Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  She felt her loneliness most sharply when she allowed her thoughts to roam back to Chawnzmit, to the days she had spent at the fort, learning the tassantassa tongue by his side. She had not seen Chawnzmit since the day he and his one-armed fellow had crowned Powhatan. Even had he still been her adopted brother, he could not have ushered her into the sacred lore of womanhood. Men were forbidden from that realm. But she missed him all the same. Matachanna was a good sister, and could be counted on to make a beautiful apron for Pocahontas’s blood ceremony. But Matachanna could not understand the stark yearning in her half sister’s heart, the unquenchable thirst. Matachanna did not know what it was like, to be not a gentleman in a gentleman’s world. Chawnzmit was the only one who understood, the only one who felt the cold stab of that particular pain.

  Gentleman. Pocahontas smiled rather sadly as she broke another ear of corn from a dry, rustling stalk and dropped it in the basket at her feet. It is strange how readily tassantassa words still come to my mind, though I have not spoken to a white man for nearly a whole moon.

  Matachanna stumbled upright from where she knelt, rustling beneath a low spread of squash leaves. She clutched a few gourds against her stomach. They were small, but their yellow flesh was streaked and speckled with green as bright and glowing as sunlight on summer leaves. “Let’s put these aside for our own supper tonight,” Matachanna said. She piled the squashes carefully beside Pocahontas’s basket. “I love the first roast squash of taquitock. It’s always delicious, but look how pretty these gourds are. Won’t they look lovely with the glowing coals all around them? I will braid your hair while we watch them cook.” Matachanna straightened, dusting her hands together. She peered sharply at Pocahontas’s face. “What are you smiling about?”

  “Roast squash.”

  “You are not. You hardly heard a word I said, and just for that, I’ll eat all the squash myself and you’ll get mix-pot stew.” She tugged fondly on Pocahontas’s braid. “I know that wistful look. You were thinking about boys.”

  Pocahontas flushed; her sister’s arrow had struck too close to the target. It would never do for anyone to know how often she thought about Chawnzmit.

  “Who is it?” Matachanna reached to snap ears of corn off a nearby stalk. The dry leaves rustled against her arms.

  “No one.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “No,” Pocahontas said desperately, “I can’t.”

  A poor choice of words: a misstep. Matachanna’s corn ears thudded into the basket, and she gaped at Pocahontas, wide-eyed and half-grinning. “Chawnzmit? You’re in love with him!”

  “Quiet! Father will be furious if he finds out you ever spoke that name. You know how he feels. And besides, I am not in love with Chaw—with that man. He was only a good friend, and I miss his company.”

  “Imagine loving a white man, anyway. I am glad you haven’t given your heart to . . . to that man, Amonute. You could never marry a tassantassa. Such a thing would only bring sorrow. They are too different from us.”

  “Are they so different?”

  “You know they are.”

  “But the women who danced that night . . . who lay with the white men . . .”

  “Oh, they all say the tassantassas are made like Real Men, only hairier. Otherwise they are the same in matters beneath the apron. But I’m not speaking of that. I’m speaking of marriage.”

  “Well, I don’t want to marry a white man.”

  “Then who do you wish to marry?”

  Pocahontas tore a corn leaf from her stalk. She twirled it between her fingers, brushed its crackling dryness over her lips. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought of it. Your heart is still set on Utta-ma-tomakkin, I suppose.”

  Matachanna’s dark lashes veiled her eyes. “Yes. And I know he wants me, too.”

  “You know? Have you spoken to him of marriage?”

  Matachanna giggled. She hid her face among the corn leaves. A breeze moved through the field, coaxing a last song from the spent plants, a dry whisper. Dapples of light and shade moved across Matachanna’s shy, beaming face. A deep stab of jealousy pierced Pocahontas, a fierce envy for the life of beautiful ease her half sister would lead. A powerful priest to marry, willing women to serve at her fire, happy children, ropes of pearls for her neck and her hair. Matachanna, stepping in time to the ordered dance of a contented life. Wanting for nothing. A place in the world.

  “What did he say?” Pocahontas asked, struggling to keep her voice light, to be glad in her spirit for her sister’s happiness.

  “He said he will speak to Father as soon as my first blood comes.” Matachanna’s face grew suddenly long. “Oh, Pocahontas, will it never come? I’m nearly the oldest girl who hasn’t entered the sweat lodge! I’ve asked the priests how to make my blood come faster, and they gave me herbs to eat and told me the dances I must do alone in the forest to entreat the Okeus and the moon spirit. But still, nothing.”

  “Perhaps you should ask Utta-ma-tomakkin to pray for your womanhood to arrive.”

  Matachanna sighed. “I have. He has been smoking and chanting for it, and he has sweated himself twice to speak directly to the Okeus. But still, I have no apron.”

  “I have heard the old women say that when harvests are poor, fewer girls enter the sweat lodge. But you are only fourteen. Sometimes it takes sixteen or seventeen winters before the courses come.” Matachanna’s face fell all the more. Pocahontas cast about for some way to cheer her. “Take comfort. Now is a terrible time to speak to Father, anyhow. The spirits are only protecting your heart, so that when Utta-ma-tomakkin finally goes to him, Father will be happy and will agree to send you off to your handsome priest’s longhouse. Then he will put together the biggest and best bride gift Tsenacomoco has ever seen!”

  Matachanna smiled at that, but she shook her head. “Father is terrible to speak to these days. He stares off into shadows with a haunted look in his eye. Half the time he doesn’t seem to hear anyone at all, even when they speak directly to him. Winganuske cannot even hold his attention for more than a moment, and she is his favorite wife. I’m beginning to fear a manitou may have hold of him.”

  “No,” Pocahontas said slowly, reluctantly. “It’s not a demon. He has been in this state ever since the tassantassas placed that metal hat on his head.”

  “You’re right. I never realized it.” Matachanna worked at the corn in thoughtful silence. At last she said, “The hat must have a spell on it. What else could steal away Father’s spirit? The tassantassas must have done it on purpose, to weaken him and humiliate him before the eyes of all his people! How could they, after we have been so kind to them?” She paused. A crow called in the momentary quiet—an omen of ill luck—and Matachanna glanced around sharply. Pocahontas saw the tiny hairs on her sister’s arms raise. Matachanna muttered, “I didn’t even know tassantassas had priests, but who else could work a spell into a metal hat?”

  Pocahontas knew the crown was not enchanted, though it certainly held a peculiar power. She did not fully understand the words Captain Newport had spoken on that fateful day, when the men leaned their weight against her father to bend his proud neck. But she had grasped the magic of those words. Sovereign. King. Loyal subject.

  Over the next several days, she often stole away from her duties, not to dance in privacy to incite the moon’s blood, as Matachanna did, or even to spy on the boys shooting for their morning meals. Instead, she wandered deep into the forest, trailing her hands absently over the boles of trees, feeling the turn of the season stirring beneath the rough bark, the subtle, fragrant vibration of rising sap and dying leaves.

  As she wandered, Pocahontas rolled the English words about like a pebble in her palm, watching them shift and flicker with her spirit’s inward eye. Sovereign. Subject. Here was tassantassa magic, and she alone understood how the spell had bound her father. Sooner or later, Powhatan would remember his useless, common
daughter, the one whose meddling had shamed his bloodline and landed his favorite son in dangerous captivity. He would remember Pocahontas and call on her, and she would have no choice but to speak the truth.

  Taquitock drew to a close. The gardens were stripped of their last small, precious yields. The harvest celebration went on for days, longer than any other festival in Pocahontas’s memory, a loud clamor of rattles and cries, of dancing and drums, ringing defiance against the thin stores packed away in the storage pits, the baskets half-full of half-naked corn ears. Popanow gathered in towers of high, gray cloud. The coming winter milled like a flock of crows on the eastern horizon.

  When the harvest celebration was over, and the men left Werowocomoco for the annual deer hunt, those women who were not engaged with gathering nuts or digging tuckahoe turned their hands to a new longhouse. It was to be a fine, large one—a yehakin fit for a powerful chief, even though the mamanatowick’s great house already stood at the center of the village.

  Pocahontas and Nonoma hauled a brace of freshly killed turkeys to the town’s central fire pit. They were weighty birds, fattened on the forest’s ample crop of acorns. The girls’ arms were weak with exhaustion by the time they settled beside the crackling embers of the great fire. Pocahontas pulled a turkey onto her lap and tore the gray down and shining brown coverts from tender, pale skin.

  “Why must we do this here, Amonute?” Nonoma spat as a stray clump of down drifted into her face, and she swiped at her tickling nose. “Our own longhouse’s fire is as good as this fire. And anyway, I hate plucking birds.”

  “I want to watch them build.” Her hands moved of their own accord, sorting the feathers by touch, casting the small, soft pieces into the fire pit, tucking the strong flight and tail feathers into a silk-grass pouch for later use.

  Now and then the breeze would shift, blowing the pungent, choking smoke of burning feathers into her face. She fanned the smoke away along with Nonoma’s complaints.

  Winganuske oversaw the effort of building. She snapped out commands to her team of women, who bent the cured and soaked saplings into high arcs and lashed them together with new sinews. By the time the girls had plucked six turkeys between them—Pocahontas doing most of the work—the frame of the longhouse had grown to nearly twice the length of an average home.

  “It’s going to be awfully large,” Nonoma said.

  “Another great house.”

  “Is Father moving, then?”

  Pocahontas shook her head. A blunt fear had begun to pound inside her head, a small and queasy worry. “I haven’t heard any word that the mamanatowick intends to move to a new yehakin.” She and Nonoma shared a long look. “I suppose,” Pocahontas said slowly, “another important chief may be moving here, to Werowocomoco.”

  “But that makes no sense. Why should any other werowance live here? They have their own territories to look after.”

  Pocahontas made no reply. There was only one werowance who might stake a claim in Powhatan’s capital. Winganuske’s gestures were avid and sharp, her body and voice brusque with the expectation of perfection. She wishes especially to impress my uncle when he arrives. So the finest and most beloved of the old bull’s herd was already planning to leave him, to cast off her old loyalties and bid for the favor of the new mamanatowick.

  “I never did like Winganuske,” Pocahontas said.

  Nonoma tossed a handful of feathers into the fire. White smoke lifted in a thick cloud. “Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  The women lashed long, straight saplings across the upright frames. Birch-bark strips would be threaded through these in the springtime, when the new sap running through the trees would leave the bark soft and flexible. One of the women finished tying her length of sinew and stood back, rolling her shoulders to loosen a cramp. She turned and caught sight of Pocahontas with her heap of turkeys. The woman waved, a tentative, almost shy gesture, and made her way across the grounds to the fire pit.

  “Anawanuske.”

  “Hello, Amonute.”

  “It’s a fine new longhouse you’re building.”

  “I cannot talk long. Winganuske will want me working. But Powhatan asked me to send you to his side if I caught sight of you.”

  Pocahontas held her breath. The day she had long feared had come. The air seemed full of spirits, crowding around her, pressing her with urgent, forceful hands. She closed her eyes; she could not tell in which direction she was being pushed.

  “Nonoma, take the turkeys back to our house.”

  “By myself?”

  “Run home and fetch Matachanna. She’ll help you. I don’t know when I will return from Father’s great house.”

  It was not Kocoum who held aside her father’s door flap, but a young warrior unfamiliar to her. Kocoum had joined the hunts this year. She imagined him moving through the violet twilight of woodland shadow, draped in a deerskin, crowned with the face and ears of a doe. She pictured the furtive dance of deception, the gentle step and bent neck of fellowship, the doe’s placid face offered to the prey while inside the skin, the slick and hairless body of a predator was waiting, deadly and eager.

  Powhatan sat on the edge of his high bedstead. His hands lay folded on his apron. Beside him, gleaming dully in the light of the heart fire, the English crown crouched with its sharp spines erect. Pocahontas halted, wordless, waiting, her eyes caught by the crown’s bright jewels like a fish in a weir.

  “Amonute. Pocahontas.” His voice was soft, resigned. From outside, at the center of Werowocomoco, a rhythmic pounding rose like drums in a distant wood: the sound of the women building Opechancanough’s longhouse. “Long have I looked at this strange hat, this gift from the white invaders. It has some meaning that I cannot discern. Some power.”

  She shuffled her feet in the dust of his fire ring.

  He lifted a hand to point toward the crown. The hand shook with his old man’s tremor. “Tell me what this means, child.”

  A hard and painful lump formed in her throat. She swallowed with difficulty. “I don’t know, Father.”

  “You do. Tell me.”

  She heaved a deep, hollow sigh. A heaviness pulled at her heart, dragging her down, as if a manitou had sunk its black claws into her spirit. “It . . . the crown . . . makes you subservient to the white mamanatowick. It makes you no more than a tanx—at least in the eyes of the tassantassas.”

  Powhatan stiffened. His eyes seemed to stare far beyond her, beyond the walls of his longhouse. “They think to have all for themselves. They think to cow me, to make me small.”

  There was a day when Pocahontas would have protested, a time when she would have argued for the goodness of Chawnzmit, if for no other white man. But she could no longer deny the truth of her father’s words, and so she held her tongue as he summoned the few men who remained in Werowocomoco. She sat at his feet, holding a gourd full of water to serve the men as they approached to receive their instructions. She listened as the men repeated the message they would carry to every territory in Tsenacomoco, to even the smallest of villages, the most insignificant tanx. She gazed down into her gourd, watching her dim reflection tremble with the ragged beat of her heart. Again and again she heard the men recite Powhatan’s command: No one is to trade with the tassantassas, even if they come to you. Even if they use force. Anyone who provides the white traitors with food or other succor shall be killed—man, woman, or child—and any tribe that aids them will be destroyed as the Chessiopiak were destroyed, wholly and completely, down to the merest babe.

  When the last messenger had departed, Powhatan stood. Pocahontas followed him down the length of his dark and empty hall, giving him her shoulder to lean upon as he ducked through the flap of his own door. They stood together, blinking in the brightness of day. A cold wind gusted through Werowocomoco. It stripped a great flurry of red leaves from the trees and scattered them down the lanes of the capita
l, tossing and playing them among the figures of the women whose backs were bent to raise Opechancanough’s longhouse.

  Powhatan watched the leaves swirl around the dark dot of the communal fire pit. His eyes avoided the new construction, slid away from the sight of Winganuske hard at work on another man’s dwelling. The mamanatowick grunted in knowing approval at the wind and leaves. “It will be an especially harsh winter, little Mischief. The white men will starve without our aid. It is certain. They will drop like flies in the frost.”

  She dashed the tears from her eyes with the back of her wrist, before Powhatan could see them fall.

  Popanow closed over the land, choking light from the days with a cold, hard fist. The season was as bitter as Powhatan had predicted it would be. The covers on the women’s storage pits froze in place beneath thick ice; the steel axes and knives that had been traded or stolen from the white men passed from hand to hand as the people of Werowocomoco labored to reopen their caches. Women took to the marshlands, wrapping hands and feet in strips of fur-lined leather. They hacked at the hard, frozen ground with digging sticks and axes, prying long, pale tuckahoe roots from the mud. The tubers were wrinkled and tasted dry and bland, but they would stretch the meager stores of food until springtime.

  During these dark and terrible days, Pocahontas spent more time with Powhatan than she ever had before. Since that autumn afternoon when she had seen him in his trembling wonder, helpless before the spell of the tassantassa crown, Pocahontas had taken on a significance to her father that she scarcely understood. He clung to her presence, keeping her as close as a priest kept his best talisman. But Pocahontas was under no illusions. This was not the role she had long desired, a place as her father’s trusted advisor, hard won through excellence and useful service. Her proximity to him was almost punitive, as if he feared that if his daughter went free, all of Werowocomoco would learn of his shame, the strange thrall the white men’s tanx hat had inflicted upon him.