Voices from within the Veil
Voices from within the Veil:
African Americans and the Experience
of Democracy
Edited by
William H. Alexander,
Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander
and Charles H. Ford
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy,
Edited by William H. Alexander, Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander and Charles H. Ford
This book first published 2008 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by William H. Alexander, Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander and Charles H. Ford
and contributors
Cover design by Stevalynn Adams
Cover photograph: Female protestor carrying sign that says 'Justice,' Monroe,
NC, 1961, by Declan Haun ; courtesy of Chicago History Museum
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-625-4, ISBN (13): 9781847186256
To those who have shed the veil . . .
To those who dropped the masks . . .
To those who have become visible. . .
And to those who have transcended.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ...................................................................................... x
Foreword ................................................................................................... xii
Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii
Chapter One............................................................................................... 1
Interpretations of the Beginnings
Post and Neo-Colonial Pocahontas(es): Terrence Malick’s Updated
Myth of La Belle Sauvage ........................................................................... 3
Page Laws
Voicing Virginia’s ‘Naturals’?: Alterity and the Old-World Reception
of Malick’s The New World....................................................................... 23
Cathy Waegner
Jamestown Shuffle: Foundations of American Racism and Slavery
in Virginia, 1690-1830 .............................................................................. 46
Ervin Jordan
Chapter Two
Early Struggles for Empowerment ........................................................ 73
“Their Hoped for Liberty”: Slaves and Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion .............. 75
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie
A Concentrated Diversity: The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp,
1619 to 1860.............................................................................................. 85
Brent Morris
The Strange Case of Sheridan Ford and Clarissa Davis:
The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia ............................... 113
Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander
viii
Table of Contents
“Thinking Men and Women who Desire to Improve our Condition”:
Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity
in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887 ........................................... 140
Richard Junger
40 Acres and a Mule: Black Folk and the Right to the Rectification
of Injustice............................................................................................... 170
Rodney Roberts
Chapter Three........................................................................................ 185
The Theory and Practice of Race in Early Virginia and Beyond
The Right to One’s Relatives: The Conventions and Consequences
of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial
and Antebellum Virginia ......................................................................... 187
Christina Proenza-Coles
The Langston-Quarles Family: A Study of Free People of Color in
Antebellum Virginia ................................................................................ 207
Judith King-Calnek
Advantage, Agency, and Unrest: Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement,
and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia,
1929-1952................................................................................................ 229
Shayla Nunnally
“The Ku Klux Klan are still scrapping here”: African American
Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924 ............................................... 254
Kimberley Mangun
Chapter Four ......................................................................................... 287
Theorizing the Black Experience
“They Just Gunned Him Down Uhgain”: Suzan-Lori Parks’
The America Play as an African American Comment on U.S.
Democratic History ................................................................................. 289
Natalia Vysotska
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell:
Women Who Influenced the Washington vs. DuBois Debate................. 300
Teresa Holden
Voices from within the Veil
ix
Chapter Five .......................................................................................... 313
The Struggle for Education and the Vote in Virginia
The Ecumenical Moment: Religious Support for Integrated Schools
in Norfolk, 1954-1959 ............................................................................. 315
Charles Ford
“Sit Down Children, Sit Down”: The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk,
Virginia.................................................................................................... 330
Jeffrey Littlejohn
Epilogue.................................................................................................. 345
Migration Matters, Even 400 Years Later: Ethnicity in the 1607-2007
Jamestown Jubilee ................................................................................... 349
Cathy Waegner
List of Contributors ................................................................................. 362
Index........................................................................................................ 365
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1.1
Fig. 1.2
Fig. 1.3
Fig. 1.4
Fig. 1.5
Fig. 1.6
Fig. 1.7
Fig. 2.1
Fig. 2.2
Fig. 2.3
Fig. 2.5
Fig. 2.6
Fig. 2.7
Fig. 2.9
Fig. 2.10
Fig. 2.11
Fig. 2.12
Fig. 2.13
Fig. 2.14
Fig. 2.15
Fig. 2.16
Fig. 2.17
The wedding of Pocahontas with John Rolfe
Matoaka alias Rebecka daughter to the mighty
Prince Powhatan
Smith rescued by Pocahontas
A dark Pocahontas rescuing Smith
Malick’s The New World
The Negro Building, 1907
European American merchants on the waterfront
with enslaved African American workers.
The Grigby Party fights back
View of Lake Drummond in the Dismal
Swamp
The Dismal Swamp
Norfolk Waterfront
India Wharf Stave Yard, located just east of Higgins'
Wharf
Higgins’ and Wright’s Wharves
Former home of General John Hodges
Colored Methodist Church in Portsmouth
Emanuel AME Church location in Portsmouth and
Glasgow Street sanctuary location
Jeffrey Wilson, Major George W. Grice, and the
Reverend George M. Bain
Mrs. Jane Pyatt and Emanuel AME Church, ca. 1940s
William Still’s depiction of escape by fifteen fugitives
from Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia in July 1856
Norfolk City Jail, where Julia Ann Gregory and her
three children were kept following Sheridan Ford’s
escape
William Still’s depiction of the escape by Portsmouth
natives John Stinger, Robert Emerson, Anthony and
Isabella Pugh, and Stebney Swan aboard Captain
Edward Lee’s skiff in 1857
Harper’s Ferry Insurrection
Voices from within the Veil
Fig. 3.1
Fig. 3.2
Fig. 4.1
Fig. 4.2
xi
Free black missionaries from Zion Baptist Church from
Portsmouth, Virginia to Liberia, ca. 1830
Journey of a slave from the plantation to the battlefield
Influential leaders in the early twentieth century:
Washington and DuBois
Booker T. Washington, ca. 1880-1890
Fig. 5.1
Protestors in front of the Norfolk Public School
Building
Fig. 6.1
Negro Building, 1907
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Norfolk State University’s contribution to the America’s 400th
Commemoration was a two-day national conference on February 22-23,
2007 highlighting the theme, America’s 400th Anniversary: Voices from
within the Veil. As part of a larger group of conferences sponsored by the
Jamestown 2007 Federal Commission and the African American Advisory
Council, these activities were part of an ongoing dialogue about
democracy and race that was hosted by Norfolk State University. We
ssembled noted scholars from the United States and abroad, community
leaders, and political figures to consider the contrasting democratic images
and oligarchic realities of early Jamestown and the larger subject of
evolving concepts of democracy, political participation, and civil rights.
The conference addressed the recurring challenges within democratic
systems posed by racial and ethnic differences and the imperative of
protecting minority rights within a republican framework. The Honorable
Timothy Kaine, Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, graciously
accepted our invitation to serve as honorary chair of Norfolk State’s
commemoration of Jamestown 2007.
We are grateful to the Federal Commission and the African American
Advisory Council for their sponsorship of our conference and their support
in bringing it to light. Dr. Carolyn Meyers, President of Norfolk State
University, and the administration and staff of Norfolk State University
offered us unstinting assistance during a stressful two years. Further, we
offer our appreciation to the many conference participants, faculty and
student workers, and community supporters who made strong commitments
to the conference’s success.
The essays contained in this volume represent episodes in the odyssey
of African Americans toward self-consciousness and empowerment. It has
been a pleasure working with the contributors to this volume. They have
been erstwhile students of those who have labored within the veil. We
offer a special thanks to Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their early and
consistent interest in our project.
INTRODUCTION
“And then—the Veil. It drops as drops the night on southern seas—vast,
sudden, unanswering. There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. As
one peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old, old
design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding. And yet it hangs
there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and
Black and White—between You and Me.”1
—W.E.B. DuBois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, 1920
As the promoters of Jamestown 2007 began to speak of the
accomplishment of greater diversity in the nation, and to market the myth
of the seamless confluence of Indian, European, and African traditions in
the early colony, many reflected not only about how the United States’
colonial origins were based on the entrepreneurial ambitions of English
settlers, the conquest and degradation of native populations, and the
subsequent uprooting and enslavement of untold numbers of Africans, but
also about the more recent legacy of decades of discrimination and
marginalization. Of course, the last commemoration in 1957 had excluded
African Americans from expressions of memory and public space. Some
prominent African Americans from Virginia even had to suffer the
indignity of receiving invitations to a celebratory dinner only to be disinvited once their race was known. Virginia was on the verge of closing
many of its schools in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown
vs. Topeka Board of Education, and the nation was still experiencing the
twilight of Jim Crow.
The discourse about the promises and dangers of democracy had
begun long before Jamestown. The people who founded Jamestown in
1607 and the others who then tried to preserve its memory after its
abandonment in the 1690s were keenly aware of this long-term interplay
of democratic images and oligarchic realities. Equally prominent in the
settlers’ minds was how to manage the colony’s increasing cultural
diversity without departing from the evolving notions of an Englishman’s
rights. Tragically, these rights became defined by the new concept of
“race”, which has clouded the future of true democracy in America ever
since. Slavery based upon “race” allowed Virginians to establish a
relatively representative government in an oligarchic, stratified, plantation
society. It also enabled Virginians to speak a political language that
xiv
Introduction
glorified the rights of freemen and to allow the new United States
eventually to embrace democratic ideals. American democracy today is
dominated by various elites that claim to be the tribunes of the people.
Looking back at Jamestown and its representations in this way will offer
insights on the future of democracy and our “liberal” and “conservative”
elites cloaked in populist imagery.
The centerpiece of the conference was a multi-disciplinary dialogue
among scholars on the issue of African American rights in this country.
Obviously at the conference’s core were discussions about the historical
significance and experiences of this minority group in America and how
the law has defined them separately from the general public. The very
idea of designating groups as minorities implies subordination and
marginalization from the general populace. Moreover, the ongoing and
permanent designation of African Americans as minorities, despite many
of them having a mixed heritage, has rendered them an unassimilated
faction whose rights and privileges must be circumscribed to protect
society from harm. This historical understanding of the role that
minorities in general have played in defining who is and who is not an
American underlies America’s true legacy as the world’s first democracy.
It is that history that continues to play a role in America’s international
and domestic policies regarding immigration, humanitarian funding and
intervention, and accessibility to technology, civil rights, wealth, and civic
enterprise.
Who are African Americans? Writer Ralph Ellison wrote in his 1947
book, The Invisible Man, about the story of a highly intelligent unnamed
hero who went to a southern black college and was eventually expelled by
the president, Dr. Bledsoe, who was seen as a great educator and leader of
his race. The hero was punished simply because he unwittingly took a
white donor through a black gin mill. After his expulsion, he traveled to
New York, bearing what he believed was a letter of recommendation from
Dr. Bledsoe, but it was actually a letter warning prospective employers
against him. The protagonist later worked in a factory, became a leader
among the Harlem communists, and had an epiphany after witnessing a
riot in New York. He realized that, throughout his life, his relations with
other people, black and white, had been illusory and invisible. His true
self was never visible because it was locked within his black skin. As long
as he allowed others to define him, he would always be invisible to others.
He finally understood, “When I discover who I am, I'll be free.”
Africans and their descendants have been defined, redefined,
pigeonholed, stereotyped, classified, segregated, and mythologized since
the establishment of African slavery in America. This process has been
Voices from within the Veil
xv
the reason for continued conflict over assimilating African Americans into
the system. It is also this factor that has resulted in African Americans
defining and redefining themselves based on the changing definition of the
term, “American.” In fact, even today the debates over the relevancy and
use of the terms black, Afro-American, African American, Colored, and
Negro continue to rage with no sign of ending. It seems that many would
prefer to be classified simply as “American,” with the hope that that would
end the ongoing marginalization of African Americans in American
society. In his seminal 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois
remarked that blacks found themselves in a peculiar situation in America.
A double-consciousness evolved in which blacks felt a dual identity: one
as a black, the other as an American. For DuBois, these two souls were
destined to be unreconciled and warring because of the primacy of race in
American society and culture. The result for blacks would be the
emergence of a "self-conscious manhood." This double-consciousness
was certainly true of African American leaders in the past, and it continues
to be true. It is this conflict that creates tension and frustration today and
leads to a kind of self-hating duality in many African Americans, despite
the incredible achievements, contributions, and exploits of many over the
past four hundred years.
But all this still begs the question, are blacks nothing but the
definition that others have given to them? Are they murderers and
criminals, Sambos and Mammies, Jezebels and pickaninnies? Are they
thugs and hoochy mammas, pimps and drug dealers or are they simply
victims of a system beyond their control? These images, which have
dominated American culture and have been embedded over many
generations in illustrations, trade cards, newspapers, articles, movies,
television, advertisements, and record labels, still resonate throughout the
world as true images of African Americans. In fact, some of the most
derogative images of blacks as threats are the primary marketing tools for
black music entertainers, showcasing them as antisocial, angry people
whose behavior marginalizes them to the sidelines of American society.
These depictions of blacks in the culture of white America have
successfully commoditized a stereotyped black culture here and abroad. If
these images are untrue, then who are African Americans, and why are
these representations still a part of American society and culture?
Since the colonial period African Americans have been popularly
depicted in stereotypical form, whether it was to soothe the consciences of
white America about slavery or segregation, defacto and otherwise, or to
justify an inherently unequal system that, at best, meted out inconsistent
justice to African Americans. The Declaration of Independence revealed
xvi
Introduction
the hypocrisy of how society viewed itself versus African Americans when
it included the passage, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all
men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain
inalienable rights . . . among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness,” with the understanding that these rights would only be applied
to whites. The 1789 Constitution would go further, declaring that blacks
were chattel and only three-fifths of a person. By the 1830s, the institution
of slavery had become well-entrenched, sustaining the unprecedented
prosperity of the new nation. However, this factor corresponded with the
emergence of the “American Dream” that characterized the United States
as a “Christian” nation whose values were steeped in Biblical principles,
and whose destiny was to spread democracy throughout the world. The
dichotomy of these ideals and slavery resulted in the emergence of
scientific racism and white paternalism, which sought to justify this
system of human exploitation with American idealism. Prior to this
period, when slavery was viewed as a “necessary evil” by most whites,
African Americans did not cover their hair with scarves or hats, nor did
they perceive their innate physical characteristics as inferior to those of
whites. With the entrenchment and expansion of slavery in America,
however, such writers as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Dew, Samuel
Cartwright, T. D. Rice, and George Fitzhugh began the process of
dehumanization by ridiculing even the noses, eyes, lips, hair, body
structure, skin complexion, and odor of African Americans. To these
essayists, everything associated with Africa was inferior and inadequate,
especially when compared to the European model. Thus, America
witnessed the birth of black stereotypes that were comforting to whites,
explaining and justifying slavery while simultaneously setting the example
of behavior for African Americans. In the eyes of slaveholders in
particular and white America in general, the image of slaves as "Sambos,"
childlike, docile, lazy, and dependent became the rule. Whites expected
and demanded a subservient deference from blacks, enslaved and free.
By the early twentieth century, blacks had learned to cooperate with
society’s “compromise policy” of Jim Crow, although this policy was off
to a shaky start as cities such as Atlanta, Georgia and Wilmington, North
Carolina were cast into the public’s eye with brutal race riots. Blacks and
whites were to work together, forming a bond of mutual cooperation in
which blacks would take their “rightful” place behind whites who were
obviously the leaders and models for achievement and progress. Some
among the black leadership, fearful of losing their position and favor
among whites, and of the violence that would certainly ensue, championed
accommodationism and peaceful co-existence as the antidote to mob rule.
Voices from within the Veil
xvii
It was in the first half of the twentieth century that blacks learned what it
meant to be a “good Negro” and a “credit to their race.” And while there
were organizations in the early 1900s such as the Niagara Movement, the
NAACP, and the National Colored Women’s League, which decried
injustice as a national policy and demanded more than the insular world
that segregation afforded for blacks, their voices were temporarily muted
by the powerful thunder of those arguing for compromise, patience, and
moderation. Ironically, in the midst of those pressures, there emerged a
diversity of voices cascading from the 1920s through the Depression era
and World War II that refused to be silenced, advocating not only that
blacks should join forces and fight for a more powerful Africa (PanAfricanism), but that blacks should claim their rightful place in American
society. After all, what would America be without African Americans?
From America’s music to its religious practices and economy, African
Americans had left their indelible imprint.
In the April 1970 edition of Time magazine, Ralph Ellison wrote an
article, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” in response to
the conservative reactions to a more radical civil rights initiative by
organizations such as SNCC and the Black Panthers. In the article, Ellison
said:
Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a
deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has
been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of
black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor
for the “outsider.” Many whites could look at the social position of blacks
and feel that color formed an easy and reliable gauge for determining to
what extent one was or was not American. Perhaps that is why one of the
epithets that European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was
the term “nigger”—it made them feel instantly American. But this is
tricky magic. Despite his racial difference and social status, something
indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the
white man’s value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that
whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.2
From the beginning of the arrival of Africans into this nation, blacks
have grappled with the issue of self-identity. This was complicated by the
process of enslavement which occurred over a period of forty-odd years,
and it continued throughout the colonial and revolutionary years. And
even after free blacks had begun referring to themselves as AfroAmericans because of their desire to reconnect with their African roots
during the antebellum period, those years brought with them self-loathing,
resulting in part from the creation of proslavery arguments that were thinly
xviii
Introduction
veiled as intellectual and rational. Blacks were characterized as beasts,
inferior beings, and even canines. Added to that were the challenges
associated with widespread racism in America and the internalization of a
“blame the victim” syndrome as a defense against these policies that
deprived African Americans of their personhood and citizenship.
Throughout, blacks have persevered to reclaim the humanity that
American society repeatedly attempted to strip from them, despite their
services to this country in war, missionary outreach, education, political
activism, and civic involvement. Perhaps nowhere is this story recorded
most poignantly than in the African American work songs, spirituals,
blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm ‘n blues, and rap music. Together, this music
symbolically reflects the actions and attitudes of resiliency, improvisation,
yearning, and confrontation which evolved and helped African Americans
to endure the cruelties of slavery and segregation, while simultaneously
providing a medium for communion and communication. Despite the
assimilation and acculturation process that has occurred in America,
African Americans have continued to refashion their culture and adaptive
perceptions to fit their own social needs and aesthetic preferences. In
Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison wrote, “‘Everybody wants to tell us what a
Negro is. But if you would tell me who I am, at least take the trouble to
discover what I have been.’” Whether the paradigm is DuBois’ burden of
double-consciousness, Ellison’s invisible man seeking identity, or Fanon’s
white masks donned by people of color, African Americans have been
defined by alienation and marginalization.
Notes
1
W. E. B. DuBois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Brace and
Company, 1920), 142.
2
“What America Would be like without Blacks,” Time Magazine, April 6, 1970.
CHAPTER ONE
DRAMATIC INTERPRETATIONS
OF THE BEGINNINGS
Fig. 1.1: The wedding of Pocahontas with John Rolfe by George Spohni.
Published by Joseph Hoover, Philadelphia, ca. 1867. Courtesy Library of
Congress.
The popular retelling of the founding of America has been more often
shrouded in myth and conjecture than in fact. Page Laws examines how
white Americans reinvented Pocahontas as a transitional, transformative
figure to justify their claims of ownership of North America. Over the
years, the iconic Pocahontas bore little resemblance to the historical one,
symbolizing her importance in framing the mainstream American identity.
This issue of remaking Pocahontas into a European was crucial in the
creation of a racially-acceptable image of Eastern Indians. This
transformation accompanied the emergence of racialism in American
society.
Cathy Waegner also confronts the issue of the ongoing mythologizing
of America’s early years. The romanticizing of the interactions between
the Jamestown colonists and the Algonquins, particularly the role of
2
Chapter One
Pocahontas, has been captured in films and plays for centuries. Waegner’s
essay analyzes the latest foray into that popular myth in Terrence Malick’s
film, The New World (2005). Castigated by critics worldwide as rife with
stereotypes, Malick attempted to give voice to the Algonquins in Virginia,
impuning a body language and vernacular that merely reinvents the noble
savage motif, but this time from a European perspective.
Tracing Old World antecedents, Ervin Jordan explores the emergence
of racism in early American society that kept formerly bonded men, such
as Angolan Anthony Johnson, who aspired to be a powerful landowner,
from achieving the American dream. This essay combines the arguments
of Winthrop Jordan (White Over Black) and Carl Degler (“Slavery and the
Genesis of American Race Prejudice”) into a cogent overview of how
racism influenced the development of white entitlement in a growing
American society.
POST- AND NEO-COLONIAL POCAHONTAS
(ES): TERRENCE MALICK’S UPDATED MYTH
OF LA BELLE SAUVAGE
PAGE R. LAWS, NORFOLK STATE UNIVERSITY
When last spotted on the big screen in 1995, Pocahontas was a singing
Europhile eager to negotiate peace among the new English arrivals and her
people. In appearance, she resembled an animated, buxom Barbie doll; in
behavior, however, she had taken a stride towards political correctness,
with particularly strong marks in environmental awareness. Still Disney’s
film was met with a barrage of negative remarks, many from critics using
a postcolonial approach, comments that prove surprisingly on target for
judging the newest cinematic Pocahontas portrayed in Terrence Malick’s
The New World (2005).
This study provides a brief overview of Pocahontas in American high
and popular culture, beginning with John Smith’s highly dramatized
narratives, including James Nelson Barker and John Bray’s 1808 “operatic
Melo-drame” The Indian Princess: or, La Belle Sauvage, and culminating
in a study of Malick’s film. Sometimes a chaste child, other times a
deerskin Lolita, Pocahontas’ sexual nature has long been contested along
with her tribal/racial loyalties. In that sense, she has much in common with
African American “colonized” women, especially those in interracial
relationships. Some have seen Pocahontas as a commodified victim of
imperialism (she was, indeed, held hostage for three years in Jamestown);
others have branded her as Native America’s first sell-out, or, in Leslie
Fiedler’s words, “our first [Uncle] Tom.”1 The triangle formed by adding
two white men—her putative lover John Smith and her future husband
John Rolfe—to one lone woman of color has titillated white audiences for
almost exactly four hundred years (1607– 2007).
La Belle Sauvage! La Belle Sauvage!
Our nonpareil is she!
But Princess Pocahontas
Gazed sadly toward the sea.
4
Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage
—Stanza from Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benet’s poem, “Pocahontas”
A Book of Americans, 1933
Theseus and Ariadne; Jason and Medea; Aeneas and Lavinia; Julius
Caesar/ Marc Antony and Cleopatra; Cortez and la Malinza,2—what these
famous couples (or in one case, a threesome) have in common is the status
of each woman as a Belle Sauvage,3 that is, a young female who “betrays”
(often under coercion) the interests of her own people to aid, abet, and
procreate with one of her country’s conquering colonizers. She is
“savage,” of course, from the perspective of the colonizers’ civilization,
for which she is also what we now call a “woman of color,” a term in itself
reflective of a white point of view. The Belle Sauvage is also most often
silent —a mute figure within the veil, switching to the metaphor of
“Voices from within the Veil” conference. Her story has been passed to us
not in her own voice, but in the words of her conquerors and their
descendants. So it is and was with John Smith/John Rolfe and Pocahontas,
First Heroine (again from the colonists’ perspective) of Jamestown and of
America. Her story initially comes to us via three white male
contemporaries: John Smith, Ralph Hamor and her husband John Rolfe. It
has been told and retold—in verse, in song,4 on stage, on screen. A
database of writings on Pocahontas lists, in fact, 1400 citations.5 Its latest
retelling is Terrence Malick’s 2005 The New World, hailed for its visual
splendor and the felicitous casting of hybrid beauty Q’Orianka Kilcher as
Pocahontas. But Malick is still indubitably a white male when it comes to
his perspective. And despite his best intentions to be sensitive to Native
Americans, his Pocahontas is really a neocolonial Belle Sauvage. The
critique of colonialism identified in the academy with Frantz Fanon,
Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha and others has not yet made it onto the
silver screen, itself a sort of high-tech veil or scrim that both obscures and
reveals.
Voices from within the Veil
5
Fig. 1.2:
Matoaka, alias Rebecka, daughter to The Powhatan,
Wahunsenacawh, who was leader of the Virginia Algonquians. This was
an illustration of a portrait done during Pocahantas’s journey to London,
England,as Mrs. John Rolfe, 1616 (published in 1624). Courtesy
Library of Congress.
In the Benets’ historical poem cited above, cheering Londoners greet
Pocahontas on her 1616 arrival in their city with an unlikely combination
of epithets: both “Princess” (for her status as New World “Emperor”
Powhatan’s daughter) and “Belle Sauvage” for her exotic red-skinned
beauty. Why the British used a French phrase (a century before Rousseau
promulgated the notion we now shorthand as “noble savage”) is not
entirely clear. We do know that Pocahontas, the “nubile,” noble savage6 in
question and her tobacco planter husband were staying at a London inn
called the Belle Sauvage. Scholar Philip Barbour—famous for his
contentious thesis that John Smith’s “rescue” by Pocahontas was part of an
adoption ritual Smith simply did not understand—insists the Belle
Sauvage Inn already bore that name before Pocahontas’ arrival.7 Though
the legend that the Inn was renamed for our Virginia Princess is poetically
6
Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage
pleasing, Barbour is probably correct. According to Pocahontas descendant,
Pocahontas Wight Edmonds, the Inn stood for at least another 250 years
after the Rolfe family checked out.8
Returning to our epigraph, both Ralph Hamor9 and John Smith call
Pocahontas the very best, the “nonpareil” of her race and gender.10 The
word “nonpareil”—another French loan word meaning the “incomparable
or unequalled one”—must have been in vogue about that time, its other
famous use being in praise of another epitome of young womanhood:
Miranda from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (III.ii.104, circa 1610). It is
widely believed that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in response to the
news of the shipwreck of the Sea Venture in Bermuda, an event that also
intersects with our Pocahontas mythos in that the Sea Venture (or the ships
fashioned from its wreck) later brought John Rolfe to Jamestown.11
Though they only had one son before Pocahontas’ death at twentytwo in 1617, an incredible (and impossible) two million Americans12
(including the Page family for whom I am named) trace their ancestry to
the Pocahontas/Rolfe union. It is no accident that Vachel Lindsay entitled
his poem of tribute “Our Mother Pocahontas.” Notably, there is no
corresponding poem for Pocahontas’ spouse John Rolfe, no “Our Father
John Rolfe.”13 Though he comes off fairly well in Terrence Malick’s film
as played by Christian Bale, Rolfe is rarely granted a place in the
American Pantheon of heroes. America’s “First Tobacconist”14 has always
had to share the glory with his rival John Smith. Rolfe may have passed on
his actual DNA, but Smith passed on some powerfully mythic genes of his
own. Indeed, the putative “romance” of Pocahontas and John Smith is
what Sommer15 has called the “foundational romance” of America. It is
this couple’s romance that Disney chooses to laud and commodify in the
animated 1995 version. It is likewise this romance that dominates Malick’s
film, much to the chagrin of historians who point out the unlikelihood of
any consummated love affair between Pocahontas (between ten and
thirteen when she met Smith) and the middle-aged adventurer. But before
turning to Malick’s film, I want to survey our national fixation with what
Rayna Green has called the “Pocahontas perplex”16 over time. Just as the
visual iconography of Pocahontas changes over time, her narrative form
metamorphoses as well, creating a highly revealing Rezeptionsgeschichte
(history of reception) for her persona embedded in American history.
Colonial and Antebellum Pocahontases
The facts of history are bad enough; the fictions are, if possible, worse.
—Henry James17
Voices from within the Veil
7
The four-hundred-year-old story of Pocahontas is, not surprisingly,
rife with gaps, and even the generally agreed-upon “facts” of her life have
become sites for contending interpretations. We cannot even agree on
which of her names to call her by: Amonute, Matoaka, her father’s pet
name Pocahontas, or her Christian name Rebecca. Scholars are fond of
pointing out that Rebecca in the Bible—Genesis 26:22—held “two
nations” in her womb, the elder of whom (perhaps Native America?) was
destined to serve the younger (perhaps the newly arrived Europeans?).18
Smith and Rolfe were both characters in and documenters of the
Pocahontas story; accordingly, their objectivity and veracity are suspect
from the get-go.19 There is a notorious nine-year gap between the time
John Smith says his famous “rescue” by Pocahontas took place (1607) and
the first of eight times he mentions it in his 1616 letter to Queen Anne.
The other colonial sources, Ralph Hamor and William Strachey, are also
sketchy.20
How old WAS Pocahontas when she met John Smith? Was she ten,
eleven, twelve or thirteen—pubescent or pre-pubescent? Did the Rescue
ever even happen? Was it perhaps John Smith’s “self-serving fabrication”
or what Stephen Greenblatt calls his “Renaissance self-fashioning”?21 We
have already mentioned the “adoption ritual” hypothesis. Helen Rountree,
the leading scholar on Powhatan life and customs, seems skeptical such a
ritual ever existed.
Was Pocahontas, at the time of the Rescue, a virgin, sexually
experienced, or perhaps already married to an Indian man named Kocoum,
who figures in the Disney version some centuries later? The Belle
Sauvage myth strongly privileges virginity, a virginity to be taken by the
colonizer just as he inseminates the previously “wasted” and fallow
virginal land.
Was she beautiful or plain? John Rolfe, in his letter to the Governor
requesting permission to marry Pocahontas, swears that he has no lust for
her, that he could certainly find a woman “more pleasing to the eye.”22 If
that is so, why is the epithet “belle” so firmly associated with her? Was
she ever raped by the colonists who held her hostage?23 Did she know
John Smith was alive before their reunion in England? Visual artist/writer
Gail Tremblay imagines she did not know;24 Malick imagines that she did.
Was Pocahontas angry that her father failed to ransom her during those
three years in Jamestown? Did she consent to her own baptism and her
wedding?25 Did she suffer from “Stockholm syndrome,” that identification
with her captors and their values?26 As in the case of other “silenced”
women in colonies all over the world,27 we have virtually no insight at all
into Pocahontas’ own feelings and opinions.
8
Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage
Fig. 1.3: Smith rescued by Pocahontas. This is a print showing the
reported rescue of Captain John Smith by Pocahontas as
Opechancanough is prevented from striking Smith with a weapon.
Powhatan is standing directly behind Smith with his left hand, holding a
calumet raised to stay the execution. Published by Hr. Schile in New
York, between 1870 and 1875. Courtesy Library of Congress.
The answers to the questions above seem, instead, firmly fixed in the
eye of the beholder and the time of the beholding. As Frederic Gleach
points out in his article “Controlled Speculation and Constructed Myths:
The Saga of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith,” “Stereotypical myths
change to reflect their times and Pocahontas may be the most vivid North
American example of this process.”28 Gleach notes that the speculation
about Pocahontas having been raped coincides with the rise of postcolonial
criticism in the academy. The nineteenth-century antebellum version of
Pocahontas was similarly affected by the preoccupations of that era when
some southerners idealized and romanticized their Indian Princess to
remind the North of the “primacy of Southern settlements”29 in early
America.
The nineteenth century parade of Pocahontases begins with what
Rebecca Faery calls Jon Davis’ “quasi-pornographic” 1805 novel.30 It is
quickly followed by Barker and Bray’s musical play The Indian Princess
or La Belle Sauvage (1808),31 the oldest play on Pocahontas still extant.32
Fortunately available in reprint form, it is just as revealing of American
Voices from within the Veil
9
culture in the year 1808 as a contemporary newspaper warm from the
presses.
Barker and Bray’s Pocahontas is impressionable and tractable, to say
the very least. She represents an ideal of womanhood so perfect that the
issue of her being non-white is simply transcended.33 She immediately
succumbs to the prodigious charm and gallantry of John Smith–a
crusading warrior knight so dashing that the Indians grow pale with fear at
his very sight. That relationship is completely Platonic, however, since
she sees him as tantamount to a god. After the requisite Rescue of John
Smith—“White man, thou shalt not die; or I will die with thee!”34—John
Rolfe quickly appears on the scene and Pocahontas falls for him, this time
romantically. The “bad” Indians who plot against the colonists—one, a
would-be suitor of Pocahontas named Miami, and the other, an evil
medicine man named Grimasco—plot in vain. They are vanquished, and
then Pocahontas can be baptized and married to John Rolfe, her destined
spouse, to whom she states her profoundest gratitude:
Thou’st ta’en me from the path of savage error,
Blood-stained and rude, where rove my countrymen,
And taught me heavenly truthes, and fill’d my heart
With sentiments sublime, and sweet, and social.35
The nationalist, nativist fervor of 1808 can be read in every line of
Barker and Bray’s play. The Old Country is labeled “stagnant”36 and later
labeled “old licentious Europe.”37 Happy are the white, newly minted
Americans38 called on to colonize the “great, yet virtuous empire in the
west!”39 Happy are those Indians manifestly destined to be conquered!
Disney’s Pocahontas – Dances With Raccoons
She’s a babe.
—Mel Gibson (voice of Disney’s John Smith) describing his shapely,
animated paramour (“The Making of Pocahontas” DVD)
Given Mel Gibson’s recent penchant for self-inflicted public relations
wounds, he is probably very lucky that animated women do not sue for
harassment. He is, however, voicing the obvious: Disney’s animated
Pocahontas is a buxom, sexually-mature woman who is very purposefully
modeled on “‘babes” of multiple ethnicities, including her voicer Irene
Bedard (an Indian), Filipino model Dyna Taylor, and white supermodel
Christy Turlington.40 To this list, Leigh Edwards adds black supermodel
Naomi Campbell.41 This effort to be representative would seem benign,
10
Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage
even noble on the part of the Disney creative team, but it has its own
drawbacks. Author of an article called “The United Colors of Pocahontas:
Synthetic Miscegenation and Disney’s Multiculturalism,” Edwards
accuses the Disney filmmakers of trying to “fashion Jamestown into the
birthplace of multiculturalism”42 at the very same time that they sidestep
the actual miscegenation that a consummated screen marriage43 between
John Smith and Pocahontas would represent. Disney’s John Smith is
wounded while protecting chief Powhatan in a totally concocted sniping
incident intended to balance the poetic scales for Pocahontas’ rescue of
him. Since Smith returns to England, the only race-mixing in Disney’s
Pocahontas is that “pre-mixing” to be read on Pocahontas’ multiculti,
animated face. Though Edwards’ complaints are overstated, he is
certainly not alone in condemning Disney for superficial political
correctness. The complaints about fudging Pocahontas’ age began well
before the film’s release, led by Powhatan Indian consultant on the film
Shirley “Little Dove” Custalow McGowan. Indian activist Russell Means
gave his blessing to the film, praising its sensitivity, but then again, Means
himself had a major acting role in the movie: playing Powhatan.44
Critic Rebecca Blevins Faery objects to the speed with which
Pocahontas falls for the first white man whom she sees. Pushpa Naidu
Parekh gives a classic postcolonial reading of the film showing how
Pocahontas is really just utilized “in the business of spiritual awakening of
the European, who still dominates the American continent.”45 While
Disney’s Pocahontas seems sincerely disturbed about the invaders’ intent
to exploit her land (singing “how high does the sycamore grow?) if you
cut it down, then you will never know”) the film as a whole commodifies
Indians and their culture most egregiously. Besides spinning off its own
straight-to-video sequel, the film created an avalanche of tasteless licensed
merchandise.
Derek T. Buescher and Kent A. Ono call the Disney version a
“neocolonialist text” because “it masks present-day colonialist relations
inherited from the past and appropriates contemporary social issues such
as feminism, environmentalism, and human freedom in order to justify
both fear of people of color and beliefs of their inferiority.”46 The cartoon
creates the bad colonist Ratcliffe47 in order to have a good colonist in John
Smith. Terrence Malick will create the same dichotomy (a logically false
dilemma) using Captain Argall as his bad guy and Smith as his good one.
In both cases, we eagerly choose Smith over the villains, barely realizing
we have been co-opted into choosing in favor of colonialism.48 Buescher
and many others point out that it is Pocahontas – then in Disney and now
Voices from within the Veil
11
in Malick – who masters the language of her lover Smith, and not the other
way around.49
The lesson of Disney’s Pocahontas is that true cultural sensitivity is
impossible to purchase from consultants and harder to pull off than it ever
seems. Despite the exhortation of the song “Paint with All the Colors of
the Wind,” white America is yet to walk in the footsteps of red America.
And it is the very nature of hegemony to veil and obscure the “things you
never knew you never knew” (lyrics to “Paint With All the Colors of the
Wind”).50
‘Tis new to him: Malick’s New World
Tis new to thee.
—Prospero to Miranda after her “Oh brave new world” remark in The
Tempest V.i.184
There are more connections between Disney and Malick’s two films
than most Malick fans would ever care to admit. Firstly, there are two
actors who cross over from the one to the other: Irene Bedard, the
speaking voice of Disney’s Pocahontas, appears in the flesh for Malick
playing the minor role of Pocahontas’ mother. Christian Bale, who voiced
Thomas for the Disney outing, steps up in billing to play Malick’s John
Rolfe. The other most striking similarity,already alluded to, is in the
multiethnic appearances of the two Indian princesses. Q’Orianka Kilcher,
whose heritage includes Peruvian Indian as well as Swiss, though only
fourteen at the time of Malick’s filming, plays a fully-developed, sexually
active woman more than ready to take on sexy “bad boy” actor Colin
Ferrell improbably cast as John Smith.
The film received mixed reviews among American critics. Stephen
Hunter of The Washington Post, typifies the negative reaction: “stately
almost to the point of being static.” He gets in another dig alluding to
Malick’s previous film The Thin Red Line: “it [The New World]’s not quite
the thin dead line, but it’s close.” But those critics who liked the film were
ecstatic. Ty Burr of The Boston Globe called it “lyrical” – “a thing of wild
beauty,” “a sprawling cinematic tone poem that paints the characters’
thoughts on the soundtrack.” Burr even praises the non-acting Kilcher–
who grew up in Germany and LA–as being just perfect for the role,
adding, “She may be more savage than the woman she’s playing.”51
Malick’s opening shots of Virginia sky, shore and waters set the
rapturous, “elegiac” 52 tone that his supporters so admire in his work.
Pocahontas invokes the Muse for the epic to come: “Come spirit.” John
Smith – embodied by a scruffy, feral-looking Ferrell – arises from his
12
Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage
dungeon of captivity onboard the English ship for a chance at redemption.
Music swells, and we see the remarkable ship from the point of view of
the Powhatan Indians darting about on shore. In the requisite “Making of
The New World” video included on the DVD, the choreographer lauds
Malick’s insistence that his core ensemble of Indian actors move like
Algonquins. Unfortunately, the result of this training creates a flock of
actors who look as if their movements have been choreographed.
Christopher Plummer announces that the Jamestown swampland will
“serve” for their settlement. He has clearly been cast as Captain Newport
to add some gravitas–Captain Von Trapp in Elizabethan/Jacobean garb.
“We must be careful not to offend the Naturals,” he says, an allusion to the
Rousseauean ethos under girding Malick’s whole film. Newport grants
Smith a reprieve from hanging–part of the New Covenant/New
Dispensation theme. Smith’s walks in the woods and adventures by
shallop begin, often to the soundtrack of birds, frogs, insects and wind.
This is Malick at his best, capturing the daily miracles that an unspoiled
landscape provides the marshes truly are Technicolor green. His sound
crew likewise captures a New World Symphony of chirps, clicks and trills
to outdo Dvorák.
One of Smith’s fellow settlers, having just spotted oysters “as thick as
[his] hand,” enthuses “We’re gonna live like kings!” From the point of
view and earshot of the natives, however, all is not well. The sound of
trees being chopped denotes the invaders’ intent to stay. The precious
honeymoon between colonizers and colonized continues for a little while.
Pocahontas with her brother approaches the strangers, daring to touch and
sniff the unknown. Says Smith, “The savages often visit us kindly.”
“They are,” he continues, “timid like a herd of curious deer.” Meanwhile,
the supplies brought from England start to dwindle. Newport orders the
men to sleep on the ships in their armor, to cut down every tree within half
a mile of the fort (European ecoterrorism begins!), to build a palisade, and
to put in crops. Slackers will be whipped. Despite the ‘live like kings’
remark above, the English class system seems to have crossed the Atlantic
intact. Ratcliffe is left in charge while Newport returns to England for
supplies; John Smith is ordered to approach the local Indian King to set up
trade. And the curiosity on both sides – Indian and English – continues to
mount. Malick inserts voiceovers of an intensely personal – even
schizophrenic—nature, for example, “Who are you…What voice is this
that speaks within me?” This odd internal dialogue blends with spokenaloud statements about the Myth of the Commonwealth53 and the new
Utopia now supposedly under construction.