He had a narrow but widely shared sense of the past - a history that has viewed American as European in ancestry. Questions like the one my taxi driver asked me are always jarring, but I can understand why he could not see me as American. I said goodbye to my driver and went into the hotel, carrying a vivid reminder of why I was attending this conference. My mental wandering across terrain and time ended abruptly as we arrived at my destination. In the wake of the Admiral, many peoples would come to America from different shores, not only from Europe but also Africa and Asia. Thinking he had reached Asia, Christopher Columbus mistakenly identified one of the islands as “Cipango” (Japan). Several hundred miles off shore was Bermuda, the “Bermoothes” where William Shakespeare’s Prospero had landed and met the native Caliban in The Tempest.Įarlier, another voyager had made an Atlantic crossing and unexpectedly bumped into some islands to the south. Jamestown, the English settlement founded in 1607, was nearby: the first twenty Africans were brought here a year before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock. Here, at the eastern edge of the continent, I mused, was the site of the beginning of multicultural America. In the English cultural appropriation of America, the indigeneous peoples themselves would become outsiders in their native land. Our highway was on land that Sir Walter Raleigh had re-named “Virginia” in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. Suddenly, we both became uncomfortably conscious of a racial divide separating us.Īn awkward silence turned my gaze from the mirror to the passing landscape, the shore where the English and the Powhatan Indians first encountered each other.

A different mirror