Risk Culture: Performance and Danger in Early America

2. The Colonial Stage: Promise and Savagery in John Smith’s Virginia

–chapter 2– The Colonial Stage promise and savagery in john smith’s virginia Two remarkable moments in John Smith’s Virginia experience suggest the deep roots of a new American regime. The ‹rst occurred in the fall of 1608, when the English adventurer was foraging for food. In a “fair plaine ‹eld,” waiting for word from Powhatan, Smith was suddenly accosted by thirty naked women, “their bodies al painted, some white, some red, some black,” performing what Smith calls a “maskarado.”1 Casting themselves in a ring about the ‹re, they danced for about an hour with “hellish” abandon , whereupon, accompanying Smith to his lodging, they so “tormented” him with the demand “[L]ove you not mee?” that it was all he could do to escape their embraces (1:235–36). In this staging of cultural contact, the petitioner , Smith, whose settlement is desperately short of food, becomes the critical observer con‹rming his sense of mastery over primitive and threatening Others. His physical hunger is displaced onto their sexual hunger; his propriety is heightened by their seduction. The “maskarado,” then, would seem to transform the anxieties of the Virginia occupation into an assertion of English authority. A second encounter in January 1609 heightens the effect of mastery. Now the negotiations for food are more desperate and violent. After extracting corn from Powhatan at gunpoint, Smith’s party sought out the 14   ruler’s brother, Opechancanough. Surrounded by seven hundred warriors (he claims), Smith evened the odds by seizing the Indian leader, who begged for release. That “unpardonable affront”2 to warrior honor was followed by a full-throated harangue. I see you Pamaunkies the great desire you have to cut my throat; and my long suffering your injuries, have inboldened you to this presumption . The cause I have foreborne your insolencies, is the promise I made you (before the God I serve) to be your friend, till you give me just cause to bee your enimie. If I keepe this vow, my God will keepe me, you cannot hurt me; if I breake it he will destroie me. (1:253) Like God’s minister, Smith vows not to “cease revenge” if he is spurned, but he also vows to restrain himself to honor those Indians who “ke[pt their] promise” by saving him from certain death while he was held captive (253). Hence he bares his breast, daring them to kill him. So masterful is the performance that the Indians throw down their weapons and trade. Such encounters have become a focus of colonial studies. Rebecca Bach, for example, in a recent assessment of Pocahontas’s masque, sees the description as a violation of Indian culture in which Smith “erases Powhatan religion,” “disempower[s]” its women, and promotes “cultural genocide.”3 Smith’s misreading of the performers’ intentions (they were likely demonstrating the importance of native women, not their seductiveness ) turns the spectacle into a simulacrum of absolute power—the central, metropolitan consciousness that, like the Stuart masque Smith echoes, imposed order on chaos. So, too, Smith’s swaggering dominance of the Pamunkeys has been read as one more example of the “treacher[ous]” English presumption that colonizers “had a ‘right to trade’ even with recalcitrant natives.”4 Smith’s “smug assurance” in the face of native resistance , Bruce Smith observes, magni‹es the “epic gravity” of the colony itself and “serve[s] as a defense against the Indians’ frightening otherness.”5 In these exchanges, the savages merely magnify Smith’s imperial grandeur. They are the bit players in his excellent adventure. But certain elements of these scenes subtly challenge Smith’s will to power. As both Myra Jehlen and David Read have noted, those readings of Smith that stress authoritarian command overlook the essential element of uncertainty that marks his early texts—the “competing rationales” for the colonial stage 15 New World activity that clash (in Read’s words) “like ships torn from their moorings in a storm.”6 Each scene captures that uncertainty through ambiguities of promise and performance. In the Pamunkey incident, Smith’s reference to vows is almost obsessive. He is hurt by his hosts’ failure to keep their promise of aid, and only the sanctity of his own vows has so far restrained him. “You promised to fraught my ship ere I departed, and so you shall,” he shouts, “or I meane to load her with your dead carkases; yet if as...