"There's an interesting story in my family's history. Is it a book?"

Family histories are perhaps the single most common pitch I hear at writers' conferences. Here's what I would tell you about them if you put 2 beers in me and then we Got Real.

Around the same time as the Revolutionary War, my pregnant great-great-great-great-great grandmother Margaret Paulee and her family set out from the Shenandoah Valley en route to a settlement near the Ohio River. Accompanied by a few other white families, she, her husband John, and their infant daughter carried all their worldly possessions west into what is now the George Washington National Forest, where they were ambushed by six musket-wielding Shawnee warriors.

This was a nightmare scenario—and an increasingly common one. Virginia’s colonial government had long ago promised the Shawnee they’d put the kibosh on the steady trickle of random white farmers coming over the mountains to squat on what little remained of their ancestral land. Spoiler alert: the government hadn’t followed through.

The Shawnee knew what generally happened next in these situations: a few rogue settlers today meant an “oops, it’s ours now” tomorrow. They were existentially terrified, and they were furious.

What happened next to Margaret makes me retch to consider. It’s not so much that the Shawnees shot all the men in her party: That’s sad, of course, but it’s also more or less painless for me to imagine, like an action movie. And also: um, I do get it.

No: I retch because of what they did to Margaret’s baby girl. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say one of the Shawnee men murdered Margaret’s baby in front of her and in one of the most mindbogglingly grotesque manners imaginable. They then headed out, Margaret and the other surviving women and children in tow.

When I heard this part of the story for the first time, I was around eight years old. It impaled me. It still does. Walking around with the full knowledge of what human beings are capable of doing to each other is like walking around with an iron rod permanently thrust through your body, inoperable, barely missing your entrails. To say nothing of actually experiencing that level of cruelty. What the fuck, humanity? What the fuck?

Anyway: the Shawnees took Margaret and the other captives back to their settlement on the shores of the Ohio River. There was an initial Will-Breaking Gauntlet Run for everyone except Margaret, who got punched once before she was spared more punches by a leader who noticed she was pregnant. Then there was a week or so of imposed starvation. But then the Stockholm Syndrome kickstarter rituals were all done, and surprise! The community welcomed Margaret as a full member of the tribe, affording her great respect and status and treating her like a daughter, sister, and friend.

Under Shawnee care, Margaret delivered her second baby—a boy, John Jr., this one blessedly not murdered until he was much older. Everyone in the tribe spoiled little John and fussed over his mother. Even the guy who’d murdered Margaret’s baby daughter was over-the-top kind to her until someone else murdered him. He’d bring her gifts and food, as if to say, boy, is there egg on my face, ha ha, kinda got carried away with the baby thing on the road there, didn’t I. Friendship mulligan?

Margaret eventually adopted another captive white kid, a little boy named Jack whose parents had also been murdered. She finally had a real family again. Then, after five years, the village chief—an old man who was very paternal about Margaret and refused to let her go—died.

A white trader (and de facto white people-Shawnee mediator) saw an opening and successfully negotiated a ransom for Margaret and John. Now it was time for Margaret to endure Trauma #2, Or: Freedom, Horrible Freedom. Once again, Margaret was ripped away from just about everyone she knew and loved; little Jack wailed “what am I to do now?” as the two were separated.¹ The Shawnee had become her family; her white husband and daughter were dead; her biological son only spoke Algonquian, and now the two of them had no one.

Violence on violence on violence. Margaret eventually ended up in Lewisburg in what’s now West Virginia. There, she met and married my great-times-five grandfather, a Scottish immigrant named Michael Erskine. She had a bunch more children, living in relative stability and peace until she died in the 1840s in advanced old age.

Margaret died right around the time Andrew Jackson forcibly removed the Shawnee and other woodland tribes from the Ohio River Valley altogether, violently frog-marching them into Oklahoma, where their descendants still live today. Turns out their annihilation anxiety had been well-placed.

In her final years, Margaret dictated this whole story to a guy named Allen, who was either her grandson or nephew. (You can read the text here, although be forewarned that the whole thing feels very much shaped by Allen’s Jacksonian Era White Man Settler Gaze.)

This is the last time I’m ever going to talk about this, she said when she was done. I’m tired, and I wake up screaming for days every time I revisit those years.

*

When I tell this story to people, 90% of them reply with some variation of: “you should make that into a book!”

When they do this, I am delighted…as a compliments piggie. As a literary agent, however, I think: no. No, I shouldn’t. And here’s why.