Ceremony

1). Explain why Tayo blames himself for the six year drought.

After he returns home, Tayo learns that "the wind had blown since late february and it did not stop after April"; in the six years he has been gone, there has been a persistent drought that has yellowed the grass and dried up the earth. During his time in the war, Tayo and the rest of the soldiers had experienced rain that "had no beginning or end." The thick, humid jungle rain clouded the soldier's lungs and minds, seeped into their wounds, and created treacherous mud and trenches. Desperate for the rain to end so that his cousin Rocky's injury could heal, Tayo prayed "for dry air, dry as a hundred years squeezed out of yellow sand." After the blanket carrying wounded Rocky slipped from his and the Corporal's hands into the muddy flood, he began to damn the rain and pray against it by chanting a story about Corn Woman and Reed Woman. When he returns to his drought-stricken home, he believes he is responsible for praying the rain away and struggles with guilt, especially after his encounter with Ku'oosh: "The old man only made him certain of something he had feared all along ... it took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web."



2). Describe, as best as you can, Auntie’s attitudes about Tayo, mixed blood, and religion.

Auntie seems to adhere more to the standards of other people rather than the standards of her family. She had initially become Tayo's caretaker in order to atone for her sister's scandalous affair with a white man and to invite sympathy and respect from her peers by taking on the burden of raising her illegitimate, mixed-race nephew. She is extremely judgemental when it comes to her people having relationships with other races and ironically adheres to Native American social codes and Christian martyrdom. Rather than assume responsibility for Tayo because she loved him or out of familial ties, she instead dutifully cares for Tayo so that she can appear to be a true Christian woman. After he returns from the war, Tayo knows as well as Auntie does that she will take care of him now solely because "she needed a new struggle, another opportunity to show those who might gossip that she had still another unfortunate burden." She revels in in the satisfaction of being right and is constantly concerned with how the deeds of her family will affect how the community sees and treats them. By using the burden of Tayo and Rocky's death to her advantage with the people of the community, she attempts to cast herself as a martyr ("[measuring] life by counting the crosses") in a narrow-minded Christian sense.