Dead before 30: Pocahontas

Pocahontas: 1595-1617

Born in the late 1500’s, Pocahontas was the youngest daughter of Powhatan, chief of the tribes whose name he took years earlier, after he had waged a long campaign to unite the southern tribes into a society not unlike the Iroquois confederacy of the northern territories.

The complexities of what Pocahontas did or did not do to spare the life of John Smith have filled volumes I can only begin to recap here. It was 1607, and on an expedition up the Chesapeake bay, Smith – a notorious adventurer, raconteur, blowhard, and general thorn in the side of authority everywhere, was taken prisoner by the Powhatans. He was held captive while the chieftans tried to figure out what to do with him. Powhatan eventually, perhaps, chose to kill him. Or, just as likely, he chose peace. In either case, there was a ceremony, a symbolic (or literal) clubbing of Smith, during which Pocahontas played the role of Smith’s savior, rushing from the crowd, throwing herself on him, and begging her father for mercy. It was granted, and Smith gained a symbolic membership in the tribe. He returned to the Jamestown Colony, and Pocahontas became the emissary and mascot of the settlers.

Whether this was an initiation ceremony welcoming Smith to the tribe, an actual execution she prevented, or even whether any of that happened at all, nobody actually knows. Pocahontas never spoke of it; Smith’s is the only account, and even then he did so ten years later, in his third volume of memoirs, and details of the encounter echo a similar story he recounted from one of his trip to the Orient, years earlier. Such is the record in the pre-blog era.

But what of Powhatan, whose dream was to become father of a great nation? His fate was sealed. By choosing peace he unleashed waves of settlers who eventually spelled the doom of the people he had worked so hard to unite. But I think of this fact: his daughter Pocahontas eventually married John Rolfe, another settler, and emigrated to England. There, she toured the royal houses, converted to Christianity, and bore a son to John. On her return trip to the Americas, she took ill and died in 1617. She was not yet thirty years old.

But Rolfe and the boy returned to America, and their descendants became one of the premier families of Virginia. In this way, Powhatan’s vision of founding a great empire in the south came true, and his bloodline flows through prominent American families to this day. Which makes Pocahontas - who was captured, converted to Christianity, and carried around the globe to wonders beyond her father's imagining, a woman, essentially, without a home or a country except what she forged from circumstances she could not control - this woman who died before 30, a princess of aboriginals who saw more of the world in her short life than the King of England - was one of the founding mothers of America.

Note: This is part of an ongoing series of prominent people who made their contribution to society, then died in their 20's. My fascination with such people has, as yet, gone unexplained.

Dead before 30: Jean-Michel Basquiat, painter

When he was sixteen, Jean-Marie Basquiat and a friend began painting cryptic phrases around the Manhattan art district and signing them with the tag SAMO. They weren't much, just a few words and the tag - kind of like tweets in that they were short, amusing, and put on display for the world from relative anonymity. Somehow, these little nuggets teased the art world's gatekeepers into such a state of curiosity that when Basquiat outed himself and killed off SAMO, his own art career took off like a meteor. This was in the early eighties, when a booming economy and Reagan-era policies gave young noveau-riche tons of spare cash to throw at art. They found a target in Basquiat. Yhis young, wild child of a Haitian immigrant had just the right whiff of the other to seem dangerous. Soon Basquiat had enough pocket money and fame to hang at galleries and glam bars, doing heroin and dating starlets like the then unknown Madonna. He befriended and was fostered by the artists Andy Warhol and Kieth Haring. His work sold for millions, the world was his; then he died of a heroin overdose in August, 1988, age 27. 

Dead before 30: James Dean, actor

The romantic fascination of celebrities who die young could well begin and end with James Dean. Handsome, mercurial, essentially unknowable, working in a medium that encourages false faces and magic deception, Dean amassed a body of work so slight and so concentrated in tragic romance, his fate as pin-up boy and shorthand reference to longing and teenage rebellion was perhaps sealed even before his untimely death.

Dead before Thirty: Stephen Crane, Author

Stephen Crane, writer (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900)

It may have been Stephen Crane Virginia Woolf was thinking of when she derided the state of her era’s literature for being more interested in matters of men and their wars than in the thoughts of women as they sat in drawing rooms. Crane’s signature piece, The Red Badge of Courage, has but one woman with a speaking role, and his other great work, The Open Boat, has no women at all. His life, as well, was one of adventure, gambling, war, and brothels.

One can little blame Crane for his material any more than you can any writer for the things they write about, but it’s undeniable that in his day Crane was both masculine and popular. While writing his first novel, the self-published Maggie (at the time a scandalous portrait of a fallen woman), he lived for a time in the notorious Five Corners of New York, amongst prostitutes and criminals. The Red Badge of Courage contains extended scenes of epic Civil War battles, and a central character who aches above all things to be considered heroic, to be tested and found worthy, and in the end considers himself both. In story after story, Crane explores men and their need to test themselves against each other in a world which cares nothing for their survival or death. It is little wonder that Hemingway considered him an inspiration, and popularized him when his literary reputation had fallen.

During his life, Crane achieved great fame on both sides of the Atlantic, and after the success of The Red Badge, parlayed his fame into a series of adventures as field reporter in the American West and later the Spanish-American war, where he traveled for a time with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Then, Crane fell into disrepute when he began a long-term relationship with Cora Taylor, the madam of a Jacksonville, Florida brothel. After a brief stint covering the Greco-Turkish war for the Hearst syndicate, Crane settled in England with Cora, where he lived the life of a profligate ex-patriot, throwing lavish parties that only left him deeper in debt. He struck up friendships with HG Wells, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. In 1900, he collapsed during a party, the tuberculosis he’d been living with finally catching up to him. He died in a spa in Germany in June, not yet 29 years old.

Over a hundred years later, Virgina Woolf may have the final laugh. Bookstores have become the playground of chick-lit bestsellers of single women chatting over lattes, and war stories are requisitely broody, irony-laden apologias for the cliché of war as a pointless relic of barbarous times. One reads his poem War is Kind, and you may not regret that his star has faded.

People who died before 30: Joan of Arc

Famous people who died before 30
Joan of Arc, saint and military leader

In 1424, when she was 12 years old, Jean d’Arc, a peasant girl in what is now northern France, was in the fields when she heard voices calling to her. They were so beautiful she wept when they left. Later, these voices – of angels, she would later claim – convinced her she was destined to help the French military in their struggle to end the Lancastrian occupation of France during one of the conflicts summed up as the Hundred Years War.

When she was 16 years old, the voices convinced her to seek out the local commander of the French feudal army, and she gained his confidence by predicting an unlikely victory in a distant battle. From here, she was granted court with Duke Charles in besieged Orleans. Low on morale, broke, and desperate after countless defeats, Charles and the army took her as a sort of an mascot, and her talk of visions turned the civil war into a religious conflict. She wore a specially made suit of armor and rallied the men to raise morale. She inspired them to attend church and stop swearing, and drove the prostitutes from the camps. Amazingly, the French responded well to this infusion of strict Christian morality. Joan attended battles herself as a standard bearer, and the newly invigorated French won victory after unlikely victory. In 1429, at the siege of Orleans, the French rallied to the offensive, drove back the English invaders, and took enough land for Charles VII to be crowned King at Reims.

Unfortunately, in 1430 Joan was captured by the enemy Burgundians during an ill-advised raid. Her family had no money for ransom, and Charles VII refused to intervene. She was sold to the British, who wanted to use her trial for heresy as a ruse to undermine Charles VII’s claim to the throne, re-opening the door for English rule of Normandy. After a show trial, she was eventually convicted and burned at the stake, then her remains were burned twice more into ashes which were cast into the Seine to prevent relics of her body being used in sainthood. She was 19 years old.

Her legend, however, only grew. A posthumous retrial declared her innocent in 1456, when folk ballads were of her virtue and glory were already popular. She has been the subject of many authors from Shakespeare to Mark Twain to George Bernard Shaw. Since attaining sainthood in 1920, she has appeared in dozens of movies: In 1948 Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for portraying her, in 1999 Milla Jovovich was a blip on the radar, while in 1989 Jane Wiedlin, better known as the guitarist for the pop band The Go-Go's,  took her persona for a loopy spin in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. She has a line of canned beans named after her, for which the website offers no explanation. She has been satirized in the Simpsons, been the inspiration for trashy Halloween costumes, and in 2006 had an entire video game with her as the central character. Not a bad legacy for a moody teenager.

People who died before turning 30: Clifford Brown

In the early fifties, as bebop hardened up and the musicians turned from marijuana to heroin, there was Cliff Brown. Cliff was a wunderkind from Delaware, a kid so talented on trumpet he was sitting in with Max Roach and Fats Navarro while still studying math at the University of Maryland. Eventually, but quickly, he moved into music full-time, touring Europe with Lionel Hampton in 1951, where he made a name for himself by sitting in on numerous recording sessions with other artists.

In 1954 Cliff emerged as a leader in his own right, and two years later had released a couple of albums with Max Roach on drums. Stardom seemed inevitable. Along the way, he set a new standard for technical skill and improvisational virtuosity. Listening to him today is a mind-numbing experience, as his attack remains perfect while he machine-guns through scales and over chords that loop and turn and pinwheel, a technician slicing the riff into tiny perfect notes the way a chef might dice a carrot.

It couldn’t have been easy for him. Jazz at that time was full of heroin addicts and self-destructive personalities, and overdoses were claiming stars left and right. Charlie Parker, for instance, died in 1955 (aged 35). But Cliff was straight, never doing drugs, and claiming that even alcohol didn’t agree with him.

But wet roads ended up doing what drugs couldn't. In 1956, on his way to a show in Chicago, with his wife at the wheel, his car skidded off a wet Pennsylvania turnpike. Cliff, his wife, and a third passenger, also a musician, died on the scene. Clifford Brown was 25 years old.

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This is part of a planned series of short biographies of people who made a significant impact on their worlds, then died before turning 30.