aware. Her hair had brightened to white. Her eyes were still mysterious and captivating, as they had been to Mead a quarter-century earlier.
But when Benedict returned to the United States from her European tour, in the summer of 1948, she looked pale and exhausted. A few days later, she suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. Mead spent days and nights by her side. Her hospital bed was ringed with old friends, who talked with her quietly about work and future arrangements. She died on September 17. It was the birthday of her father, the man whose own early death, she once said, had determined the entire course of her life. She had been doing anthropology nearly to the end. When friends went through the contents of her purse, they found the normal bits and pieces of everyday life—bank receipts, scrap paper—as well as a notebook with scribbled thoughts on how Austrians might differ from Norwegians.
Condolences were sent to Mead as if she were the next of kin. In most ways that mattered, she was. “The discovery of anthropology—and Dr. Boas—proved to be her salvation. That is where you came into the picture, Margaret,” wrote Benedict’s younger sister, Margery Freeman. “One of the deepest satisfactions of her life has been the privilege of stirring up your intellect, and then watching you carry the torch into fields where she could never go.” Whatever intense private grief Mead must have experienced she spun into the matter-of-fact business of getting on with things. She steeled herself for the organizational and emotional tasks at hand, comforting family, commiserating with friends, and notifying as many people as she could—telegrams to those she could locate, longer letters to those harder to find, nothing to old colleagues whose whereabouts were impossible to trace.
Mead telegraphed Deloria about an upcoming memorial service. There was no way for her to afford the trip from South Dakota, however. Deloria said she felt an obligation to stay put and continue what she had been doing since publishing her Dakota grammar: helping to keep afloat the school her father once ran on the Standing Rock reservation. When Mead eventually sat down to work on her own form of public mourning—a hodgepodge of Benedict’s academic writing, memoirs, and poetry, which Mead titled An Anthropologist at Work—she made sure Deloria got a copy. “And thank you also for calling me an Anthropologist,” Deloria wrote in a return letter. Merely knowing that Mead thought of her that way, as someone who would want to read the gleanings of Benedict’s scholarly and literary life, perked her up. It was among the last surviving correspondence between the two of them. Deloria continued with her own studies and writing, but most of it was still unpublished at the time of her death in 1971. Her last mailing address was a motel.
If Mead tried to reach Hurston to let her know of Benedict’s funeral, no record of it remains. By the late 1940s, Hurston had lost touch with many of the people from her past, whether at Columbia or in Harlem. Over the years, she had occasionally hatched plans for a return to fieldwork. “Together we can do something that will make Dr. Margaret Meade’s [sic] ‘SAMOA’ look like the report of the W.C.T.U.”—the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union—she told her old research partner, Jane Belo, in 1944. But life could feel like a Florida loblolly, sinking, sinking, with her toes never quite hitting solid ground. The year Benedict died she was arrested on false charges of molesting three neighbor boys. She was eventually cleared, but it was hard to find her way back. She fell into another depression and made plans for suicide.
It would be decades before a clue about Hurston’s virtual disappearance happened to come across Mead’s desk, via a surprising source: an article in Ms. magazine. In 1975 the young poet and novelist Alice Walker recorded her own efforts to follow Hurston’s long trail away from fame. The piece surveyed Hurston’s early work and reminded readers of the long-ago world of Harlem rent parties and Negro vogue. It placed Hurston squarely alongside the men, such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, who had succeeded her as voices of the black experience. She was, as Walker put it, “one of the most significant unread authors in America.”
From Walker’s article, Mead learned that Hurston had continued to write short stories and newspaper columns, small essays, and plenty of queries to publishers about planned, but never