Today I begin the first installment of the first eight chapters of my second historical novel Alsoomse and Wanchese.
The first chapter begins in the fall of 1583 at Roanoke Island, located just inside North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The Algonquian inhabitants have begun the initial phase of a village ossuary burial, a community burial of individuals who had died sometime after the previous ossuary burial, usually five years before.
Early during my teaching career I took an active interest in the events of England’s first serious attempt to establish a colony in North America. The story has four phases, the final phase being the disappearance of the so-called “Lost Colony,” a settlement of Englishmen, women, and children abandoned temporarily by its governor. Historians base their interpretations of what transpired on what five English participants reported to Walter Raleigh, the administrator of the enterprise. Missing is any firsthand accounting by Algonquians. The historian Michael Leroy Oberg wrote: “Indians are pushed to the margins, at best playing bit parts in a story centered on the English. … Roanoke is as much a Native American story as an English one.” I wanted to write an Algonquian story.
Two years of research prepared me to believe that I knew enough about the Carolina/Virginia coastal plains Algonquian culture to create major characters and devise a plot that reflected that culture, that portrayed accurately historical fact, and that revealed universal truths about human beings of any time period. I wanted my novel to instruct and entertain.
My novel portrays the first phase of the Roanoke story: Algonquian life and conflict in 1583 to the departure in 1584 of the first English ships to arrive at Roanoke.
Below is a list of translated Algonquian words, a list of characters mentioned in the provided excerpt, and a map.
Algonquian Words:
Cattapeak: spring
Cohattayough: summer
Kwiocosuk: shaman, priest
Mamanatowick: ruler of several villages
Nepinough: earring of the corn season
Popanow: winter
Taquitock: the harvest and the falling of the leaves season
Weroance: chief of a village
Weroansqua: female chief of a village or dominant wife of the
village’s weroance
Characters:
* historically identified person
Alsoomse (Independent) –17, protagonist
Askook (Snake) – 21, Hurit’s brother and enemy of Alsoomse and
Wanchese
Chogan (Blackbird) – 12, Wingina’s son by deceased first wife
* Eracano – 30, Numaes’s husband and Wingina and Granganimeo’s
brother-in-law
* Granganimeo (He Who Is Serious) – 33, Roanoke weroance and Wingina’s brother
Hausisse (Old Woman) – 40, Odina’s mother
Hurit (Beautiful) – 25, Roanoke weroansqua. Granganimeo’s second wife
Keeqsquaw (Virgin) – 17, acquaintance of Alsoomse
Kimi (Secret) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s dead sister, 4 at time of
death, 1575
Kitchi (Brave) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s dead brother, 11 at time
of death, 1580
Matunaagd (He Who Fights) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s father, 35
at time of death, 1579
Matwau (Enemy) – Hurit, Askook, and Huritt’s father, 38 at time of
death, 1579
Nadie (Wise) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s mother, 36 at time of
death, 1582
Nuna (Land) – 16, Alsoomse’s friend across the lane
Nootau (Fire) – 20, Sooleawa’s son and Alsoomse and Wanchese’s cousin
Odina (Mountain) – 16, Alsoomse’s friend across the lane
* Osacan- 26, elite member of Wingina’s council
* Piemacum (He Who Churns up the Water) -- 25, hostile Pomeiooc weroance
Powaw (Priest) – 31, Wingina’s kwiocosuk
Pules (Pigeon) – 11, Odina’s sister
Rowtag (Fire) – Sooleawa’s husband, 36 at time of death, 1579
Samoset (He Walks Too Much) – 19, womanizer, friend of Askook
Sokanon (Rain) – 18, Sooleawa’s daughter and Alsoomse and
Wanchese’s cousin
Sooleawa (Silver) – 39, Nadie’s sister and Alsoomse and Wanchese’s
aunt
*Tanaquincy – 28, Granganimeo’s chief advisor
* Taraquine – 19, warrior and friend of Wanchese
* Tetepano – 27, elite member of Wingina’s council
*Wanchese (Take Flight off of Water) – 20, protagonist
Wapun (Dawn) – 12, Nuna’s sister
Wematin (Brother) – dead mamanatowick, brother of Ensenore, 50 at
time of death, 1579
* Wingina – 34, current mamanatowick and Granganimeo’s brother
Here is the first half of Chapter One.
Chapter 1
Using a moistened scrap of deerskin, Alsoomse removed dirt and decayed skin cells from the left humerus of her mother’s skeleton.
“I need to know so much,” she whispered. “What I never asked.”
Turning her head, she placed the deerskin on the rim of the clay pot that contained the hot water. She was, maybe, half finished.
She had not cried.
She looked across the dirt lane that separated her Aunt Sooleawa’s longhouse and those of her friends, Nuna and Odina. Loblolly pine stood like sentinels behind Nuna’s and Odina’s houses, gray mist beyond a dismal backdrop. Nuna and her young sister Wapun were kneeling over their mother’s bones. Odina and her young sister Pules were helping. Their sickly mother, Hausisse, was convalescing in her longhouse.
Alsoomse worked alone.
Wanchese! Where was he?! Was their mother’s burial so unimportant?!
How often he had disappointed her! Pivoting on her right knee, she stared at the pines through which the village path twisted. Might there be a canoe arriving? She imagined her brother disembarking from Dasemunkepeuc, where Wingina -- Wanchese’s substitute father and mentor – lived, where Wanchese had spent much of the past two falling of the leaves attempting to advance himself.
Hoping that he would appear made worse her realization that Wanchese was selfish. She was strong enough to do this work herself. She would do this herself, even though her aunt and her two cousins were close by to help. Sokanon had twice brought hot water from the fire to pour into the pot. Nootau was one of the men digging an extension of the mass grave they had dug three summers earlier. Wanchese shamed her.
Her mother Nadie and Aunt Sooleawa had shared this longhouse with their children after they had moved from Dasemunkepeuc the cohattayough following their husbands’ simultaneous deaths. Three cohattayoughs had elapsed. Separating himself from the family, Wanchese had grown into manhood. Alsoomse was not yet a woman. Yearning to accomplish so much, striving to comprehend the limits of her existence, she coveted her mother’s insight.
Footsteps. Sokanon’s shadow crossed Nadie’s upper skeleton. “Let me help, cousin. You have too much to do.” She indicated Nadie’s pelvis and leg bones.
Alsoomse’s eyes refused. “You have helped me, already. I must do the cleansing.” She looked away. Lines creased her broad forehead.
“All right. You do it.” Sokanon frowned. Alsoomse watched her walk into their longhouse. Far better to be independent than needy. If she had offended Sokanon, so be it. She wanted privacy. To ask her questions. To feel her hurt.
Alsoomse moved the deerskin cautiously over her mother’s right thigh bone. The skin caught on something jagged. She touched it with her right forefinger. Part of the top of the bone was cracked. When? What else had her mother kept from her, Wanchese, her father? She could only guess. “You, so respected for being wise,” she whispered. “I need your wisdom.”
Five popanows ago Alsoomse had spoken unkindly to Chogan, Wingina’s son. The boy, seven cohattayoughs old, had asked to be taught how to weave a reed mat. “You are a boy, Chogan, not a girl! Learn how to make bows and arrows and learn how to hunt!” Several of Chogan’s friends had heard her and had teased him. Two sleeps later Wingina had come to their entrance.
“It is your nature to learn from mistakes,” Nadie had said to her.
“I do not want to learn that way!” Alsoomse had answered then and thought now. “I just want to learn.”
Nadie’s eye sockets stared.
“Tell me what you have told me that I have forgotten.” She placed her palms against her ears, as though to impede distractions. “Help me, Mother. Help me.”
She glanced at the entrance to her longhouse, stared across the lane at Nuna and her sister. Satisfied, she lowered her face a hand’s length away from her mother’s skull. “How do you know who to marry?” Keeqsquaw, a popanow younger than she, had confided that her father two sleeps ago had beaten her mother. “Please, how will I know who is kind?”
Nadie spoke. “Pay less attention to how a man first treats you. Pay attention especially to what a man does when he believes he is not being watched.”
“They do not speak to me, Mother. They walk past me.” She closed her eyes, kept them shut five seconds. “I want to be loved.”
“Do not choose a man only because he wants to look at you. Do not let your loins choose him. Watch him when he is with unimportant people and you will learn if he is kind.”
Alsoomse blinked twice, wiped away liquid with the tip of her left forefinger, shut her eyes hard.
“A kind man, like your father, sees beyond what a girl looks like. He sees a woman’s soul.”
Alsoomse inhaled, held her breath, exhaled. Her left thumb touched her skin above her left eye, her little finger the skin above her right eye. Remembering what her mother may have said once or imaging what she would have said had she not died had not sufficed.
Whom could she approach to entreat?! Not Aunt Sooleawa, to whom she had not been close, who did little else but sit on a log in front of the longhouse where she weaved mats. She had only the living mother of her past and the imagined mother of the present.
“What does a man like father see in a woman’s soul?” she said aloud. She thought: obedience, generosity, tenderness, devotion. She doubted that she could be that person.
“Mother, I want to question things. Know the why of things. Decide things. Why must weroances, kwiocosuks, and a husband – kind or not -- decide who I must be?”
“We gave you your name for a reason.”
“That is not an answer.”
“Be respectful, child, dutiful. The gods have taught us our roles. We must obey them, please them.” These were the words that Nadie had spoken after Alsoomse had refused to admit to Granganimeo that she had taken sacred tobacco from the temple and sprinkled it around her mother’s and Sooleawa’s longhouse. “We must please also the wise ones who speak to them. Life is perilous, Alsoomse. Kiwasa makes it so. Weigh what you think before you act. Accept.”
Had the wicked god Kiwasa decided that her father and uncle and Wematin and more than a dozen Dasemunkepeuc and Secotan braves had to die because they had not demonstrated lavishly enough their reverence? Or, believing that Kiwasa would protect them, had Wematin’s kwiocosuk given Wematin mistaken advice? A summer after her father’s murder, Alsoomse’s little brother Kitchi had drowned in the high waves of the Great Waters. Her sister Kimi had died eight nepinoughs ago from a fever. It had been to gain Kiwasa’s favor that she had sprinkled the sacred tobacco that she had taken from the temple around the perimeter of her mother’s and aunt’s longhouse!
How much of life’s miseries was caused by the gods? How much of it was man’s doing? She wanted to know! She had nobody to ask.
Installments will be posted on Sundays and Thursdays.
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