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and then in the newspapers it is mentioned something about
the Snake Dance.
R: There are two beautiful parties. The Snake Dance is later
in the summer--it's late in August, It doesn't have all the
religious connations that the Green Corn Dance has, It's
just a beautiful party, It's just beautiful, beautiful, beau-
tiful! But it's somewhat like the Green Corn Dance, which
occurs around the first of June, Everybody gathers on this
hammock--this island with old dead pine trees that I can still
see--for a week, and they came not from miles around, but
from hundred of miles around. All Indians, Indians, Indians....
K: Even the Indians on the reservations?
R: What do you mean, even? Even the Musko...they had to practi-
cally kidnap the Muskogees from Brighton, which is north of
Lake Okeechobee! Well, yeah, and the last night of the Green
Corn Dance....
K: How long does it last?
R: It lasts a week. And there were chickees set up, and people,
families, groups--whole big families, I mean like seven sis-
ters and all their brothers can camp about, and whatnot, The
last night of the Green Corn Dance nobody is allowed to go
to sleep once they begin dancing, and nobody is allowed to
eat. But in at every stop in the chanting...it's a snake-
like dance, handholding like you did in college in the 1920s,
and going around snake-dancing around a fire, and chanting
out things that sound like, ahsee-dow-ho-asee, and these
things.
They would line 'em out, you know. The three old, old
men sitting' there, they would sorta line out the dance, and
everybody would go around. I said to Howard, "Who's the neat
little guy on the end?"
He said, "He's my sister's son. We call him Weepers."
I said, "How old is he?"
"Three."
And this was about midnight. And I said, "What do ya
mean, Weepers?"
And he said, "Don't you know 'finders keepers, loser
weepers?' We call him Weepers. That's his nickname."
But men, women, children chanting around. And in between
every dance the sheriffs, who carry a long pole--a slender
cypress pole'about ten feet long with a thing on the end that