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The Jemez Dance used to be one of the finest and most elaborate of the Indian dances, and the tribe, living more remotely, had kept itself more fresh and vivid and unspoiled than for instance the Tesuque Indians, the pets of the artists, who dance on the same day. But the growth of the great city of Albuquerque and the development of the high road to Jemez Springs have attracted the gaze of the white man in all its vulgar curiosity and ignorance. I do not speak of artists and poets, who are as reverent at a dance as the most pious at Mass, but of those who think of life as a colored supplement to a Sunday paper, a Chaplinade, a burlesque, something over which to be facetious.
"There's a bunch of dudes coming over from a dude ranch," said a cowboy, referring to a touring party from a fashionable resort.
"A speculator come here las' week from Albuquerque and booked up every spare room in the pueblo," said another. "But the road's nigh blocked with snow. Guess we sha'n't see any Albuquerque folk this year. Too much scared of being stranded. Once a party got snowed up here for a week."
"There's a man here I'd like to insult," said Ewart with a laugh. "He is Babbitt himself. I'd like to go up to him and say 'Mr. Babbitt, I believe,' with a courtly bow."
Babbitt was certainly there with his wife and kodak and furs and waiting automobile, but he was not duplicated. He stood out in relief against all the rest. For all the lesser Babbitts had been scared by the snow.
November the 12th, Spanish festival of St. Iago, festival of the war cry by which the country was conquered, Saint Iago a ellos,—Up and at them, St. James! was the great day at Jemez. It was a bleak Sunday morning and the stark, jagged hills, pedestals of rock, standing places which encompass the dark village were lit by radii of a flashing sunrise. Silhouetted up there stood solitary Indians, watching religiously, and they remained till night had fled and the living sanguine of the mountains was revealed. Down below, in the streets of the pueblo, you would think there were a hundred wild horses. For the visiting Indians, unable to find stabling, had turned their horses loose, and they ran about like dogs, hunting for provender, whinnying to one another, biting one another, kicking, scampering from yard to yard. Our three horses were set upon by droves which I sought to keep off whilst they ate.
Usually in the morning the Jemez Indians dance a horse dance—very fitting in such a place of horses—one Indian is made up as a horse, and he is accompanied by a drummer with a soot-colored face, and a naked mirth-maker. And these parade the mud-built town. But this year that dance was omitted.
Instead the traders and the Navajos chaffered over the price of blankets. Snowflakes fell indolently on to the gray streets, on to the horses' backs, on to the many hogs, on to the quaint mud domes of the bread ovens, the estufas, in front of the houses, but it settled most of all on the gorgeous handwoven blankets of the Navajos. Every year hundreds of Navajos ride in from their country, which lies between the Jemez River and the Grand Cañon, and bring a years' product in woven blankets, and there come to meet them here many Indians from Santo Domingo. For the Domingo Indians mine turquoise, and are clever craftsmen in silver. The Navajos want silver and turquoise ornaments; the Domingans want blankets. So a great barter takes place. Besides these, the white trader comes and buys in dozens and makes many profitable deals.
"Don't tell anybody," said Mrs. Babbitt. "I've brought these parrot feathers. Don't you think I might get a bracelet with them?"
And she did.
Meanwhile from a squatters' village came a meager crowd of Mexicans in black, and filled the seats of the little Indian church, and gave to the fiesta the appearance of a Christian festival. A priest also appeared and a Roman Mass was sung. A group of Mexican youths with guns waited to fire a volley in air at the elevation of the Host—but they were discouraged and took to random firing instead.
"I think we'd better give these fellows a wide berth," said Ewart, as he watched the way they were fooling with their rifles.
They were neither pious nor careful, for they continued taking shots at sparrows and crows while the figures of St. Iago and the emblems of the Church were carried past them in procession.
Curiously irrelevant seemed the diminutive, black-dressed procession, following a white-surpliced priest, a man with a lantern, a man with a Cross, and two men with figures of the Saint, a Mexican carrying a modern, machine-made St. James and an Indian carrying the original Indian-made image of wood. The Navajos, all between six and seven feet tall, swathed from head to ankles in voluminous, bright colored blankets, looked exceedingly morosely at the spectacle, only their dark, cavernous eyes staring from faces which they covered even to their noses with the flaps of their blankets. The wind blew, the dust rose, the snow came slanting down, and the black-robed Mexicans turned their faces away as they trudged. The Cross and the flickering lantern wavered in air as they went.
There met them, accidentally, the heralds of the dance, the ugliest and squattest of the Jemez Indians, their faces blackened out with soot, and bearing in their hands tiny, home-made drums which they beat with a will. The tom-tom was beaten by two of them, and a third, with widely dilated eyes and old, strained, carved-out face and flying hair, sang in pagan voice—Hoi hoi ho-ho, ha-ha-ha-ha. The Church went one way; they went another, without a salute, as if one were invisible to the other.
At noon the Presbyterian missionary made his annual visit and, with the Agent and the District Nurse and the aid of a harmonium, struck up "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me." The Indians had marched out in their beauty; no ugliness now, no devil frightening, but a serene picture of physical loveliness. The Koshare, spirits of ancestors, mirth-makers, leaders of the dance, had been prohibited this year, their nakedness having been considered unseemly by the white onlookers. But the youth of the village were nearly naked, and nothing short of glory to their Creator.
The dance was like wind in the corn or fast-traveling shadows on the hills; it was like the dimpling of the waves where many waters meet together; it was like the arching of the necks, the waving of the manes of many horses on the prairie; it was like the trembling of morning light upon the mountains and the sea. The snowflakes emulated it but did not succeed. And all who watched seemed turned to stone, to perfect immobility, by the perfection of the movement that they saw. The hundreds of tall Navajos were like statues, and those on the roofs looking down on the wide, brown, sandy, open place of the dance—there were many on the roofs—looked like figures that had survived centuries and looked on unmoved hundreds of time, hundreds of years. They were completely and sharply silhouetted against the mountains and the sky.
The Jemez men were painted a dark yellow, and wore white moccasins threaded with silver bells. In their hands they carried gourds with peas in them which they rattled. 'Twixt their bare arms and an armlet they carried slips of green pine. They were crowned with leaves and feathers, they had turquoise necklaces on their smooth round necks. And their long, coal-black hair hung on their backs to the mount of their hips. The barefooted women wore green tablitas, like crowns, on their heads, and colored fajas about their waists. They had bracelets and rings, they held green branches in their hands. Their dance was a tremble, a departure from calm; the men's dance between them a prolonged ecstasy, a descending out of eternal movement into calm.
They surged up the village street, ever forward, ever more of them, more strung-out, more beautiful—accompanying at the side were dramatic groups in everyday attire, chanting, exhorting the unseen Powers, roaring together fantastic choruses of semimusical gibberish. And the drums beat inexorably, as if they were the voice of the gods, the control whom no one at any time had ever disobeyed.
You are changed to stone, yes, to the stone of the Stone Age. Babbitt has gone; there is only this that you see. Ah, no—for somewhere a church bell has been set a-ringing and a harmonium is playing a hymn; yes, there it is, in much rebellion and complaint—"Nearer, my God, to Thee!" Mr. Babbitt nonchalantly strides in among the dancers and distributes cigarettes which the dancers, being nearly naked, cannot put away. He will not be denied. He photographs the scene. He has a knowing look. The Indian Governor is angered, but what can he do? There is nothing the white man understands except force; neither manners, nor reason, nor what is sacred. So the will of the white man will prevail. The beautiful dancing will cease.
"I give it ten years," said the Forestry agent of the Government. "By that time they will all be citizens. It will be a Presbyterian village."
"Just like a village in the Highlands of Scotland," I hazarded.
The agent smiled. For he was a Highlander by extraction. The Scot, though sentimental at home about "the snowflake that softly reposes" on his native hills, about the heather, the kilt, the bagpipe, and the rest, is often the most unsentimental and prosaic fellow when in the presence of another nation's romance.
However, the Presbyterians have it not all their own way in Jemez. The Catholics claim it as their ground, sanctified by the blood of Franciscan martyrs. They are educating the children and making them, therefore, extremely naughty and ill-behaved during the dance. For they are taught to despise paganism. The pranks played by the children on their dancing fathers and mothers I should prefer not to mention in describing the beautiful dance. Yet they were there and were signs of the times.