Natchez Powwow Zone
Chapter I: The Blue Corn and the Magnolia Memory
The afternoon hung heavy and golden, the air thick with the fragrant, caramelized scent of roasting maize and the deep, loamy perfume of ancient earth. They crossed the invisible threshold into the Powwow zone, a vibrant tapestry of sound and color sprawling beneath the immense, bruised-violet sky of the deep South.
Gloria held a steaming ear of blue corn, its kernels glistening like polished lapis lazuli beneath a heavy, melting coat of sweet butter. She took a delicate, deliberate bite, closing her eyes as the butter ran in a golden rivulet toward her wrist.
“Now this,” she drawled, her voice a molasses-slow melody that could charm the fangs off a rattlesnake, “is absolute sin on a stick. It melts right on the tongue, John. Just like those big, doughy pretzels we used to get at the Magnolia State Fair back in June. Remember? Back when we had exactly three dollars to our names and we had to lick the butter off each other’s fingers because one was all we could afford?”
John smiled, his eyes crinkling as he watched her unapologetic delight. “I remember the pretzels. I remember the heat. And I remember you complaining about the humidity ruining your hair.”
“My hair is impervious to humidity, sweetheart, it’s my disposition that wilts,” she shot back, her eyes dancing with a wicked, playful light. She licked a stray drop of butter from her thumb. “But if you look at me the way you’re looking at this corn, we’re gonna get arrested right here on sacred ground.”
Chapter II: The Mound of the Great Sun
He shadowed her fluid, confident movements as she navigated the festival grounds, her hips swaying to the distant, primal cadence of the drums. They wandered beyond the imposing, emerald-draped silhouette of the Great Sun’s mound, finding themselves before a smaller, elongated earthwork. It was abandoned, swallowed by a riot of tangled weeds and crumbling softly under the weight of centuries of neglect—a spectral monument returning to the soil.
Gloria stopped, turning to face him. She placed her hands on her hips, her posture a picture of sassy defiance.
“You know, darlin’,” she purred, stepping into his personal space until he could smell the jasmine oil at her throat, “you’ve told me on more than one occasion that you love me like a wife. And I suppose that’s meant to be enough for a girl, is it? All the devotion, none of the paperwork. A mighty convenient arrangement for a free-roaming man.”
John reached out, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. “It is the deepest truth I know, Gloria.”
She gave a soft, pragmatic laugh, leaning into his touch. “A wife gets a ring and a mortgage, honey. I get the fun parts and the mosquito bites. But Lord help me, I’ll take it. For now.”
She grew fidgety, the restless energy that always bubbled just beneath her surface taking hold. She grabbed his hand, dragging him with determined enthusiasm toward a replica of a Natchez Indian dwelling, its woven thatch golden in the descending sun.
“Sometimes,” John murmured, his voice adopting that quiet, melancholic reverence she loved but loved to tease him for, “in the dead of winter, a family of deer will wander into this plaza. They stand perfectly still in the frost. But at my approach, they scatter into the bare woods, their white tails quivering like ghosts in the mist.”
Chapter III: Hemlock Dreams
Gloria leaned against the woven wall of the dwelling, studying him with affectionate exasperation. “You always did have a penchant for the dramatic, John. Listen here, sugar. I had the most peculiar dream last night. I was a fuzzy little caterpillar, thick with ambition, just climbing up this massive, green plant. I was starving, so I began to chew on a leaf.”
She paused, pressing a hand to her stomach with theatrical flair. “Suddenly, I got a bellyache that would rival a Sunday hangover. I realized, with absolute horror, that my lovely green lunch was poison hemlock. But, being the resilient creature I am, my tummy settled down right quick. I went about my business, spinning this gorgeous, silken cocoon around myself, dreaming of the spectacular butterfly I was destined to become.”
Her voice dropped, laced with mock tragedy. “Well, once my beautiful chrysalis was complete, I emerged. But my wings! They were stunted, withered little things, and alas, I could not fly. The hemlock had robbed me of my sky. When I woke up in a cold sweat, I knew exactly what the universe was telling me.”
“And what was that?” John asked, thoroughly captivated.
“That I had been ingesting half-baked dreams, sweetheart,” she said, tapping his chest with a manicured fingernail. “Dreams that gave me heartburn so fierce I couldn’t stomach reality.”
“Them old dreams are only in your head, Gloria,” he said softly.
“Maybe,” she conceded, stepping closer and resting her head against his shoulder. “But I never feel closer to you than when we’re two hundred miles from home, untethered from the world. Let’s just quit the city, John. Let’s live in a tent down by the creek, right where those green, jointed horsetails grow—the ones you told me were ancient, primordial things from before the dinosaurs even thought about walking the earth. We’ll spend our days hunting arrowheads and fossilized shells in the sandstone.”
“As a child,” John mused, his gaze drifting toward the tree line, “I can recall one overcast, freezing winter day. The sky was the color of bruised iron. I hiked up that creek wearing thick rubber wader boots, my hands numb, completely lost in the hunt for those very fossils.”
Chapter IV: Echos of the Loess Bluffs
“Then we’ll do it again, but warmer,” she declared, her eyes bright with sudden, fierce domesticity. “We’ll live just as they did here three centuries ago. We’ll wash our bodies where they bathed in the crisp, Pre-Columbian mornings, right below those towering bluffs. You know the ones—the loess soil formed under grinding ice-age glaciers, blown all the way from the western plains just to settle here. Now they loom over the water, tan and mighty, but in the late afternoon sun, they catch a reddish hue. They look like a great western canyon where solitude is plentiful and the world is quiet. I’ll dig up red clay to shape my own pots, and I’ll grind painted stones from the creek bed to make our dyes.”
John’s expression darkened, the historian in him unable to let the romanticism go unchallenged. “It’s a beautiful vision, Gloria. But try to visualize the carnage, too. The wailing of women and infants, the plaza strewn with bodies. That is what must have occurred right where we stand after the French genocide of the Natchez Indians in 1730. That bloody event marked the absolute ending of the Natchez Nation. And the wives of the Great Sun? They didn’t get to make pots in the canyon. They were sacrificed, strangled, and buried alongside him when he died.”
Gloria sighed, a long, drawn-out sound of pure Southern exasperation. “Lord above, John! A girl tries to paint a little romance, a little Tarzan-and-Jane domesticity in the dirt, and you gotta bring up the French and their bloody massacres. Please don’t burst my bubble, sweetheart. You possess a mind like a steel trap, and half the time you’re caught in it yourself. These people were lovers of nature, and I have to believe in the beauty of their lives. Just like I absolutely must believe that you’ll marry me one day, instead of just sacrificing me to your brooding.”
Chapter V: The Sacred Hoop
Wisely recognizing retreat, John changed the subject. “Let’s climb the Great Sun’s mound. We can get a view of the whole arena from up there.”
They scaled the steep, grassy incline. At the summit, the world opened up. Large, bruised cumulus clouds drifted lazily overhead, casting slow-moving patterns of shadow and brilliant, golden light across the festival below. From their high vantage point, the chaotic noises of the powwow—the bells, the chatter, the laughter—softened into a distant, unified hum.
“Look down there,” John pointed. “You can see the perfect circle of the vendors’ tents, all those brilliant colors surrounding the central dancer’s arena. People milling about like water flowing through stones. The dancers in their regalia, stomping and turning, kicking up the dust, circling the singers. And the singers, beating the hide drums, pulling chants from the very center of the
earth.”
The powwow appeared not as a temporary festival, but as an eternal, harmonious village celebrating the sheer defiance of living. John leaned against the wind, his voice weaving a tapestry of time.
“I imagine how many peoples throughout the history of the world have gathered for festivals exactly like this, since time immemorial,” he whispered. “I close my eyes and I can see the circle of felt yurts of yak herders on the vast, freezing steppes of Asia. I can see the tents of the Peruvian Indians scattered like wildflowers in a lush, green valley hidden high in the snow-capped Andes. I can see the Aborigines, painted in white clay, dancing around a roaring fire in the cool, star-choked outback night.”
“You’re a poet when you aren’t being a coroner,” Gloria teased gently, wrapping her arms around his waist from behind. “You’ve told me over the years that the powwow is part of the circle of life. The sacred hoop, as the Native Americans put it. You know, the Great Plains Indian, Black Elk, stood at the very top of Harney Peak in the Black Hills so many decades ago. He raised his weathered hands to the sky and cried, ‘Oh, let my people live.’ His vision, and the vision of the Ghost Dancers—that resurgence of their culture—it’s coming true, to some extent. It’s beautiful, John. Their religion isn’t outlawed anymore; it’s beating right down there. They’re sharing their worldview with us, and we’re embracing it.”
“Listen,” John interjected, pointing toward the arena. “They’re saying the closing prayer. Asking for a good year ahead for all the spectators. The master of ceremonies has just called for the flag ceremony.”
A low, resonant chant rose from the drum circle. “Hey, yah, hey yah…”
Down in the dust, the participants formed a solemn line. With slow, measured, reverent steps, they proceeded toward the flag. A profound, ringing silence fell over the massive crowd as the fabric was lowered from the pole. The people saluted. The flag was folded with exacting care into a crisp triangle, tucked beneath the leader’s arm, and carried off the arena, the dancers following behind in a long, graceful, curved line.
Chapter VI: Talismans and Constellations
As the crowd began to disperse for the evening break, Gloria held up her left hand. The silver band on her finger caught the fading light, framing a large, flawless turquoise stone.
“This ring you bought me ten years ago,” she murmured, her sassy tone softening into something fiercely tender, “is better than any new trinket you could have bought me on this trip. It commemorates a whole decade of us, John. Ten years of loving a man who thinks too much. Not every relationship survives a decade of my fire and your ice, but ours did. That, my handsome historian, is something worth celebrating.”
John took her hand, pressing a kiss to the knuckles just above the stone. “Here’s to our turquoise jubilee in seven more years.”
Gloria let out a rich, throaty laugh. “Well, listen to you! Planning seven years down the line. You’re so wonderfully optimistic when you aren’t obsessing over the 18th century. That’s what I love about you. Besides, turquoise is my birthstone. I’m a Sagittarius, honey. We need room to gallop.”
“And as you well know,” John replied, falling easily into their familiar rhythm, “I am an Aquarius. Which means my planetary stone is also turquoise, since Uranus rules my sign. Being near you, seeing you wear that stone, it has brought me nothing but profound good fortune. But answer me this: if I had been a Virgo, would you have still stayed with me?”
Gloria feigned a look of absolute, aristocratic horror. “A Virgo? Lord, let me see. Virgos are highly, notoriously incompatible with Sagittarians. The very thought of being shackled to a man governed entirely by the cool, calculating sign of a logician? Honey, I’d rather kiss a catfish. I apprehend far more in a single, intuitive heartbeat than cool reason ever comprehends in a lifetime. It’s daunting just to think about.”
She winked, her smile turning wicked again. “But… any astrologer worth their salt will tell you that the stars aren’t always right. They just suggest; they don’t demand. So, yes. I would have kept you. In fact, John, let me buy you a ring. A man’s ring, set with your true talismanic stone: Jasper. I’ll have it engraved with my initials on the inside. To protect you from evil, from bad logic, and from yourself, even if I pass on before you do.”
John swallowed hard, the weight of her words settling deep in his chest. “If you do that, Gloria… that will be my perfect wedding ring. But I’ll put it on my bank card.”
She smacked his arm lightly. “Don’t be dense, darling. That is absolutely not how it is done with nuptial rings. A woman buys the man his band. And don’t you even think about trying to pick it out. I have the taste in this relationship.”
Chapter VII: The Mystic Night
The sun dipped violently below the horizon, bleeding out in streaks of magenta and bruised orange before surrendering to the velvet dark.
“Let’s stay for the night dances,” John said, his voice suddenly thick with an emotion he couldn’t quite name.
“The mystic night holds many mysteries,” she agreed, stepping closer to him as the evening chill rolled in off the creek.
The fires were lit in the arena below. Sparks cascaded into the ink-black sky like a reverse snowfall of embers. The drums began again, no longer a steady heartbeat but a frantic, surging rhythm that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly in the marrow of the bones. The night dancers emerged, their regalia catching the firelight in flashes of silver, bone, and neon beadwork.
The energy was wild, intoxicating. Gloria’s eyes reflected the leaping flames, her chest rising and falling with the rhythm. John looked at her, truly looked at her—this woman who demanded nothing but everything, who laughed at ghosts and challenged the stars. He felt the sudden, terrifying realization that ten years was a preamble, and he was tired of waiting for the future to happen to him.
The climax of the music crashed through the air, a wall of triumphant sound. John didn’t think. He didn’t weigh the history or the logic. He grabbed Gloria’s hand, spinning her away from the edge of the mound and pulling her flush against his chest.
“I don’t want to wait for the Jasper ring,” he breathed fiercely, his voice raspy, cutting through the thunder of the drums.
She looked up, startled, her sassy retort dying on
her lips as she saw the sheer, unbridled intensity in his gaze. “John?”
“No more talking about one day,” he said, his hands framing her face, holding her as if she were the only tether keeping him from floating off the earth. “No more living like ghosts on the edge of the plaza. I want the paperwork. I want the mortgage. I want the magnificent, heartburn-inducing reality of you, Gloria. Every day. Forever.”
Gloria’s breath hitched. For the first time in a decade, the sharp-witted Southern belle was entirely speechless. A slow, radiant smile broke across her face, brighter than the fires below. She didn’t offer a witty comeback; she just pulled his mouth down to hers, sealing the vow in the smoky, electric air of the powwow night.
…The drums finally faded into a soft, steady thrum, leaving the night air humming with an electric sort of silence. Gloria pulled back just enough to trace the line of his jaw with a manicured nail, her eyes sparkling with that familiar, mischievous heat.
She gave a playful, dramatic huff, smoothing the lapels of his jacket before resting her hands firmly on his chest. “Well, sugar, since you’ve finally come to your senses, I suppose I should warn you: I won’t be needing a traditional honeymoon. Lord knows you’ve already carted me all over creation, from the sweltering streets of New Orleans to the edge of the Grand Canyon. I reckon we’ll just take a raincheck on Europe until we manage to store up enough quarters in our piggy bank while we’re living like two perfectly happy paupers. Or maybe,” she added with a wink, “the Eiffel Tower will just have to wait for our next lifetime when we’re feeling a bit more flush.”
John chuckled, pulling her closer until her forehead rested against his. “We’ll just hole up in the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter and pretend we’re in Paris, what with all those French street names there.”
“Pretend we’re in Paris?” Gloria arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow, her voice taking on a molasses-smooth pragmatism. “Good heavens, John, why would we want to downgrade? The Louvre is so impossibly vast we’d just be little mice scurrying in a marble maze, exhausting ourselves for the sake of art. The New Orleans Museum of Art is infinitely more manageable for a civilized afternoon. Besides, that rusty old Eiffel Tower is entirely too high up, and as a woman of profound common sense, I am perfectly happy to admit I’m afraid of heights.”
John laughed, the sound warm and grounding against the cool creek air. “Fair enough. And I suppose the French can be full of hauteur, whereas New Orleans practically invented Southern Hospitality.”
“Exactly, darling,” Gloria purred, leaning her weight comfortably against him. “I certainly wouldn’t stoop to the level of Parisian snobbery. Heavens, we are so remarkably lucky not to be going to Paris. Why cross a perfectly good ocean just to be sneered at by people who take themselves too seriously?”
“And I’d bet my life,” John added, his eyes tracing the firelight reflected in hers, “that whatever Creole cuisine they attempt over there can’t hold a candle to the real thing.”
“Not a flickering chance in hell,” she agreed, giving his lapel a final, decisive pat. “As far as I’m concerned, the Travel Channel is about as close to Paris as I ever care to get. I like my romance right here in the heat.”
John smiled, lacing his fingers through hers and nodding toward the rhythmic, pulsing throb of the arena. “Then let’s go gourd dance some more and count our lucky stars.”
