Part 25

The women of the tribe are the strongholds of conservatism. I recall holding a council of mixed sexes, the talk relating to some form of community improvement along modern lines. And when it was over, I asked my interpreter:—

“Do you believe they understood?”

“The men, of course,” he replied, emphatically; “but do you think it possible to get that stuff through a Hopi woman’s head? Epten. The men will try to carry out your wishes; but they are in for a very unpleasant time of it with their women. A Hopi woman! She is like a piece of sandrock. The winds wear it away, but it will take many years.”

The younger women, who have had schooling, wear the gingham and calico dresses they have learned to make and launder, and the field matrons assist them in renewing these garments. But the old ones, and the students of middle-age, are most likely to be found wearing the ancient Hopi weaves. A dress may be of thick cloth caught at one shoulder, leaving the opposite arm bare, belted at the waist with a woven sash, the wearer’s legs and feet bare most of the time, unless for some special journey she dons the woman’s wrapping and shoe of buckskin. She grows thick and fat, her countenance rounding into a broad, complacent face that can smile pleasantly or become stolidly impervious as the mood strikes her. Once married, her hair is parted and hangs down her back in thick plaits. Her hands are thick and coarsened from hard labor, the making of pottery, and especially from the baking of piki bread.

This baking is done on a red-hot stone over the fire. The Hopi woman sits before it, at her side a pan of batter, sometimes colored red or blue. She dips her hand into the batter and smears it deftly over the hot stone. Before it has burned and curled, she wipes over it a second layer. This last cooks perfectly in a thin wafer, quite like tissue-paper, crinkled and brittle. This she peels off and places in a pile of such sheets. All day she does this, often until her palm is perfectly cooked with the bread. The sheets are then rolled, again resembling a packet of tissue, quite like those we used to buy at Christmas time for decorations. A dozen of these rolls, and the Hopi man will take the trail, fully provided with provender.

Some rather reject the thought of eating piki bread, but I have sampled Indian foods more than once, and with different results. An old Navajo shemah can broil mutton ribs and prepare a pot of coffee over a hogan fire in such a way that one who has had a hard trip,—and more of it to come,—thinks them delicious. And piki bread is not half bad, although rather flat in taste, and gritty, for the sand will intrude; and I suppose if one accepted it as a steady diet his teeth would be worn down in time, like those of the older Hopi. As for the cooked hand, one should gratefully accept and eat piki without being too curious as to its making. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Next in the Hopi life-calendar appears the urgent necessity for marriage. The happy man has very little to do with this affair. The bride-elect—self-elected—and her mother, a wily dowager who has contrived a large part of the proceedings, decide most of these things for themselves. I cannot say how early negotiations have been opened by the aunts and uncles of both signatories, but of course they have been consulted. At any rate, on a day the girl and her mother pay a visit to the eligible young man’s home, and tender his parents a present of piki bread and cornmeal on a woven-reed plaque. Most Southwest tribes use a wedding-basket symbol; the Navajo import from another tribe a wedding basket of definite design, and will use no other. If the boy’s parents accept these presents and replace them with a portion of mutton on the same plaque, they have signified their consent to the union. If there has been dissension between the Montagues and Capulets and a plague on both houses, so to speak, the disdaining parents give this piki and meal to others, signifying their lack of interest in mere foreigners, and these receiving diplomats break the sad news that a perfectly good offer has been declined.

But if the present is accepted, the uncles of the bride-elect gather at her home to advise her concerning the duties of a good wife, and at an appointed time the girl, accompanied by her parents and close relatives, headed by the one who named her, proceed to the home of the groom’s parents for a feast. This gathering is held at night, and when they depart the bride remains. She spends four nights in her husband’s people’s home, doing the housework for the whole family. Very early in the morning she begins the corn-grinding, to pay for her husband. During these four days there is a ceremony of hair-washing, and her hair is given a peculiar cut to mark her as a married woman. Ever after she wears it so. And during these four days the boy’s uncles bring in cotton for her wedding-robe. They are paid for it in meal, and they depart to the kiva to weave it. While at this weaving, they are fed by the girl’s family. At the end of the four days the robe is finished. The uncles heap a wealth of advice on the groom before he departs from the home of his birth. Then the bride dons the white robe and goes with her husband to the home of her own parents; that is to say, she is accompanied by her husband. If he has had any ideas of a home of his own, away from the precincts of mother-in-law, he has not announced them, and apparently discretion is the better part of valor.

In this manner a young lady has gone to the home of a desirable young man, proposed for him, married him, partially paid for him, decked herself with apparel manufactured by his people, and then led him to her home in triumph.

There is nothing new under the sun. Vamping was reduced to a precise science by the Hopi many centuries before the pueblo de Los Angeles was dreamed of.

“And—hark! As I live, again the villagers!”

All this has not been enough to establish cordial relationship between the families. There must be something in the nature of a riotous shivaree. These folk who have captured our darling boy must not be permitted to crow too loud. So the mother of the groom, his influential aunts and other female relatives, especially those whose temperaments will lend verve to the affair, proceed to the rival house. They go upon an errand of mock-seriousness that may assume proportions. They will say unpleasant things in loud voices, especially for the benefit of the neighbors, to the effect that this bride has numerous and glaring defects, and that, if the truth be told, perhaps their paragon has not acquired the most beautiful and gracious of the village maidens.

The women of the bride’s household reply in kind, their language not always the most decorous. Personal references are made, involving the cleanliness and habits of both parties, and a friendly fight is on. These ladies proceed to sling mud,—at first verbally, and then actually,—real mud, over the house and each other. The bride and her mother will have to have a vigorous house-cleaning after this, and fresh plastering on the interior walls. Perhaps that is the idea of it—to make them furbish the domicile.

The masculine element is conspicuous by its utter absence. The men know better than to appear. Like white men on house-cleaning day, they seek the highest roof or the lowest cellar, along with their disconsolate dogs. Woe betide any absent-minded one who strays within the field. Both parties are likely to turn on him with more than words and mud. It is not likely that the men will dare come home until after sunset, when, no doubt, their attention will be distracted by recitals of the affair, and the condition of the home will cause them much grief.

A friendly, if undignified, roughhouse, to show the world that these two families, now having common interests, can endure the most unpleasant conditions and survive.

And would you imagine that the groom is ever to have a home of his very own, with a fireside, and slippers, and everything? Not unless he has his Agent behind him and bravely kicks over the sacred traditions, risking ostracism possibly and at least a great deal of home-town misery. Just how long Jacob will serve that family for Rachel, I am not aware; and unlike Jacob, he serves after having been snared. He draws and transports the water, if he has a wagon; he cuts the wood and attends the field; he wrangles horses, herds cattle, and helps manicure the sheep. He is owned by this old mother who directed her daughter’s attention toward him.

To be fair, sometimes the girl has fancied him for herself, without too much urging of family; and I recall asking more than one diffident groom, when about to publish banns:—

“Do you really, of yourself, wish to marry this woman?”

“Well, sir—she wants me to marry her.”

In delicate matters of this kind, the Hopi young man is pleasantly agreeable and strives to please.

And I succeeded in getting very few of them to take another point of view. There were several determined Romeos who had selected girls for themselves, who paid court despite all family disapproval, and who finally won out in their suits. But they were shrewdly wise to fortify themselves in Governmental positions: interpreters, policemen, laborers, or assistants, otherwise they would likely have been ostracized and come close to starvation. Having joined the Moungwi’s official family, however, and being endowed with monthly salary “fresh and fresh,” they could assert a bit of independence, could demand immunity from the bitterest of traditions; and I suppose they made much of their closeness to the Big Chief. Most Indians do. “I will tell my white uncle” has throttled many a threatened unpleasantness.

Then too, they were regarded by those less fortunate as rich men, having, besides a monthly surety, certain perquisites and a supposed subtle influence in foreign affairs.

“This Moungwi speaks to Washington by papers and the singing wires; and do you not know, stupid one, that I often talk with him?”

Their family visitors and retainers increased and were many. Not an enviable position, a place at court, despite its reflected importance and privilege. And the fall thereof when, Fate decreeing, the Moungwi with loud words dismissed one of these believed favorites! A return to the kiva influences was not a happy experience. Sanctuary had not been copied or absorbed from those early Spaniards and their holy friars. Indian ridicule and Indian persecution can be very cruel.

Few of the young men have the wherewithal to build a home or to buy one, either at the mesa or in the valley, so they are tied for years to this feudal family-system, waiting to inherit from their elders.

Even when one is so fortunate, so energetic, or so rash as to throw aside the traditions, he simply accepts bondage without mother-in-law, since no part of the house nor anything he brings to it, other than his personal belongings, may be claimed by him. The woman owns and rules the home, and this includes the children and the harvest. The children are of the mother’s clan. The man may disport himself, gaily dressed and agile as a panther, in the ceremonies; he may be a leader in the hunt; he may declaim in the kiva; but his authority ceases at the threshold of the Hopi home.

For has not this woman, during the first year of her married life, ground from one to two thousand pounds of corn meal in payment for her man and her wedding dress? She has, indeed. And since she has purchased him, she has the right to divorce him. He may slave in the hot fields and the sand-blows, running to and from the patches, hoe on shoulder, to charm a crop of corn. He has planted with ceremony—so many grains for the hot wind, so many for the field rat, so many for the katchina, and so many for himself; but once he has harvested it, and packed the Hopi share to the home cellar, his ponies may starve for the lack of a hatful of grain if his wife is not generous. One thing with another, I think the Hopi male has a rather tough time of it. Sometimes he grows a bit fretful and proceeds to push his wife about, rarely going so far as to box her jaws, which she very often thoroughly deserves and earns. Then, if she still likes him, she appeals amid tears to the Agent, with view to having him reprimanded and, unless it be crop-time, jailed. But if she does not care for him overmuch, having, as related of an Ethiopian matron, “entirely lost her taste for that man,” she abruptly divorces him.

This action calls for no assemblage of the family circle or of chieftains, no personal complaint, no service of notice, as one might imagine. Friend husband returns at evening from the sheep-camp or cornfield, probably crooning an old kiva hymn, at peace with all the Desert and its demons, to find his saddlegear, his cow-rope, and his other shirt on the doorstep. The decree is thus handed down, recorded, and confirmed. There is no appeal. He is out. He hoists his few belongings on his back and departs away from there.

If a young man, he will likely return to the parental roof; if not, he becomes a solitary and a wanderer for a season, roosting about where nightfall catches him, to be found later in company with some divorced woman or widow, cheerfully toiling to harvest corn for children not his own. When this thing has been repeated a number of times, and throughout a whole tribe, the Agent’s job of keeping vital statistics of clarity begins to loom into proportions. A Hopi genealogical record resembles a war-map. The keeping of it becomes abstract science, having both biological and anthropological phases.

I have known Hopi men of middle age who long maintained a fatherly interest in their children after such a social cataclysm; but they were not many, most of them growing careless of any and all responsibility; and I have found women as the heads of households to which—to adjust the records—I had to assign four husbands, all living and none present.

But to return to the Hopi wedding. After the four days spent in the home of her husband’s people, and her triumphant return with the captive to the house of her mother, the bride is supposed to deny herself the pleasure of all Hopi revelry and ceremony until the next Neman Katchina Dance. This occurs about a fortnight prior to the Snake Dance of August, and is an appeal for rain and harvest fruition. Then she arrays herself once more in the pure white robe, and appears for a few moments at the ceremony. This is to be her last bid for public attention and the bride’s centre of the stage, before settling down to a life of toil certainly, the rearing of many children probably, and perhaps a number of alliances. But it matters not how troubled her life, how peaceful, pure, how hectic; this first marriage is the only one to be distinguished by a ceremony and a symbol. This is the last time she wears the robe—save one. When next we see her in its white folds, she, having fulfilled the monotonous duties of a true Hopi or having, like Emma Bovary, tested all of life’s experiences, is waiting, peacefully uncaring, to be carried to her last bed in the shadow of the great, immutable mesa.

My introduction to the importance of the wedding robe came about through an effort to eliminate the evil power of the tribe’s old women. The weddings were arranged entirely too early, and operated to defy both Arizona State Law and Service regulation. It was a foxy method and held to with savage determination. An appeal to the Bureau would have brought only the hopeless decision that a tribal marriage had been declared a legal marriage by great Eastern Solons bent on pushing Orientals into Occidental grooves. Often too, young people were forced into these marriages. And the results were highly pleasing to the Hopi elders, and four-fold: Rachel’s mother procured labor in the form of Jacob. Jacob’s family received the ton of corn meal that Rachel would grind. Certainly Rachel, and often both contracting parties, were prevented from attending the schools, as the old Hopi earnestly desired; and Hopi traditions as to fruition were completely satisfied.

There was an even more serious result. This grinding of corn meal early and late, crouched over the stone metate, ended in the young mother’s losing her first-born. At one time there was no Hopi woman at the First Mesa whose first-born child was living.

So, as Moungwi, I gave them fair warning that these things must stop. They did not stop. An Indian, of whatever tribe, will always chance a test. They are a great people for stolid experiments. My first idea of punishment was, the child-wife to the boarding-school, the groom and his father to the Agency jail.

“But,” these male unfortunates finally convinced me, “you are punishing the wrong persons. We men have had nothing to do with the matter. Get the old women.”

And when this was done there were lamentations and floods of tears. One old virago nearly washed me from her home. It was a wet season at the mesa. And the virus worked about as successfully as a local philosopher of the Hopi described another’s conversion to Christianity via baptism.

“First time they get him, just like vaccinate him—no take. He backsliding now—dance all time—old Hopi again. But next time they get him baptized, mebbeso it take all right—mebbeso.”

Not all of my efforts produced success.

You may ask, Why not secure the girl in school before this untoward happening? The younger children of the Hopi all attend day schools, located close to their homes, and often a girl will reach maturity before the matrons have knowledge of a marriage scheme. With the child-wife in the boarding-school, caught during those first four days, there was no procession to mamma’s house, no corn-grinding, no attendance of the Katchina dance, and no robe. The joy had been taken out of life. There was mourning in both camps; for, as Jacob was in jail, there was no water-hauling, no woodcutting, no unpaid laboring in the field. It was a very sad state of affairs, tribally, and apparently this strange Moungwi had little sympathy for the human race,—at least the Hopi division of it, and its urge to perpetuate itself.

One day, about two years after the imposition of such a sentence, I met an old man at a distant mesa who asked for a talk.

“His daughter is home now,” said the interpreter, “and he wants your permission to have her robe woven.”

“Robe—you mean a wedding robe?”

“Yes. You recall she had no tribal ceremony; and it is like this: When the white people marry, they have a ring. The white robe is our ring. If she dies, there will be no robe to bury her in.”

Such is the stupidity of the alien when he seeks to rule the so-called heathen. My method was justified to protect the weak and the young, but I had cast out sentiment.

It may be they shall give me greater ease Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.

Quite so many Lispeths. I promptly gave permission for the weaving of a robe, and I hope she has had no use for it, nor will have, these many years.

The mid-West moralist may interpolate a question here. Without their own service, did you permit them to go unmarried? This had little in it of the material compared with that robe episode. But as Moungwi, a commissioned Head of the people, vested also with the authority of the State of Arizona, I would solemnize a legal ceremony if events had proved one necessary and the parties had attained a legal age. I never married a woman to a scoundrel. But I have married four couples in one morning, issuing first the State license as a deputized clerk of the court, solemnizing the ceremony as a magistrate, blessing the bride, and immediately thereafter summoning into open court the groom and all other guilty persons for trial on a charge of child-prostitution. This method was drastic, and very wearing on one who had other things to engage his attention. And it was not a very cheering family-event. But it finally produced obedience. There came a time when the Hopi would consult the Agency records as to their children’s ages, and would inquire about school terms, and what Moungwi thought about it, before framing-up family alliances.

The happiest of the Hopi marriages were those following my permission to schoolboys and girls to arrange their own courting, sometimes at the school, thus breaking down old mesa-lines. Boys of the First Mesa married Hotevilla girls: a thing that would never have been tolerated by the parents on either side. Close as are the mesas, housing the one people, they might as well be separate provinces. Seldom will a First Mesa marry an Oraibi, for instance, and vice versa. A local form of derision among the Hopi is to mock the differences in pronunciation and intonation of their common language. Oraibi is less than thirty miles from Walpi, and yet an Oraibi is a being recognizing a different civilization.

When last I visited Phœnix, I entered a shop to make a purchase. A fine-looking Hopi came forward and greeted me. We talked about the folks at home, of his summer visit to the mesas, who had died and who had married.

“Now let me see,” I parleyed, for it is hard to remember all individuals of a tribe. “You are married—what is your wife’s name?”

“Why, you know her; she was Youkeoma’s granddaughter.”

“Sure enough—Viola—the one who hid in the wagon and ran away to school at Phœnix, for fear I would send her back to Hotevilla.”

Birth and baptism; marriage and divorce; many dances; a lifetime of endless toil and endless prayer; many harvests, rich and meagre. Then comes the time when he has planted his last crop, or she has finished the last of household labors. Something happens to end things, and to serve summons to the Judgment Seat, that lonely prominence overlooking the Oraibi-Dinnebito Washes in the west. The tireless feet will no longer cover the steep trails to the pueblo on the heights; the mesa and the valley will know them no more. Death, as to us all, comes as a surprise. There is a sad wailing that is soon hushed.

A woman of the family prepares the body for burial and washes the hair. Then someone is nominated to sit with the dead, to express the common grief. When first I heard of this, he was described as “the one who has to be angry with the dead.” But the explanation was somewhat distorted. The person who has this duty does talk to the dead, saying:—

“Oh! why did you leave us? Were you angry with us, that you have gone away never to return? We are left here, lonely. What was it we did to make you angry with us—that you have left us....”

If death occurs in the night, the burial is early the next morning. No food is eaten. The body is arranged for burial in a sitting position. A corn-planting stick is placed so as to project above its head. Then the father or nearest male relative carries the body to the sand-mounds below the mesa where adults are interred and buries it. Young children have shallow graves in another place, for it is believed that their spirits are weak, too weak to struggle through deeper soil.

Then the father returns to the home, procures food that he carries to the grave in a ceremonial bowl, and leaves it there. One finds these bowls, broken, in the sand; and of course it is expected that they will not be disturbed. Above the graves of children one may find weathered toys and the remnants of a doll.

Returning to the house a second time, he gathers all the mourning ones around a common bowl of food, and they break their fast.

A simple life, simply ended.