Dionisio was his real name, but everybody called him Tigre—"Jaguar." "The name suits," his mother often said. "His skin is the wild honey color of the jaguar. He is spirited and mischievous and curious."

"And lazy too," his great-grandmother would add. But Tigre was only twelve years old, and very dear to his father and mother. They understood his sleepy, daydreaming ways, knowing that soon enough he would be a man, with a man's work and a man's worry.

How soon they could not have guessed. For Father was terribly injured by a falling tree, and suddenly there was no one but Tigre to be man of the family. On the fearsome night when he went alone through the forest to fetch the bonesetter from the distant head village, Tigre began to grow up.

But The Corn Grows Ripe is more than the story of a boy's momentous year of learning to be a man among his people. It is a story of the people themselves, Maya Indians of the twentieth century living in a village in Yucatán, following the ancient customs and celebrating the traditional festivals of their age-old gods.

And because corn is the most precious thing in the world to the Mayas, and the care of his family's cornfield the most important of Tigre's work, his story is full of the drama of seasons and weather sent by the gods to bless or destroy the crops.

Jean Charlot's beautiful drawings—some of the finest he has ever done—show vividly the strength, dignity, and grace of the Maya people and the fascinating details of their surroundings.

From the dust jacket