by Tony Horwitz
Warren steered to the widest point in the river and cut off the engine. For 360 degrees there wasn’t a sign of humanity, apart from our boat. “It would have looked about the same four hundred years ago,” he said, “when the English started mucking around here.”
For the first time in Virginia, I sensed how hard it must have been for John Smith to navigate this watery wilderness, which was almost devoid of landmarks. Heavy foliage obscured the shore, forming a low band of green that stretched for miles. High reeds camouflaged creeks emptying into the river. I wouldn’t have known the channels were there if Warren hadn’t told me.
This uniform, well-cloaked landscape made southeastern Virginia ideally suited to ambush. At one point, Smith described Indians raining “more than a thousand arrows” on his boat, which he’d learned to armor with a shield of tightly woven sticks, hemp, and grass. Near where Warren and I now drifted, his sixteen-man party had been surprised by seven hundred Pamunkey under Opechancanough. Smith challenged the chief to a duel on an island in the river, wagering copper against corn. “Our game shalbe the conqueror take all,” he declared with characteristic bravado, before grabbing a long lock of the chief’s hair and pressing a pistol to his breast. The “trembling king” ordered his warriors to lay down their bows and deliver up baskets of corn. Or so Smith later claimed.
He wasn’t so adroit at escaping another hazard of travel in these parts: the tidal mudflats that he called “the Ooze,” a mucky mantrap that ensnared the English and their boats. During one trip on the Pamunkey River, Smith was so “stuck fast in the Ooze” that he had to be rescued by natives who came “to bear me out on their heads.”
He didn’t say how they reached him, but an anthropologist in the 1920s described Pamunkey scampering across the mud, legs bent and weight on their shins, never letting one limb bear down for more than an instant. In the goopiest mire, called floating mud, they crawled on their bellies.
“If you stand up straight in it, like the English did, you sink right down to your ass,” Warren said. “My father knew how to cross it, but I never could.”
His father, who had served as chief for forty-two years, was also among the last of the Pamunkey to trap animals the traditional way. The reservation still abounded with the furry creatures Smith had described: “Powlecats, weesels and Minkes,” and strange animals he knew only by their Indian names: Aroughcun (raccoon), Opassom, and Mussascus, a beast he likened to a “water Rat” that smelled “exceedingly strongly of muske.” Warren’s father stalked all these animals, but the muskrat most of all. At low tide, with Warren’s help, he set out a wood contraption called a deadfall trap. When the muskrat went for the bait of wild parsnip, a log fell from a forked stick, clubbing the animal into the mud. Unlike a metal trap, the deadfall didn’t rust or rip the pelt, which Warren’s father sold for three dollars, with the meat bringing twenty-five cents.
“He gave the meat money to us kids,” Warren said. “I bought my first car on muskrat money, about two hundred and fifty dollars I’d saved up.”
No one used deadfall traps anymore, or made canoes from cypress, as Warren’s grandfather did. But the Pamunkey caught shad in handmade nets and milked their eggs and sperm at the reservation’s hatchery, to reseed the river’s stock. They also hunted deer and duck on ancient tracts, and dug clay from the riverbank to make pots.
“There’s no mystical tradition, or ritual, or language left—that was already gone by my grandparents’ time,” Warren said. “Being Indian for them was just a way of life, living off the land and the water. The little we do of that now is all that’s left.”
Warren started the motor and returned upriver. After pulling the boat out, he invited me back to his house for grilled croaker. While the fish cooked, he showed me family photos, beginning with black-and-white studio portraits of unsmiling, dark-haired forebears and ending with color pictures of his five smiling daughters, several of them blond. “The Indian blood is going out,” he said.
For the past several generations, few Pamunkey had married other Indians. There weren’t many in Virginia to choose from. Warren’s wife was white, and all his daughters had married non-Indians. “It’s getting harder and harder to define ourselves by blood,” Warren said.
It was also becoming hard to maintain Indian identity as tribal members moved off the reservation or commuted to the city. Warren had worked in Richmond as an art therapist and employment counselor, among other jobs. “People want to freeze-frame Indians—they don’t want me driving a nice car and living in a nice home,” he said. “But my dad didn’t want me to fish and trap. He wanted me to get an education and go into the world.”
Warren went to a shelf and pulled down a volume of John White’s drawings of sixteenth-century Algonquians. Flipping through portraits of tattooed, loinclothed natives, he said, “They’re part of my history; I’m interested in them. But I can’t relate to these people. We’re talking about the Stone Age. How are you going to identify with that?”
Even so, Warren had reproduced one of White’s drawings on his business card. A talented artist, he made jewelry of owls, spiders, and turtles, and painted natives in traditional regalia. When I pointed out that this seemed to suggest a strong identification with his distant forebears, Warren nodded. “Maybe I’m more Indian than I realize,” he said. “It’s part of me and it’s not. We’re all mixed up between two worlds.”
TORRENTIAL SPRING RAIN set in, so I broke off my tour of Powhatan country and camped out at the state archives in Richmond. It didn’t take me long to realize why Warren and other Indians I’d met seemed wary at first of inquisitive strangers. While Zuni resented prying anthropologists, Virginia’s eight surviving tribes had been victimized by a much deadlier species: whites who sought to deny they were Indians at all. The most virulent assault had occurred within living memory, in the guise of science, and had almost succeeded.
“The savage aborigines,” Walter Plecker wrote in a medical journal in 1925, were a “complete failure” at developing America’s natural bounty. Only the “great Nordic race” was capable of that. But early settlers made a “fatal mistake” by introducing “other savages, many being recent cannibals.” Over time, the mingling of African, Indian, and Caucasian blood had weakened America and threatened its purity and progress. “Race suicide” was imminent, “unless united, determined and radical measures are adopted before it is not too late.”
Plecker’s article, “Racial Improvement,” wasn’t the work of a lonely crank. He was a leader of the movement known as eugenics, a warped offshoot of Darwinism that sought to strengthen the gene pool by weeding out “inferior” strains. Plecker was also Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics, the keeper of its birth, death, marriage, and other records. This gave him the power and means to make the state a laboratory for his race-cleansing fanaticism.
To Plecker, Indians posed the gravest threat. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 denied white status to anyone with a trace of “non-Caucasian” blood, but permitted marriage between whites and Indians. Plecker believed the state’s Indians were actually mixed-breeds with African ancestry, making them “Mongrel Virginians” and covert agents of racial infection.
His solution was to expose, persecute, and purge anyone he regarded as impure, even alerting cemetery administrators to racially suspect corpses that had been buried alongside Caucasians. Plecker also disinterred antebellum records, which often listed both natives and free blacks as “colored.” Using this and other “evidence,” he set about reclassifying Virginia Indians as “Negro.” He changed birth certificates and forced local registrars, obstetricians, and midwives to do the same, so that children born to Indians were no longer Indian. In essence, Plecker waged statistical genocide against the few tribes in Virginia that had survived the earlier onslaught of war, disease, and dispossession.
“Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete,” Plecker boasted in 1943 of his “racial integrity” files, which tracked Virginians
’ “pedigrees” back more than a century.
Nazi atrocities discredited eugenics, and in 1946, Plecker finally retired, at the age of eighty-six. But his thirty-four-year reign of terror had a long afterlife. By altering or destroying records, he had damaged the paper trail Indians needed to gain federal recognition. Many natives fled the state to escape harassment, and most of those never returned. Others hid their Indian ancestry and melted into the white population. By the end of the twentieth century, only a few thousand Indians remained in Virginia: three-tenths of one percent of the population.
Even more insidious was the wedge Plecker drove between Indians and blacks, who often lived side by side in Virginia. To guard against the slightest suspicion of “impurity,” which would subject them to the third-class citizenship of blacks, Indians during the first half of the twentieth century had quarantined themselves. They formed their own churches and schools (or sent children to Indian schools in other states), avoided social contact with blacks, and enacted tribal statutes forbidding members to marry them.
“You had to be careful of the company you kept,” Gertrude Custalow told me. An elderly Mattaponi Indian, she lived at a reservation down the road from the Pamunkey. “If you were too close to a black person, you were ostracized by the tribe because it would give the state an excuse to take away our land.”
The scars of Plecker’s campaign lingered to the present day, and so did habit and tradition. Many Indians still kept their distance from blacks, and some tribes continued to forbid intermarriage. No such strictures applied to contact with whites. The result was a strange realignment. Indians whose ancestors had battled Europeans for survival were now thrown together with their historic persecutors. And while laws and taboos restricting contact between whites and blacks had eased, those sundering natives and blacks remained.
This divide was starkest in Charles City County, just west of Jamestown, where I headed once the rain subsided. The Chickahominy Indians who inhabited the county in the 1600s were entirely driven from their land, unlike the Pamunkey. But some returned in the 1800s, to what had become a plantation county where blacks outnumbered whites by two to one. Natives formally reconstituted the Chickahominy tribe in the late 1800s, aided by whites who wanted to divide the county’s nonwhite majority. But it wasn’t entirely clear who qualified as Chickahominy. Families split, with some members joining the tribe, and others not.
“This is my grandmother’s cousin; he was chief of the Chickahominy,” Richard Bowman said, showing me pictures on his living room mantel. “And this is my father-in-law, the one in the war bonnet. His grandmother and my father’s grandmother were sisters.”
What made this odd was that Richard also displayed a plaque of appreciation from the NAACP. He’d headed the local branch of the civil rights group in the 1960s, and led the fight to integrate schools in the county, an effort Indians joined whites in opposing.
Now a trim, bald man in his eighties, Richard had light brown skin, brown eyes, and high cheekbones—not unlike the people pictured in bonnets and buckskins in his living room photos. But he identified with a different tribe. “My grandmother was born a slave in 1860 on a plantation near here,” he said. “Others of my family were free blacks. I’m proud to be their descendant, too.”
Richard took me for a drive in his truck, past the Chickahominy tribal center and powwow grounds. Most of the people who lived in his rural community were tribal members, including the current chief, another relative of Richard’s. “I wouldn’t want better neighbors,” he said. “But we don’t socialize. They’re still frightened someone will call them ‘colored.’ ”
Richard acknowledged he might have Indian blood, too. “I’ve probably got all the major groups in me,” he said. “Race is a frame of mind. You are who you think you are. America’s a free country.” But it hadn’t always been so, and he wanted to ensure that remembrance of early Virginia included this legacy. “Jamestown wasn’t just about English and Indians,” he said. “A lot of other people’s roots go deep here, too.”
THIS WAS AN aspect of Jamestown’s story that had, until recently, attracted little notice. Just a year after the colony’s founding, a supply fleet brought eight Poles and Germans to the fort. Recruited for their skill at producing finished goods for export, they founded a glassworks at Jamestown, the continent’s first industrial enterprise. These forgotten Germans and Poles were, in a sense, forerunners of the immigrant tide that would fill America’s factories in the nineteenth century.
In 1619, another new labor force arrived. A ship under joint Dutch and English command landed at Point Comfort, east of Jamestown. The vessel, John Rolfe wrote, “brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes,” which the governor of the colony acquired in exchange for food. In another dispatch, Rolfe referred to the cargo as “Negars,” the first recorded use of the N-word in America.
The Africans had been pirated from a Portuguese slave ship en route from Angola to Mexico. Little is known of their fate in Virginia, which didn’t start codifying slavery until 1661. Some of the Africans may have been enslaved for life, others held as indentured servants, like poor whites, laboring for seven or more years before winning their freedom. A few early Africans became substantial landowners; one family moved to Maryland and named its seventeenth-century holding Angola.
But as Virginia’s plantation economy boomed, the status of blacks deteriorated. In 1705, the colony declared that slaves “shall be held, taken, and adjudged, to be real estate.” By 1790, when the newly created United States took its first census, there were almost 300,000 slaves in Virginia—40 percent of the state’s population.
If Point Comfort, where Africans were first sold in Virginia, was slavery’s Plymouth Rock, Charles City County represented its first great hub. Richard drove me along the James, where early colonists founded vast plantations, using Africans to grow tobacco and build some of the oldest and grandest estates in the South. One of these plantations passed down to a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who made a careful inventory of his 110 slaves, including several listed as “mad,” “crippled,” or “worthless.” The riverside estates later spawned forgettable presidents, William Henry Harrison and John Tyler. Several of the manors are now tourist attractions, with guided tours led by women in hooped skirts.
“Folks pay these days to see what slaves built,” Richard said. “Not that you’ll hear a lot about that on the tours. Mostly, they tell you about the furniture.”
Driving back inland, he turned down an avenue that led to a colonnaded brick mansion, more modest than those by the river. In the side yard we found a ruddy, white-haired man struggling with a swimming pool cover. Richard strode over and thrust out his hand. “I’m Richard Bowman,” he said. “My grandmother was born on this plantation.”
“Isn’t that something?” the man replied, smiling broadly as he grasped Richard’s hand. “I’m James Bailey, pleased to meet you.”
James was a retired Richmond stockbroker who had bought a thousand acres of what was once a twelve-thousand-acre plantation. He showed us a beautiful boxwood garden, then led us to a wooden outbuilding with a single large room and a sleeping loft above. “This here was one of the slave quarters,” he said. “We’ve found records dating it to at least 1720.”
Richard stepped inside, standing before the stone hearth. “My grandmother might have been here,” he said, “her feet could have patted over this floor.”
James nodded. “You can almost reach back and touch the past.”
If there was discomfort in their encounter, I couldn’t detect it. They chatted amiably about hunting and fishing and mutual acquaintances. Then Richard said he was on the committee planning the county’s upcoming commemoration of Jamestown’s four hundredth birthday. He asked if he could bring people here to see the plantation where their ancestors had lived and labored.
“That’s a great idea!” James said. The two men exchanged phone numbers and Richard drove back down the long avenue and through
the woods, back to his modest frame house. “A generation ago I don’t know if I’d have had the spunk to do that, and he wouldn’t have responded that way,” Richard said. “Times has certainly changed.”
RICHARD’S PARTING COMMENT stuck with me as I completed my tour of Powhatan’s vanished domain. Times had indeed changed in the way Richard meant, with the civil rights movement and the transformation it brought to the state. But viewing the same landscape through the lens of Virginia’s beginnings, and of my long, strange journey across America, I kept seeing shadows cast by much more distant events.
Four centuries after the wedding of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, marrying “out” was still a raw issue in southeast Virginia. The tobacco Rolfe planted was mostly gone, but the plantation slavery its cultivation spawned had left three races still jostling with one another, over the past as well as the present. Each person and group I’d encountered—Richard Bowman, the Pamunkey, the Descendants of Ancient Planters—was staking a claim to the same historic ground. As if to give Woody Guthrie’s famous song about America a new refrain: “This land is my land.”
I’d heard a similar chorus throughout my rambles: from Spanish and Pueblo in New Mexico, Catholic and Protestant in Florida, black and white and red and shades in between in North Carolina. When it came to memory of the country’s founding, Guthrie’s ribbon of highway wound back to a land that was made by me.
As a mere third-generation American, I didn’t have a horse in this race to the start line. Ellis Island was my family’s Plymouth Rock. This gave me the freedom, I thought, to rummage through other people’s attics without prejudice. Perhaps, in a roundabout way, I was honoring my own heritage, too. Some of my ancestors in czarist Russia were dissident “bomb throwers,” or so my family claimed. In homage to this, I liked exploding American icons and myths.
