Poison in the Colony, page 6
Reverend Buck opens with a prayer, and the meeting begins. The most interesting part is when a case is brought against John Martin, who is accused of stealing corn from the Indians. Governor Yeardley stresses how important it is for all colonists to treat the Indians with respect and kindness, in order to keep the peace we now have. He says that absolutely no robberies will be tolerated. I am very happy to hear the governor say this. If everyone keeps the peace, then surely the dreaded third battle from the prophecy will never come to pass.
The General Assembly was to meet all week, but one after another, the men fall ill with the summer flux. One of the burgesses dies. And so the meeting is cut short, but not before the assembly makes many important decisions. They lay out the specifics about how the hundred-acre plots will be assigned to the ancients. They enact laws against drunkenness, idleness, and gambling. I also hear them talking about the colony’s first tax, which is to be paid to them.
When I tell Da about the tax, Alice wants to know what a “tass” is.
“Those men are making laws for us,” Da says, “and so we all pay them for doing that.”
“Why are they making the poor servants pay the same as the rich land owners?” I ask him.
Da doesn’t look up from the chair he is repairing. “I suppose we’re paying them to make laws, not to be fair,” he says.
The General Assembly adjourns on August 4. The tax is collected: one pound of the best tobacco from every man and every servant in the colony, paid to the assembly members for, as one hot, sweaty field-worker says, “having sat in the cool of the church and talked for five days.”
* * *
. . .
On Sunday afternoon after church services, my mother sends me to go fishing. Bermuda is catching up on a week’s worth of chores for his mother, and so I am going alone. With my worms in a bucket and my fishing stick over my shoulder, I walk through the fort toward the gates.
Sunday is the day for visiting and trading, and there are many natives in the fort with their baskets of bread, meat, and dried berries for trade. Samuel stands in a circle with Choupouke, a young Indian man who lives in James Town, and two visiting native men. The four of them are speaking Algonquian. When Samuel sees me, he calls me over.
“Bring us back some trout. Can’t you see we’re starving at the soldiers’ barracks?” he says.
The other men laugh—they obviously understand enough English to get Samuel’s humor.
I shake my head. “Mum will want me to bring her anything I catch. Are you too lazy to do your own fishing?”
Samuel pretends to nearly faint. “Mowchick woyawgh tawgh noeragh kaquere mecher?” (I am very hungry; what shall I eat?)
Now he is clowning for his friends, and I don’t like not knowing what he is saying. I decide to show off one of the Algonquian words I do know. “I’m not giving you any of my noughmass. Go catch your own noughmass.”
Samuel laughs, grabs me, and tickles me.
“Samuel, let me go.” I struggle to free myself from his grasp, but he holds on tight.
“Netoppew?” he asks.
“Yes, we’re still friends,” I say. “Just let me go fishing before my mother decides I’ve got other chores to do.”
The next moment I look up and gasp. The creature’s white wings shine bright in the sun, the feathers on his body lift in the breeze, and his dark face is set with determination. The bird man has just walked through the gates into the fort.
Fourteen
“LET ME GO! I have to warn Mum!” I cry, but Samuel still holds me tight. I sink my teeth into his arm.
Samuel sets me loose with a shove that sends me sprawling onto the ground. “Have you gone mad?” he says, rubbing his arm. “I was just playing.”
The bird man is now walking quickly toward me. I panic, scramble to my feet, try to run, but Samuel grabs me. “Stop being rude!” he says, and jerks my arm.
The creature has not only a human face, but the arms and legs of a human as well. I hear Algonquian words spoken behind me. “Wingapo, Nemattanew.”
The creature nods. “Wingapo,” it says.
Wingapo. It is the word of greeting among netoppew, among friends.
Samuel speaks to the bird man in Algonquian, then he looks at me sternly and says, “I told him no wonder the English bullets cannot hurt him—they are afraid of him like little girls. Now you must show respect. Nemattanew is a great, honored warrior.”
I look from Samuel to the bird man and back again. An honored warrior? A man, not a creature of the faery realm? I let out a shaky breath. “Wingapo,” I say. Nemattanew nods to me. Then he speaks to Samuel in Algonquian.
“Ah,” Samuel says. “He tells me you saw him in the musses, the woods, a while back, that you were alone and were afraid of him and ran away.”
I feel my face turn red with embarrassment. How could I have been so silly to think he was a faery creature come to steal my sisters?
“Well, you only need to be afraid of him if you want to fight him in a battle,” Samuel says. Then he rattles off something in Algonquian that makes the whole circle of men laugh.
I blush again. “Can I go now?” I ask. I am trying to be polite, but I want very much to be done with this.
“Nobody is stopping you,” Samuel says.
As I hurry away, I hear my name called out in a gruff voice with a heavy Algonquian accent. I stop and turn. Nemattanew is looking at me.
He lifts his chin toward me, then he takes one finger and touches it to the center of his forehead. The gesture sends a chill down my back.
To make things worse, Charles has been watching this whole interaction. As I leave the fort, my worm bucket swinging and my fishing stick in hand, he follows me.
“I saw you with that Indian warlock,” he calls after me.
I keep marching down the hill toward the river, trying to ignore him.
“I heard him say your name,” Charles says, catching up to me. “Do you do your evil rituals with him in the forest?”
I wheel around to face him. I don’t even know how to begin to respond to these insane accusations.
“Ah, so you do have rituals with him in the forest.” Charles raises his eyebrows.
I want badly to punch him but I stop myself. “I just met him today,” I say as calmly as I can. “And he is a great warrior, not a warlock. You should check to see if there are balls of wax in your ears.”
At the river’s edge, I pull a worm out of my bucket and stab it onto my fishhook. Charles watches me.
“Don’t you ever do any work?” I demand.
He raises his head high. “I am a gentleman,” he says.
If Captain Smith were still here, Charles would be working. When he was president, Captain Smith didn’t let the gentlemen be idle the way they are in England, and the way they are becoming here.
Charles gets bored with watching me fish and decides to leave me alone. Halfway up the hill, he calls back to me, “You just wait. I’ll have plenty to report to the governor.”
My stomach clenches. But then I comfort myself with the thought that Governor Yeardley will not likely put me on trial just because an Indian warrior spoke my name.
* * *
. . .
My mother has been assigned to make coats for the laborers of the colony. This time, Governor Yeardley has made sure she has good cloth and good thread, and even new needles. She is proud of her work. While Katherine sleeps, Alice and I sit with Mum. Alice practices her sewing on a scrap of cloth, and I sew the hems on the coats, making my stitches as straight and neat as I can.
Alice looks up from her crooked stitches. “Da is coming home,” she says.
“Yes, sweetheart,” Mum says. “He’ll be home later at noon for dinner.”
Alice shakes her head. “No, he’s coming home now.”
Mum and I exchange a look. I tense inside. A few minutes later, we hear Da’s whistle as he walks through the fort toward our cottage. Mum goes pale.
I lean in to Mum’s ear and whisper quickly, “Don’t worry. When she gets a little older, we’ll tell her to ask God to take it away from her, the way I have, and it will be gone forever, the way it is for me.”
Da bursts in through the door. “I’ve got the map!” he declares. “The map of our land.”
He plops a piece of paper down on the table, in the midst of our sewing. It is a crudely drawn map that looks like winding snakes. I realize the snakes must be the rivers, flowing through the land.
“Here is James Town,” Da says, pointing. “And see this? This is Point Comfort, and here’s Kecoughtan, or Elizabeth City as they’re now calling it.” He runs his finger over places that are down the James River from James Town. “And this”—he points, then looks up at us—“this is our land. One hundred acres.” It has been inked in, a long rectangle, not near James Town, but down the river near Elizabeth City.
My mother touches the place on the map he has pointed to. She looks up at my father in amazement. “I was a servant girl,” she says. “Now I am a landowner.” She shakes her head slightly. “It is the New World.”
Da’s eyes are bright. “I want to start clearing and building a house as soon as the tobacco harvest is over,” he says.
That’s when it actually hits me. “We’re moving?” I ask.
“Of course,” my father says. “We’re moving to our own land.”
Leaving James Town? Leaving our cottage? “But . . .” I must be able to come up with an objection that will stop this nonsense. “We’ll be outside the fort gates. It will be dangerous.”
My father pats my arm. “Don’t worry, Virginia, we are at peace with the natives, so we don’t need the fort walls anymore. There are plenty of settlements up and down the river now, and they are safe.”
I hear Samuel’s voice from years ago, How long do you think the peace will last with her gone?
I am still scowling. How can he ask me to leave the only home I’ve ever known?
My father continues with his news. “Samuel will be coming with us. We’ve decided to join our acreage and share the two hundred acres that gives us.”
What about Bermuda? What about our home, our cottage? What if the Spanish attack, and there we are, right at the mouth of the river? What if the peace with the Indians doesn’t last?
Alice is climbing up onto the table to better see the map. “This is our land, Da?” she asks. “This right here?” She goes to pick up the paper, but Mum rescues it from her grasp. Da pulls Alice onto his lap. “This is a picture of our land. Our real land is out there.” He sweeps his arm to the south. “It has trees we can cut to build a house with, good soil for a garden and tobacco, turkeys and deer we can kill for meat, and grass for when we get a cow. It has everything we need.” Alice nods, her face full of wonder.
I sigh. At least Alice is excited about our move.
After supper, I am still grumpy. I put a dry diaper on Katherine and swaddle her. I help Alice change into her nightgown. All the while I am feeling dark and sad about this move.
My mother puts her arm around me. “Get some sleep, Virginia,” she says gently. “It will all look better in the morning.”
* * *
. . .
Samuel comes over early the next day before he has to leave for the fields.
“Da says we’re joining our land together,” I say, trying not to sound too sullen.
He nods. “And do you like our choice of location?” he asks.
I cock my head to the side. “Land is land, isn’t it?”
“Don’t you remember?” he asks. “This land is like a good-luck charm. Point Comfort was where your family and I were well fed while almost everyone in James Town starved to death.”
“When I was a baby,” I add. It is a story I’ve heard many times, but I didn’t realize they had chosen our land to be close to the place that saved us that winter.
“We’re hoping it will bring us good luck again,” Samuel says.
I narrow my eyes at him. “In case everyone starves to death again?” I am only joking, so I’m surprised when Samuel takes my comment seriously.
“Sure,” he says. “There were lots of horseshoe crabs there to eat last time.”
“Good morning, Master Collier,” Da says.
Samuel laughs. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he says. “The New World can’t make me into a gentleman. But it turns out Reverend Hunt was right.”
“Right about what?” I ask.
Samuel gets a faraway look. “Just before he died,” he says, “Reverend Hunt told me I would not always be a servant. He said I would be something much greater than that. I never dreamed I’d be a landowner.”
“And don’t forget, you’re also our best interpreter,” Mum says.
“Don’t forget, you’re also a smelly field-worker,” I say.
He tries to punch me in the arm, but I jump out of the way. Samuel leaves to work in the fields, and I go out to our garden to harvest and weed before the day gets too hot.
It is late August, and the heat has settled in like an itchy wool blanket. In the afternoon, the little ones are napping and my mother is busy at her sewing. I ask if I may go down to the river to dunk my head in and cool off.
The air is filled with the chirping and whirring of crickets and cicadas. It surprises me when I get to the river and see a lone ship sailing in. No one has given the shout of “Ship ashore!”
She approaches slowly, her sails only barely filled. There is a groggy haziness to the day. Are the watchmen asleep? I wonder.
A few gentlemen stand, watching, smoking their pipes. As the ship draws nearer, I expect to see the familiar Union flag: the red cross of St. George against the white cross of St. Andrew with the blue background. But when I see the flag it is flying, fear grips me. It is not a British flag.
We have all been warned to keep a watch for ships flying the Spanish naval jack because a Spanish ship would most likely mean attack. But this flag is neither British nor Spanish. It has three wide horizontal swaths of orange, white, and blue. I overhear the gentlemen’s conversations.
“It is a Dutch ship.”
“No, it’s an English warship.”
“Nonsense. She flies the Dutch colors.”
“An English captain who wants the freedom to attack Spanish or Portuguese ships, and steal their cargo, without enraging our peace-making king, will fly the Dutch colors. It is an English ship.”
I watch curiously as this ship, flying its impostor colors, comes nearer. Finally, someone calls out, “Ship ashore!” and a few watchmen stagger down to the wharf to help the ship dock. The captain calls out a greeting in perfect, unaccented English. The conversations onshore continue.
“Ah, the White Lion. That ship saw many a bloody battle with the Spanish during the war.”
“Her captain must still be causing a ruckus at sea. I wonder what he has stolen?”
“Whatever it is, he will certainly want to sell it to us.”
The gangplank is lowered. But there are no crates or barrels to unload. No cattle or hogs to lead to shore to sell.
As I watch, I feel as though I am back in the dream, the dream of ships. Because what I see cannot be real. Led down the gangplank, with chains around their necks and ankles, are people. About twenty of them. Men, women, and children with skin the color of brown butterflies, dressed in tattered robes of orange, yellow, and indigo.
The conversations onshore are hushed, but one word stands out: slaves.
People. For sale.
Fifteen
THEY ARE ENSLAVED Africans, stolen from a Portuguese slave ship. They had first stopped at Point Comfort and were sent along to James Town. Governor Yeardley buys them in exchange for the food the crew of the White Lion needs for their trip back to England. They now belong to the colony.
The Africans are taken out of their chains and sent to the hot tobacco fields to work alongside the London street children, indentured servants, and other commoners like Samuel and my father. Tobacco is queen, we commoners are her servants, and the gentlemen reap the profits.
Samuel says that James Town is becoming more and more like England. He says that when Captain John Smith was president, even the gentlemen had to work in the fields if they wanted to eat. But now the gentlemen have servants in their homes to do the women’s work and servants in the fields to do the farmwork, and they sit puffing on their pipes while their wives gossip with the other gentlewomen.
“We won’t be like that when we get our land,” Samuel promises me. “We know the value of hard work.”
“Yes, and we can’t afford servants,” I remind him.
A few days after the landing of the White Lion, another ship arrives at Point Comfort carrying more stolen slaves. This ship not only flies the British colors, but it is a ship well known to us: the Treasurer. Captain Argall used the Treasurer to capture Pocahontas and bring her to James Town, and he carried her to England aboard it. According to the Powhatans, it is the ship on which Captain Argall gave Pocahontas the deadly poison that took her life.
The Treasurer is now involved in more intrigue. Her captain, Daniel Elfrith, sailing under the British colors, did not have permission to plunder Spanish ships. His stolen slaves are contraband and he can be accused of piracy. The residents of Point Comfort want nothing to do with him, his slaves, or his request for food. He leaves without trading anything or anyone. But not before one of his “contrabands” jumps ship and runs off into the forest.
