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, [[352]]having, as related of an Ethiopian matron, “entirely lost her taste for that man,” she abruptly divorces him.
Photo. by A. H. Womack
HOPI WEDDING COSTUME
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 [[353]]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 [[354]]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.