In 1608, a "Love Dance" for John Smith and his men:
Then the
ceremony began: “thirtie young women came naked out of the woods, onely covered
behind and before with a few green leaves, their bodies all painted, some of
one colour, some of another, but all differing, their leader had a fayre payre
of Bucks hornes on her head, and an Otters skinne at her girdle, and another at
her arme, a quiver of arrowes at her backe, a bow and arrowes in her hand; the
next had in her hand a sword, another a club, another a pot-sticke . . . .”
Thus adorned with paint of various colors usually reserved
for men (red was a woman’s color, but men on occasion wore blue, black, and
yellow as well as red) and armed in a mimicry of gender roles, from men’s
hunting (the otter skins, bows and arrows) and warfare (the sword and club) to
women’s cooking (the pot-stick), these young women “cast themselves in a ring about the fire, singing and
dauncing . . . .” After the dance, which lasted “near an hour,” was done, the
young women invited Smith to their lodging, where, as he tells it, “all these
Nymphes more tormented him then ever, crowding, pressing, and hanging about
him, most tediously crying, Love you not me? love you not me?” Then there was a
feast with more singing and dancing, and afterward, “with fire brands in stead
of Torches they conducted him to his lodging.”
With this tantalizing conclusion, Smith leaves us to wonder
what happened next. Where was Pocahontas? Smith’s earlier use of the phrase “Pocahontas
and her women” could mean that Pocahontas was among the dancers. Were the other
young women some of Powhatan’s many wives? Were Smith’s English companions also
given this special treatment? And the most important question of all: in the
absence of Powhatan, did Pocahontas and the other young women stage this
ceremony for their own amusement?
If these young women designed their dance to flaunt their
femininity before the Englishmen and to mock masculine prowess in hunting and
fighting--the principal activities of Indian males--then this ceremony suggests
not only Indian women’s awareness of the importance of gender roles, but a
shrewd and subtle humor in the use of them. If Pocahontas had an adolescent
crush on John Smith, she may have contrived to entertain him thus, and perhaps
to flaunt her sexuality before him, without the constraints of her father’s
presence. Whatever the nature of
their relationship, it was very close, and on one occasion Pocahontas risked
her life to warn Smith and his men of a planned surprise attack on them by her
father.
--an excerpt from Virginia Bernhard, “Pocahontas Was Not the Only
One: Indian Women and Their English Liaisons in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,”
in Searching for Their Places: Women in the South Across Four Centuries,
Thomas W. Appleton, Jr., and Angela Boswell, eds. (Columbia and London: University
of Missouri Press, 2003).
