A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [76]
Ann was ambitious. That was how Waluja and Sumarni put it, at least when they expressed the idea in English. “She would often tell us, ‘I want this, that, this. I have to get that,’” Waluja told me. She liked to put her plans in writing, often in the form of a diagram with multiple steps, as though it were proof that she intended to deliver. The working conditions were rough, but she never complained, even walking long distances in heat or rain. “She just exhaled loudly,” said Waluja, whom Ann took to calling Joko. Then she would say, “It’s nothing compared to hell, Joko.” In the village of Pocung, the river that ran through the bottomland would overflow, preventing her from reaching the home of a craftsman she was observing. She would overhaul the day’s schedule on the spot. She adapted easily to the customs of her informants. In a culture in which tea and snacks materialize at almost every encounter, Ann accepted whatever was offered rather than risk appearing rude by declining. “Speaking of cash crops, we arrived in Kajar just at the time of the peanut harvest,” she wrote to Dewey in July 1978. “This meant that at every house we surveyed we were given large glasses of sticky sweet tea, refilled at least 3 times despite all of my ‘sampuns,’ and big plates of peanuts in the shell to consume. Considering some days we visited 5 or 6 households, I don’t think either Joko or I will be able to look a peanut in the face again (yes, peanuts do have faces—smirky, nasty little faces, in fact). At any rate you can be sure that before moving on to the next village we are checking out very carefully what they have just harvested.” (Sampun is a Javanese expression, roughly equivalent in this context to the American expression “I’m full.”)
On one occasion, in a village called Jambangan in Ngawi, a town in East Java on the Central Java border, Ann was invited to watch a tayub, a dance performed by young women at which men in the audience may join in. It was rare for an outsider to be present, Sumarni told me, and men in the audience turned out to be drunk. When the men began shoving money down the dancers’ strapless tops, Sumarni said, she watched Ann closely. “She laughed,” Sumarni said. “Uncomfortably.”
With her interview subjects, she could be tender. “She was always touching,” Sumarni said. Before beginning an interview, she might put her arm around a farmer’s shoulders and ask if he had eaten recently. If the answer was no, she sometimes would say sorrowfully, almost to herself, as though trying to come to grips with the fact, “He said he didn’t have anything to eat.” Occasionally, Waluja and Sumarni noticed her turn away and wipe tears from her face. Once, she was visibly upset by the sight of an elderly woman in the village of Kasongan who, despite her age, was forced by her circumstances to work. “I wondered if she was too sensitive,” Waluja told me.
Ann was nothing if not methodical. She accumulated lists—of raw materials, of people to contact, of nineteen steps in making agricultural tools. “Steps in Surveying New Village,” she wrote in pencil inside the back cover of one notebook;