Accomac Erotic

The Accomac were an Algonquian-speaking people who lived at the southern tip of Virginia's Eastern Shore, in what is now Northampton County, from before English contact in 1608 until their reservation was broken up in the early nineteenth century; their descendants, long known as the Gingaskin, merged into the peninsula's free communities of color and still live there. Their name is usually glossed as "the other side place," and that is how everyone saw them: the people across the Chesapeake. A dozen or more miles of open water kept them at arm's length from the Powhatan paramount chiefdom. They paid tribute and spoke what John Smith recognized as Powhatan's language, but they ran their own affairs.

They lived on a narrow strip of sandy land with water on both sides: corn, beans and squash in the fields, fish, oysters, clams and crabs from the creeks and marshes. The Eastern Shore also supplied shells for roanoke, the disk beads that served as wealth and tribute around the Chesapeake, which gave a small people more weight than their numbers suggest. Smith counted about eighty fighting men in 1608 and was told of a recent sickness that had killed many more. He called their leader the most handsome and courteous native ruler he had met.

A leader of that generation enters English records as the Laughing King, named Esmy Shichans and often identified with the name Debedeavon. He chose accommodation early and kept to it. He gave land to the interpreter Thomas Savage, sold corn to a hungry Jamestown, and in 1621 warned the colonists that Opechancanough was after a poisonous plant that grew on the Eastern Shore to use against them. When the assault of 1622 fell on the western settlements, the Accomac stayed out. Loyalty bought little. English planters poured onto the peninsula for the same reason the Accomac valued it: good land, safe from mainland wars.

By the 1640s the survivors were confined to a reservation of about 650 acres, and the colony began calling them the Gingaskin. They held that ground for more than a century and a half, farming, fishing, and marrying free Black neighbors, which white officials then cited as proof that they were no longer Indians. In 1813 Virginia's legislature ordered the land divided into individual lots, decades before allotment became national policy, and after the panic that followed Nat Turner's revolt in 1831 nearly all of it was sold to whites. The name survives in Accomack County and the town of Accomac, both north of where the Accomac lived.