Chapter 2
I had enrolled in an alternative college in Seattle: Washington Humanities University, or WHU. It offered a bunch of courses in the human sciences. History, Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, Arts, Sociology, Political Science, Archaeology and Anthropology. The program was conducted in a way that interlaced as much as possible all the subjects from every course.
I was very excited with the prospect of studying, especially anthropology. I had thought my academic life would be over after graduating high school, but Edward eventually told me some of them loved to go to college from time to time. They just had to choose the right places and keep themselves low key.
The subject I anticipated most was mythology. Ever since I dug myself into vampiric and native american tales, I felt so passionate about those stories. After all, if vampires and werewolves were real, could gods and demigods be as well? This was a thought that intrigued me, and no one in the family had much to say about it. This was something even they had no knowledge about, and that spurred me on as well.
The first weeks of classes were even beyond my expectations. There were two professors, particularly, that struck a cord in me. They were anthropologists Dr. Alden Eagles, who was actually born at Jacob's reservation, and Dr. Mary Ellen Voight, that had been a renowned field archaeologist before losing her movements from the waist down, in an accident at one of her excavating sites.
Mr. Eagles was in his late forties, and was a stern but very polite man, so tall and so strong that he sometimes seemed a giant to me. His specialization was not native american mythology, as one would expect. He said he had been a victim of prejudice in his undergraduate days, and wanted to prove that he could have knowledge about any topic, not just those referring to his own culture. This didn't mean, though, that he had lack of expertise in native american mythology and culture. Quite the contrary. The class he taught that I was in was entitled "Introduction to Anthropology". Duh. It was my first semester.
Mrs. Voight, who was 56 years old (I did the math by the age she was when she discovered a large site in Northeast Brazil) had a very different personality. She was sunny, sympathetic and just plain lovely, despite her sad and difficult personal history, which went way beyond just her accident. Her specialization was, of course, pre-historical studies, which was the subject of her class. But she was so well-read that it seemed a class about everything, even though we ended up learning the subject as thoroughly as humanly possible considering the rhythm of our schedule.
They were both unbelievably smart.