Hannah and Her Sister: The Facts of Fiction

• Published in: Prospects
• Main Author: Fay, Julie
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1998
• Subjects: General Medicine; Hannah; Emerson; abenaki
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300006244; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0361233300006244

When I was growing up in Southern Connecticut, my mother referred occasionally to an ancestor of ours who had killed some Indians. In 1970, I went away to college and Mom came up to Massachusetts for Parents' Weekend. Just across the river from my campus in Bradford stood a statue in the center of Haverhill's town green. My mother pointed it out to me (my sister had gone to the same school, so Mom knew her way around the area). I'd been passing this tribute to our ancestor – supposedly the first statue of a woman ever erected in this country – every time I went to town to pick up subs or hang out with the townies. Not sure whether to be proud or ashamed, my mother and I stood and looked up at the bronze woman streaked with bird droppings. Her hatchet was raised, her hefty thigh slightly raised beneath her heavy skirts; we imagined we saw a family resemblance – the square jaw and round cheeks that are distinctive in our family. At the base of the statue, bas relief plaques narrated Hannah Emerson Dustin's story: taken by Abenaki Indians from her Haverhill home along with her week-old infant and her midwife, Mary Neff, Dustin watched as her infant was killed by the Indians. She was then marched up along the Merrimack River, through swamps and woods, to a small island where the Merrimack meets the Contoocook River, in present-day New Hampshire. Shortly after her arrival at the island, Dustin – with the aid of Mary Neff and perhaps that of an English boy, Samuel Lenardson, then living with the Indians – hatcheted to death the sleeping people, scalped them, then made her way back down the Merrimack in a canoe. As I looked at the statue, I wondered many things about Dustin.