Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  The blisters healed. The corn grew tall and strong, the stalks shrouded with bean vines. Ears grew in the joints of the corn leaves, seeming to appear overnight, swelling to the length of a hand almost as soon as they had emerged. And then cohattayough was nearly over. Soon the days would grow shorter, the nights colder. The harvest would commence in two more turns of the moon.

  Where has the year fled to? Pocahontas dropped her digging stick and lay back in her garden. The sun had already departed in a blaze of pink and gold. Night as dark as the flesh of a plum stole around the edges of the sky. Above her, the corn swayed and whispered in a soft breeze. Drums carried, a heartbeat pulsing vital and loud at the night’s fire. Women’s voices rose in song. It was a joyous sound, the simple gladness of being together, of being alive. Pocahontas felt far removed from that gladness. It drifted around the edges of her spirit, fading away like the trace of an echo.

  She watched the stars emerge. They were like white bead shells in the sky, scattered by a careless hand and forgotten. Beneath the soil she felt the earth itself stretching, unfurling like a coil of bark drying in the sun. What was that sense of opening, of slow, inevitable blooming? Images crowded her mind: a crack in a butterfly’s chrysalis, a turtle’s limbs emerging from its shell with deliberate care. She thought of deer leading fawns through the dusky forest, of the moon riding high and round against a purple sky.

  She understood that the time had come to go. She could wait no longer, for soon—very soon—she would have a new name.

  Pocahontas rose to her feet. She held still for a long moment, listening to the last birds of the evening calling out to the dancers at the fire. She waited for her legs to tremble under the weight of her vision, but they never did. She found her digging stick beneath the squash leaves, brushed it clean, and lifted her hand to her face. The smell of rich damp, earth dark and moist, clung to her palm. It smelled new and forgiving. Good.

  While the village of Orapax danced, Pocahontas gathered what she would need. Sleeping mats, bundles of dry tinder, baskets of food, a sturdy gourd for her water. She packed a bag with greasepaint to keep the flies from her skin, two antler knives, and a pot of salve for blisters and wounds. The bag felt heavy in her hands, but when she hoisted it to her back and fixed the strap against her forehead, it weighed less than a feather on the wind.

  Pocahontas crept through the lanes of Orapax, stealing between the shadows of the longhouses. No one saw her go. At the trail to the riverbank, she paused to look back at her home. The fire was bright in the center of town, ringed by song and laughter. Through the leaping, shimmying light she saw legs move and stamp; she saw bodies and arms bend, whirling, clapping. A shadow raised its arms in the ecstasy of dance—a young woman’s form—Matachanna? Another moved through the firelight, chest out, proud as a turkey beneath an oak tree. Kocoum?

  “Good-bye,” she whispered.

  As she picked her way through the darkness toward the beached canoes, she thought she heard Matachanna’s voice call after her—“Sister!”—in answer.

  Paddling was nearly as good as gardening for soothing the mind and quieting the spirit, though the old calluses from her digging stick were no protection against the harshness of her oar. Blisters appeared in new and tender places: in the center of her palms, on the fleshy pads and the lined joints of her fingers. When the river was broad and calm enough to permit it, she would tuck her paddle into the hull and allow the small dugout to coast. She trailed her hands in the water to take away the heat and pain. When the cool river water was no longer sufficient, she dabbed her hands with ointment and wrapped them in strips of soft buckskin, tying the knots with her teeth and stiff, aching fingers.

  Pocahontas paddled for a few hours the first night, and then secured her boat against a snag in a quiet eddy. She slept until dawn, made a hasty breakfast of dried fish and water dipped over the side of her canoe, and continued downriver in the pink morning mist. Well before the sun was high, the sound of the falls faded, taking with it the spectral threat of a Massawomeck ambush. Freed from that particular worry, she allowed herself to slip into the easy rhythm of the canoe: dip and pull, lift and cross. The current and her own wiry strength carried her downstream as fast as a rabbit bolting.

  Two days passed, filled with nothing but the river and the simple, mindless, soothing act of paddling. Fish darted away from her bow, and deer startled and watched her pass, trembling in the shallows, water still dripping from their black muzzles. Birds cried, and Pocahontas called back to them. She smelled the outflowing of brooks and streams that carried the rich loamy scent of woodlands down from the hills to mingle with the faint salt of the river.

  By night she beached, exhausted, on the edges of the various territories through which she passed. It was not precisely dangerous for a girl to travel alone through Tsenacomoco, yet Pocahontas had no desire to be sent back to her father at Orapax by an overly cautious werowance. Her arms were nearly too tired to work the fire stick, but each night she made a tiny fire and slept huddled close beneath her mats. Even in sleep she kept her shoulders visible so that any warrior who might chance upon her would see by her tattoos that she was Pamunkey, and a girl: no threat to anyone.

  On the third morning she rose up fresh and ready like a sapling sprouting from the forest floor. Her body had adapted to the hard work of rowing—even her blisters had hardened, and her hands flexed with a strength and eagerness that surprised her. Her spirit, too, felt changed. The knowledge that Matachanna would never love her again did not bring the fierce, desperate sorrow she had felt in Orapax, nor the anger that kept her isolated in the gardens while the world went on dancing and living without her. Rather, her sadness was a small thing—still real, still bitter, but something she could contain like corn kernels inside a priest’s rattle. The sadness would still shake, and she knew its noise would sometimes be great, but it was her own hand on the rattle. She could master it and tuck it away at will. It would never again blot out her spirit completely.

  All day she paddled, rejoicing silently in the new strength in her body. She smiled at herons wading in the tidal mud of the shallows. She laughed when they took indignant wing, calling hoarsely, scolding her for her unseemly speed. By sunset her lower back began to ache, as did her stomach. She had eaten little that day, too caught up in the pleasures of solitude and the rhythm of the river to stop.

  She cast about for a suitable spot to land her canoe, and realized with a dull, creeping surprise that she recognized this place. Why had she not known it sooner? The shelf of riverbank was low and muddy, still scored deeply with the tracks of many dugouts. The trails leading back into the woods opened before her eyes like friendly hands.

  Pocahontas beached carefully, dragged her canoe above the tideline, and made her way inland to Werowocomoco.

  In the fading red light, she walked the remembered lanes of her childhood home. Frames of longhouses still stood, but an encroaching growth of passion-fruit vines draped over them, dangling copper-bright fruits into spaces where once the smoke of heart fires had hung. The ground surrounding the communal fire pit was still flat and dusty, and here and there she could make out the pale ghost of a human footprint. But the grounds had been danced over by many other feet in the months since Powhatan had left Werowocomoco. The round-padded feet of coyotes or wolves stalked the edges of the ring. The pronged prints of birds showed here and there, stark in the dust like fresh tattoos. The sharp, cloven tracks of a deer indicated where a brave buck had walked across the ashes of the fire pit. Along the eastern edge of the ring, the sinuous trail of a snake moved like the path of a stream, fluid and mysterious in the fading light.

  A cold breeze moved through Werowocomoco. It shivered the passion-fruit vines, which danced darkly in the gathering twilight. Pocahontas crouched still beside the fire pit, watching, all senses alert like a rabbit emerging from its scrape. But not even ghosts moved in the old capital.

  After a t
ime she built her fire there in the communal fire pit where so often she had clapped and sung, side by side with Matachanna and the other girls. Her fire was small, but she held her hands up to it, and it lit her skin with a vibrant, hot glow.

  She stood, turning to rummage in her food basket for an evening meal—and paused, one hand on her cramping belly. At first she was afraid an illness had seized her insides. But she held her breath, and felt the pinch of pain ebb like the outflowing tide. Then it gathered itself to surge again. She remembered lying in her garden and saw once more the delicate moth’s cocoon splitting, the creature inside struggling to break free.

  She touched between her thighs. There it was: the dark smear of blood on her fingertips. She knew it would be there even before she inspected her hand in the firelight. She had not reached Jamestown in time.

  Pocahontas laid out her sleeping mat. She unwrapped an old, hardened dumpling from its silk-grass wrapping and set it beside a strip of fish and a strip of venison. She sat gazing at her supper. She knew certain rites should be observed, knew that proper dedications must be made to the spirits for luck and fertility, for magic and long life. But it was other women who knew the lore. Only women could dedicate her—women who had entered the sweat lodge and received the rites from those who had crossed that magic threshold before. She gnawed on the tough fish, mulling over her predicament with a calmness that surprised her. Was it more dangerous to go about in the world as a woman undedicated? Or was it worse to perform the rites incorrectly? Which would offend the spirits more, causing them to cover their eyes when she passed? Which would leave her more vulnerable to attack by ill-tempered manitou?

  She did not know. There was no one to tell her. She gazed earnestly into the fire until the brightness of the light stung her eyes and left echoes of the flames flitting across her vision as bright as chokecherries on an autumn tree. Okeus, I saw you burn. You know me. Guide me correctly; bring me safely through this passage.

  Pocahontas rose. Beyond the vine-covered bones of the longhouses she found an ancient oak, found the soft moss at its base by feel in the darkness. She recovered from her traveling bag the buckskin strips that had wrapped her hands. These she fashioned into a belt, but did not tie it yet between her legs.

  She sat again beside her tiny fire. She drew into her mind the image of the Okeus, his hard black body circled by flames, the leering, white-eyed face emerging and vanishing again through a drifting veil of oily smoke.

  Speak, Okeus. Guide my hand. Make me strong against manitou. Make the spirits pour out their favors on me, like water from a gourd. Make their blessings sweet as nut milk. Let me not offend.

  A voice filled her ears. It was loud as a hundred rattles; it was low and dark, forcible as thunder. “Woman’s blood is magic. Woman’s blood makes life. Woman’s blood is fire.”

  Pocahontas trembled.

  “Blood is the fire that drives copper from the orestone. Blood is the fire that simmers the pot, that bakes the bread, that makes one cake out of water and meal.

  “Blood is the fire that consumes the forest, tree and root, spirit and flesh. Blood is the fire that fells the tree and hollows its heart, that it may carry men upon the river.

  “A fire may cleave or a fire may bind. A fire may destroy. A fire may create.”

  Breathless, eyes closed, she waited.

  “Your blood is your power. Anoint yourself with the blood. Direct your power. Make of yourself a mighty fire, girl-who-was-Amonute.”

  She opened her eyes. Don’t think, she told herself as her spirit shuddered and gasped. Don’t ruin this vision. Move like the river moves, flowing between the high banks that guide it.

  She dipped her hand once more between her thighs. She touched the dark, earthy wetness to her forehead.

  Make me wise, she commanded the blood.

  Her hand went to her heart, streaking a track of magic across her breast. Its coolness burned against her skin. Make me loving. Make me give, and not take.

  The voice chuckled. It was an ominous rush, a prickling whisper like the sound of the falls at Orapax. “Wisdom, love, generosity? That is all you seek?”

  It is all.

  “And power? Influence? A territory of your own, werowansqua? What of immortality? Do you not wish to be remembered for all time, to be your own self for all time?”

  She could not speak, even in the confines of her awestruck spirit. She shook her head and lowered her eyes to the earth. She recalled the shapes moving around the fire on the night she left Orapax. The movement of those silhouettes, both familiar and mysterious. The way their dance called to her, the thrum of their song repeating along her bones. The simple goodness of a brief, honest, common life. Oneness with the whole was not immortality. But it was wholeness.

  “Then sweat,” the voice commanded.

  A brisk wind moaned down the length of Werowocomoco. The fire blazed yellow and hot, like summer sun on the cornfields. She pulled a sleeping mat over her head and opened it like a heron’s broad wings. The heat of the fire pressed against her body, cupped in the shadowy lodge of her bark-woven wingspan. She rocked, singing under her breath, and felt the blood dry on her forehead and heart. The sweat emerged like dew along her limbs, gathered in the crease of her neck.

  I am alone, she chanted, mournful, resigned. Aloneness is my fate. I enter womanhood apart from all women, and apart I will always stand.

  My wings are isolation. My cape is a wall. My lodge is small and empty. I am drained of the things Amonute lived for. Her desires are dust in the wind.

  The sweat broke. It ran in streams down her back, her chest, her face. It left a prickling on her skin, a trace of heat and magic. The sweat carried Amonute away.

  Okeus, you know me. Okeus, I saw you burn. Fill me with wisdom and generosity. Make me a basket that is useful; fill my being with love. For even though I must be a woman alone, I would be a woman who is wise. I would be a woman who gives.

  When she could take the heat no longer, Pocahontas let the mat fall to the ground. She gasped when the cold night air touched her skin; a great, forceful burning suffused her limbs, the fire that was blood. She drank deeply from her gourd and then tied her new moss belt between her thighs. The deep, booming voice spoke no more. She was alone with the silence of Werowocomoco, alone but for the light of her small but vigorous fire.

  Pocahontas tucked herself between the mats. Stars painted the sky in a white, glittering swath, and across the band of light she saw silhouettes move: women bending and stooping, twisting in the joy of dance; men strutting and leaping; all of them rising together like a flock of birds lifting from the earth. She was apart, but she watched them glide across the brilliant night sky, and the perfect oneness of their movement was as beautiful as pearls on a chain.

  She did not know, as she fell toward the sleep of total exhaustion, who she would be when she awoke. She had no true name now; Amonute was gone in a streak of sweat and blood.

  In the deep night, in the night that turned and shuffled, leaped and swayed like dancers in a ring, Pocahontas dreamed.

  Wings stretched from her body—long, pale wings with ragged white feathers. She sprang into the air, beating at the sky with broad, feathered arms, digging like a canoe paddle churning the river. She called out as she flew, but no one answered; she was a bird without a flock.

  She glided. Wind moved over her body, through it, teasing tears from her eyes. Words brushed her skin; the wind was made of words.

  Wool.

  Boot.

  Gun.

  Bid Pocahontas bring me two little baskets, and I will give her white beads to make her a chain.

  Her bird feet tangled in a length of red string. She bent a long, strong neck and sliced the string away with a heron’s bill.

  Far below her, against the blackness of the earth, a tiny fire danced in a wide circle of ash. She dived toward it. As she cam
e closer, she saw that the fire reached out red hands and pulled dry sticks into its own heart. And it grew warmer. Never larger—never great. But warmer and brighter, pushing the darkness away. People drew near. They held their hands up, smiling at the warmth and nodding their heads.

  Her feathers fell from her wings. When they landed in the flames, the blaze was hot and cheery. Ah, the people said, speaking in one voice. This fire is good.

  She woke to the croaking of a heron, calling from somewhere at the river’s edge. Though she ached from a restless sleep on the hard, cold earth, she held her body very still, clinging to the images of her dream. They were fading quickly, slipping from her grasp like fronds of riverweed, slick and wispy in the hand.

  I have a name, she realized. The knowledge of it filled her with quiet pride, with a hot, trembling wonder.

  She sat up abruptly. There was a pot of greasepaint in her bag; she worked the tight lid free and was glad to see that the paint was red. Not puccoon—she was a common woman, and such luxuries were not for her. But it was bloodroot, and the color was right.

  She painted her inner thighs with the bloodroot. She was aware that the painting was a blessing a female relative should have bestowed: Koleopatchika, perhaps, or Matachanna. But she was a woman alone now, a woman apart. Her fingers could paint as well as any other’s.

  The silk-grass cloth that had wrapped her bread would have to do for an apron, at least until she returned to Orapax. She spread the cloth beside the ashes of her fire, and, smiling, she traced her chosen symbols with one bloodroot-covered finger: a heron in flight above the ring of a small fire.

  She stood and fixed the apron of womanhood in place with her last long strip of buckskin. Then she declared her new name to the bones of Werowocomoco.