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In his 1930 epic poem The Bridge, Hart Crane codified the Algonquin "princess" Pocahontas as the mythical mother of the USA. This reading of Pocahontas-as a symbol of the coming together of cultures, and potential for a strong, heterogeneous future-is, by now, a staple of American folklore. This mythological apparatus was concretized, with reference to Crane, by Leslie A. Fielder in his seminal 1968 text, The Return of the Vanishing American, which compared Pocahontas and Hannah Duston as the two alternative mythological "Mothers Of Us All." It's a curious story though: the version that is closest to the facts as far as they are known-that Pocahontas was a princess, that she converted to Christianity, took the name Rebecca and married the Englishman John Rolfe-runs a slow second in popular imagination to an almost entirely fictional story: the romance of Pocahontas and John Smith in 1607 at the birth of the Jamestown colony.
Disney, of course, had a role to play in this: in their 1995 animated musical Pocahontas (Gabriel and Goldberg), Mel Gibson voiced the broad-shouldered, chisel-jawed John Smith to Irene Bedard's Pocahontas in a version of the story that ends after Smith leavesJamestown: no mention of Pocahontas's subsequent conversion to Christianity and marriage to Rolfe is made. This adaptation, though, already existed: in the 1956 single "Fever," it is "Captain Smith and Pocahontas" who "had a very mad af- fair"-and never mind that neither Smith nor Pocahontas ever claimed that such a tryst had taken place (John).
What Hart Crane, Disney screenwriters Carl Binder, Sunnah Grant, and Philip LaZebnik, and songwriters Eddie Cooley and John Davenport (Otis Blackwell) had in common was a point of communion: a story that balanced the white European and Native American narratives in a romance-a narrative that mutually incorporates these two elements into an American origin myth. There are different elements at play in all ofthem too: the sexuality of the woman who stands up to her father in the song, protecting her lover because "he gives me fever"; Disney of course wished to tell a child-friendly story, director Mike Gabriel telling The Columbian that "the story of John Rolfe and Pocahontas was too complicated and violent for a youthful audience" ("So Who?"). Hart Crane, however, had a grander...