Page:Here and there in Yucatan - miscellanies (IA herethereinyucat00lepl 0).djvu/86

 a separate home. When a man desires to make any woman his wife he proposes to her, and, if she accepts him, clears a patch of ground; builds a hut; plants banana trees; then takes her there. They have no marriage ceremony of their own; occasionally a Carib is now married to his first wife by the Catholic priest.

The women do all the work, even cultivating the ground. They have to provide for themselves and their children, as well as for the husband when he visits them. If a woman ventures to marry one who is not a Carib, she is liable to be tied to a post, naked, and whipped by any one who chooses to inflict the penalty on her. If a man among them leaves his people when a child, he must return within a certain period and build a house, or be thenceforth an outcast. A boy, who had been taken into a white family, when asked if he would not like to go back to his people, said: "Not till I am a little bigger, because they might give me to Mafia."

A Methodist minister who was some time in Stan Creek said the Caribs were very honest and harmless, but great drunkards; that he thought they would not kill a child as they feared the sight of human blood. They, however, can roast a live one without seeing blood.