Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 11, 1991 TAG: 9103090401
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICK K. LACKEY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Page 110 is awfully late for love to begin to bloom in a bodice-ripper. But their soon-shared passion heats as surely as summer air under a searing sun.
She falls for Capt. Smith a scant five pages later.
"His eyes! It was the god of sky looking right at me through his eyes! And his hair! Like the early sun on a golden field."
Eight pages later he sits by her and they almost touch.
It was her first chance to see him well, and she could barely repress a gasp.
They first touch on Page 156.
"She felt her body start to tremble slightly. I can't take my eyes away from his, she thought. I feel as if I am sinking into their blue depths. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Her whole being was paralyzed by the look in his eyes."
And so on.
The novel, a 456-page paperback, is based on the legend that Pocahontas, favorite daughter of the powerful Chief Powhatan, persuaded daddy not to slay Smith because he moved her. The torch song "Fever," sung at a white heat by Peggy Lee, is based on that legend.
"I embellished a little bit," said the author, former Virginian Susan Donnell, now of London. "I put her in the House of Commons. It's possible she could have gone there.
"As she was kidnapped and kept on a ship, I had her in a little sea battle. The battle could have happened, but we don't know for sure. The main things were absolutely factual."
Donnell was speaking by phone from a friend's Manhattan apartment shortly before she embarked on a three-week, 18-city, coast-to-coast promotions and book-signing tour.
After four days on the market, "Pocahontas" soared to No. 27 on the Waldenbooks best-seller list, for the week ending Feb. 23. The list is based on sales at the chain's more than 1,000 stores.
It is precisely the kind of popular book whose embellishments drive historians batty.
There was no love affair between Pocahontas and John Smith, declared Helen C. Rountree, associate professor of anthropology at Old Dominion University, who has studied the Powhatans for 21 years.
All the while John Smith was in Virginia, Rountree said, "Pocahontas was a prepubescent girl." She had a kind of schoolgirl crush on Smith, Rountree said, but her affection was not returned.
Furthermore, Rountree continued, it is doubtful that Pocahontas saved John Smith from her father. Initially, her father helped the Englishmen, seeing them as potential allies.
"I don't think Smith needed saving," Rountree said. "You don't rescue people who don't need it."
No Pocahontas Day
Rountree has written "Pocahontas' People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries." It was published last year by the University of Oklahoma Press. Curt Gaul, a park ranger at Jamestown, recommended Rountree as the best authority on Pocahontas and the Powhatans.
It includes 82 pages of reference notes and 24 pages of bibliography.
So will the legend of Pocahontas and Donnell's novel prevail over laborious historical research?
Most likely.
Two hundred thousand paperback copies of "Pocahontas" have been published by Berkley Books of New York. It sells for $8.95 and is being heavily promoted.
The book's publicist asked the Williamsburg City Council to declare a Pocahontas Day, but it declined.
Williamsburg Mayor John Hodges scanned the book. In it, he said, "Pocahontas and John Smith went at it again in England while she was married to John Rolfe. That's a little hard to believe."
Relatively speaking
In the phone interview, Donnell said she was just a girl of 6 or 7 when she entertained her parents by staging reenactments of John Smith's rescue with her brother and cousin. This all took place at their historic Front Royal home, called The Millar House after its first resident, her ancestor Randolf Millar.
Two things prompted Donnell to write "Pocahontas," her first book.
One was her discovery from family journals that she was a 14th-generation direct descendant of Pocahontas.
The other was a fire five years ago that destroyed The Millar House, then more than 250 years old. The house's destruction was noted in the Washington Post. Its loss moved her, she said, to begin writing novels about her relatives. Several more novels will follow, she said, the next one on the Randolph dynasty.
At age 16, Donnell said, she learned during a family table conversation that she was descended from Pocahontas. A relative's black eyes were mentioned, and someone said, "That must be the Pocahontas in them."
At age 18, Donnell married a banker, with whom she lives today in London. She won't give her age.
Asked about her research for the novel, Donnell said: "I did it all from England. I went to different parties and discovered a lot of descendants of Pocahontas right there in England."
The Duchess of Bucclough, the Astors, the Mountbattens, they're all descended from Pocahontas, she said.
The research and writing took about 1 1/2 years. In the interview, Donnell could not recall the names of the historians whose books she had consulted but said she had relied on books from the London Library and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, along with family records.
She makes no claims to being a trained historian. Like most novels, hers contains no reference notes. It does, however, include many known historic incidents, such as John Smith's injury by exploding gun powder and Pocahontas' trip to England, where she died.
Other writing Donnell has done includes part-time reporting for the Associated Press and free-lancing for various publications.
The writing of the novel went slowly at first.
"The first chapters took forever," she said, "but after that it started to come much more easy. I started to enjoy it. It's definitely an exciting book, so it was fun to do."
She believes that Pocahontas saved not just John Smith but the entire Jamestown Colony.
"I think the book shows one element that nobody has ever thought of," she said. "Pocahantas was an important geo-political figure. If she hadn't intervened with her powerful father to keep him from running the English away from Jamestown, the Spanish would have been free to come up from Florida or the French to come down from Nova Scotia and the United States would have been Spanish- or French-speaking today."
In England, Donnell said, Pocahontas is a respected figure.
"She is quite well known there, particularly among the taxi drivers. They all know where the Pocahontas statues are."
Appearance questioned
In what some would call an act of cruelty, this reporter read part of Donnell's book to Rountree, including this description of Pocahontas:
"Because her eyes glinted so often with precocious thoughts and ideas, she had been given the name Pocahontas, which meant Little Mischief or Little Wanton. She was not small, though, and her arms and legs were long and well molded. Her firm, fine skin was the color of sand under water."
Pocahontas' legs could not have been long, Rountree said, because Pocahontas was quite short. She probably also was muscular, Rountree said, because even a chief's daughter worked.
The book cover shows Pocahontas with waist-long black hair, and she has on a deer-skin dress with lots of fringe.
As a prepubescent Powhatan girl, Rountree said, Pocahontas would have gone naked, and her head would have been shorn, except for a long pony-tail in back.
As to the legend of Pocahontas saving John Smith, that came from Smith himself, according to Rountree and various historians. Smith, it seems, was an occasional blowhard.
In the months immediately after his capture in 1607, he made no mention of being saved by an Indian maiden. No contemporary made any mention of John Smith being saved from Powhatan by Pocahontas.
Smith first claimed Pocahontas saved him in his "Generall Historie," written 17 years after his capture, after relations with the Indians had soured, to say the least.
Rountree wrote in her Pocahontas book:
"Readers of Smith's later works will note that in his lifetime he was conveniently saved `by a fair lady at the moment of direst peril - not once but three times.' And the women are not depicted as real people, but `were stage dieties who intervened at the proper moments, and always women of high rank - an aid no doubt to Smith's pretensions to being a gentleman, coat of arms and all.' "
A matter of history
Donnell, in an author's note at the beginning of her book, says historians disagree over whether Pocahontas and John Smith were lovers.
"I feel sure in my heart that they must have been," she wrote. "History records that Pocahontas was so overpowered with emotion when she saw Smith again in England after several years apart that he could not have been a mere friend. Furthermore, during the early days in Virginia, she would not have risked her life and performed feats of bravery time and again for Smith and his fellow adventurers, who were strangers to her, unless there was a strong attraction."
She does not, however, specify which historians recorded that.
As for her book, Donnell said, "People tell me it's exciting, powerful, passionate."
Rountree would rather Donnell had never written it.
"I've seen too many people take literature literally and think it was history," she said. "Since I have spent my career trying to make the Indians regular people in other people's minds, I don't find her work useful."
by CNB