Sugar hurries to join the line, leaving Alice feeling bewildered and slightly annoyed. She surely had no idea she belonged to a clan. Also she’s apparently the only person for miles around, besides Cash, who isn’t making wedding plans.
The chief hands the pipe to the first old man, who closes his lips on the stem, closes his eyes, and breathes in. Then he rotates the pipe one complete turn, parallel with the ground. It’s an odd-looking gesture that takes both hands.
He hands the pipe to the woman behind him in line, the one who was debating Grasses with Letty. The old man walks five or six careful steps toward the east and takes a place at the edge of the clearing. When the woman has gone through the same motions, she joins him. One by one each person takes the pipe; even children do.
Alice spots Annawake in line behind a barrel-chested boy and a slew of kids, and there is Cash, looking like a tall, congenial weed among a cluster of chrysanthemum-shaped women. He seems round-shouldered and easy with himself each time he takes another little step forward. It’s a slow process. Alice keeps her eye on two little twin girls dressed in identical frilled square-dancing skirts, moving patiently forward in the line. When their turn comes, the mother touches the pipe to her own mouth first, then holds it to her children’s lips, helping each one to rotate it afterward. When the last person in line has smoked the pipe and everyone moves to sit down, Sugar motions Alice over to what she says are the Bird Clan benches. “Third ones from the east, counterclockwise,” she points out with her finger. “So you can find them again.”
“Well, it’s a good enough seat, but I don’t see what makes me belong here.”
Sugar stares. “Alice Faye, you’re just as much Bird as I am.
Grandmother Stamper was full-blooded. You get your clan from your mother’s line.”
Alice never met her mother’s mother, a woman of ques-tionable reputation who died dramatically and young somehow in a boat. As the story is told, she didn’t even own the clothes she drowned in; Alice hadn’t especially thought this woman might leave her belonging to a clan. She doesn’t argue, though, because the chief has begun to pray, or talk, again. With his arms crossed he paces back and forth on the bare dirt circle, sometimes looking up at the sky but mostly addressing the fire. His words seem very calm, more like conversation, Alice thinks, than preaching.
Sugar says he is preaching, though. “He’s saying how to be good, more or less. Everyday wrongs, and big wrongs. Don’t be jealous, all that business,” she confides. “Same stuff he always says.”
Alice feels transported, though. His words blend together into an unbroken song, as smooth as water over stones. It is a little like those holy-roller churches she loved, where, when someone fell into a swoon, you felt their meaning; in the roof of your mouth and your fingertips you felt it, without needing to separate out the particular words.
A blue-tick hound walks across the clearing in front of the chief and lies down with a group of dogs near the fire. They all hold their heads up, watching him. Now and again a latecomer truck pulls up through the woods, joining the circle, and respectfully dims its lights. The focused attention in the clearing feels to Alice like something she could touch, a crystal vase, small at the ground and spreading as it goes up into the branches of the oaks.
All at once the chief raises his voice high, and something like a groan of assent rises up through the crowd and the glass is shattered. There is only quiet. Then babies start up with fretful cackles, and old men stand up to shake the hands of old women they didn’t see earlier, and the dogs all rise and walk off toward the kitchens.
“Now we get to dance,” Sugar says, excitedly. A dozen teenaged girls come out, checking each other seriously and adjusting side to side as they line up in a close circle around the fire. They’re all wearing knee-length gingham skirts and the rattling leggings made of terrapin shells filled with stones. Alice is taken aback by how much bigger these are than the training shackles Sugar showed her; they bulge out like beehives from the girls’ legs, below their dresses.
They all begin to move with quick little double sliding steps, giving rise to a resounding hiss. Several old men fall into line behind them, nodding and singing a quick, perfect imitation of a whippoorwill. Alice feels chills dance on her backbone.
The old men begin a song then, and the young women step, step, step, counterclockwise around the fire. As other people come into the circle, they take up hands behind the singers and shackle-bearers, making a long snake that coils languidly around the fire. All at once, when the chief holds up his hand, everyone’s feet stop still in the dust and the dancers whoop. It’s the sound of elation.