While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Boys were
sent every morning to bathe in the river, even through the ice."
The boys would shoot birds and a little boy liked to show his birds to his
grandmother.
The older woman in the family would talk to both the girls and the boys
about how to take care of themselves. White Moon remembers that his grandmother
told him he was not to interfere in other people's affairs. "That feeling grows
in... I don't want to fool with anybody's business and I don't want them to fool with mine." A boy used to be told that
he was not to marry until he could kill a deer75 and skin it; "now it
is different," said Grandmother Chu’'uu to White Moon, "but still you
should not marry until you can help support a wife." And she also talked to him
about not showing jealousy in public.76 I infer she had opinions
about not "going to extremes" see pp. 52-53). If he got into a fight, said his
grandmother, and was shot in the back she would feel very bad about it, but if
in the front, she would feel bad but yet proud--a Plainslike flourish. "We sure
do think a great deal about being brave,"
added White Moon.
Formerly systematic instruction
about behavior on war parties was given to
the boys by their senior relatives,
sometimes by their father, generally by
their grandfather, in the evening. The
youths had to collect wood and keep up a big
fire while "getting their
lectures."-According to Ingkanish, boys were
supposed to listen even more to their uncle
(mother's brother)77 than to
their father. A boy, whatever his age, was
not to answer back to his uncle or father,
especially if the senior was a warrior or a
doctor. If the boy spat, the elder knew he
was not listening and would stop talking.
Nowadays, "you can't talk to the boys," they
do not listen to you.
On the return of a war party with a
scalp (ba'at), the scalp was left
outside the camp until the scalp dance, but
scalps were kept permanently in a "grass
house78 which was closed up and
dark. If a little boy, a youngster of three
or four, showed himself quarrelsome and mean
to the other children, he would be taken
into the "grass house," to test his courage.
In the "grass house" he would hear voices (Ingkanish).79
After a man had fought80
against the enemy together with another man
the two might become friends, tesha, which
was the same as brother. Thereafter, if your
tesha was in danger, you stood by him
to the death, "never leave him.81
If your tesha asked you for anything
you had, you would have to give it to him,
otherwise the relationship would break on
the spot. This tesha relationship was
held also between women. They would help
each other in sickness or other emergency.
74 Like Shawnee, the Delaware sent their children, boys and girls,
from eight years upwards, into the brush to get a supernatural partner. Of his
daily river bath, Pardon, Caddo, D )` law he early "I never got any partner from
it, only rheumatism."
The early morning bath in running water was universal in the Southeast (Swanton
2: 699).
75 Ten deer (Pardon).
76 See p. 30
77 See p. 63.
78 The aboriginal Caddo house was thatched with grass (Swanton 2: 688); the
ceremonial house was entirely covered with grass (Joutel, 345).
79 For these spirit voices, cp. Hatcher, XXX, 291-292.
80 "The Caddo never used shields."
81 Cp. Grinnell, 46-47, 49.
