“The Heavens,” it is written, “declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.”

The firmament revealeth the mud-turtle, noble and dignified in its slime.

I will not open these wounds again so as to satisfy anyone’s idea of what it is to be human.

“I OFFER you your liberty.”

“What did you say?”

“I offer you your liberty.” Her brother, the hot-headed Black Coals, smiled.

“It is yours to offer?” As soon as Mary had asked this, she realized she might have offended her brother. But the irony escaped him and he told her, yes, he was offering her, his sister, freedom.

His face was kind and old, and out of love and courtesy she took no issue with him, saying she would think on it. Three days later, without discussing this with Hiokatoo, she thanked her brother but said that she had made up her mind to stay at Genesee. And then she told him something she had never told him: “I had thought of moving on and trying to settle myself on land of my own, but I cannot have all things in this life.”

Black Coals was well pleased with his sister’s resolve. One day he told her that they should apply to the great council at Big-Tree for a parcel of land.

“What?”

“Why did you never tell me,” he said, “that you would like some land? I can’t help you get what you don’t ask for.”

She assumed that he meant that if they were successful they would own it together, but Black Coals stood with his hands in his pockets and said no, that the land should be hers.

“Mine?”

“Yours alone.”

“And Hiokatoo’s as well?”

“No. Yours. I know you will take good care of your husband.”

BECAUSE she had summoned up tact of heart for her aging brother, because she had not reproved him for his offer of freedom, she found herself pacing off a boundary.

She knew what she wanted. She walked; she looked. She judged. She would walk and then turn sharply and walk off again in a straight line. What she wanted included streams with brown trout, fields for her and her family, fields she could lease, stands of trees, and hills and valleys, including one great hill and one great valley.

While she was measuring off her land, Black Coals was sickening. He died at Grand River, but not before he had enlisted the aid of his friend, Farmer’s Brother, to work with Mary on the negotiations at Big-Tree.

AND SO in 1797, Mary, known to her French captors as l’autre, known to the Seneca as Two-Falling-Voices, known to her first husband as Two, known to her second husband as Two-Falling; known to her white neighbors as Mary; known to her white solicitor, because of his conservative stubbornness, as Mrs. Jemison; known to her children as Mother; came to own land: more than ten thousand acres.