Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  She hooked her finger with Matachanna’s. “It’s good of you, Sister. And you, Nonoma. I know we haven’t always been the best of friends, but I’m glad you’ll be with me.”

  When the canoes were filled, Naukaquawis gave the word; they coasted in twos and threes out into the river. The spirits of all the women and girls were buoyant with anticipation of a great adventure to come. Even the warriors seemed relaxed and happy, those fierce, stoic men who would guard the women as they cleared the tassantassas’ land and set seeds and sprouts into high black mounds of newly turned earth.

  At sunset they reached the fort. Pocahontas lifted a palm in the white men’s greeting, called “Wingapoh!” and “Halloo!” in her familiar voice. A returned shout of “The princess!” carried across the water, filling her stomach with a warmth as satisfying as well-cooked stew.

  The palisade gates opened wide for her, as they had done so many times before. Chawnzmit came jogging out to meet her. His face glowed with happiness and relief at her presence—she knew he was glad to see that their friendship was not irredeemably broken. But she noted that he wore the hard, blue metal helmet, and his shirt of many interlinked metal rings gleamed over his accustomed wrappings of strong-smelling wool.

  He took her hands in his own. It was a tassantassa gesture of gratitude and welcome, she knew—but she felt Matachanna and the other women stir in surprise. To the Real People, it was an intimate touch. Her face burned hot in the sun, and she dropped her eyes demurely from Chawnzmit’s face.

  “I’m so glad you’ve returned,” he said hesitantly. “Your father . . .”

  “He was very angry at your deception. He will not tolerate such a display of disobedience again.”

  Chawnzmit was quiet for a moment. Gently, she freed her hands from his grip. At last he said, “I understand.”

  Pocahontas brightened. “But Powhatan is also very generous. He has allowed me to bring you something better than dried corn and fish. My sisters and I will show you how to plant a garden and how to tend it, so that when taquitock comes, you will not be hungry.”

  The days that followed were sweet. The season of cohattayough settled over the land like warm, deep fur, coaxing blossoms from the trees and birds from their nests. The air filled with the perfume of promise, a lush, rich, rounded scent, hinting at the seed beneath the soil, humming softly of growth yet to come. The days lengthened. Sunsets lingered, filling the forest with the long, sideways slant of golden light that heralded a mild night and a warm morning. In the beam and glitter of those fire-orange shafts, newborn tribes of insects danced and shimmered.

  Never before had Pocahontas taken such joy in work. She bent her back to the task of clearing a great swath of land beyond the palisade, working alongside the rest of the women with songs and rhymes quick on her lips. They chanted and swung their arms to their own concerted rhythms. “Now we cut and now we clear,” left hand gathering the tufts of high grasses; “planting time is almost here,” right arm sweeping with the antler knife. The vegetation came loose to the striding cadence, pull and cut, tear and toss: “Beans to plant and corn to grow,” the knife cleaving through stout stalks of brush, “secrets only women know!” Stark earth showing bare and startled in the sun.

  The men of the fort made shorter work of the nearby trees than the Real People could have done. The women would have built carefully tended fires around the trunks of oaks and chestnuts, corralling and directing the heat with dark-colored mats until the trunks were heavily charred. The char would have been chipped away with bone chisels, and then the process repeated until the trunk was thin enough that the tree finally toppled and was hauled away to become a dugout canoe, a process of more tedious burning and chipping.

  But the tassantassas merely hacked away with their axes, sending chips of sweet-smelling wood flying, crying out a warning as the trees groaned and cracked and then rushed toward the earth with a jarring shudder and a roar of shivering leaves. The white men cleared the garden space in less than a quarter of the time a proper char-and-chip might take, and the women eyed the blue metal and the sharp beaks of tassantassa axes with sly deliberation.

  Under the watchful eyes of the warrior guards, the women led the tassantassas into the field and showed them how to mound the earth to receive the seeds, how to plant corn and beans side by side so the strong cornstalk might provide a friendly place for the bean to twine and climb in its quest for brighter sun. They taught them how to space squash seeds, so that when the plants sprouted, their broad, glossy leaves would cover the earth and keep the soil damp and soft throughout the whole of the garden.

  By day they planted and laughed with the tassantassa men. By night, the white men built up their communal fire and shared corn cakes and fish stew. The women danced and sang, spinning in the fresh cohattayough air. The white men clapped their hands as the Real Women danced, and now and then one would call out his appreciation to this dancer or that, cupping hands around a wooly beard to shout, “My lady!”

  When they had danced their fill, the women retired to the longhouse they had built at the garden’s edge. It was a makeshift thing, the saplings that held up its arch rather flimsy and its sides covered with soft woven mats rather than sturdy birch-bark strips. The bedsteads were lumpy and hard, the sleeping mats so old that they would not grow soft no matter how they were beaten. Yet for Pocahontas, it was a place of joy and peace. There she fell asleep each night with a deep current of satisfaction thrumming along her tired muscles, tugging her into happy dreams. Her work with the tassantassas was good. They had shown no tendency to deceive since she had arrived to clear the land. The words she had spoken to her father had been true, after all: once they knew they would never again starve, the English would be good allies and honorable subjects. Chawnzmit—who was, like she, no gentleman—would be her true friend once more. She would be free again to talk and laugh with him, the only being in all the world who understood what it was like to dream, to yearn for something more than the dull life of the lowly born.

  A week after their arrival, Pocahontas sat in the soft new summer grass on the edge of the tassantassas’ garden. She, Matachanna, and Nonoma were sorting seed beans into small baskets, which the women would soon tote throughout the garden, driving the seeds into the growing mounds with their sharp hardwood digging sticks. The seeds were dry in her hands, drinking the moisture from her skin. They made a soothing music as they spilled from dusty palms.

  “So,” Pocahontas said casually, “what do you think of my tassantassas?”

  “They’re our brother Naukaquawis’s tassantassas, not yours,” Nonoma said. But there was no sting of scorn in her voice. Time had worn away the rough edges where Nonoma and Pocahontas clashed and caught. Now they joked and teased one another as if they had grown up in the same yehakin. Pocahontas pulled an ugly face, showing Nonoma her tongue, and they giggled together.

  “I think they’re strange,” Matachanna said. “They’re pleasant enough, but there is something about them I don’t entirely trust.”

  Pocahontas looked at her over their basket of seeds, brows cocked quizzically.

  “I don’t know what it is, exactly,” Matachanna went on. “But look at them—how oddly helpless they are, and yet how strong. Their axes can fell eight trees in a single day, but they can’t puzzle out how to dry fish for the winter.”

  “It’s only because they have no women with them,” Pocahontas said practically. “It’s always women who do the food work.”

  “And that is the strangest of all,” Matachanna said. “Why would they make a town here without any women? I’d understand them more if they were only passing through, but here they are, a year after their arrival, with a wall and houses built, and those strange, huge boats waiting in the river. But no women at all—not a single one. They are the oddest men I’ve ever seen.”

  “No wonder they starved in the wintertime,” Nonoma said. “Have you ever seen a
man bake his own bread or cook his own stew? Okeus! Did they think corn cakes would fall on them from the sky?”

  “It’s not only the question of food that’s strange,” Matachanna said. “They have no women to garden or cook, but they also have no women for . . .” She trailed off, her face flushing red, and busied herself with the seeds as if she had not spoken her thoughts aloud.

  “Look how she blushes,” Pocahontas whispered to Nonoma. “She’s thinking of Utta-ma-tomakkin.”

  Matachanna glared at her. “Laugh all you like, Amonute, but you know it’s true. What do the men do for pleasure, if there aren’t any women in their town?”

  Pocahontas shrugged. “I never thought about it.”

  “Nor I,” Nonoma admitted. “Maybe . . . maybe they lie with each other?”

  “Well, they must,” Matachanna said, matter-of-fact, tossing a handful of beans into the nearest basket. But her face was still bright with embarrassment. “Have you ever known a man to go long without visiting some woman’s bed? Of course not! It’s as necessary as breathing for them.”

  Pocahontas lowered her voice, made it as dark as smoke. “Has Utta-ma-tomakkin told you all about these things? The terrible, driving needs of men?”

  Matachanna flung a handful of beans into Pocahontas’s face; Nonoma shrieked with laughter.

  “I am not the only one who thinks your tassantassas are strange,” Matachanna said. All trace of blush faded from her face. She was suddenly quite serious. “Our men also talk about their odd ways. I’ve overheard. The tassantassas have curious ideas about gift giving. They won’t give up a knife or an axe for anything—not even in trade. Not any longer, that is—they used to trade their tools, or so I’ve heard. Now they won’t part with them, even for the food they so desperately need. Oh, they’ll give copper, anything made of copper, and plenty of beads. And sometimes that strange-smelling cloth they wear. But the blue metal . . .”

  “They call it steel,” Pocahontas interjected.

  “Steel. They will not part with steel even as a gift, as an offering of thanks. Here we are, building a garden for them, teaching them how to plant and grow, and they will not give up a single piece of their precious steel.”

  “Rude,” Nonoma agreed. Then she snickered. “Yet they are too dull to notice when the men take their steel anyway.”

  Pocahontas tensed. She sat up very straight. “Take their steel? What do you mean?”

  “The men have made a game of it. They wait until a tassantassa is working with one of his tools. Then they walk up and talk to him, engage him in trade. While he is distracted with his tools lying on the ground, the man picks up a tool with his toes. Or sometimes he takes it with his hands, if he can. It is better to take it with the hands, braver. The other men account him better at the game if he can snatch up a piece of steel by hand. But the toes will do. The tassantassas don’t notice at all.”

  The white men had unusual customs, peculiar ideas about what was polite and what was rude—that could not be denied. But Pocahontas was quite certain the tassantassas did know that their steel was being taken. Faced with the intimidating boldness of a Real Man, painted in his fearsome colors and puffed by his natural haughtiness, most Englishmen would rather keep silent about such ostentatious “gifting.” Yet to the English, the loss of their steel tools was not gifting, but theft. A worm of anxiety burrowed into her gut. How long had the game been played? The tassantassas were surely at the limits of the stiff, silent, straight-faced endurance, which they called politeness. While the women danced and sang and took joy in their work, the men—both white and Real—must be hot as stewpots on the verge of boiling over.

  The pot did boil over two days later. Pocahontas and her sisters were making their way into the fort, each carrying a bundle of new-made digging sticks for the tassantassas’ own use. As they passed through the open gate, bare feet sinking into the thick, cool mud of Jamestown, they heard shouting from the direction of the communal fire. Pocahontas tossed her digging sticks in a careless heap against the palisade wall and ran.

  A knot of white men surged, pawing at one another like quarreling dogs, their voices clamoring together so that she could make out none of their words. But no—she saw as she sprinted forward that they were not fighting each other. They were shoving and jostling so that each man might gain a better view of whatever held their attention near the fire. Pocahontas squeezed among them, gasping as she was pressed and shoved this way and that. The rank odor of so many white men gagged her. She heard Matachanna call her name fearfully from back among the cabins. At least she and Nonoma are at a distance, she thought, and sent up a prayer for their safety even as her spirit chattered in fear for her own life.

  She made her way to the front of the crowd, stumbling as she burst forth from the press of wool-covered, steel-clad bodies. She froze and stared in horror at the sight that greeted her.

  Two large, burly tassantassas held two Real Men, pinioning their arms behind their bodies. It was Naukaquawis and his friend Mackinoe, a sly, grinning trickster who would certainly have taken to the game of liberating steel from the white men with his toes. Mackinoe may have invented the sport himself; he was fond of causing trouble, and was quick with a laugh and a fox-sharp smile whenever he was implicated. He was smiling now, his teeth bared easily in a smugly amused face, even as the big tassantassa who held him gave his arms a vicious jerk that straightened his back and arched his shoulders. Naukaquawis’s face was only slightly more serious, with a small measure of chagrin beneath his amusement.

  Chawnzmit and the dark-haired, snake-eyed man called President Ratcliffe emerged from the crowd a heartbeat after Pocahontas did. She looked desperately to her friend, but Chawnzmit’s eyes were still and thoughtful beneath his thick, sand-yellow brows.

  President Ratcliffe raised his voice. It was dry as bean dust; it made Pocahontas’s limbs shiver. “What’s going on here? What is the meaning of this?”

  The big man who held Mackinoe replied. “Caught these two trying to lift our knives. And an axe. Right in front of our faces, you know the way the savages do.”

  “Aye, we’ve lost enough steel to them already,” said Naukaquawis’s captor. “Time we ceased to turn a blind eye to their thieving.”

  A whoop split the air. Two Real Men had scrambled onto one of Jamestown’s watchtowers; they nocked arrows to their bowstrings, aimed among the tassantassa crowd. Chawnzmit’s hand fell to the butt of his weapon. Giddy, her spirit lost in a mist of fear, Pocahontas repeated the word for that terrible piece of steel over and over in her mind. Snaphaunce . . . gun . . . gun.

  Naukaquawis’s sharp, commanding voice leaped above the angry commotion of the crowd. “Hold your arrows! Do not shoot a single tassantassa. Leave us be. We’ll get out of this ourselves. Do you think we can’t?”

  The bowmen lowered their weapons. Chawnzmit eyed Naukaquawis, his stare hard with suspicion, but his hand left his gun. In the momentary silence that followed Naukaquawis’s words, Pocahontas heard her sisters’ distant sobbing.

  Pocahontas staggered forward. She made a bow to Chawnzmit and Ratcliffe—she knew the English appreciated such things, knew it was a gesture of great respect. “Chawnzmit, may I speak with you?”

  He took a step toward her, but Ratcliffe held out a hand. “No, Smith. The men are right; we’ve had enough of the savages’ thievery. It’s not right that they should come to our fort and mock us to our very faces.”

  “They don’t see it as thievery,” Chawnzmit said. His voice was laden with derision. “And if you had listened to me and allowed me to give them gifts, it never would have come to this.”

  “I will not be chided, Smith. Watch yourself.”

  Chawnzmit’s face reddened. “You sent me out to learn of the naturals’ ways. You said yourself we needed their knowledge, their skills, to survive. Yet when I tell you they expect gifts, you disregard me. Why waste my efforts? Why w
aste the lives of good men—George Classen, Jehu Robinson, Thomas Emry?”

  “Do not speak those names to me. Were it not for you, all three of those good men would still be alive.”

  “You’re every bit as bad as Wingfield. Arrogant, ignorant, too impressed by half with your own high birth.” Chawnzmit spat into the mud. The crowd of tassantassas gasped and murmured like a distant storm.

  Pocahontas felt rage buffeting her from all directions, falling on her like physical blows from Chawnzmit and Ratcliffe, from the crowd of white men, from Naukaquawis and his warriors. I must stop this somehow—now, before they kill one another, and me, too. Oh, Okeus! Defend me!

  She bowed again, low, and clasped her hands in a show of desperate entreaty, a gesture she hoped the white men understood. “Please, allow me to . . .”

  A rough hand took her by the chin and lifted her upright. For one wild heartbeat she thought it was Chawnzmit who handled her so unkindly, and her stomach curdled with fear and sorrow. But it was Ratcliffe who stared down into her face, Ratcliffe’s pale cheeks marked by angry blooms of red. The crowd of tassantassas gasped. They did not approve of their princess being used so coarsely. She heard Naukaquawis issue a warning hiss.

  “I will allow you to do only one thing,” he said, his voice low and dark, calm with the weight of his fury. “Go back to your father, little princess, and tell him what we have done. Let mighty Powhatan see that England will not be so crudely treated.”

  Her eyes slid away from his face, sought out her friend Chawnzmit. She pleaded silently for him to intervene. He glanced toward Naukaquawis, then back to her. Something shadowed his blue eyes, regret or sadness, or perhaps hard determination—she could not be sure. But when he turned away from her, the pain was greater than the pain of Ratcliffe’s steely grip. The president released her with a jerk; she stumbled and clutched a hand to her bruised face. Tears blurred her vision. “Chawnzmit,” she called, but he did not look back at her as he walked away.