Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  The reverend gave a dry chuckle. “In truth, I do not see him—not with my eyes. But I am not a great man, Pocahontas. I try to be humble, and God knows it is not always easy. But I know that I am far from great.”

  She gazed down at her hands, nodded her understanding. “I am also far from great, though once, greatness was all I aspired to.”

  “Oh?”

  “When I was a child, I was wild and selfish, and full of ambition. I did all I could to serve my own ends, but in the end, it brought me only grief. Worse, it brought grief to everyone I love. I think I shall never be able to forgive myself for that . . . that sin.”

  She had heard him talk of sin often enough. The familiar word seemed to brighten him. “Sin is a terrible burden, and ambition always has a sting. But there is forgiveness. Through Christ, we are granted redemption for even the worst of our sins.”

  Christ. Reverend Whitaker spoke often of the half god. John Rolfe was fond of Christ, too. Pocahontas did not understand what made the English deity so noteworthy, and if Christ was so quick to forgive the English for the terrors they had wrought throughout Tsenacomoco, she wanted no part of him, even if he could remove the burden of guilt from her spirit. But John and the reverend both seemed sincere in their Christ belief, and both men were kind to her. She was willing to grant a small, tentative peace to Christ, for their sakes.

  “I understand your difficulty,” the reverend said. “At least, I sympathize with it. You feel you have no place here; you are caught between two worlds. You cannot even bear to don the full garments of an Englishwoman.”

  She turned to him sharply. “I am not an Englishwoman, and besides, the full garments are terrible. Have you ever worn a bodice and sleeves, Reverend Whitaker?”

  He chuckled. “Of course not. In truth, they do seem quite terrible. But one can grow used to them.”

  “One can grow used to anything, I suppose. Even captivity.”

  “Never you, though. You tolerate this . . . this circumstance, but you are not used to it.”

  “No. I have no choice but to tolerate—until I am finally returned home.”

  Reverend Whitaker drew in a breath and moved his head as if to speak, but held back his words. An owl called into the pause, distant and small.

  “Perhaps there is a place for you here, Pocahontas. A true place, not this uncomfortable captivity. A way for you to have a home again . . . at least until you are returned,” he added hastily.

  “What do you mean?”

  “John Rolfe has grown very fond of you over these months you have spent together.”

  She waited, digging her fingernails into the wood of the wall.

  “He has approached me about the possibility of marrying you.”

  Pocahontas burst out laughing. It tasted bitter and scornful. “Marry me! I am not a fool, Reverend. It is only a ploy to tie me down, to bind me tighter to Jamestown. To keep me longer, and never let me go.”

  Reverend Whitaker sighed. “Sometimes,” he said, “Christ provides his redemption wrapped in packages that at first glance make little sense to us.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. You must speak plainly to me.”

  He answered her tart challenge with gentle words. “There is no stopping what has already begun, Pocahontas. The English will not go away. We will not leave your land. If your people and mine are to live side by side, we must find some way of forging a peace. Do you understand?”

  Pocahontas swallowed hard, and did not answer.

  Reverend Whitaker laid a hand gently on her own. “Think on what I have said, child. Only think on it—that is all I ask.”

  He turned away, leaving her alone on the watchtower.

  Somewhere deep in the forest, a ring of torches drew tight. She felt the deer’s foot lift, felt its ear turn. She felt the arrow fly from the bow.

  “My girl,” Mary chided, “won’t you wear shoes? It snowed overnight and the ground is as cold as ice! Mercy, it is ice. Be sensible, please.”

  Since the summer had drawn to a close, Mary had made it her most vital task to force Pocahontas’s feet into the stiff leather of a proper Englishwoman’s shoes. Pocahontas had accepted the wool stockings readily enough. They itched, but when layered they were nearly as warm as good fur-lined leggings. The shoes, however, she could not tolerate. They held her feet in a rigid grip just as fearful as the bodice. The few times she had tried to walk in them, she had hobbled and pitched like an ancient grandmother leaning on a stick.

  “Stockings are warm enough for me.”

  “You’ll catch your death,” Mary said, not for the first time, and threw up her hands in surrender.

  The earth was indeed cold, but so hard-frozen that Pocahontas’s feet remained dry in her woolen stockings. Together with Mary and a handful of other women, all of them bundled in fur capes and thick scarves, she made her way toward the palisade gates.

  For the first time since her arrival, she would go through the gates. Someone, Reverend Whitaker, or perhaps John Rolfe, had convinced Lord De La Warr that Pocahontas could be trusted not to flee. Indeed, how could she flee without a canoe to carry her upriver? Besides, now that most of the Real People had retreated to distant villages, the nearest occupied territory was Pattawomeck, home to the very people who had sold her into captivity. Nonoma would rejoice to see her again. She could claim another copper kettle if she returned Pocahontas to the fort.

  As they crossed the plank pathway at the fort’s center, Pocahontas kept her hand in the crook of Mary’s elbow, enjoying the warmth of her friend’s furs. She had often watched as the women of the fort “took the air,” gliding along the river in their skirts like upturned baskets, smiling and laughing. Sometimes they gathered herbs along the edges of the marsh, or in the summer picked flowers for their tables. Now and then the women would fall silent and stand gazing downriver—dreaming, Pocahontas thought, of their far-off home. Men were always close at hand with muskets slung over their shoulders and their watchful eyes on the forest. Taking the air seemed to be an important ritual of womanhood. As strange as these English wives were, with their restrictive clothing and shyness, their aversion to hard work and their hours of idleness, Pocahontas was pleased to be included at last among their rituals. She caught sight of the gate ahead, looming between two rows of cabins, and her heart quickened.

  Pocahontas squeezed Mary’s arm. “Come—let us go faster!”

  “Patience, child. Plenty of time to . . .”

  A shout rose up beyond the gate. The men on the watchtowers readied their muskets.

  “God have mercy,” Mary muttered. “What is it?”

  The voice called again: a male voice, angry and indignant. “I seek Lord-del-a-wair.” He spoke English with a heavy, stilted accent. It could only be a Real Person.

  One of the men on the watchtower waved his arm in a gesture of the trade language. Go away.

  Pocahontas dropped Mary’s arm and ran toward the gate. The men on guard shook their heads and warded her back with their hands. “I’m sorry, Princess,” one said. “It’s not safe to go out just now.”

  “That man—I can speak to him.”

  “Lord’s orders, my lady. The gates stay closed.”

  She moved along the flat face of the gate until she found its hinge. The gap was wide enough here that she could peer through. The thick wood of gate and palisade restricted her vision, but she could see brief flashes of a body crossing her narrow view: a man was pacing outside. She caught a glimpse of Pattawomeck tattoos. A messenger from Japazaws? Or had Powhatan bought the loyalty of a Pattawomeck and hired him to carry a message to Pocahontas? Her hands pressed helplessly against the gate.

  “Message,” the man called out.

  “No message now,” came the answer from the watchtower. “Come back at night.”

  The messenger did not understand. He must have rehearsed th
e sound of his few English words, but knew nothing of what the white men shouted back to him. In frustration he cried out in the Real Tongue. “Let me in!”

  The man waved his arms, shook a fist, all to no avail. At last he started toward the gate.

  “Back!” one of the white men shouted. “Halt! Come no closer.”

  The Pattawomeck messenger came on. His face was determined. It filled Pocahontas’s vision.

  A shot cracked in the cold morning air. She felt the vibration of it leap through the earth and the wool of her stockings burned against her skin with the shot’s reverberation. The man’s face froze and he dropped out of sight.

  Pocahontas sprang away from the gate, gasping. Mary was at her side, clutching her, pulling her face against the fur swathing her breast.

  “Come away, Princess. Come away!”

  She fought her way free of Mary’s embrace. “Open the gate!”

  Men were gathering, milling about; they would go out to the man now that they had felled him—now that it was too late to hear the message he carried.

  Somebody said roughly, “Get the women away from here.”

  Mary tugged at her hand, but Pocahontas rounded on the men. “You shot him! He wasn’t even armed!”

  “You don’t know that,” Mary whispered.

  “I saw the man! You killed him for no reason!”

  “Widow Mary, keep the princess well back. There may be more savages out there.”

  Hands closed on her wrists, took her by the shoulders. Not only Mary’s but many soft hands—the women of the fort, closing around her in a sympathetic ring.

  “Poor dear,” one of them muttered. “Come away. You’ll only make yourself miserable if you stay to see.”

  The circle of women shuffled her back, tucked her against a cabin wall, and held her there. Pocahontas stared about wildly as the palisade gates opened. Men edged through, arms at the ready, but when they were certain there were no more Real People to be found, they relaxed. Pocahontas peered between the women’s cloaks while the men moved around the Pattawomeck’s body.

  One of them bent and lifted the knot of the man’s braid. The messenger’s head rose at a sickening angle and then fell back again. When the bells in his braid chimed, the Englishmen laughed. One lifted his head again and let it fall, like a child idly playing with a poppet.

  The women of the circle hid their eyes in distaste, but Pocahontas pushed at them, shoving past their grasping hands until she was free. She ran across the frozen ground, her white shift flying. She opened her mouth to shout, but another voice stole her words. She halted in wonder.

  “Stop it! In Christ’s name, show some respect for the dead.” John Rolfe came rushing from another direction, still pulling his cloak about his shoulders. Pocahontas pressed herself against the wall of a cabin and watched as John berated the men, driving them back from the messenger’s body with a hard stare. The men slunk away like dogs. John stooped, touching the Pattawomeck gently here and there, and then closed the man’s staring eyes and stood over him a moment with head bent in silent prayer.

  A familiar hand slipped into Pocahontas’s own.

  “Mary.”

  “Come, darling. There is nothing you can do for the poor man. John Rolfe will see to him—he’ll see that the fellow is treated proper.”

  That night, after she had helped with the washing up from a supper she hardly tasted, Pocahontas slipped from the cabin to pace the lanes of Jamestown. She would have liked to climb to the pinnacle of a watchtower, as she often did when this sad, pensive mood came upon her. But the Pattawomeck man had been shot from one of those towers, and tonight she could not bear the view. She would see nothing from that vantage but the messenger, small and vulnerable against the ground.

  She dallied at the well, listening to the soft echo of water shifting underground. She watched clouds creep like spreading stains across a pale, distant moon. The moon was ringed with a halo of white. There would be snow again soon.

  Pocahontas moved aimlessly, letting her feet carry her where they would. She wrapped her arms about her body to ward off the chill. She would have to ask Mary for a cloak. English cloaks were very long and, like all their clothing, restrictive. But at least the cloaks were flowing, like her linen shift. She would be warmer, without yielding to the captivity of bodice, sleeves, and shoes.

  She passed shuttered windows through which the barest flickers of firelight danced, seeping from the cracks, moving like ripples of water against the black of old wood. Women and men slept behind those shutters. Soon Jamestown would fill with children—and more women and men would come, riding the waves on their great ships, an unending flood spilling over Tsenacomoco. She thought of the Pattawomeck man, dead because he did not understand, and hot tears stung her eyes, burning as they slid down her cold cheeks.

  Her feet found the smooth-worn threshold of the chapel. She looked up at the door uncertainly. It was late—perhaps Reverend Whitaker was not within.

  A wind gusted down the lane, tearing at her shift and stinging the bare skin beneath. She wrapped her arms more tightly, and when the wind died away, she pushed the chapel door open. Even if the church was empty, at least it would be warmer there than the alleys of Jamestown.

  Inside, a circle of yellow light spread upon the far wall. Reverend Whitaker sat at the little table where she took her reading lessons, writing in his record book with a white plume. The stub of a lone candle burned on a shallow dish at his elbow.

  He greeted her with his soft, distracted smile. “Pocahontas.”

  She moved carefully through the pews, feeling her way in the half darkness with hands numb from the cold, and sat across from the reverend.

  “What brings you here tonight?” he said.

  “I am troubled in my spirit.”

  He laid down the plume. “What troubles you, child?”

  “A man was killed today. A Pattawomeck.”

  “I have heard. A sad tale. You are grieving for him—is that it?”

  “Yes.” She studied the tabletop. She could read the carvings now: T.S. 1611. R.W. shot a savage Apr. 1612. Her eyes slid away. “John Rolfe is a good man, Reverend Whitaker.”

  “He is indeed.” The reverend laughed softly. “What brought on that thought, I wonder?”

  “Today, when the man from Pattawomeck was shot, John Rolfe stopped the other men from . . . from disrespecting the body. He did this not for me—not because he knew how my heart broke to see it. He did it because it was right.”

  The reverend waited. More words balanced on her tongue, tipping this way and that, deciding whether they would topple out of her mouth or fall back down her throat into silence. She swallowed. She was not yet prepared to speak further of John Rolfe.

  But she did speak on. “I want redemption, Reverend. I want to make whole what I can—what can still be saved from breaking—if anything can be saved. If it is not too late.”

  “I believe much can be saved. I believe it is not too late—not for all. Not for you.”

  “I do not do this for me. I have no ambitions anymore, no dreams of greatness for myself. When I became a woman, I took a new name, and I asked the Okeus to grant me a loving and generous heart. What I do, I do for others—for my own people. Let no more be killed. Let my sacrifice keep them safe.”

  “Someone has surely answered your prayer, whether my God or your own, for yours is a loving, generous heart indeed.”

  His smile said it could be only his God who had granted her wish. But it was a kindly smile, so she did not correct him.

  She lowered her lashes. “I will accept your Christ as my god. I will be content to live among your people, here at Jamestown. Baptize me, and I pray that your God will make me a bridge between our two worlds, so that all men may go in peace.”

  “A noble prayer, Pocahontas.”

  At the sound of her na
me—the old name, long lost—she looked up. “I ask one thing of you. Among my people, we take new names at times such as these. When boys become men, and girls become women. When warriors become chiefs, or when a person has a great and true vision.”

  “I see.”

  “Grant me a new name, Reverend Whitaker, for this is a time when I stand at a fork in the trail. I have chosen my path. I turn my back on the other. Give me a new name to carry with me as I walk.”

  “Naming a person is a fearful responsibility. How are names chosen among your people?”

  “Dreams. Visions.” She eyed him. The guttering candlelight touched his face and then receded, the shadows moving about him. “Or priests. I would pray for my name, but I do not know if Christ will hear me.”

  “He will. But if you like, I would be honored to choose your new name, child.”

  She stood. “Then I will see you in the morning, Reverend Whitaker.”

  When dawn broke, Pocahontas rose from the warm blankets where Mary stirred, muttering in her sleep. She washed in the cook pot, as she always did, and when Mary rose to stoke the fire, Pocahontas opened the trunk where the dresses lay folded with sprigs of fragrant herbs crumbling among the wool. She pulled the items out one by one and laid them on the neatly made bed. Mary watched her in open puzzlement, but when Pocahontas held the panes of a green bodice up to her own chest, Mary quickly loosened the strings so she could slide it down over her head.

  The bodice was tight. Pocahontas’s breath came in shallow gasps, and her head swam. But perhaps she would have been light-headed and fluttering even without the hard panels gripping her, the laces as strong as braided sinew. The sleeves made her arms stiff, and left her feeling as thoroughly wrapped as a bundle of venison in a cellar pit. The folds of her heavy skirt dragged, hiding the unyielding shoes and the hem of the linen shift. The weight of it all slowed her. She moved through the world like a dreamer still asleep.

  Mary accompanied her to the chapel, beaming and offering an arm whenever Pocahontas lost her balance beneath the strange sway of fabric or in the forced, stilted shortness of her strides. But they made the threshold of the building before the sun had climbed above the palisade wall.