This reading took place at The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico on August 13, 2024. It has been edited slightly to remove names of the attendees who asked questions.
Chapters:
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Introduction
So I’m going to read to you today from my book which has been out for about six weeks.
It’s called Taken by the Shawnee, published by a really remarkable small press in New York called Turtle Point Press.
This is a bad time for publishers as some of you know.
There’s a big problem with people who read on Kindle, which means the bookstore doesn’t make any money.
And so I’m really pleased that this small press, not enormously wealthy, but with a publisher, Ruth Greenstein, who really feels a commitment to her writers, not just to one book but to later books.
She’s going to publish my next book in September 2025.
That’s called Cowboy Tales.
It’s fiction.
This is historical fiction.
And people often ask me, “Well, how in the world did you get started on this?”
So I’m going to read you from my author’s note which will explain that.
My first clue and inspiration for this book was a letter written in 1938 in Charleston, West Virginia, on the yellowing typewriter paper of that time.
It is addressed in flowing script to Master Worth Bingham and Master Barry Bingham, my older brothers, from Cousin Sally, who added, “I prefer the just Sally.”
“I’m sending you the story,” Sally typed, “of your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Margaret Handley Pauline Erskine.”
Sally added, “You must let your mother read it over to see if there’s anything you should not read until you are bigger boys.”
You can imagine they got more interested when they heard that.
I was the youngest and a girl.
Cousin Sally didn’t consider me an appropriate recipient, and yet I am the one who has read, studied, thought, and created, becoming part of the great modern movement of women taking charge of the writing of history.
These few yellowed pages contain Margaret Erskine’s account of her taking by the Shawnee Indians in 1779.
Based on a brief narrative, she dictated to her grandson, Alan Caperton, six decades after her capture in the wilderness on what was then the western frontier of Virginia, now West Virginia.
By now, 245 years later, Margaret’s story has passed through many hands and has been filtered through and colored by many points of view.
Along the way, her voice has been lost.
Her ignorance as a 26-year-old white woman, her use of terms we no longer accept, her buried thoughts, her sighs, her frowns, her sudden spurts of laughter were washed out, carrying away the intimacy of her experience.
Our expectations of that experience have changed as new light has been shed on what have been called captivity narratives, nearly all black white women from different periods and different areas.
Our expectations of these narratives reflect the agonizingly slow changing of our attitudes towards Native Americans.
Now we know that many captives, especially the women, did not want to return to their earlier lives or their earlier families.
Everything in the tribal life they had experienced caused them to value it.
Was it the friendships, the order, the shared work, the greater participation of the women in the lives of the tribes?
Finally, a space has been opened for my reconsidering and reimagining of Margaret’s life.
I began this work as an ignorant white woman, a descendant of slave-owning colonists, just as Margaret began her story as an ignorant white woman imbued with the prejudices of her time.
We have learned together, she as the actor in her story and I as the listening and learning author.
The story begins with Margaret’s birth in Pennsylvania in 1753 and her death in Virginia in 1842 at the ripe old age of 89.
Why should we care about Margaret’s story?
The courage and ingenuity she showed in surviving and adapting bear a similarity to the courage and ingenuity we all need as we face the relentless destruction of the natural world, a destruction prefigured by our destroying of Native lands and peoples.
Courage, once it has taken root in a woman, endures, grows, and forms her future.
Reading
Now I will read you a section from the first chapter about how she learned that she was going to make this trip.
Margaret studied her husband John’s face and knew she had no recourse but to accept.
She’d seen him listening to the traveler’s tales, not so much listening, Margaret thought, three years married but still noticing, as jumping at the news, grabbing it, strangling it, like a baby bird.
Not that John would do such a thing, but he did have strong hands on the hoe and the pickaxe, although he was less certain on the flintlock, which he handled like a flower.
Later, much later, Margaret would think of that, the flintlock waving in John’s hands like the long stem of a tulip.
From the day they’d met, she’d known John had the itching foot.
He’d complained almost as soon as their cabin was raised of seeing smoke from neighbors, hearing the crack of axes splitting firewood, even smelling burnt corncob coffee every morning, acrid and strong.
This Margaret disputed.
She disputed very little else.
Now she began to prepare.
Their old buffalo robes must be rolled up and secured with twine.
She practiced on one, making sure to get it tight.
Their blankets bundled together, one feather bed mashed into a ball, tallow candles packed in saddlebags along with fire flints, the griddle, the jerky from hams cured the previous fall, corn for the four cows and two horses, hauled and packed in homespun bags.
She showed herself.
And with each task, moving closer to September 23rd, the date of their leaving, she packed a prayer, a simple word or two, “Lord, deliver.”
So they start out and the group going across the mountains.
They hope they’ll get through to Cumberland Gap in Kentucky.
They’ve heard that the land in Kentucky is very rich.
They think it’s all wide open and free, which of course it isn’t.
We know now.
So they’re going prepared for a long trip on horseback and then settling and raising a cabin when they get to Kentucky.
That’s what they think is going to happen.
So the party going along is Margaret, her husband John, her sister-in-law Agatha, her husband Alan, and two young men that she calls come-alongs because they have no family, so they just start out and come along.
It turns out they’re not much use to anybody.
So this is their first night on the trail.
They’ve been riding all day.
They’re tired.
They cook a little bit and then she, Margaret and Agatha, lie down and go to sleep.
The two women fell silent, listening to the creak of their saddles and the clip of the horse’s hooves as they passed over a stony patch.
Now out of John’s eye range, Margaret hiked up her skirts to her knees and pressed Jenny into a trot.
She’s been very bold because she knew that wearing a long skirt, which was of course traditional, would not be easy on horseback, so she’s borrowed a pair of her husband John’s breeches, which he would really disapprove of, so she puts her skirt on over them.
Behind her, she heard Alan, that’s John’s brother, begin to practice his owl hoots.
All the boys in the Greenbrier Settlements learned owl hoots to convey their whereabouts when they were out hunting.
John shouted at his brother, but Alan went on hooting, then tried his wolf howls, real enough to make the hair rise on the back of Margaret’s neck, that dreadful, lonesome wail.
She pulled Jenny up and turned to look back.
She saw John riding his brother down, grabbing his shoulder, clapping a hand over his mouth.
Then the two men tumbled off their horses, which took fright and lumbered off.
John pinned his brother down and pummeled him.
One of the come-alongs caught the reins of the frightened horses.
“Be silent, you fool,” John gasped, holding his brother down.
“Hoot,” Alan began, half choked.
John pulled his ear.
“Hoot.”
It was fainter now, and then the beginning of that terrible howl.
John choked his brother till one of the come-alongs tore them apart.
At that moment, a shot rattled the branches by Margaret’s head.
“Turn back, women,” John shouted.
Agatha turned her horse, but Margaret, her blood up, was at that heathenish howl, dug her heels into Jenny and rode on ahead.
A hand snatched her right rein.
She tried to free it.
The hand jerked Jenny to a halt, and then a pair of hands dragged her from her saddle.
She snatched the baby up as she fell, protecting her with her arms.
And then she was on her back.
The baby, awakened suddenly, began to wail, then tuned up to scream.
She clutched the baby with all her strength, but another pair of hands pried her from her arms.
She scrambled up and saw John and the other three men striking at five Indians, closing, falling on the trail behind her.
No one had had time to load and fire.
Agatha was fast to a tree tied with a rope.
She was screaming.
As John grappled with a warrior, Margaret saw a tommyhawk raised over his head.
John used the butt of his flintlock as a club, striking, and the savage reeled back, then straightened, aimed, and fired.
Clutching his side, John dropped his gun, and Margaret screamed.
She could see blood streaming from his side.
And then that smoky smell.
Now a face loomed above her, long earlobes with ornaments, a feather topknot.
The face had no expression she could decipher.
He was holding the baby.
“Give her to me!”
Margaret screamed.
She felt herself grabbed from behind, her arms pinioned.
The savage flipped the baby, holding her by the heels, and dashed her head against a tree.
The sound was like a gourd struck with the heft of an axe.
Then he slung the body to the ground.
Margaret saw it crumple.
She crawled towards it.
Hands seized her, dragging her back.
The topknot Indian pulled her up and pushed her into her saddle.
She saw Agatha untied and heaved onto her horse.
Behind them, John was staggering away, then running, bent over, his arm tight to his bleeding side.
Alan was on the ground, motionless, an Indian on top of him with a scalping knife.
The two come-alongs had fled.”
And you will see there, that’s an example of what I mentioned in the beginning about the use of what we consider rightly inappropriate terms.
To these two women, and to the men too, at this point in the story, all they could think about any native person was that it was a savage.
And this is going to be part of Margaret’s very steep learning curve as she spends four years with the Shawnee.
So she has to decide, and decide very quickly, how she’s going to react to the baby’s killing.
This is part of the history of the colonial period.
Some of you may know that many babies didn’t survive their first year.
They were taken away by all kinds of diseases and so on.
So I think, and this is my imagination, but I think women didn’t form the kind of close bonds with their babies that we expect now.
Because if you think this baby is going to die in less than a year, you really might try to protect yourself a little bit by not becoming that engaged.
And so all along, the baby has not been baptized or named, because again, this was the habit, since they would wait to see if it survived.
All along she refers to the baby as “the baby,” not “her baby.”
It has no name, it’s probably about nine months old, and she is able to reconcile herself to the murder of the baby.
This is probably the most difficult part of the book for me to write, because she has not formed the kind of close bonds we expect.
She also has to make a decision that what she wants more than anything else is to survive.
And that means that she cannot make a big fuss about the murder, because they would simply have murdered her.
She would just be a problem and there wouldn’t be any reason for them to take her along.
She’s determined to survive.
And this is very much part of her character, which I’ve developed all through this story.
She’s a survivor.
She’s strong physically and mentally, even spiritually.
She doesn’t give up.
She doesn’t decide, “Well, I might as well die too.
This is horrible.
My husband has been, as far as I know, murdered.
The baby has been murdered.
And so what is the use of going on?”
But that’s not her point of view.
Her point of view is that she needs to survive.
And so during the four years of her long learning period, because this is tough, that is her motive.
And she’s very different from her sister-in-law, Agatha, whom she always calls her sister.
Again, that was the habit at this point in the 19th century.
And if you think about your in-laws, what a difference would it make if you didn’t call them in-laws?
So, Agatha has a very different outcome.
So, now I’m going to read you a little bit later.
They’ve ridden all day with the Shawnee.
They don’t know where they’re going.
Of course, they can’t communicate with the Shawnee.
The Shawnee don’t speak English.
They don’t speak Shawnee.
So they don’t know.
But they do figure out that they’re not going to Kentucky.
They’re not going in the right direction to get to Kentucky.
So where are they going?
They have no way of knowing.
So they’ve had a little bit to eat, and she and Agatha are going to sleep.
She and Agatha were obliged to rest as best they could on a bare piece of ground some distance from the warriors.
They pulled their skirts down to their feet.
It was warm enough still to manage.
The Indians wrapped themselves in their blankets before stretching out nearer to the fire.
Uncle, Margaret has decided she needs to name all these men.
She doesn’t, of course, know their names, so she invents names.
And one of them is Uncle.
Uncle came to the two women and with gestures ordered them to take off their boots.
Agatha began to whimper as she untied her strings till Margaret helped her, which calmed her.
They handed their boots to Uncle, who retreated a few feet, then settled on a stump to keep guard, his flintlock across his knees.
Margaret lay on her back and offered Agatha her shoulder for a pillow.
As soon as her sister was asleep, she eased herself away, stretching out a few feet closer to the trees.
The deep quiet of the night recalled one of her chief private joys.
She dropped into sleep as though falling down a deep well.
An hour later, she felt her skirt snatched up and John’s britches pulled down.
Before the man could pin her arms, she drove the thumb and forefinger of her right hand into his nostrils.
She ground her nails into the thin, crusted flesh while he struggled to break her grip, tossing his head like a wild horse and spreading his knees to clamp hers.
He seized her hand to wrench it away from his nose, but Margaret was strong.
She dug her nails in more deeply and raised her mouth and bit his chin to the bone.
He yelled.
She tasted the first trickle of warm blood.
Let me go, God damn you, he howled.
She recognized the voice.
It was Gertie.
Now, Gertie, who I’ve introduced earlier, is actually a real, some of these characters really did exist.
He did exist.
He was a very wayward white man.
At times he sided with the natives.
At times he sided with the colonists.
He just did whatever he wanted to do.
He was completely unpredictable and everybody knew that and they didn’t trust him.
So he’s just come along with this group of Shawnee.
They didn’t invite him.
He’s just come along with them because that’s the kind of thing he does and he sees an opportunity here.
She unclamped her fingers and then before he could begin another foray, she drew up her knee and jammed it into the juncture of his britches.
He rolled off her cursing and crawled away into the darkness where she heard him cursing and moaning for some time.
Sitting up to be sure Gertie was gone, Margaret saw Topknot, that’s the one she thinks is the chief.
Margaret saw Topknot watching.
Briefly, she wondered why he had not stopped the assault, then understood.
She was not his.
She was her own.
A look she didn’t know how to read passed over his face.
It might almost have been a smile.
So they go on riding and again, they don’t know where they’re going but they eventually get to a big river.
It’s the Ohio.
They don’t recognize it as the Ohio.
They have to get across the Ohio which is a real challenge, either swimming or riding on their horses which are swimming.
Topknot sees that these two women are, this is a big river, probably not going to be able to make it so he does procure a canoe and paddles them across in the canoe and they get together and proceed on what we now know as the Indiana shore going up towards the Shawnee camp which was probably pretty close to the city we now know as Cincinnati.
They settle there and Margaret begins to learn through her friendship with the Shawnee women the kinds of things she needs to do.
She’s very friendly with the Shawnee women and they are very friendly with her.
I think what makes the difference is that she is adopted by Chief Whitebark as his daughter to replace his daughter who has died.
So she’s not in competition with the women.
She’s not a concubine.
She’s not a wife.
She’s a daughter and that gives her a little better position to make friends with these women.
So why did the Shawnee even tolerate her?
This is another mouth to feed.
This is a woman who may not be able to keep up with them all the time.
She decided there are several reasons.
One is that she’s literate and at this point the tribes were not literate.
They were being presented with a lot of our treaties which we would then proceed to break and it helped them to be able to have these treaties read before they signed them.
So that was one gift and she also teaches the children how to read and write.
Another gift she had was that her mother had given her a lot of herbs and her mother was a healer and she’d learned some of these practices.
So even though the Shawnee had their own herbs and their own healers, these were herbs from a different part of the country so added a little more to their knowledge of medicine.
And the last thing was that she knew how to sew.
They were beaders but they were not sewers as we think of that.
So she could cut out the calico that came from the traders and make these men’s shirts and that raised a real issue because in this society she would not have touched these men.
That would not have been acceptable at all.
So how do you measure for a shirt if you can’t touch the person?
This raised a real issue for me.
So I finally figured out a way that with her hands without actually touching them she could make a rough measurement of their chest and arms and cut out these shirts and sew them.
So she was useful to them and she had to be useful to them because there’s no other way they would have tolerated her.
Agatha, as you may have gathered, doesn’t have much ability to be useful.
She has a lot of trouble riding.
She falls a lot.
She cries a lot.
She complains a lot.
But the Shawnee are practical people and they see that this is a very attractive white woman.
So they do what is obviously the right thing to do.
They sell her.
And they sell her to the governor of Detroit and she eventually becomes his wife.
So Agatha departs fairly early in the story.
Otherwise they would eventually have killed her because she was just too much trouble.
But being practical they saw that there was some advantage in this woman that they could take.
So this is a long story of her gradually learning how to survive with these people, gradually changing her whole attitude towards them as she begins to see them and understand them as individuals.
And she ends up really being very much at home there.
She’s with them for four years.
After four years her family in Virginia get together $250 to ransom her.
I don’t think she wanted to go back.
And you may know this was true in other situations.
But once the ransom money was accepted she really didn’t have any choice.
So the last part of the book, which was really fun to write, is how she gets back to Virginia.
Obviously she wasn’t going to be riding alone through the woods.
She’d get lost.
She’d never make it.
So there is a white man whose job is to take these women back home.
And along the way they gather up three other women, all going to different places.
And these women are received in ways that surprise them and surprise the reader.
It’s not all joyous acceptance.
And I think a lot of the colonists were very suspicious of women who seemed to stay too long with the tribes.
Why didn’t you run away?
Maybe you liked it there.
Maybe you fell in love with somebody.
It’s made even more difficult because she comes back with a three-year-old son, John.
And they of course are certain that this is a Shawnee boy.
He speaks Shawnee.
He’s dressed like a Shawnee.
And he’s not crazy about the rules of these white colonists.
So she can never persuade them and probably will never persuade the reader either that this is actually the child of her husband, John.
I don’t see Margaret as a liar.
So I just didn’t make any decision about that.
She says his father was John.
Everybody else says his father was a Shawnee warrior.
I don’t know.
Of course, from my point of view, it doesn’t really matter.
But it certainly mattered to Margaret and to John.
Neither one of them was ever accepted in this little colony in Virginia.
They had a very difficult time there.
When John was a teenager, she finally decided to send him to live with his uncle in a larger city and be trained to be a lawyer.
His uncle was a lawyer.
And that worked to some degree.
But after a few years, John decided he didn’t really want to be a lawyer.
And he joined up with a fur trading company to go out and capture and skin wild animals.
And they got to the Yellowstone River and they encountered a band of Mandan Indians and John was murdered in his early 20s.
And what is so sad about it is the Mandan were traditional allies of the Shawnee.
But of course, they didn’t recognize him as a Shawnee.
They recognized him as a white man.
Margaret went on to marry again.
She had a flock of children.
Interestingly enough, as I was running through all the names of these children and grandchildren, there’s no Margaret.
And I thought, why didn’t they want this name to be carried on?
Well, you can probably speculate about why that was.
So I’m now going to read you the very end of the book, hoping that you will be interested enough to read the book itself because there’s a lot that I’m not reading to.
Needless to say, we’d be here until tomorrow.
So this is chapter 25.
Margaret’s four Erskine children were growing swiftly into tall strangers.
All the boys, she thought, took strongly after their father with penetrating dark eyes under inky eyebrows, long, sharp noses and thin lips often set in a line.
Her daughter, Jane, was a softer version with blonde hair falling to her shoulders and a sprightly humor that attracted the attention of Hugh Elmwood Caperton, a prosperous and respected member of the community.
Jane and Hugh were the first in that generation to marry.
Before any amount of time had passed, it seemed to Margaret, marriages were happening and children were being born.
Falling asleep at night, she carefully listed all her grandchildren’s names.
Catherine, John Paul Lee, her long dead husband’s only namesake, another William, then another Jane, then an Eleanor, Alan, another Michael, and finally an Agnes.
Her daughter, Jane, mother of Alan, in time a U.S.
Senator, Margaret married Jane, Louis, Elizabeth, George, and James.
Her husband, Hugh Caperton, built a big house across the valley from Walnut Grove where Margaret was living and called it Elmwood.
It stood under the hill where the graveyard was laid out.
Margaret had already chosen her spot at the crest with a wide view of the valley and the growing town beyond.
John, long since grown to manhood, visited from time to time to see his mother, but he never lingered long.
He had no chosen profession, having rejected the law, and his uncle was no longer willing to house and feed him.
Margaret did not protest when John told her that he was leaving with a bunch of fur trappers to travel west to the banks of the Yellowstone River, where there was a chance still of finding a good number of otters to kill and skin.
The traders were no longer eager to buy beavers since the pelts were not wanted for men’s hats.
The fashion had changed, but otter was beginning to be called for to trim women’s fur in cloth coats.
During the following two years, Margaret received three letters brought by travelers who had crossed her son’s path in that far-off place, then nothing.
She knew well what that meant.
Finally, word came that John had been killed on the Yellowstone by a band of Mandan Indians unwilling to share their hunting grounds with what they thought was a group made up entirely of white men.
His body was buried somewhere in that territory.
Margaret found herself wondering why the misfortune he had endured for his short life, the cruel issue never resolved of his parentage, had not somehow protected him from the Mandan, and allies of the Shawnee.
She did not mourn for long.
There was no form for it, no burial service, no grave to visit with a handful of flowers, and she knew in her heart that John was free at last of the suspicions that had clouded his life.
As time passed, the enormous brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren was a source of comfort to Michael Erskine, her husband, who often smoked his pipe by the big stone fireplace in the Walnut Grove parlor, telling stories to anyone who would listen of the old days of danger and hardship.
Only one grandson, Jane’s son, Alan Caperton, captured Margaret’s attention.
He rode across the valley often of an evening, hallooing as he galloped up the hill to Walnut Grove.
Margaret would bestir herself to throw another log on the fire and set the kettle on the hob for tea.
Smelling of horse and his own fierce sweat, Alan would take a seat beside her.
As he accepted his cup, he often asked her to tell the tale of her years with the Shawnee.
Margaret hesitated to begin.
The decades that had passed had not dimmed her memory, but it made her reluctant to tell a story most listeners found only alarming.
At last, one winter afternoon in her 86th year, she watched as Alan drew a notebook out of his jacket pocket and reached for the inkwell.
“Begin, Grandmama,” he said, his voice reminding her of his grandfather’s, “Time grows short.”
Margaret knew that it did.
She sighed deeply and leaned back in her rocker, clasping her age-spotted hands in her lap.
Her hands recorded many years of labor, but that, she knew, was not the story Alan wanted.
Perhaps telling of her captivity from the beginning when she was a young wife with a baby in front of her on the saddle was the only way to the reconciliation with her kin that had always eluded her.
Perhaps in time to come readers would believe her account, and the hatred that had done so much finally to drive the Shawnee from the Ohio country would be to some slight degree abated.
She remembered the sentences near the conclusion of The Pilgrim’s Progress that she had learned by heart so many years ago.
“I see myself now at the end of my journey.
My toilsome days are over.”
And as Alan dipped his pen and held it suspended over the first page of his notebook, Margaret Handley Pauley Erskine began, “On the 23rd of September in 1779, we set out west for the fertile lands of Kentucky.”
Thank you.
Q & A
Thank you very much, Sallie.
That was a wonderful journey.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah.
A lonely novel, but I think with what you’ve read, you have piqued our curiosity.
Oh, good.
We want to know more and read more.
I think Sallie will be open to taking a few questions.
Certainly, I would love that.
Somebody way in back.
Thank you for your presentation.
I’m really interested in women’s stories because I think we all have a story to tell.
I read recently that the first time a story is told, it’s ours.
And thereafter, it becomes someone else’s version of our story.
So I’m really interested in your process and how you decided how much of Margaret’s story to tell and if there were parts of it you chose to leave down.
Thank you.
That’s a really interesting question.
I think I was helped, oddly enough, by the fact that this manuscript that came down through my family based on her recitation of her years to Alan was only about 12 pages long.
Well, you can’t write a book with 12 pages.
That’s never going to work.
Also, I had the feeling, which of course I couldn’t prove, that she probably had left a good deal out.
She was surrounded by people who didn’t really understand anything about the Shawnee, didn’t want to understand anything about the Shawnee.
So she may have just decided not to tell certain aspects of her story.
She did say that the baby was murdered.
That’s in that manuscript.
So that she included, but there were very little other references to any kind of violence.
That doesn’t mean there was no violence, but it might mean that she decided just not to include it.
However, the Shawnee were known to be very friendly and accepting with their captives.
That wasn’t true of the Plains tribes.
But this tribe, which was in the Ohio country, had that reputation.
They were losing their members all the time.
Either we were killing them, they were dying of the diseases we brought.
So they were very eager to have new people that they could adopt into the tribe and showed a lot of real sympathy and understanding for particularly the women who came from a culture that they didn’t know anything about.
So it was easier for me to give myself permission to imagine because I only had 12 pages of what we would call fact.
Now needless to say, as an ignorant white woman, I had to do a lot of research.
I spent three years reading everything I could lay my hands on about the Shawnee and about the colonial people at that era.
I ended up reading or skimming 53 books.
There’s a lot written, some of it more enlavening than others.
And so I felt as though I had at least a bare knowledge of who these people might have been and of what that period might have been.
Otherwise, imagining would have just been foolish.
You know, it would have been full of all kinds of ignorant mistakes and so on.
I’m sure it’s still full of some mistakes.
And probably if a member of the Shawnee tribe ever read it, they might well say to me, “Well, you know, this just is inaccurate.
We didn’t do this.
We didn’t act this way.”
But I had to trust that my imagination made it clear that like all us human beings, we’re all at some level the same.
You know, the fact that you come from a tribe, of course, means that you have many differences in your customs, in your spiritual life and so on.
But at the bottom, we’re all the same.
And I wanted to make that very clear because I think a lot of our prejudice is based on the fact that we think other people, however we define them, are really different and maybe even less.
So it was great fun.
I know the country she was in.
I, in fact, went back and did some driving around.
I visited the no longer a village.
It’s now a town where she had been born and lived.
And it was fascinating because for me, it was exploring.
It was spreading my mind and my imagination into areas that I’d never gone into before.
And I was very fortunate in having a lot of research to rely on.
I think otherwise it would have been impossible.
It would have been just fantasy.
And this is not fantasy.
This is a historical novel.
It’s my first one in which my imagination blends with what I could learn from the so-called facts.
Does that answer your question?
Oh, good.
Please.
Do you have any sense from her writings how Margaret felt about the death of a baby?
Yes.
And I didn’t read you that section, but I had to really try to imagine what that would have been like.
As I said, I think her bond with her infant daughter was not as strong as the bond you would expect women to have now because she knew this baby was probably going to die.
So she had a certain degree of detachment that I don’t think we would find very often today.
She also knew that if she made a big fuss about it, her life would be over because they had no reason to tolerate a lot of screaming, crying, complaining, and so on.
So if her motive was to survive, which it was, she had to repress what she felt.
Now what she felt underneath the repression is probably a deep sense of mourning and loss, but it’s not something that she ever expressed.
It was just too dangerous to express it.
It wouldn’t bring the baby back.
And so she had to put that aside and not dwell on it.
Rather hard today for us to imagine because for us, losing a baby would be just a terminally upsetting event that we would never forget and probably would change the course of our lives.
But it was different for Margaret.
It was a different period.
She had a different relationship with this baby, and I hope I made that believable.
I didn’t want anyone to assume that she was just hard-hearted because she wasn’t.
But she made the kind of decision that if you’re in a survival situation, you have to make.
What is it that really matters?
Is it expressing yourself, which we think and believe is very important, in a way that may put your life in danger?
Or is it that you manage to suppress what you feel and go on?
Very much of that time, too, because the 19th century for everybody was very tough.
And if you were a complainer and everything bothered you and you were constantly talking about how hungry you were and how cold you were, people really wouldn’t want to be around you.
So it was a tougher time than we have in this country experienced.
It’s probably the tough time that is coming, but it hasn’t come yet.
So we are still in that pleasant state, most of us or many of us, of being pretty comfortable and pretty unthreatened.
She had never been in that state.
Her life in the colony with her mother had been very tough.
So she also had that to rely on, that things had never been easy for her.
Yes?
I wonder if there’s a reason why they didn’t contact the tribal.
Well, to tell you the truth, I was a little afraid.
You know, I think when you’re writing fiction, this is fiction, you have to rely on people being to some degree accepting of fiction, that it is different from fact, it’s not being presented as fact, and some faith in the integrity of the imagination.
That’s asking a lot.
And understandably, any tribal people are very, very apprehensive about us taking over their stories and telling their stories, as they should be.
It’s not really what we should be doing.
But since this was Margaret’s story, it was not the Shawnee’s story, I felt a little degree of comfort in telling it.
I hope at some point, I don’t know how this would happen, the remnant of the Shawnee in Oklahoma, one of them does come upon it and tells me what he or she thinks of it.
It might be a little bit, shall we say, difficult to accept, but I would certainly learn.
However, I wasn’t willing to do that while I was writing the book.
I had that experience.
I was attending a lecture on Gwyneth Parker.
Oh, really?
His grandson, I don’t know him, he was present.
And he was enraged, and he yelled because it was all archival, and they hadn’t contacted him.
Yeah, I know.
That’s a perfectly understandable reaction.
And in fact, some years back, I was at a reading here of a book called The Unredeemed Captive, some of you may have read it, by an East Coast academic.
And it was about another captivity story that took place in New England.
And there was a Native American in the audience, not from that part of the world, but he felt very angry, very hurt, really rose up and said, “You have no right to read this.
You let us tell our own stories.”
And I remember that feeling.
It was a very difficult and uncomfortable moment, because you couldn’t, as a writer, claim, “Well, I know everything.”
You know, you have to admit that it’s very partial.
And yet, as I say, you have to hold on to the integrity of the imagination.
Otherwise, there really would be no fiction.
It would all just be disguised, or half-disguised fact.
And we need to keep that distinction.
We need to understand that there is this thing called fact that a lot of people put a lot of faith in.
I don’t, because it’s usually been strained through all kinds of points of view.
But fact is what most people rely on.
And if they think that a writer has strayed too far from the fact, they’ll lose faith.
And I’m hoping my writing is powerful enough to prevent that from happening.
Who knows?
Yes?
I was wondering, when the first time you, for the hardest part of you, understand when you use the word “savage,” did you find yourself balking a little?
Yes.
What were the conversations you had with your publisher about using that kind of word, even though it’s a historical fiction, from her perspective, but written in 2024?
Well, to tell you the truth, it’s fortunate it was an East Coast publisher.
They’re not as well-informed as we are.
And I don’t think Ruth Greenberg was ever particularly uncomfortable with me using the word “savage.”
I was.
I was, because it’s a totally unacceptable term.
She’s has been, but it’s taken us a long time to realize that.
But it was the term that Margaret would have used.
And I couldn’t really whiten that.
There was no reason to suppose that she was unlike all the other people she knew at that period, all of whom would have used the word “savage.”
Over the length of her four years, she does let go of that language.
And so by the time she’s been with Ashanti and has gotten to know them as individuals, she never uses that word anymore.
And I think it’s a very difficult question.
It’s very difficult.
Comes up a great deal now, as you know, in many contexts.
But that’s the way I decided to try to handle it.
Yes?
I’m curious.
First of all, thank you for a wonderful presentation.
Thank you.
I really enjoyed it.
And as you’re aware from the book News of the World, the little girl in that story loses her English.
And even at the end of that novel, she never totally recognized that I’m being able to speak English.
Yeah.
And of course, Margaret is old.
But I mean, I know of a personal case from my own life where someone was taken captive, an older man, and had a terrible time getting his English back.
Isn’t that interesting?
Yeah.
And I just wondered with Margaret, she must have learned shortly.
She did.
And it sounds like she used English to help them.
But did she have any problem when she reentered the white world that you were aware of, of recovering her own language?
No.
And I think some of that was, of course, her personality.
She was such a striver, you know.
And she knew that once she was back in Virginia, she had to speak English.
I mean, things were rough enough without her trying to, you know, preserve her Shawnee.
John never did really learn good English.
And I think partly that was because his first years with the Shawnee were so important to him, really formed his personality.
He loved being with that tribe.
They treated little boys in a way that was very sympathetic to him, a lot of freedom, a lot of outdoor adventures, real companionship between the groups of boys.
So he never, he learned enough English to manage.
But I never felt that he was entirely comfortable speaking English.
Yes.
Where did she get the needles to sew?
She had with her this thing called a housewife.
It’s a little pouch that you wear strapped around your waist.
And in that she had things like needles, thread, a pair of scissors, a few other little, you know, essentials that she carried with her.
Yeah, she, they didn’t have any access to needles because the traders wouldn’t have brought them since the Shawnee wouldn’t have had any use for them.
But that’s where she got her needles.
And you can imagine she kept very good care of those needles.
That was her lifeline.
Excuse me?
That was her lifeline.
Yeah, exactly.
Yes, it was.
Yes.
Did her writing of what you have in the cave about her, the birth of her son in captivity?
Yes, that’s an important scene.
She had to follow the Shawnee custom, which was when you go into labor, you’re taken out into the woods.
Some kind of shelter is built, some food and water is left, very minimal.
And you’re there.
And you’re by yourself and you have to deal with it.
And again, the fact that she was such a survivor made her a little more capable of, you know, not just giving up and, oh God, I’m going to die and so on.
So she does go ahead and give birth.
And she not only gives birth, she’s there for two more weeks, nursing the baby, worried about wolves because wolves are often drawn to afterbirth.
Wolves don’t come.
And because she is a part of the tribe, she just had to agree to do it their way.
There wasn’t any way to insist, well, first of all, where are you going to go?
There’s no hospital, you know.
And they didn’t provide any kind of midwife.
I don’t think that was true of all the tribes, but it was true of the Shawnee.
It was accepted as being a purely female function in which men had absolutely no part.
Other women were extraneous and it was just up to you to deal with it.
And I have a lot of admiration for that.
I think that’s maybe a healthier way to go than the way we do it now.
Yes.
This will be the last question.
I just wanted to tell you, I just finished the book yesterday.
I thought it was a wonderful book.
I just thought it was just wonderful.
You did an admirable job of creating her character, her strength, and also a very positive take on the Shawnee.
Yes.
And even though, you know, she called them savages, that’s not the feeling that you get when you read them.
No.
So thank you.
That’s a great compliment.
Sallie, thank you very much.
You’re welcome.
[APPLAUSE]
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