But it is on the twilight trip to the well, the conventional Zuñi hour of courtship, that Waiyautitsa will be approached by suitors. Muffled in his black blanket the youth may step out from the corner where he has been lurking and put his hand on the girl’s arm. If she will have none of him, she may avert her head and hasten on to overtake the woman in front, but if she fancies the fellow, she will pause, if but for a moment or two, to talk. It is a brief encounter and, with somebody in front and perhaps another girl coming up behind, it is far from private; still after Waiyautitsa has had a few such meetings, “two or four,” she is likely to invite the young man to join her household. At first, for a few days, he will stay in the common room, in the room where all sleep (sleeping and dressing, let me say, with the utmost modesty), he will stay only at night, leaving before dawn, “staying still” his shyness is called. Then he will begin to eat his meals with the household. There is, you see, no wedding ceremonial and a man slips as easily as he can into the life of his wife’s household.
Waiyautitsa will pay a formal visit on her bridegroom’s people, taking his mother a basket of corn meal. To Waiyautitsa herself her young man will have given a present of cloth for a dress, or a buckskin for the moccasins he will make for her. Hides are a product of the chase, of cattle raising (cowhide is used to sole moccasins), or of trade, men’s occupations, and so moccasins of both women and men are made by men. Women make their own dresses, although, formerly, before weaving went out of fashion at Zuñi, it is likely that men were the weavers, just as they are to-day among the Hopi from whom the men of Zuñi get cloth for their ceremonial kilts and blankets, and for the dresses of the women. Even to-day at Zuñi men may make up their own garments from store-bought goods and it is not unusual to see a man sitting to a sewing machine.
A man may use cloth or thread for other than economic reasons. In case a girl jilts him he will catch her out some night and take a bit from her belt to fasten to a tree on a windy mesa top. As the wind wears away the thread, the woman will sicken and perhaps in two or three years die. A woman who is deserted may take soil from the man’s footprints and put it where she sleeps. At night he will think of her and come back—“even if the other woman is better looking.” Apprehensive of desertion a woman may put a lock of hair from the man in her house wall or, the better to attach him to her, she may wear it over her heart. Women and men alike may buy love charms from the ne’wekwe, a curing society, potent in magic, black or white. There is a song, too, which men and women may sing “in their heart” to charm the opposite sex. And there is a song which a girl may sing to the corn as she rubs the yellow meal on her face before going out. “Help me,” is the substance of it, “I am going to the plaza. Make me look pretty.” Rarely do our girls pray, I suppose, when they powder their noses.