A Girl Called Samson (117)

“William Bradford, Myles Standish, John Alden,” he parroted dutifully. Our children had heard the stories too. I’d felt I owed it to my mother.

“Yes. I wonder sometimes if William Bradford knows me the way I’ve always known him. I think he might. Every soul that has ever been born is a pinprick of light in an enormous net, and his light and mine are connected.”

“An enormous net,” he murmured. “Yes. I think so too.”

“But it is not William Bradford I think about most. It is her.”

“Who?” The word was soft, and he had grown still.

“His first wife. Dorothy.”

“Your grandmother.”

“No. I have no relation to her at all. Not by blood. But she is the one I think about.”

“She is the one who threw herself overboard, into the sea,” he said, remembering. “The one who lost her hope.”

“Yes. We are the descendants of his second wife, of Alice, who came to Plymouth Bay in 1623, a widow with two children. She gave William Bradford three more, and one was Joseph, my ancestor. But it is Dorothy I dream of. She haunts me. She cries and asks her son, John, to forgive her. I cry and ask my husband, John, to forgive me. And now . . . my mother haunts me too.”

“Why?” he asked, wiping the tears that had begun to spill over onto my cheeks. I bowed my head and began to weep, and it was not the quiet weeping of frustration or the pained weeping of a bullet in my flesh. It was not even the sorrow of death or the reassertion of life. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was roiling up from someplace deep, from my well of miseries, a place I thought long dry.

“Deborah. Deborah,” John moaned, pulling me into his arms. “Shhh. Don’t do that. I can’t bear it.” But there were tears in his choked rebuke. I was not prone to tears, and he didn’t know what to do with this version of me. For several minutes, I was too overcome to tell him.

“I have hated my mother. Loathed her. But I see now that there was much to admire. She did not abandon us or throw herself into the sea, though she could have. She was too proud for that. And she was so proud of her heritage. It has only recently occurred to me that my mother took pride in what was because she knew no pride in what is.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The one thing my mother gave me was my name. She made me proud of my name. She made me proud of what I came from and who I was. Yet I have spent so many years hiding from my name.” I rubbed my chest, battling the sentiment that surged there. “It was Deborah Samson who marched and bled and starved and served. Me. But Deborah Samson is still an object of scorn and speculation when anyone thinks of me at all. And I have allowed myself to be by staying silent. I never even told my mother what I did.”

I was overcome again, drowning, and John did not try to answer or even urge me to stop. He held me for a long time, the way he’d done after Phineas died, and when he finally spoke, I heard the same helplessness in his voice, the same guilt.

“You’ve remained quiet all these years . . . for me.”

“You are my heart, John Paterson.”

“And you are mine. But you are unhappy.”

“No. Not unhappy. It is not so simple as that.”

“You have lost your hope,” he whispered.

“Yes. I have lost my hope because I have lost my purpose.”

“What can I do?” he asked, his compassion evident. “Tell me, soldier.”

“I know what I am asking. I know it might cost you your dignity, and it might even cost you your good name, the name your father had and now . . . the name of our son.”

“I have never cared all that much about my name, Samson. I told you a long time ago. No one will remember John Paterson. That has never been what motivated me.”

“I need to tell my story, General. I want to tell it. Even if no one wants to hear a woman speak. Even if I am run off the stage and chased out of town. I need to tell my story because it is not just my story. It is Dorothy’s. And Elizabeth’s. And Mrs. Thomas’s. It is my mother’s story and your daughters’ story. We were all there too. We suffered and sacrificed. We fought, even if it was not always on the battlefield. It was our Revolution as well, and yet . . . no one ever asks us.”





30

DIVINE PROVIDENCE

People wanted to hear it.

I arranged the entire tour myself. I booked venues and put advertisements in the papers. I went to Boston and Providence and Albany and New York. I filled halls. The Colombian Sentinel said it was the first tour of its kind, a woman giving a public lecture.

I started every show with a demonstration. I wore a uniform—a blue jacket with white facing and crisp white pants. It wasn’t the uniform I’d been given years before. It wasn’t the uniform I’d patched and repaired. I’d fashioned myself a new one, identical to the old. The hat on my head with its jaunty feather was new too. But the musket was the same. The maneuvers too. I performed a full five minutes of drills with John calling out the commands, the snap of my gun and the whisper of my movement the only sound in the hall.

I loaded my weapon, ripping the paper cartridges open with my teeth and flying through the motions of pouring the powder, dropping the bullet, and tamping it all down with my rod, drawing a smattering of applause as I completed each demonstration of my manly skill. Then I marched back off the platform and out of the hall, only to quickly change and return to the assembly, wearing the attire of Deborah Samson, the wife of a general, my hair swept up, my dress accentuating my female silhouette. But I still carried my musket, and the crowd loved that.