Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [175]
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING he closeted himself with Natalie Curtis in a schoolhouse. If he expected a lecture on Hopi mythology, he was disappointed. She was more intent on criticizing the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ latest folly, the substitution of European-style houses, with rain-shedding, hot tin roofs, for the flat, cool, adobe-walled architecture that spread so naturally around him. She talked about the inability of most white men to understand either the beauty or the fitness of Indian aesthetics. She complained about Congress’s failure ever to have made “a systematic study” of the whole Indian problem, ethnological, environmental, and educational. Until some great foundation like the Carnegie or the Rockefeller should finance such a study, she said, efforts to improve the lot of the tribes would be like the rain-shedding roofs—“misfits in spirit as in fact.”
Roosevelt listened and memorized with a receptivity not far short of Natalie’s own as a song transcriber. But he was too old, and too much of a white man himself, to admire pagan values as much as she. He went no further in his commitment to her cause than to agree that there should be “an interchange of ideas between the two races.”
At dawn the following day, she went to the Colonel’s quarters with a bottle of hot coffee. She had promised to take him to the crest of the ridge, so that he could see the Hopi runners coming across the plain as heralds of the great Snake Dance. But his bedroom was empty. He had already heard the call of the crier and climbed the highest butte above town in pitch darkness. By the time she found him, the “yellow line” of Pueblo cosmology was widening in the east, silhouetting Roosevelt’s bulk against the sky. When the runners appeared below, they seemed aware of his importance, and leaped up the side of the escarpment as if they had not already run five miles. Painted children accompanied the winner’s final, easy-breathing rush.
Roosevelt applauded, privately wishing that he could enter such a splendid athlete in the next Olympic marathon.
All thoughts of common humanity faded, however, when he returned to the kiva for the Washing of the Snakes. Nicholas, Archie, and Quentin were permitted to climb down the ladder with him. The ensuing drama moved beyond strangeness into the realm of dream.
About twenty Hopi took part in it, naked except for breechclouts. The number of snakes on the floor around them had increased to about a hundred, with many of the more venomous breeds now at large. Again feather wands stroked errant ones away, as the oldest priest puffed smoke and sprinkled cornmeal over a huge tureen filled with water. In deep silence, he mumbled a prayer, and the other Indians punctuated it with what sounded to Roosevelt like “a kind of selah or amen.” The chant grew louder and the copper bodies began to sway, but there was little hint of any rising passion. Acolytes reached casually into the tangle of snakes and passed them, coiling and waving, to the priests around the bowl.
When each priest had a couple of fistfuls, the chant rose to a scream, the snakes were dunked in the water, and then hurled halfway across the room so violently that several thunder-sticks were knocked flat. Roosevelt boggled at their willingness to be abused. The phrase he had used in endorsing Natalie Curtis’s book came to him. He was being granted a glimpse into “an elder world.”
At five o’clock the climactic Snake Dance began in the village. Antelope priests and snake priests, their faces daubed, chanted and stomped in a rhythm intended to reverberate to the center of the earth. Plumed headdresses tossed and leather kirtles flapped as they circled the rock Archie had climbed. At its foot, little girls dusted the newly washed snakes with corn meal. Then the dancers broke into couples, one of each scooping up a snake and putting it in his mouth. A particularly daring priest clamped his jaws around two narrow sidewinders. The flat triangular heads were left to float free and strike at will. Roosevelt saw no bites to the face,