The Invisible Line (47 page)

The pavilion representing French Equatorial Africa combined two tribal architectures. A low-slung story inspired by the Mangbetu people of the Congo was painted with geometrical designs, while a towering cupola rising in the center was reminiscent of a conical Mousgoum house of northern Cameroon. To critics, the combination of styles was too jarring. The cupola looked like a fat bunch of bananas. The building was overly mannered, contrived, even fake.
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Inside, though, Field saw someone more than authentic—she was ideal. The woman had come from Central Africa, an area the French called Oubangui-Chari. As a baby, her lips had been cut away from her face and enhanced with small wooden discs. As she grew older, larger and larger discs were inserted, stretching and beautifying her lips. As an adult, she looked to Western eyes as if she had a duck's bill or, as the sideshows of the time described Ubangi women, “crocodile lips” or “monster mouths.”
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Field sought out the exposition's organizer, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, the elderly French general who had tamed Morocco and Madagascar, and asked if he could borrow the woman for the day. Although Lyautey was wary that anticolonial subversives were trying to infiltrate the Bois de Vincennes and sow dissent among the native workers, he gave his blessing without hesitation. Given Field's immense family wealth and status in the world of ethnography, Lyautey's decision to grant his request was an easy one; Field's interest in the woman was flattering.
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Field was not even thirty years old, but he was a man accustomed to deference. He traced his family to one Hubertus de la Feld, a ninth-century French chieftain. Field's visits to France sometimes included a trip to the Strasbourg cemetery, where a mossy stone marked a remote forefather's grave. One side of Henry Field's family had arrived in the United States among the first Puritans in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The other side included Southerners of dignity and worth, most notably Field's grandfather, the Louisiana senator Randall Lee Gibson.

What impressed people most about Henry Field's pedigree, however, was his great-uncle, the department store magnate Marshall Field. As a student at Oxford, Henry Field had done extensive anthropological fieldwork in the Near East. In 1926, a year after graduating, he moved from England to Chicago. He assumed the position of Assistant Curator of Physical Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, founded and run by his family.
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The young anthropologist escorted the woman from the Equatorial Africa pavilion to a taxi, waiting with its top down in the morning sun. They sat side by side in the backseat. Field was tall, tweedy, with a patrician's forehead and strong chin. The woman wore her hair in braids tightly woven along her head. With her left hand, she held up her lower lip, which extended ten inches from her mouth.

The taxi headed west, toward the center of Paris. The streets and sidewalks were crowded with summer traffic. At the Bastille they turned onto the rue de Rivoli and drove its length, with the Marais on their right, Notre Dame and the Île-de-France on their left. At every stoplight, there was pandemonium. In cars, on foot, Parisians cheered and saluted the Ubangi woman. She started jabbing Field with her right elbow and talking at a rapid clip. Field could not understand her but assumed that she was “chatter[ing] like a magpie” to express her pleasure. “Like all beautiful women,” he wrote, “my companion did not remain oblivious to this attention.” He was certainly enjoying the moment, something he would remember decades later with “mingled amusement and embarrassment.” The great fashion designers of Paris might create distinctive and original looks, he thought, “but my companion had the biggest lips in France!”
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After the Louvre and Tuileries, they turned left, skirting the ChampsÉlysées as they drove straight through the place de la Concorde and across the shimmering Seine. Past Bonaparte's tomb and the Eiffel Tower, they plunged into the Fifteenth Arrondissement, winding their way to the rue de Vouillé and the Villa Chauvelot. It was a humble neighborhood, and there was little commotion at the woman with lip plates. The neighbors had grown used to the procession of unusual people: Nepalese princes and princesses, a student from Shanghai, Malays, Hawaiians, a boy from Madura, off the Javanese coast.
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Field brought the woman to a quiet stone building. A fountain built into its outside wall was adorned with small North African tiles, black and turquoise. By design, one black tile was missing from the pattern; otherwise, perfection would attract the evil eye. They entered the building and went upstairs. They were greeted by a startled Siamese cat. Behind him was an open studio cluttered with clay models and plaster casts: heads, feet, legs, hands. A “haughty and extremely handsome” woman with long gray hair tied in an elaborate bun, flowing green smock, artfully draped scarf, and oversize black tam approached Field and his find. Her handshake was firm.
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While her assistants shaped approximations of full-length bodies around wire and wood frames, Malvina Hoffman—Auguste Rodin's disciple and Henry Field's protégée—was endowing the rough clay with life, proportion, and a sense of movement. A New Yorker, Hoffman had been based in Paris for the entirety of the Colonial Exposition. Nearly every day she would “kidnap” native workers from the Bois de Vincennes. The exposition provided a wealth of splendid subjects. The Ubangi woman was hardly the first Hoffman had met. The sculptor had spent years traveling through Africa; while in the Congo, she had drawn a portrait of a woman with lip plates. The sculptor may have offered her new subject a cigarette, having seen Ubangis smoke through long hollowed reeds. Hoffman agreed with her patron that the Ubangi he had chosen was ideal for the vast project that he had commissioned.
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WHEN FIELD STARTED WORK in Chicago in 1926, he had proposed to his curator an entire exhibition hall devoted to what he called “the principal racial types of the world.” Alongside more traditional exhibits that “would illustrate the bases on which mankind may be divided,” dozens of sculptures—full bodies, busts, heads—would populate the hall. It would represent the latest knowledge of physical anthropology through the work of “the finest artists in the world.” The curator, Berthold Laufer, a German brought to the United States by the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas, embraced the idea, and the museum's president, Field's cousin, told him to plan it “without regard to space, time, or cost.” It would open in time for the 1933 world's fair.
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In order to commence the project, Field first had to determine what he meant by the “principal racial types of the world.” Of course, there were three principal groups—he could ask just about anyone walking down Lake Shore Drive, and they would give the same answer: white, yellow, and black. Within those groups, Field knew there were important subgroups that could be determined by analyzing “the form, color, and quantity of the hair; the color of the skin; the shape of the head and face; and the character of the nose, eyes, mouth, and lips,” as well as stature. For years Field covered “yards of paper” with notes, waking from sleep to write down ideas and interrupting his reveries at the Thursday-night symphony. He inspected more than a million pictures of representative types from galleries, photo services, and museum collections across the United States and in more than a dozen cities in Europe, creating a Library of Racial Photographs with twenty thousand prints. Consulting with Laufer, with anthropologists at the Smithsonian, Harvard, and the Museum of Natural History, and with leading scientists in England, France, and Germany, Field developed a list of 164 racial types, from Kalahari Bushmen to Basques to Blackfoot Indians.
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The next step was to find “one single artist with the talent and physical endurance” to travel the world and sculpt all 164 types. Field's cousin, Marshall Field III, suggested Hoffman. The anthropologist traveled to Hoffman's New York studio and was particularly struck by an “amazingly lifelike” sculpture of Anna Pavlova as well as two oversize heads of Nubians that showed “the most delicate realism combined with a strong dramatic sense.”
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In February 1930 Field commissioned Hoffman for the years-long project. To keep costs in control after the stock market crash, he deleted some of the “less important types” from his list of races, culling it to an even one hundred. That summer the sculptor set up her Paris studio. Field and his colleagues helped her establish other studios around the world and provided her with dozens of letters of introduction for upcoming trips through Europe, India, Africa, Asia, and Australia. From the start she was working at “concert pitch,” sculpting from live models all day and from memory at night. At a Paris foundry, sixty men were employed in creating plaster and sand molds and casting her statues in bronze. Hoffman supervised the patina work closely, “to suggest the variety of tones and textures of all the races.”
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In September 1931, after several months of sculpting workers at the Colonial Exposition, Hoffman left Paris and began traveling around the world, from New York to San Francisco, Honolulu and Yokohama, to Hong Kong and the Philippines, Bali and Batavia, Singapore and Calcutta and Ceylon. She sailed in forty types of ships, from ocean liners to outriggers, slept in castles and huts, donned pith helmets and crossed jungles and dosed with quinine. As she traveled around the world, she found models, sketched portraits, and shaped a mountain's worth of heads and bodies out of clay and plaster of Paris. Eight months later she was back in Paris, enjoying “spring blossoms . . . peace and fertility, balanced temperature and modern plumbing.” By the end of 1932 the finished sculptures were in Chicago: twenty-seven life-size, twenty-seven busts, and fifty heads. When the Hall of the Races of Mankind opened in May 1933, the sculptures would make her famous, and they became one of the signal triumphs of Henry Field's long and distinguished career.
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HENRY FIELD HAD BEEN estranged from his father for years. His parents had divorced in 1907, before he turned five, and a year later his mother had married an Englishman. They moved from Washington, D.C., to Baggrave, his stepfather's country house in Leicestershire. Field enjoyed an aristocratic upbringing, digging up fossils on the family estate as a boy, then went on to Eton and Oxford. By the time he headed back to Chicago to take his job at the Field Museum, he had dropped his father's family name and assumed his mother's.
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Like Malvina Hoffman's sculptures, Field's father, Preston Gibson, was broadly representative of a certain type of man—dark and dashing, the quintessence of privilege in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Randall Lee Gibson's youngest son had been twelve when he was orphaned, a sad, lonely boy with an inheritance worth millions. According to the terms of his father's will, he had no guardian, just four trustees of his fortune. Preston moved a few doors down the street from his father's mansion in Washington to the house of his mother's sister Leita. Within months Leita had married Preston's trustee Edward Douglass White, who had been recently appointed a Supreme Court justice.
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Soon after his appointment Justice White cast his vote with the majority in
Plessy v. Ferguson
, upholding a Louisiana statute that required railroads to segregate their cars by race. When he was not addressing issues of national importance, Justice White tried to establish a home for his new wife and nephew that embraced simplicity and order. Preston and his uncle took silent afternoon walks through the city, nodding to passersby; spent late nights in their private library, reading about George Washington and John Marshall; and enjoyed frequent visits from the Roman Catholic archbishop of Baltimore. White often entertained his nephew with stories that featured “old colored m[e]n” he had run across in New Orleans and Washington. The justice assumed their accents and idiosyncratic diction for comic effect.
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Yet for all the love Preston Gibson claimed to feel for his aunt and uncle, the teenage boy brought constant disorder into their lives. Aunt Leita found him to be “unruly and disobedient . . . reckless . . . [and] unfortunately depraved.” “It is impossible to compel him to tell the truth on any subject,” she complained. “The exposure of one falsehood after the other seems only to excite a sense of amusement in his mind when spoken to on the subject.” Preston's “tendency to dissipation” was matched only by his “irresistible tendency to theft,” from which no family member, houseguest, or servant was safe.
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Instead of being sent to a reform school, as his aunt would have wished, Gibson wound up at Yale. He was popular on campus, a pitcher on the baseball team and a secret society inductee, idolized by classmates for his role on the football squad that held an undefeated Harvard to a zero- zero tie just before Thanksgiving in 1899. He gained national notoriety two months later when he eloped with Marshall Field's niece Minna, a seventeen-year-old debutante boarding at the Misses Masters' School in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Despite their scandalous union, the couple was embraced by her mother and stepfather, the prominent novelist Thomas Nelson Page, whose tales of “ole Virginia” reflected a national nostalgia for vast plantations, belles and gallants, and happy slaves. It was an attractive version of the past at a moment when legislatures were enacting Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs were murdering hundreds of men and women every year. Preston Gibson could certainly find common ground with Page in conversation. Typical of his generation, the rakish Yalie enjoyed nothing more than a minstrel show, and he was becoming an accomplished teller of “Kentucky Negro stories.”
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