The young men and girls do, to be sure, have non-ceremonial dances together, and in preparing for them there are opportunities for personal acquaintance. I saw one of these dances not long ago. It was a Comanche dance. There were a choir of about a dozen youths including the drummer, four girl dancers heavily be-ringed and be-necklaced, the pattern of whose dance, two by two or in line, was very regular, and a youth who executed in front of them or around them an animated and very beautiful pas seul. After dancing outside in the plaza, they all went into the “saint’s house” to dance for her “because they like her”—a survival no doubt of the custom of dancing in the Catholic church observed by the Indians in Mexico and not long since quite generally in New Mexico.
But it is on the twilight trip to the well, the conventional Zuñi hour of courtship, that Waiyautitsa will be approached by suitors. Muffled in his black blanket the youth may step out from the corner where he has been lurking and put his hand on the girl’s arm. If she will have none of him, she may avert her head and hasten on to overtake the woman in front, but if she fancies the fellow, she will pause, if but for a moment or two, to talk. It is a brief encounter and, with somebody in front and perhaps another girl coming up behind, it is far from private; still after Waiyautitsa has had a few such meetings, “two or four,” she is likely to invite the young man to join her household. At first, for a few days, he will stay in the common room, in the room where all sleep (sleeping and dressing, let me say, with the utmost modesty), he will stay only at night, leaving before dawn, “staying still” his shyness is called. Then he will begin to eat his meals with the household. There is, you see, no wedding ceremonial and a man slips as easily as he can into the life of his wife’s household.
Waiyautitsa will pay a formal visit on her bridegroom’s people, taking his mother a basket of corn meal. To Waiyautitsa herself her young man will have given a present of cloth for a dress, or a buckskin for the moccasins he will make for her. Hides are a product of the chase, of cattle raising (cowhide is used to sole moccasins), or of trade, men’s occupations, and so moccasins of both women and men are made by men. Women make their own dresses, although, formerly, before weaving went out of fashion at Zuñi, it is likely that men were the weavers, just as they are to-day among the Hopi from whom the men of Zuñi get cloth for their ceremonial kilts and blankets, and for the dresses of the women. Even to-day at Zuñi men may make up their own garments from store-bought goods and it is not unusual to see a man sitting to a sewing machine.
A man may use cloth or thread for other than economic reasons. In case a girl jilts him he will catch her out some night and take a bit from her belt to fasten to a tree on a windy mesa top. As the wind wears away the thread, the woman will sicken and perhaps in two or three years die. A woman who is deserted may take soil from the man’s footprints and put it where she sleeps. At night he will think of her and come back—“even if the other woman is better looking.” Apprehensive of desertion a woman may put a lock of hair from the man in her house wall or, the better to attach him to her, she may wear it over her heart. Women and men alike may buy love charms from the ne’wekwe, a curing society, potent in magic, black or white. There is a song, too, which men and women may sing “in their heart” to charm the opposite sex. And there is a song which a girl may sing to the corn as she rubs the yellow meal on her face before going out. “Help me,” is the substance of it, “I am going to the plaza. Make me look pretty.” Rarely do our girls pray, I suppose, when they powder their noses.
Courtship past for the time being, courtship by magic or otherwise, Waiyautitsa is now, let us say, an expectant mother. Her household duties continue to be about the same, but certain precautions, if she inclines to be very circumspect, she does take. She will not test the heat of her oven by sprinkling it in the usual way with bran, for if she does, her child, she has heard, may be born with a skin eruption. Nor will she look at a corpse or help dress a dead animal lest her child be born dead or disfigured. She has heard that, even as a little girl if she ate the whitish leaf of the corn husk, her child would be an albino. If her husband eats this during the pregnancy, the result would be the same. On her husband fall a number of other pregnancy tabus, perhaps as many as fall on her, if not more. If he hunts and maims an animal, the child will be similarly maimed—deformed or perhaps blind. If he joins in a masked dance, the child may have some mask-suggested misshape or some eruption like the paint on the mask. If he sings a great deal, the child will be a cry-baby. The habit of thinking in terms of sympathetic magic or of reasoning by analogy which is even more conspicuous at Zuñi than, let us say, at New York, is particularly evident in pregnancy or birth practises or tabus.
Perhaps Waiyautitsa has wished to determine the sex of the child. In that case she may have made a pilgrimage with a rain priest to Corn Mesa to plant a prayer stick which has to be cut and painted in one way for a boy, in another way for a girl. (Throughout the Southwest blue or turquoise is associated with maleness, and yellow with femaleness.) Wanting a girl—and girls are wanted in Zuñi quite as much as boys, if not more—Waiyautitsa need not make the trip to the mesa, instead her husband may bring her to wear in her belt scrapings from a stone in a phallic shrine near the mesa. When labor sets in and the pains are slight, indicating, women think, a girl, Waiyautitsa may be told by her mother, “Don’t sleep, or you will have a boy.” A nap during labor effects a change of sex. When the child is about to be born, Waiyautitsa is careful, too, if she wants a girl, to see that the custom of sending the men out of the house at this time is strictly observed.
After the birth, Waiyautitsa will lie in for several days, four, eight, ten or twelve, according to the custom of her family. Whatever the custom, if she does not observe it, she runs the risk of “drying up” and dying. She lies on a bed of sand heated by hot stones, and upon her abdomen is placed a hot stone. Thus is she “cooked,” people say, and creatures whose mothers are not thus treated are called uncooked, raw—they are the animals, the gods, Whites. To be “cooked” seems to be tantamount in Zuñi to being human.
It is the duty of Waiyautitsa’s mother-in-law, the child’s paternal grandmother, to look after mother and child during the confinement, and at its close to carry the child outdoors at dawn and present him or her to the Sun. Had Waiyautitsa lost children, she might have invited a propitious friend, some woman who had had many children and lost none, to attend the birth and be the first to pick up the child and blow into his mouth. In these circumstances the woman’s husband would become the initiator of the child, if a boy, when the child was to be taken into the Kachina society. Generally the child’s father chooses some man from the house of his own kuku or paternal aunt to be the initiator or godfather, so to speak, of the child. Ceremonial rites usually fall to the paternal relatives.
But the infant will receive attentions of a ritual or magical nature, likewise from his mother and her household. He is placed on a cradle board in which, near the position of his heart, a bit of turquoise is inlaid to preclude the cradle bringing any harm to its tenant. Left alone, a baby runs great risk—some family ghost may come and hold him, causing him to die within four days. And so a quasi-fetichistic ear of corn, a double ear thought of as mother and child, is left alongside the baby as a protector. That the baby may teethe promptly, his gums may be rubbed by one who has been bitten by a snake—“snakes want to bite.” To make the child’s hair grow long and thick, his grandfather or uncle may puff the smoke of native tobacco on his head. That the child may not be afraid in the dark, water-soaked embers are rubbed over his heart the first time he is taken out at night—judging from what I have seen of Zuñi children and adults a quite ineffectual method. That the child may keep well and walk early, hairs from a deer are burned, and the child held over the smoke—deer are never sick, and rapid is their gait. Their hearing, too, is acute, so discharge from a deer’s ear will be put into the baby’s ear. That the child may talk well and with tongues, the tongue of a snared mocking bird may be cut out and held to the baby to lick. The bird will then be released in order that, as it regains its tongue and “talks,” the child will talk. A youth who speaks in addition to his native tongue Keresan, English and Spanish, has been pointed out to me as one who had licked mocking bird tongue.
Waiyautitsa will give birth to three or four children, probably not more, and then, as she approaches middle age, we may suppose that she falls sick, and after being doctored unsuccessfully first by her old father who happens to be a well known medicine man of the Great Fire-brand society, and then by a medicine man from the ne’wekwe society whose practice is just the opposite, Waiyautitsa dies. Within a few hours elderly kinswomen of her father’s will come in and wash her hair and body, and at dawn sprinkle her face, first with water and then with meal. The deceased will be well dressed, and in a blanket donated by her father’s people she will be carried to the cemetery lying in front of the old church, a ruin from the days of the Catholic establishment in Zuñi. There to the north of the central wooden cross, i. e., on the north side of the cemetery, Waiyautitsa will be buried. Women are buried on the north side and men on the south.