The White by Deborah Larsen. Knopf: 240 pages. $22.00.

In 1758, on a recently settled farm, a teenager named Mary chops wood, so engrossed that “the family axe is a glittering extension of her own arm.” She lifts her eyes and glimpses a hostile group of French and Shawnee watching her. Moments later, Mary finds herself “in the grip of a Shawnee,” led, along with her parents and siblings, away from home. When the party stops to camp, Mary and her family are handed their own stolen food. She observes that her father’s eyes “are as fixed as the eyes of a newly dead person.” So begins Mary’s permanent separation from her life as a white woman.

“The White,” Deborah Larsen’s first novel (she has previously published a book of poetry, “Stitching Porcelain”), fictionalizes the true story of Mary Jemison, a white woman who, though captured, lived the rest of her life as a Seneca, marrying twice and bearing eight children. Mary eventually told her story to James Seaver in 1823, who transcribed, and, some believe, embellished it. Since Mary was not “rescued,” her story stands out from the popular captive narratives of the time.

Larsen doesn’t attempt a new biography; instead, she imagines events in Mary’s ruptured life, as the familiar breaks away and she becomes another self. Ultimately, Larson paints a portrait of a woman with the freedom, respect, and communal support she might not have had in white culture. And the novel moves beyond the captive narrative, celebrating survival, growth, and integrity.

Though the rest of Mary’s white family is taken away and scalped, the captors spare her so that she might symbolically replace the brother of two Seneca sisters, killed violently by whites. After unsuccessfully pleading that her captors kill her as well, Mary stops talking, and strives not to feel: “it was an actual thing, that blankness: it hung there like a great pearly fish in deep water.” Mary’s “great, pale blankness of non-thought” remains in spite of the respect and generosity shown by her two adopted sisters, Branch and Slight-Wind. They even arrange for the Society of False Faces to perform a ritual, the purpose of which isn’t entirely clear, but which seems meant to draw out the reclusive. The tribe renames Mary “Two-Falling-Voices,” for her twin white and Seneca selves.

When Mary does begin to speak, she surprises even herself with her self-possession. Two-Falling-Voices emerges from her new name, becoming outspoken and witty, a collector of new words in every language she encounters. We might call Mary both victim and survivor, but as she becomes more Seneca than white, the words and their meanings blur. Has she “survived”? Or has she been awakened, or even saved? As she learns Seneca ways, Mary must revise her understanding of family, language, spirituality, grief, and labor.

“The White” paints a rare but intriguing picture of early America’s mixed cultural nature. Though European cultures ultimately had more power, forcing native tribes from ancestral homes, Larson suggests that many common people interacted, walked unharmed on one another’s land, and spoke each others’ languages. For a time, Mary lives with runaway slaves. Later, she lives on her own land among whites and Seneca. Near the end of her life, however, Mary moves to a reservation, to be near her chosen people.

Almost like a long poem, “The White” is composed of brief but poignant short scenes--poetic snapshots—some from Mary’s point of view, and some from a narrator’s. Mary/Two-Falling-Voices is like two waterfalls from different sources emptying into the same river. But she is also distinctly her own person, her own river, with her own course.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.