COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

In memory of Christopher

EPIGRAPH

A statue of Mary Jemison stands but fifteen miles from my present home in the woods. Some say that at a site not far from this statue, iron spikes and a single shoe buckle have been unearthed and that they belong to the vanished house that Mary’s father built on the banks of a creek, the Conewago, which continues to cut the broad valley where this story begins.

Adams County, Pennsylvania

PRAISE

ACCLAIM FOR DEBORAH LARSEN’S

The White

“Illuminated by a wonderful sense of detail and natural rhythm, of landscape, body, and the shifts and changes of time.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“There is a wealth of life in this spare novel. At times the short sentences and spare language can feel light and ephemeral, but the weight of the writing is hidden in such brevity. The shards of images sink in to wash to the surface long after the last page is read.”

—The Oregonian

“An accomplished first novel. . . . Larsen handles . . . complex emotions and her dueling desires with subtlety, and her elegant prose vividly brings Mary’s world and thoughts to life.”

—Booklist

“A brave . . . stark, snowdeep novel.”

—Austin American-Statesman

“Being American is to wear a coat of many colors. . . . Larsen’s novel is an instructive, winning reminder that the coat was once woven from broadcloth and buckskin, feathers and silk, in a fabric as hard to unravel as it is to deny.”

—Daily News

The sky is pale margin. Neither flesh nor a god, it appears to dissolve at the firm edge of land where a tale might begin.

These edges of earth, muddy browns and flat blacks with offshoots of green, are marked and distinct and indeed suffer their distinctions, just as the Seneca language suffers its difference from English or French. Only the snow sometimes softens the world—its bulwarks, stiles, and mountain faces; that pier-head, this rigging, those docks beyond which lie impassable waters.

I was born a white at sea on the way to the New World. From my youth in that world I wished to own land bordered by sky, as my mother and father had once purchased woods and fields which were dappled with changing light. In time this happened in such a fashion, I daresay, as it had happened to few women before me.

But I was taken by those whom we called Indians. Nearly speechless for a time, I was beset by terrors.

My birth name was Mary.

PREFATORY NOTE

PREFATORY NOTE

IN 1758 a woman around the age of sixteen named Mary Jemison—or as some now think, Mary Jamison— was actually taken by a Shawnee raiding party in south-central Pennsylvania; she was forced from her home, which lay close to what would later be known as the town of Gettysburg.