Chapters (13)

The “plot,” then, some descriptions of historical events, many details, and the basic content of a few speeches are drawn from the written account I read, A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison: The White Woman of the Genesee, by James Everett Seaver, M.D.; revised by Charles Delamater Vail, L.H.D. (20th ed., New York: American Scenic & Historic Preservation Society; printed by Harper & Brothers, 1918). That book was first published in 1823.

Scriptural quotations are from the King James version of the Bible.

My research in many works contributed to this book. I found information to do with Aharihon, the (vampire) Skeleton, and the False Faces in Anthony F. C. Wallace’s The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (Vintage). Frederick Drimmer’s introduction to Captured by the Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts, 1750‒1870 (Dover) was helpful on the matter of scalps and scalpings. Parker on the Iroquois (Syracuse University Press), by Arthur C. Parker, was the source of some details of corn and food plants. The lines about Kautam on page 178 as well as the lines about slavery and the italicized material on pages 204‒206 and on pages 208‒210 are taken almost verbatim from the Seaver account. Professor Timothy Shannon and Professor Elizabeth Richardson Viti at Gettysburg College graciously provided me with technical help.

The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the Boyer Chair in Poetry provided by Gettysburg College gave me time to write; I am grateful. Thanks also to the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

I would like to thank the following persons for the generous help, present and/or past, that made this book possible: Jeffry Spencer, Jill Jansen and Stanley Steenmeyer, Judith and Walter Marquis, Carol and Hunting-ton Small, Joan and John L’Heureux, Baird Tipson, Anne Bucher Lane and Will Lane, Stephen Quint, Leah Hager Cohen, Annie Dillard, Lori Taylor, Linda and Larry Taylor, Erin Hosier, and Meredith Blum. I am especially indebted to Betsy Lerner, Sonny Mehta, and Deborah Garrison.

Finally, I am ever grateful for the support of my family: Aimee Larsen, Patrick Cowan, and my matchless husband, David Cowan, continue to sustain me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DEBORAH LARSEN

The White

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 Stanford and a Wallace Stevens Fellow at Yale. She teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College, where she holds the Merle S. Boyer Chair.

ALSO BY DEBORAH LARSEN

Stitching Porcelain: After Matteo Ricci in Sixteenth-Century China

COPYRIGHT PAGE

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2003

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Larsen, Deborah
The white: a novel / Deborah Larsen.—1st ed.
p. cm.