Virgin Earth

Spring 1654

John was at sea, running from grief, once more, and knew that he had chosen the right course. The movement of the ship rocked his sleep at night and the noise of the wind in the sails and the creaking of the timbers were the sounds of mourning to him. He thought of Johnnie constantly and, away from the land and from Hester, he felt free to think of Jane, his first wife, and knew that if there were a heaven and a communion of saints, then she was with her son now. As the seven-week voyage went on, he felt that he could let Johnnie go, as he had once before let Jane go, and love him only in his heart as a memory, and not with that wrenching desire to bring him back.

He was asleep when the ship sighted the Virginia coast and was awakened by the noise and excitement of their arrival in Jamestown. Bertram Hobert hammered on the little wooden shutters around John’s bunk and shouted, “Up, man! We’ve arrived!” and John tumbled out to find the ship in its usual chaos as sailors slackened off the sails and the lookout man shouted directions, and the passengers still battened down below the hatches tried to repack their goods which had been scattered during the long voyage.

“Better this time than last,” Bertram said optimistically. “At least we know the dangers now, eh, John?”

John looked into the face of his old friend. The dreadful hollowed face of hunger had gone, replaced by a rosy round prosperity, but most of Bertram’s teeth were missing and the remainder were black.

“We were greenhorns,” John said. “We knew nothing.”

“Now we do,” Bertram said. “I will be a man of substance in this land yet, John. I will be a burgess and leave a five-hundred-acre plantation.”

“I wonder what changes have taken place since we were last here?”

“Nothing but good,” Mrs. Hobert said over her shoulder, throwing linen into a bag. “I hear that the savages are quite driven back and there is a road made through the woods from Jamestown down to the sea and westward along the riverbank inland.”

A sailor lifted the hatch above them and shouted that they could come up on deck. John hefted his chest through the hatchway, and took his bundle of clothing.

“You’re traveling light,” Bertram remarked.

“It is going home that I hope to be laden,” John said.

They scrambled out on deck and then paused in amazement. For a moment John thought that something had gone ludicrously wrong and they had come to the wrong place. But then he saw that the old wooden fort had gone, the mixture of garrison and town had changed. Before him now was a new town, an elegant town, beautiful and solid and built to last.

A line of stone-built houses with small ornamental gardens before them lined the front road alongside the river and looked down to the quay. Great trees had been left in place to shade the road, and around each tree they had built graceful circular seats so that passersby could rest in the shade. Each house had a bright new wooden fence before it, one or two even had low stone walls to mark the division between the garden and the street.

There was a pavement slightly raised with wooden beams to keep the ladies’ shoes dry and a gutter for storm water and sewage, which drained away into the river.

The houses were built two, even three, stories high, so close that they were all but adjoining and they were built like good London houses, not flung together with wood and mud; but well-planned, proper houses with a central doorway and a window on either side with well-hung shutters and glass in the windows.

The people walking up and down the road and strolling down to the quay were changed as well. The sharp division into the one or two wealthy men and the rest, hungry, work-hardened paupers, was over. There was a more gentle gradation of wealth and status that you could see from the shirts and waistcoats of the laborers through the smart dark homespun of the artisans and smaller planters through to the silks and satins worn by the gentry.

And now there were slaves. John blinked at the numbers of black men and women, fetching, carrying, running at an obedient dog-trot behind a cart, catching the ropes on the dockside and running the gangplank out to the ship, unloading carts and throwing down the bales of cotton, and women with trays on their heads weaving through the crowd at the dockside with fresh produce to sell. Many of them were branded with the mark of their owner on their forehead or cheek. Many of them had the old scars of a whipping on their backs. But some of them, like the women traders, were clearly free to sell their own goods, and walked at their own speed with an arrogant roll of their hips under bright-patterned dresses.

A sailor opened the ship’s railing, made sure the gangplank was secure and then stepped back. John walked down the plank to the new land.

He had not thought that he would find her again, and he knew she would not look for him; but he did not expect that the country would be emptied of Suckahanna’s people. The last Indian war had indeed been the last. Opechancanough’s execution was the death of the People as well as the death of their last greatest war leader. Some drifted away, inland, and found other nations that would accept them, and then they too had to move, always westward, always away from the coast and the encroaching white men, the noise of falling timber and the scarcity of game. Some went into service, a service more like slavery for they were paid no wages and allowed no freedoms and worked until they died for no thanks. Some were imprisoned for the crime of rising up to defend their own villages and they served their sentences until illness and despair finished the work that the war had begun.

John stopped every one of the few Powhatan women or children that he saw in Jamestown and asked for Suckahanna, and for Attone, by name, but they all shook their heads at the strange white man and pretended that they could not understand his speech, though he asked them both in English and Powhatan. Ignorance and deafness were their last defense, and they mimed ignorance and deafness and hoped to somehow survive, clinging to the very edge of life in a land which had once been unquestionably their own.

John and the other men on the ship went to the governor’s office where the maps of the territory were kept and claimed his headright and then sold it on to William Lea, with his original claim alongside it.

“You don’t want it yourself?” Lea asked.

John shook his head. “I’m no planter,” he said. “I tried it before and I have not the skills or the endurance. I’m a gardener. You’ve paid my passage and more and I’m glad for that, but I will spend my time here out in the woods gathering the most interesting plants I can find – my cargo for the return journey.”

A gentleman in the office with them turned at the mention of plants and looked at John keenly. “Ah!” he said. “Now I know who you are. I am sure that you must be Mr. John Tradescant. I had not known you were coming to visit us again.”

John felt a little curl of pride at his name being known before him. “How do you do, Mr.-?”

“Forgive me,” the planter said. “I am Sir Josiah Ashley. I saw your garden when I was last in London and I ordered some plants for my garden here.”

“You are gardening?” John asked incredulously. “In Virginia?”

The man laughed. “Of course, everything will be very much changed since you were last here. I have a house and before it, running down to the river, I have a garden. Nothing compared to the great gardens you will have worked in, I know. But it is a pretty little couple of acres and it gives me much pleasure.”

“And do you only plant English plants?” John asked, wary of another hopeless attempt at an English garden in foreign soil like the barren attempt in Barbados.

“I grow flowers and plants from the woods too,” Sir Josiah replied. “I have a great love for English plants, of course, they remind us of our old home. But there are some exquisite flowers and shrubs that I have found and brought into my garden and they thrive.”

“I should so like to see them. And if you had any stock I should offer you a very fair price.”

Sir Josiah bowed. “You must come and stay with us.”

“I could not impose,” John started shyly.

“This is Virginia,” the man reminded him. “Guests are not an imposition; they are our only source of entertainment. You will be a great pleasure for us. I am sure you have much news of London.”

“Then I would be delighted.”

“I drive back to my house tomorrow,” Sir Josiah said. “Shall I collect you from your inn?”

“Drive?” John queried.

“Oh yes, we have a road which runs alongside the river. The tobacco still goes by boat, of course, but I generally drive into town in my cart.”

John blinked. “I see that everything is indeed changed.” He paused for a moment. “May I ask one thing: when I was last here I spent some time with the Powhatan people, before the war. They helped me in the woods when I was plant collecting.”

“Oh yes?” Sir Josiah was pulling on his gloves and clapping his hat on his head. John saw that the Virginian belief that the very air was a danger was still prevalent.

“I was wondering where they would be now?”

“Dead, most likely,” Sir Josiah said without regret. “A bad business. They could have lived with us in such harmony. But they chose not to. A bad business indeed.”

“All of them?”

“There is the village, of course.”

“The village?”

“There is a Powhatan village some ten miles inland. You could go and visit if you liked. I doubt that any that you recognized would be allowed out unless you took them into your service and said you would be responsible for their behavior.”

“I could do that?”

Sir Josiah hesitated. “Forgive me. You may not bring savages into my house.”

“You don’t have slaves?”

Sir Josiah laughed. “Of course I do. How else could I grow tobacco? But I won’t have the native peoples of this land anywhere near my borders. Africans are my slaves, the others are no use to me at all.”

“But I could go to the village and see if there was anyone I recognized?”

“Of course.” Sir Josiah gestured at the clerk. “George, give Mr. Tradescant here a pass to go to the savages’ village. I will countersign it. Shall you go today?”

“Yes,” John said quietly. “Today. At once.”

He told the woman at the inn that he would be home for dinner and would leave the next day. “And where are you going now?” she asked with the freedom of speech that the new colony allowed.

“I am going to find someone,” John said. “At the Powhatan village.”

“An old servant?” she sniffed. “If you want a servant you can buy a black girl for little more than seven pounds and she will serve you far better than any Indian. The blacks live longer too, and they’re more cheerful company. I’d have a black if I were you.”

“I want to find a particular person,” John said, choosing his words with care. “Not a slave. Can you point out the road?”

“Oh indeed,” she said. “There is only one road really. There is the road which runs east from here, inland, and there is the road which runs west to the coast. The Indian village is north of here. Take the road upriver and ask whoever you see on the road. Anyone can direct you.”

“Thank you,” said John, and set off.

He had thought he might collect some specimens as he walked upriver but there was almost no forest left at the riverside. The road went past one large house set among field after field of tobacco, and then past another. Some of the houses were still the familiar wooden buildings in the style that John remembered; but they were all growing and sprawling out, with new rooms added on one side, and stables built nearby. The more prosperous were grand with huge pillars and beautiful terraces, like little palaces in miniature, and behind them were little huts made of wood and roofed with reeds, the slave huts, poorer-built than the stables; horses were so much more valuable than slaves.

There were common plants by the wayside but the constant plowing and replowing of the land for tobacco had uprooted anything of any size. John thought it incredible that the woods where Suckahanna had run when she was a little girl should now be as tame and as enclosed as the riverside at Surrey.

He passed a gang of slaves working on the road, filling in the potholes with chippings of stone, and they pointed him on: on and then turn right after the next grand house, for the savages’ village. The overseer rode up as John left them, tipped his hat to John, confirmed the directions and then went past him to the men. John heard a yelp of pain at a casual blow, and trudged onward without turning his head.

He turned right as they had advised and found that the track led him through a marsh of foul water. This was land that no one had wanted, far from the road and from the river, and needing to be drained and cleansed, a project which might take years and never be done. There were rotting trees sunk deep into the marsh and, in their shelter, water-loving plants just coming into bud. John hesitated to step off the single-track causeway and risk a wetting but promised himself that he would stop and collect them on his way back.

He turned another corner and saw a little wooden house, built like his own Virginian shack had been. On either side of it a tall wooden fence ran as if to enclose a huge field. The little hut was a gatehouse, the only way into the enclosed acres. On the porch lounging in the sun were two men in remnants of what had once been good jackets, chewing tobacco and spitting into a brass bowl placed conveniently between them. They watched him as he walked up and John felt self-conscious and needlessly guilty as they stared at him, walking along the deserted road toward the village that no one ever visited.

“Good day,” John said.

One man got to his feet and nodded a greeting.

“I have come to seek a servant of mine,” John said, succumbing to the prejudice of the place. “I have been a long time in England. I wondered if she was here.”

“Might be,” the man said unhelpfully. “We’ve got a hundred and sixty-two of ’em here.”

“And where will I find the others?” John asked, looking around, thinking there must be another village nearby.

“That’s all there is,” the man said. “D’you have a pass?”

John handed over Sir Josiah’s letter. “I mean, where are the other Powhatan? The rest of them?”

The man could hardly read; he only looked at the paper and at the seal on the bottom. “That’s all there is left,” he said simply.

John hesitated at the enormity of what the man was saying. “There is surely another village elsewhere in the colony with more people?” he asked. “There were thousands of them when I was last here, thousands.”

The man shook his head. “This a hundred and sixty-two is all that is left of the Powhatan,” he said. “Unless they start having babies again. But they don’t show any disposition at the moment.”

The other man sniggered. “Most unwillin’.”

“Can I go in?” John asked.

“I’ll take you,” the soldier said.

He lit the fuse on his musket and held the gun across his chest, the fuse between his two fingers, the end of it aglow. Then he led the way into the enclosed village.

John walked through the gate, and then stopped and blinked. It was like the village he had known, but in miniature; the long houses were too few and built too small. There was a dancing circle but it was compressed against one of the blank encircling wooden walls. There was the central street leading up to the house of the werowance but it could be walked in forty strides. There was no sweat lodge that he could see. All around the houses, planted with the meticulous care of the Powhatan women, were the food crops, cramped up against the houses. John recognized at once the growing stalks of the Indian corn and the amaracock planted between them, and the little shelter built to overlook the field where the children would wait for their mothers to finish their work.

“Can I talk to them alone?” John asked the soldier.

“They don’t speak English,” he said. “You’d better just look for your girl. I can line them up for you. They understand ‘Muster.’”

“No, no,” John said. “I can speak Powhatan. Let me speak with them.”

The soldier hesitated. “Shout if you need help then,” he said and went back to his seat.

The women working in the field did not raise their eyes at this exchange, they did not take more than a glance at John. But John knew that they would have seen every detail of him, and that if Suckahanna or Attone or any of his people were alive in this cage then they would know within minutes that he had come.

He walked up to the little confined field and spoke in Powhatan.

“Sister,” he said. “I was the husband of Suckahanna and the friend of Attone. They called me the Eagle when they took me into the People.”

She did not break off her work, her hands still moved in the earth, setting the little plants, dropping in seeds. She did not look up at him, she might as well have been deaf.

“I have come to find Suckahanna, or Attone, or any of my people,” John said. “Or news of them.”

She nodded at that; but did not pause in the steady, sweeping movement of her hands.

“Did you know them?” John asked. “Suckahanna, Attone, any of them? She had a little boy-”

The woman turned her head and called a single word, the name Popanow, the child of winter, and a young girl came forward.

“I knew Suckahanna,” she said simply. “You must be the Eagle. I would not have known you, they spoke of a hunter and you are too fat and old.”

John concealed the hurt to his vanity and looked at the girl. “I don’t remember you.”

“I was born in the village of the bad water,” she said. “You were long gone.”

“Suckahanna?”

She paused. “Why d’you want to know, white man?”

John hesitated. “I am a white man, I know,” he said humbly. “But once I was a Powhatan. Suckahanna was my wife and Attone was my friend. Tell me, Popanow, what became of my wife and my friend and my people? I was not with them because they sent me away. I have come back to learn what became of them. Tell me, Popanow.”

She nodded. “It was like this. The soldiers were hunting us down, every month they came a little closer. It was like a hunting trip for them, they came out in spring. Winter we were left alone to starve and freeze but spring and summer they came out and destroyed our fields when they could find them, and broke down the fish weirs, and tracked us with their dogs.”

John flinched at the matter-of-fact solidity of her description. “Attone wanted to lead us upriver and north, away from the white men. We thought that another People might take us in, or if they would not then we could fight the white men and die in the fighting rather than be picked off one at a time. Others thought that the white men would grow weary of the sport of hunting us and start to hunt for food. They would leave us alone after a while. I think Suckahanna was with Attone. She said we should go.

“We started to move out in the winter. We had not enough stores of food, and it was not safe to light fires. A slave saw us.” She was suddenly alight with anger, animated with resentment. “A black slave who thought more of his master than anything else – the white man’s dog, the white man’s fool – he ran and told his master, who brought out some other planters and they hunted us through the snow and we were easy to track in the deep snow, and slow-moving with old people and babies to carry.”

John nodded. “I remember. I was with them when they went to the marshland.”

“We left the people who could not keep up with us. We thought perhaps they would be taken up by the hunting party behind us and sent back to Jamestown for servants. But they did not take them for servants, they killed them where they lay in the snow. The white men cut their throats and scalped their heads where they lay. It was…” she sought the word to describe it and found none, “…ugly.

“Attone said we should make a stand and fight the hunting party and then we would be safe to go on. They sent the older women and the babies ahead and the rest of us made a trap, a pit in the road, and we hid in the trees, and waited.” She paused. “It was desperate, digging and trying to hide the pit with branches and fresh snow scattered on top, and knowing they were so close behind.”

“You were there?”

“I was there. I had my bow and my quiver of arrows. I was ready to kill.”

“And?”

“They had horses and guns and dogs,” she said. “They were hunting dogs, they would keep coming even with an arrow in their eye. They got me at the shoulder and pulled me down. I thought they would eat me alive. I could hear the crunch of their jaws on my bone and smell their breath on me.” She swept back her hair and John saw the ragged scars where a deep bite had been gouged out of her neck and shoulder. “It’s odd to feel an animal licking your blood,” she said.

“My God,” John whispered.

“Half a dozen of us were still alive at the end, and they made us walk back to Jamestown.”

“Suckahanna?”

“Dead.”

The word was like a blow in the pit of his belly, it fell no lighter for being expected. He had known that Suckahanna would never have been taken alive. He had known from the very start that what he was seeking in this strange diminished village was the news of her death.

“Attone?”

“Dead.”

“Suckahanna’s son?”

“He got away,” she said. “He could be anywhere. Maybe dead in the forest.”

“The baby? The little girl?”

“Died of hunger or fever or something. Before we tried to leave the village of bad water.”

There was a silence. John looked at the girl who had seen so much, who was indeed a child of winter.

“I shall go.” He paused. “Is there anything I can do for you or for the People?”

“Would they set us free if you asked them?”

“No,” John said. “They would not listen to me.”

“Do you think that they will hold us here forever?” she asked. “Do you think that they mean us to have enough land to plant, but nothing that we can enjoy, nowhere we can run free? Do they think that now we will do nothing more forever than just cling to life at the edge of the white man’s land?”

“No,” John said. “I am sure not. There is a new government in England and it is pledged to care for the poor and for the men and women who are driven off their land by enclosures. It gives rights to tenants and people who live on the land. Surely they will give you the same rights here.”

She looked at him and for a moment he saw Suckahanna in her eyes with that delicious sense of the ridiculous which had been so often and so lovingly directed at John. “Oh, do you?” she said and then turned and went back to her work.

John walked home dryshod in his English boots across the wooden causeway, not touching the earth, forgetting the marsh flower, not seeing anything but the winter battle in the snow and Suckahanna going down, fighting to the last minute, and Attone falling beside her.

He could see nothing else for the long walk back to Jamestown, not the new and beautiful houses nor the pretty sailing ships which the planters now used instead of canoes on the river, not the settled prosperity of the fields drawn like a net of squares thrown over the landscape, ignoring the contours of hill and slope and stream and imposing their own order on the wildness. He did not see the outskirts of Jamestown with the little shanty town of poor wooden houses, nor the town center with the governor’s beautiful house and the new assembly room for the burgesses where they were doing their best, by their lights, to build a new country in this place.

That night, when he went to bed, he thought he would dream of the battle and the defeat of the Powhatan and the dreadful death of Suckahanna in the cold snow with dogs snapping at her throat.

But he did not. He dreamed instead of the Great Hare leaping over the winter snows, with its coat pure white, winter-white, and only its long ears tipped with chocolate fur, gathering his love Suckahanna, and his friend Attone, into its gentle mouth and taking them back into the darkness away from the world which was no longer safe for the People.

Sir Josiah’s house was one of the grander stone-built houses and his garden was richer than John could have imagined. His wife greeted them and ordered rum and lemons and hot water despite the heat, and then Sir Josiah took John, punch glass in hand, down the steps to the garden.

It was a garden poised between two worlds. In many ways it was an English cottage garden: on the far sides were plants for cutting, for drying and for medicinal use in a scramble and a muddle of richness. John strolled over and saw, in their springtime growth, the familiar herbs and flowers of England, thriving in this virgin earth.

Immediately before the house Sir Josiah had laid out a serpentine knot, an attempt at the formality of the English great gardens. It was edged in bay and planted with daffodils, and between the daffodils were growing some white daisies. John admired the colors and felt the familiar lift to his heart at the sight of spring bulbs, but then he looked a little more closely.

“Did you bring these daisies from England?”

“No,” Sir Josiah said. “I found them growing here. There’s a place down by the river, a patch of grassland, I found whole clumps of them and dug them up, and planted them here and they have thrived and multiplied.”

John, oblivious of the snort of laughter from Lady Ashley on the terrace, dropped to his knees and took a closer look. “I think this is a new kind of daisy,” he said. “A Virginian daisy.”

“I thought it was just a daisy I might have for very little effort,” Sir Josiah said carelessly.

“And it’s very pretty,” John said. “I’ll take a couple home with me when I go. I should like to see it growing in London, I have a good collection of daisies. Could you show me where it grows in the wild?”

“Of course,” Sir Josiah said cheerfully. “We can go out this afternoon. And you must have a good roam through my woods. And when you have done with me I’ll give you a letter of introduction and you can go upriver and stay with my neighbors and see what they have that takes your eye.”

Lady Ashley came floating across the grass toward them. “Is this your first time in Virginia?” she asked with the slight drawl that the planters all shared.

“No,” John said. “I was here more than ten years ago for a long stay.”

“And were you plant-collecting then?”

“Yes,” John said cautiously. “But it was not like this.”

Sir Josiah wanted to lend him a horse but John preferred to walk in the woods. “I miss too much if I am too high and going too fast,” he said.

“I’m sure there are snakes,” Lady Ashley pointed out.

“I have good thick boots,” John said. “And I was much in the woods when I was last here.”

Sir Josiah had left a good stand of timber to the north of his estate and John started to walk there and then found himself following a stream which drew him deeper and deeper inland. He walked as he always did, as his father had always done – with only the occasional glance toward the horizon and the path ahead and with his eyes mostly on his boots and the little plants under his feet. He had been walking all morning when he suddenly exclaimed and dropped to his knees. It was a sorrel, but what had attracted him was the tiny indentations of the leaves. It was an American version of the familiar plant. John swung his satchel down, took out the trowel and carefully lifted the plant from the moist, dark earth, wrapped it in a broad leaf and tucked it into the pocket of his satchel.

He straightened up and walked on, his eyes glancing up at the trees, and then down to the path. After a little while, amid the buzz of the Virginian spring, the birdsong, the loud cry of the occasional flight of ducks and migrating geese, there was a new sound: a soft tuneless whistling. John was happy.