Selu: The First Corn Woman

Selu feeds her family every day, and every day the food is the same: corn and beans, always fresh, always enough. Her sons eat without asking where it comes from. For a long time this is sufficient.

Then they wonder.

The sons follow her to the storehouse and watch through a crack in the wall. They see what she does: she stands over the basket and rubs her hands together, and corn falls from her hands into the basket. She rubs her stomach, and beans fall. She produces the food from herself, from her own body. She is not grinding stored grain. She is the source.

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She comes out of the storehouse and sees their faces and knows immediately what they have done.

She says: you have watched me. By watching, you have broken what was between us. She does not say this in anger. She says it as a fact, with the calm of a person who has thought about this possibility and has known it would come. The sacred can only sustain itself when it is not examined directly. The sons’ eyes on her body in the act of production have made that act impossible to continue.

She says: I am going to die. This is not your fault. This is what happens.

Then she gives them instructions.

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She tells them: kill me. When I am dead, clear a circle of ground and drag my body seven times around it. Stay awake. Watch through seven nights. The corn will come up where my blood has fallen.

The sons do what she says. They kill her. They clear the ground and drag her body around it, and where her blood falls, the ground darkens. They stay awake the first night and the second night and through several nights beyond that. But they are young and exhausted, and on the seventh night some of them sleep.

Where they stayed awake the full seven nights, the corn comes up thick and full, stalk by stalk, each one strong. Where they slept, the corn is thinner, smaller, fewer stalks per area.

This is why corn requires the work of the hands — the clearing, the planting, the weeding, the staying awake — because the sons did not stay awake for all seven nights. If they had, corn would grow without effort wherever the earth was cleared. Because they slept, the relationship between humans and corn is a working relationship: the people tend the corn, and the corn feeds the people, and the tenderness is the memory of Selu, who gave herself so that her children could eat.

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Selu means corn.

The Cherokee word for corn is the name of the woman. This is not coincidence and is not metaphor — it is a precise statement of relationship. When Cherokee women plant and tend and harvest the corn, they are not working with a grain. They are in relationship with a person who chose to become food.

The first corn grew from her blood in the earth of the Southern Appalachians, and the corn has been growing from that same earth ever since, in the care of the people who remember what Selu gave.