Historical Heroines
Page 16
When Phoolan’s gang arrived in Behmai, she only found two of the men involved in her rape. Allegedly she shot or ordered the shooting of all the men in the village out of sheer frustration but Phoolan claimed she had no part in it. True or not, a massive manhunt began, which she evaded for two years with help from the lower caste community, until sickness halted her. She negotiated surrender – no death penalty and a prison term of eight years. The authorities agreed then threw her in prison for twelve years without a trial. Who knows how long she may have rotted there if the Chief Minister of Utter Pradesh, a staunch supporter, hadn’t successfully appealed for her release.
After prison she carried on her fight for the downtrodden but this time she did it legally winning a seat in India’s government as a member of the socialist party in 1996. She was India’s marmite though, whilst adored by the people she represented, the middle classes were repulsed by her past. She needed bodyguards 24 hours a day. Despite her protection she was shot dead in 2001 by relatives of those killed in the village massacre.
Above all she was a champion for women at the bottom of social hierarchies. Although illiterate, she narrated her story to two ghost writers so she could speak on behalf of the women lost in those dark depths. She was born into deprivation and she became a queen. A powerful message for India’s damned.
Pocahontas (1596–1617)
The story of Pocahontas has been hijacked by Disney. Although they depicted her as a fabulous, nature-loving heroine, is it really a plus for woman’s history to change someone’s story so radically? Not to mention reducing them to a piece of merchandise?
The real Pocahontas may well have been fabulous but flaws make a person real and generally more interesting. What was it really like for her, living at the lowest rung of the ladder, as both a woman and a dispossessed minority in a colonial, male world? Not all singing birds and helpful bunnies one imagines.
So whilst Pocahontas lives in so many people’s imagination as a free-spirited peacemaker, she still sits perfectly in a female Native American cliché bubble – an anatomically impossible Barbie doll dressed in suede and feathers. Even without Disney’s distortion of her character, it’s still difficult to tease out the truth. Information either comes from the viewpoint of male colonial settlers or from the oral story telling of the Mattaponi tribe. These accounts are totally opposing and there is little of Pocahontas’s voice. She is always the third person and never the narrator.
Mattaponi oral story tellers agree with Walt that this is a love story, just not one between her and the colonial leader John Smith (she would have been 10 when she met him), but that of a father and daughter. All the historical accounts agree she was a daddy’s girl, daughter of the chief of the Powhatan tribe, Wahunsenaca. She is presented as being key to cordial relations with the English – ‘The Peace of Pocahontas’.
Some of her story has been cobbled together from John Smith. However he writes several years later after the infamous Powhatan rebellion that slaughtered so many of the Virginian colonists. It can be assumed he had an agenda. His famous story that she placed her head in front of his to prevent the chief slaughtering him has many holes. First 10-year-old girls were not allowed to be present at ceremonies and this particular ceremony was to honour him as chief of the English colonists. The Powhatan tribe had made similar allegiances with other neighbouring tribes to avoid war and they perceived the Virginians as just another tribe. It seems unlikely that a feature of the ceremony was to club the honoree’s head in. However at the time he was writing to Queen Anne asking to introduce his ‘civilised Indian’ Pocahontas and needed to ensure she was sufficiently entertaining.
The whole story of the Virginian colonists and the Powhatan tribe is awash with misunderstandings that have been thoroughly lost in translation. It’s unlikely that she brought food and supplies for the starving colonists of her own volition. She was probably sent with envoys as a sign of peace. However, relations with the English deteriorated badly. There was a drought and food was scarce. The colonists raided native settlements frequently and fiercely. During this time Pocahontas married Kocoum, a member of the Patawomeck tribe, and oral history remembers them having a child. She would have been around 14. John Smith had returned to England by now.
The English re-enter her life in 1613 when Captain Samuel Argall, desperate to restore order, kidnapped her and held her life to ransom. According to the colonists, she was brought to Jamestown where she was treated well and converted to Christianity. She was married in 1614 to John Rolfe, an English widower who finally rescued the dying settlement by introducing tobacco crops. They had a son called Thomas.
The Manatoponi remember differently. According to her sister, who was brought to keep her company, Pocahontas was severely depressed, unsurprisingly. She had been raped and when pregnant forced to marry John Rolfe. He needed her to gain access to important tobacco crops. She appeared willing so she did not make things worse for her people. Nevertheless relations improved as the marriage created a kinship allegiance.
The Virginia Company was desperate for more support from England and sent Pocahontas and John to London as proof that they were successful in civilising the ‘savages’ and converting them to Christianity. English society found her enchanting in much the same way you might find a new exhibit captivating. A sign that Pocahontas was not the willing participant claimed was when they bumped into John Smith and she refused to acknowledge him.
On their way home just before they were about to embark at Gravesend, she grew seriously ill and passed away. What killed her is anyone’s guess but some believe she was poisoned having outlived her usefulness. Regardless any peace between the British and the Native Americans died with her.
Policarpa ‘La Pola’ Salavarrieta (c. 1791–14 November 1817)
The heroine of Colombian independence and a member of the Colombian resistance, Policarpa worked as a seamstress as her cover for being spy with the Revolutionary forces when Spain was fighting to regain control of the colony of New Grenada (now Colombia).
Born in Guaduas, in either 1791 or 1795, depending on which historical source you consult, the daughter of Joaquin Salvarrieta, a merchant, and Mariana de Rios, Policarpa was one of eight children. Her parents, brother Eduardo and sister Maria Ignacia died in the smallpox outbreak in 1802.
In 1817 she moved to Bogotá, which was full of Spanish Royalists keen for General Pablo Morillo, aka ‘The Pacificator’, to continue his so-called Reign of Terror. ‘The Pacificator, Brigadier D. Pablo Morillo, arrived,’ wrote the wife of a Bogotá physician in a personal account, ‘and immediately began the persecution. He imprisoned all revolutionaries, surprising them at night in their homes …’
Using forged identity documents, La Pola moved from house to house, ‘working’ for the women of Spanish Royalist households, wives and daughters of their officers and soldiers, all the while keeping her ear close to the ground and gathering crucial information to pass on to the resistance. She collected money, made uniforms and hid soldiers. She was a brilliant recruiter, with a keen eye for those wanting to move to the side of the Revolutionaries. Eventually discovered, her execution by Spanish Royalist firing squad for treason was witnessed by a 19-year-old soldier, Jose Hilario Lopez, who went on to become President of the Republic of Colombia (although he saved his own skin on arrest by defecting and joining the Royalist forces).
It seems absolutely certain that Policarpa’s tongue was never silenced. One account has Policarpa being led into the square yelling so much to the crowd that the Spanish governor feared that the lesson he was trying to impress on the people would be lost. He gave orders for the drummers to beat louder. Still Policarpa raved on, admonishing the soliders for not turning their rifles on the authorities, berating the firing squad for preparing to shoot a woman. Policarpa was in fact not the first woman to be executed under Morillo’s regime of terror. At least five other patriot women, in Cali, Cucuta, Tumaco, Popayan and Charala, had been executed. More would follow. �
�Assasins!” Policarpa is said to have shouted. ‘My death will soon be avenged.’
Forced to face the wall, hands tied behind her back, she was executed.
There is no record of her birth certificate, although those of her siblings survive. There is an annual holiday of celebration in her honour, the ‘Day of the Colombian Woman’, she features on Colombian banknotes and there is a statue of her in Bogotá.
Princess Olga (c. 890–969)
Princess Olga of Kiev ruled from 945–c. 963. No one fits the angel-demon cliché more than her. Renowned for burying men alive and setting fire to an entire town because they killed her husband Igor, she somehow was canonised in 1547 as a saint, the first woman in Russia to achieve this accolade.
Kievan Rus (as early Russia was known) at this time was made up of many tribal villages all managed by the capital Kiev. These tribes paid tribute in the form of goods such as furs and honey in an annual trip made by the regent.
Unfortunately Prince Igor got a bit greedy and spectacularly underestimated the Slavic Drevlian people. Having already collected tribute, he decided to ask for more – that didn’t work out well for Oliver Twist – and the Drevlians killed him for breaking the Viking’s equivalent of a gentleman’s agreement.
The Drevlians, now a bit cocky, decide to assume power by marrying their leader Prince Mal to Igor’s widow Olga, who was now acting regent for her toddler son Sviatoslav (try saying that three times really fast). It was their turn to become victims of woeful underestimation.
Olga pandered to their egos by agreeing to the engagement and asking the delegation to come to Kiev the next day as honoured guests carried in on their boats – a Kiev tradition. Flattered, the delegation retired for the night and as they slept Olga’s people dug a giant ditch. The next morning whilst preening like peacocks on their ceremonial boats they were rather dishonourably chucked in the ditch, followed by Olga giving the order to bury them – ALIVE!
Act 2 of Olga’s revenge sees her invite Drevlian’s VIPs to meet her people to encourage support for the marriage. Innocent of what has befallen their brothers, they duly arrived to be hospitably invited to refresh in the bathhouse. As soon as they entered, the doors are locked and the bathhouse set on fire, burning them ALIVE! There’s a theme emerging.
Still blissfully ignorant of Olga’s psychotic acts, the people of the Drevlian capital Iskorosten agree to attend a memorial feast at her husband’s grave when she arrives at their capital. Her servants ply them with drink until they are so drunk they barely notice being massacred by her army. Well, they say alcohol numbs pain.
Finally after she invades them with her army, the survivors cotton on that Olga doesn’t fancy marriage or indeed any form of alliance and they plead with her to stop, offering their best tributes. She agrees on the proviso they send her three pigeons and three sparrows from every household. Olga orders her people to attach rags drenched in sulphur to the birds’ legs and then release them to fly home to their roosts in the Drevlian capital. When the highly flammable sulphur ignites, the town and its people (ALIVE) are burnt to the ground.
All a jolly good yarn to tell little Russians with the light out, but probably heavily embellished having been written down by a couple of monks (who would have loved Stephen King) in The Tale of Bygone Years several generations after the devilish deeds were carried out. Although there is no doubt that the Vikings would have demanded some form of ghastly retribution.
Olga was an effective ruler, possibly a lot more than her son proved to be, changing the haphazard and dangerous tribute system into a well-run tax organisation, consolidating the many tribes under her rule and defending the city from the 968 Siege of Kiev whilst Sviatoslav was gallivanting on failed foreign invasion attempts.
All this begs the question – how did such a fiercely independent and ruthless woman become a saint? It seems that after asking to be baptised by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, possibly as a political move to ally with the growing powers of the powerful Byzantine Church, she takes to Christianity like a duck to baptised waters. Constantine also asks to marry her – nothing like the promise of a kingdom to make men want you. She’s just not interested and expertly rejects him saying now you are my Christian godfather how can we get married? Luckily he takes it in good humour replying, ‘Olga you have outwitted me.’
She can’t persuade her son and his subjects to convert but she has such an influence on her grandson little Vladimir that when he assumes power he successfully christanises Kievan Rus. The Church credits her with bringing Jesus to the heathen pagans of Russia, thereby saving many souls. Saint Olga is portrayed as looking humble, pious and subservient – you’ve got to love papal propaganda.
As she had been canonised by this point for introducing Christianity to Russia, the monks probably wanted to proselytise that even the most evil pagans can be redeemed by Christ.
Ruby Bridges (1954–)
On the morning of 14 November 1960, 6-year-old Ruby Nell Bridges became the first African-American child to attend William Frantz, an all-white elementary school in the American South. She had a military escort and her mother accompanied her. The event would make her an historic and pivotal member of the civil rights movement.
Her parents were sharecroppers and moved to New Orleans when Ruby (born in Tylertown, Mississippi) was 4. Her father found work at a petrol station and her mother took on night jobs in order to make ends meet. Soon Ruby had another sister and two other brothers; they all shared a room in a small apartment.
At that time schools were segregated. Ruby had a kindergarten near her home, but it was for whites only. She instead travelled several miles to attend an all-black school. Her parents were insistent that she take the ‘white school’ test – a notoriously difficult test to see whether a black child was intelligent enough to attend a white school. Ruby passed.
It was a mere five streets away but on her first day she was driven there accompanied by federal marshals. She spent the entire day in the head teacher’s office. Nearly all the parents of the white children had either kept them at home or came to the school to collect them. Heaven forbid their white children be in the company of a black child. Three other 6-year-old black girls (Tessie Prevost, Gail Etienne and Leona Tate) also made history, attending McDonogh No. 19 School.
For that first school year Ruby had a teacher (white) and a classroom all to herself. She learnt alone. The other two students in the school were white, and learned in a separate classroom. The school was effectively still segregated. The school itself lost a large number of pupils; parents withdrew their children either out of disgust for integration or out of fear at the anger expressed by protestors outside the school. Those who allowed their children to remain also faced resentment for supporting integration.
John Updike, who like fellow writer John Steinbeck, watched events unfold at the school and remarked on the rapid decline in the numbers of students at the school, which originally had around 1,000 pupils enrolled. Other consequences were that Ruby’s father was fired from his job and her grandparents were forced off the land they had been sharecropping for the last quarter of a century.
These experiences couldn’t fail to shape Ruby’s life. A civil rights activist, she worked as a travel agent for fifteen years after high school. She married Malcolm Hall, had four sons and established the Ruby Bridges Foundation, dedicated to fighting racial prejudice and promoting tolerance and respect. Unveiled in 2014, there is now a statue of Ruby Bridges outside William Frantz School. US President Bill Clinton awarded Ruby the Presidential Citizen’s Medal in 2001.
Sacajawea (c. 1788–1812)
In 1803, and under President Thomas Jefferson, the US conducted the Louisiana Purchase and bought over 800,000 unexplored square miles of land for $15 million from France. Subsequently the Corps of Discovery Expedition set off to map out a route from Missouri and the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific and back again.
Accompanying them on the 1805–6 voyage of discovery was bili
ngual Shoshone tribe member Sacajawea. She was the only female on the trip. Although ostensibly brought along for her skills as a translator, Sacajawea was also a herbalist, plant expert and guide to the Corps, led by President Jefferson’s 29-year-old secretary Meriwether Lewis and his friend and co-captain 33-year-old William Clark. She helped them trade, barter and traverse the unfamiliar terrain.
It is not known how Sacajawea felt or what she said. No one even knows what she looked like. There are also debates on whether she died when the history books claim she did. What is known is that Sacajawea was born in the Lemhi River Valley (now Idaho), and was part of the Lemhi group of the Native American Shoshone tribe.
Kidnapped in 1800, when she was only 12, during a buffalo hunt by rival tribe Hidatsa she was sold as a slave to fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau. She became the second of his wives (like the Native Americans he lived with, he practised polygamy) and soon bore him a son. Just two months after Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau was born, on 11 February 1805, Sacajawea, with her husband and newborn, joined the explorers.
Historians are wary of attempts to romanticise her story and are likely appalled by her stereotypical Native American depiction in Hollywood movie Night at the Museum. The journals of Clark and Lewis and other members of the Corps reveal a cold lack of empathy for Sacajawea; they never agreed on a common spelling for her name and often just called her squaw, Indian woman or Indian girl. Clark referred to Sacajawea as the group’s ‘token of peace’ and noted that he witnessed Charbonneau striking his wife during a meal.