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walked out of the Green Corn Dance at nine o'clock in the
morning and got home, got dressed, and went to a Jewish
wedding at noon at the Seville Hotel, And the Seville
pictures are of the most beautiful Jewish weddings in the
world! The bridegroom's mother gets drunk, the men dance,
they.... And I thought, "Boy! I've seen it all!"
K: Who else besides you and Morton Silver have been around to
see this? Do they have many other visitors come?
R: Less and less. Janny and Maggy and Marky..
K: These are your children?
R: ...have been there at one time or another over the years, but
they don't like a bunch of gawking strangers. It's only dear
friends, and I never wrote about it. I thought it would be
very rude and very vulgar, and not get the message across at
all if I wrote about it.
K: How 'bout the Green Corn Dance, now?
R: Oh, the Green Corn Dance was this. The Snake Dance is the
same thing, but no punishment, no scraping--just larking and
just fun. I said, "What in the hell's the Snake Dance about?"
Howard said, "Well, you know the water's high, and the
snakes are high too. They get over the road. It's to keep
the snakes quiet." Snake Dance is just purely for fun, and
it doesn't have any scraping.
K: And it's held at a different time of year?
R: Uh, Snake Dance is held, as I recall, late in August when the
fall winds are coming up. They are the most beautiful parties,
and then these beautiful Indian friends of yours like Alice
Osceola and Mittie Jim bring you hominy grits, fried bacon,
and biscuits. I think they're Bisquicks baked in Seminole
style for breakfast the next morning. It's a beautiful party,
It's a week-long party. It makes you wish you were Indian.
I know why those little Indians aren't running away!
K: I hate to leave the Green Corn Dance, but perhaps we might say
something--we've been talking around it for quite a while--
about the structure of tribal leadership as you know it.
R: They've given me a new view on life in the sense--I believe