The White » (Reprint)

Deborah Larsen grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and currently lives with her husband in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Her collection of poetry, Stitching Porcelain, was published in 1991, and her poems and short stories have appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, The Quarterly, Oxford Magazine, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Yale. She teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College, where she holds the Merle S. Boyer Chair.

In 1758, when Mary Jemison is about sixteen, a Shawnee raiding party captures her Irish family near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Mary is the only one not killed and scalped. She is instead given to two Seneca sisters to replace their brother who was killed by whites. Emerging slowly from shock, Mary—now named Two-Falling-Voices—begins to make her home in Seneca culture and the wild landscape. She goes on to marry a Delaware, then a Seneca, and, though she contemplates it several times, never rejoins white society. Larsen alludes beautifully to the way Mary apprehends the brutality of both the white colonists and the native tribes; and how, open-eyed and independent, she thrives as a genuine American.

The New Yorker

In 1758, sixteen-year-old Mary Jemison was seized by Shawnee warriors from her homestead in southwestern Pennsylvania; she witnessed the scalping of her family, and was then adopted by two Seneca sisters to take the place of their brother, who had been killed by whites. The crux of this starkly beautiful novel, based on an account of Mary's life published in 1823, is her ultimate decision not to be "redeemed" -- released from captivity. The author, a poet, channels the violence of Mary's life into spare, almost Biblical prose, and delivers a transfixing portrait of a woman who, no longer considered white and never wholly Seneca, refuses to be defined by tragedy: "I will not open these wounds again so as to satisfy anyone's idea of what it is to be human."