“Oh, that looks fun,” Alice cries to Sugar. “Can’t you do it?”
“Oh, I will, directly. You should too. You don’t have to wait to be asked, just go on up any time you feel like it.”
Another dance begins right away. The song sounds a little different, but the dance is still the same gentle stomping in a circle. Only the girls with the turtle-shell legs do the fancy step, concentrating hard, with no wasted motion in their upper bodies; everyone else just shuffles, old and young, pumping their arms a little, like slowed-down joggers. There are several rings of people around the fire now, and the crowd is growing. Alice is fascinated by the girls who remain in the inner circle by the fire, in the honored place, working so hard. This forest feels a hundred miles away from the magazine models with their twiggy long legs.
These girls in their bulbous shackles have achieved a strange grace, Alice thinks—a kind of bowlegged femininity.
The dancing goes on and on. An old man produces a drum, and the music then is made up of a small skin drum and deep, mostly male voices and the hiss of the turtle shells above it all like a thrilling high wind. When Alice asked Cash, earlier, about the dance and the music, he said it would be music that sounds like the woods, and Alice decides this is right. No artificial flavorings. It’s the first time she has witnessed an Indian spectacle, she realizes, that had nothing to do with tourism. This is simply people having a good time in each other’s company, because they want to.
“What are the songs about?” she asks Sugar. To Alice they sound like “oh-oh-wey-yah,” and sometimes the chief sings out in a sort of yodel. His voice breaks and rises very beautifully, and the crowd answers the same words back.
“I couldn’t really tell you,” Sugar answers, at last. “It’s harder to understand than regular talking. Maybe it don’t mean anything.”
“Well, it would have to mean something, wouldn’t it?”
Sugar seems untroubled by the idea that it might not. “Let’s go,” she says suddenly, grabbing Alice by the hand. “Just go in after the shackles,” she instructs. “Don’t get in front of the girls.” Alice wouldn’t dare.
She follows Sugar in, trembling with nerves, and then there she is, stomp dancing like anybody. At first she is aware of nothing beyond her own body, her self, and she watches other people, imitating the way they hold their arms. But she’s also aware that she’s doing a strange and unbelievable thing. It makes her feel entirely alive, in the roof of her mouth and her fingertips. She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you’ll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.
Once in a while, Alice remembers Cash and feels a thrill in her stomach. She looks around for him, but can only see the people in front of her and those beside her in the snake’s other coils. The song turns out to be a short one, and Alice is disappointed to see that when it ends everyone leaves the clearing and settles back down on the benches of their respective clans. Even after such a short time, her calves feel pinched. It’s like an all-night workout on the Stairmaster she has seen advertised on Harland’s shopping channel. A Stairmaster with a spiritual element.
While the dancers take a break, a young man stretches a hose from a spigot in one of the kitchen shelters, looping it through the trees, and attaches onto its end the kind of spray nozzle people use for gardening. He carefully hoses down the dirt floor of the dance area, beginning with the eastern part where the chief stood and paced, and working his way slowly around the clearing. He never sprays any water into the fire.
The fire seems to Alice like a quiet consciousness presiding.
It’s not like an old dog, after all, because it commands more prolonged attention. It’s more like an old grandmother who never gets out of her chair.
Sugar is busy gnawing on a chicken wing and introducing Alice to everyone in sight. Alice is too tired to remember names, but she notices Sugar is very proud about pointing out Alice’s connection to the Bird Clan.
“I know we had the same grandmother,” Alice tells her finally, when all the Tailbobs and Earbobs have drifted away.
“But you’re forgetting I’m not Indian.”
“You’re as Indian as I am. Daddy was white, and Mama too except for what come down through the Stamper side.”
“Bloodwise, I guess,” Alice says, “but you married Roscoe and you’ve lived here near about your whole life. Don’t you have to sign up somewhere to be Cherokee?”