"Emily Gaskin - The Green Corn Dance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskin Emily)

"I will do what I can for him," I say. "But these are his visions and his path to
follow."


"Like hell. I'll find him a therapist."


"That's not what he needs."


"Neither are you."


I stand at the windows, waiting for Steve to come home from work. Sunlight
falls through the thin gauze curtains, and I wrap myself in them. They are liquid
with light, draping like the cathedral tents of mosquito netting in Big Cypress.


I cannot help but think of Grandmother. She moved with such grace amidst the
generations of tribal women. She had walked all their paths, knew all their secret
worries and how to soothe them. And she knew so many stories! They flowed
sweetly from her lips, calming her audience with their wisdom.


As a child, I made Grandmother tell one of them again and again: the story of
the Red Maiden and the White Man. How years ago, before the reservation,
before we even knew such a word, the tribe had been driven from their hunting
grounds. How they rode until their anger and their weeping made them stop and
give fight. How, calling the Great Spirit for courage, they beat down the white
man and regained their homelands.


She told how the tribe captured a youth from the white army, and they decided
that he would be sacrificed at the next Green Corn Dance, in thanks to the Great
Spirit for all his gifts.


But the chief's foolish daughter cast her eyes on the white warrior and fell
hopelessly in love. She begged that his life be spared. The tribal chiefs roared and
thundered, but seeing her sorrowful desperation, they at last relented, granting
the young maiden's wish.


One day the newly joined lovers were sitting in their secret forest place near the
water and the cypress. The Great Spirit descended upon them and saw the
beautiful red maiden in the arms of the white man. Enraged, the Great Spirit sent
his flaming arrow down upon them. When the smoke cleared away, nothing but
a large hole in the ground marked where the lovers once had been. Then the
God of the white man, who is also our Great Spirit, saw this hole he had made
and grieved. He decided to sow the hole with seeds of growing life as a symbol