Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [120]
“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 questionable 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.
“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