THE POCAHONTAS-JOHN SMITH STORY
The Pocahontas-John Smith Story
By
Pocahontas Wight Edmunds
James H. Bailey, Ph.D., Editor
THE DIETZ PRESS, INC.
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA[4]
Copyright © 1956, by
POCAHONTAS WIGHT EDMUNDS
Quotes from Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg. Copyright, 1918, byHenry Holt and Company, Inc. Copyright, 1946, by Carl Sandburg.By permission of the publishers.
Quotes from Western Star by Stephen Vincent Benet. Copyright,1943, by Rosemary Carr Benet. Published by Rinehart & Company.
FROM THE PRESSES OF THE DIETZ PRINTING COMPANY
Introduction
WHEN my Tales of the Virginia Coast was published in 1950 the NewYork Times (Book Review) page "In and Out of Books" asked the DietzPress: "Do you really have an author named Pocahontas Wight Edmunds?"Before the printer's ink was dry a reporter rushed in to tell him thathis grandmother had that name. I hastened to write that mygreat-grandmother was named Pocahontas as was my mother, my niece andseveral cousins. Besides we had two Matoacas in our family and all of usare descendants in two lines, since first cousins married about acentury ago. The name of the present first lady of Virginia is AnnePocahontas Stanley, and Pocahontas was that of her mother. If ships,hotels, camps, counties and commercial products appropriate the name,why not descendants? To be named "Pocahontas" is to borrow glory and toattract excitement as surely as dark flannel attracts lint.
When I was five our family visited the Croatan settlement near RedSprings, North Carolina, and my father imprudently revealed the Indiannames of his wife and daughter. Mother blushed and I bawled as thedrunken crowd of Sunday afternoon clasped us to their bosoms sotenaciously that Father could scarcely extricate us from their clutches.Later in the week, Chief Locklear came calling in a golden, yellow surrywith yellow fringe, bearing tribute of native scuppernong grapes. Theywere offered red and sweet, for red, sweet Pocahontas's sake rather thanours.
I was usually given the Indian role in school plays. In 1923 I was askedto take the Pocahontas role in the mammoth Virginia pageant in Richmond.In 1925 the Fox News-Reel introduced me: "Descendant of Chief PowhatanOpens the Biggest Book in the World." This volume was Dr. Matthew PageAndrews's[6] Story of the South, which had stood ten feet tall on thestage of the Strand Theater when I had played "Carry Me Back to OldVirginia" on my violin in front of the illustration of my ancestress.
Lecturers and notables have singled me out of the mob for the name'ssake only. The sonorous American poet Vachel Lindsay bent low as hehalted a campus receiving line