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By Sallie Morgan
Special to the Rappahannock News
On Friday, June 8, at 8 p.m. the RAAC Library Senes will mark the 400th Anniversary of America’s first permanent English settlement at Jamestown with a special program featuring Bob Deans, author of “The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James.”
Deans’ beautifully written book is a biography of Virginia’s James River, which is the most historic waterway in America. The book takes readers on a captivating journey through time, from the founding of Jamestown in 1607, to the fall of the Confederate capital of Richmond in 1865.
It was along this river that the first democratic body in the Western Hemisphere met in 1619, just weeks before the first stolen Africans arrived in chains. It was here, too, that the voice of the Revolution emerged, the basics of nation-building unfolded and civil war was fought to free the slaves, affirm our national purpose and redefine forever what it means to be an American.
“The story is ugly in places. Seldom is it fully just or fair,” writes Deans. “And yet, this American cradle has not only endured; it has been redeemed, through the long-running drama that ties Native American dreams to European ambitions and the power of the African people who came to this country in chains and somehow kept faith through the long nightmare of slavery with their unfathomable will to be free.”
The book is not a novel, but in some ways it reads like one because the characters - Powhatan, Pocahontas, John Smith, John Rolfe, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Benedict Arnold, Gabriel Prosser (who
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