In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D’Amato Read Free Book Online Page A

“exploratory placement in novel pedagogic situations.” One doctor in Salt Lake told me that PTSD was a blanket term that didn’t really cover whatever I had, or didn’t have. I figured that meant I wouldn’t get any scholarship money out of it.

In September of 1988 an anthropology grad student from BYU, Brigham Young University, came to speak at our junior high school and redirected my life. She showed videos of old kivas and Zuni corn dances, and just as I was falling asleep she started showing Maya pyramids, and I sat up. I got my nerve up and asked some questions. She asked me to tell where I was from. I told the class. A few days later they let me and the other redskins out of school to go to a Native American Placement Program scholarship conference that she was chairing in Salt Lake. It was in a gym at the high school and included things like flint knapping and freestyle face painting with Liquitex acrylics. A student teacher introduced me to another professor named June Sexton and when I told her where I came from she started talking to me in pretty good Yukateko, which really blew me away. At some point she asked whether I’d ever played el juego del mundo, and when I didn’t know what she meant she said it was also called “alka’ kalab’eeraj,” the “Sacrifice Game,” which was close to a word my mother had used. I said yes and she brought out an Altoids box full of curiously red tz’ite-tree seeds. I couldn’t play at first because I was having something that I might identify as nostalgia, or the poor second cousin of nostalgia, but when I got it back together we played through a few dry rounds. She said a mathematician colleague of hers was working on a study of Maya divination and would love it if I could teach him my version. Sure, I said, thinking quickly, but I couldn’t do it after school hours. Anything to get out of PE.

Incredibly, a week later a green van from a place called FARMS—the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies—actually did pick me up right before lunch period and drove me north into the mountains, to BYU in Provo. June babe led me into a forgettable building and introduced me to Professor Taro Mora. He seemed to me like a wise old sage, like Pat Morita in the Karate Kid saga, even though he was only forty. His office was totally plain, with a wall of books and journals on Go—which is that Asian board game played with the black and white pebbles—and another wall of stuff on probability and game theory. He worked in catastrophe modeling. He said he’d collected versions of the Sacrifice Game from all over Central America, but that the variant I’d learned was one that only a couple of his informants had even heard of and that differed from the usual game in a few important ways. First of all, in most places the client just comes in and says, “Please ask the skull/seeds this for me,” and the sun adder does everything else. But the way my mother did it, the client played against the adder. Second, she’d made a board in the shape of a cross, while almost all other adders just sorted the seeds into a single row of piles on a flat cloth. The third and most tantalizing thing was simply that I’d learned the Game from a woman.

This was almost unheard of. Throughout 98 percent of the Maya region, adders were invariably men. Taro said he wasn’t an anthropologist but that he guessed my mother might have represented a survival of some Ch’olan tradition of female secret societies that had otherwise disappeared soon after the Conquest.

Taro met with me twice a week until the end of the semester, when he went back to New Haven. By that time I’d found out that he was the head researcher of something called the “Parcheesi Project” and that he and the graduate students in his lab had a theory that all or almost all modern games are descended from a single ancestor, an ur-game. They’d started out trying to reconstruct it by collecting tribal games in