Still Here

Thunder in the waning light, not from the sky but from guns awakens two powerful women in the midst of the first Puritan War in America in 1675. Weetamoo, the powerful squaw sachem of the Pocasset Wampanoag people and Mary White Rowlandson, a prosperous minister’s wife from Lancaster, Massachusetts Bay Colony, are swept up in the calamity of King Philip’s War after both their homes are raided in bloody battles.

By reading between the lines of Rowlandson’s own true captivity narrative and exhaustively researching historical records and Wampanoag oral tradition, author Christine Duffy Zerillo imagines how the two women survived together for eleven weeks during the bloodiest war of its time. After losing their homes, families, and friends in parallel events, they endured the challenges of winter, starvation, disease, and terror while relying upon one another for survival.

As their cultures collide and struggle to preserve their own ways of life, can Weetamoo and Mary learn from one another and see themselves as anything but sworn enemies? Or is their hatred and fear too deep-seated to find the common threads that bind them to one another.