A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(3)
All at once she realized who had come, and it made her knees feel weak. This was a visit from the eight clan mothers. They were important dignitaries in the Seneca culture. In the old times they had been simply the oldest, wisest, and most trusted women of each clan. When the Senecas in New York State had been divided into several reservations, Jane’s band, the Tonawanda band, had overwhelmingly retained the old religion and codified the old form of government, including the clan mothers.
But the clan mothers were stronger and older than law. Since the day in prehistory when the Senecas had first appeared on the great hill at the foot of Canandaigua Lake, the women of each clan—Snipe, Hawk, Heron, Deer, Wolf, Beaver, Bear, and Turtle—owned a longhouse, and all of them together owned the village and the land where they raised the three sisters—corn, beans, and squash—and brought up the children. Because the women knew each child best, the clan mothers had always chosen the chiefs, and could remove them if they were disappointed.
And now, here they were, the eight clan mothers, not much different from the eight who had signed the letter to President John Tyler in 1841 to inform him that every Seneca chief had refused to sign the despicable and fraudulent 1838 Treaty of Buffalo Creek, and so the Senecas refused to be forced off the Tonawanda Reservation. The eight were also not so different from the women a thousand years before that, who had decided whether a captive should be adopted to take the place of a dead Seneca, or be killed to avenge him.
Even though she’d been running for miles, Jane felt her heart actually speeding up as she walked to the driver’s side of the nearest car. She smiled. “Hello, Dorothy. Hi, Sarah. Hi, Mae. Hi, Emma. What are you all doing here in Amherst?”
Dorothy Stone said, “We came to see you, Jane. I hope you don’t mind. We called ahead early this morning, but you were out already. We took a chance. Are you free, or should we come back tomorrow?”
“Come on in,” said Jane. “Don’t sit out here in a car.”
The car doors all opened, and Jane hurried to the next car and said, “Hi, Natalie. Hi Daisy. Hi Susan. Hi Alma. Come on in. I’m so sorry I didn’t know you were coming.”
She trotted ahead to the front door, her mind already scrambling from place to place in her mental image of the house, picking things up, straightening others, or in desperation, hiding them. Another part of her mind was in the kitchen opening the refrigerator and searching for appropriate food and drink. It was a tradition that Seneca wives keep food ready for unexpected visitors. In the old times people from any of the Haudenosaunee nations might arrive unexpectedly after a journey along the great trail that ran from the Hudson River to the Niagara. If she had lived then she might have served soup made with corn, beans, squash, and a little deer or bear in it for flavor. Jane swung the front door open and rushed into the kitchen.
Jane pulled some berries from the freezer. She defrosted strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries in the microwave and found some angel’s food cake to pour them over. She started a pot of coffee, made lemonade and put the pitcher and glasses on a tray, then piled everything on the biggest tray she had and carried it out so she could serve it as soon as the ladies had settled into seats near the big stone fireplace in the living room.
As Jane poured lemonade and brought in a tray of cookies, she surreptitiously looked around the living room. These eight formidable women looked like any gaggle of matronly ladies in spring dresses with flowered patterns, middle-aged and older, who might have come out for a game of bridge or a club meeting. But the clan mothers held great power. They were a governmental council that had been functioning the same way in the same region for many centuries longer than the British Parliament. In the old times they’d called for war by reminding the chiefs that there was a Seneca who had been killed but not yet avenged. When they didn’t want war they would say that the women weren’t inclined to make the moccasins for warriors to wear as they made their way to the distant countries of enemies.
As Jane occupied herself serving the cake and berries she felt the muscles in her shoulders relax a little. The women were all very cordial to Jane. “You have such a beautiful house.” “I love the flowers you’ve got in that bed along the side. My grandmother had tulips like that when I was a little girl.”
Jane accepted their compliments, and felt an almost childish sense of validation, but she could not ignore the unusual nature of this visit. This wasn’t just Jane’s own clan mother stopping by for a chat. This wasn’t even a delegation made up of her moitie—Wolf, Bear, Beaver, and Turtle. It was the mothers of all eight clans assembled here together—something that couldn’t be meaningless, any more than the arrival of all nine Supreme Court justices could.
She held Ellen Dickerson in the corner of her eye. She was a tall, straight woman about fifty-five or sixty years old, with deep brown skin and long, gray hair gathered into a loose ponytail that hung down her back. She sat on the edge of her chair with her back perfectly straight, and yet managed to look comfortable. Jane knew that it would be Ellen Dickerson who spoke first because she was clan mother of the Wolf clan, Jane’s own clan.
Jane’s father, Henry, had been a Snipe. Her mother had been a young woman he brought home from New York City who had milk-white skin and eyes so blue they looked like pieces of the sky. In order to marry Henry Whitefield she should have been a Seneca and come from a clan of the opposite moitie from the Snipes. The women of the Wolf clan had insisted on adopting her, just as they had taken in captive women, runaways, or refugees hundreds of years earlier. In Seneca life, children were members of their mother’s clan, so a couple of years later when Jane was born, she was a Wolf.