooden box with a piece
of glass on top, so the skeleton was still visible within it. Moved it
upstairs to the workroom where other skeletal models were assembled.
But did they return it to Mene?
There was a new president by this time, a zoologist named Carey Bumpus. His
view? We ve got hundreds of skeletons here. How the hell do I know which of
these bones is your father?
And Mene?
A very difficult life, never quite comfortable in America. When he was
almost twenty, he finally got some of the Arctic explorers to take him back
home.
Did anyone know him there?
Clem smiled at me. A tiny place like that, a dozen years after the white men
took six of the tribesmen away? Certainly. These people have no written
language, only oral history. But the story of Qisuk and Mene had been told
many times. And he still had aunts and cousins there. In a sense it got
worse.
But why?
Like a man without a country. Now he could no longer speak the Eskimo
language.
Did he stay?
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Not for long. The loneliness there was as profound for him as it had been in
New York City. He came back to America, wandering around New England until he
finally settled in a town in New Hampshire, where he found a job in a lumber
mill. But it was all shortlived. Mene died in the Spanish influenza epidemic
that swept the country, before he was even thirty.
I turned the pages of Clem s book of documents, looking at photos of this
young outsider throughout his life. There were images in which his velvety
brown eyes seemed to express all the joyous promise of every childhood, but
far many more in which the pain of his isolation dimmed the gaze as he grew
into an adolescent and young adult.
Before he died, though, was he able to arrange for his father s body to go
home with him?
Never. It was one more broken promise.
I hesitated to ask. To this day, has Qisuk s ? I stopped, not knowing how
to refer to the remains. It certainly wasn t an intact body.
Natural History accession number 99/3610? That s all Qisuk was to the museum
leaders.
The dead man bore the same kind of identification tag as a stuffed moose or
prehistoric fish.
Clem went on. Yes, in 1993, more than a century after the six Eskimos left
their homes, their bones were returned to Greenland for burial. I told you,
didn t I, that my father was born in the same village? It s called Qaanaaq.
Yes, you did.
My family was there at the time, in the beginning of August, when the
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