Hester

by Laurie Lico Albanese

We stand for several moments together, and I recall what my father told me: enchanted beings live beside the sea. They rise and look beautiful, but they keep their powers hidden from sight, much as the placid sea is always

“I’m working on a story about a young man who looks over a garden wall and longs for a beautiful girl who’s forbidden to him,” he tells me one night.

Evil in the shape of an unexceptional man.

“I can’t be soothed. I don’t want to be soothed.” I hear his agitation growing. “The hand must be here—” He presses his hand flat against the tip of his nose. “When I covered your face with the handkerchief I was trying to show you the truth of my darkness. I don’t want to lift it—I don’t want to be soothed. To take away the anguish would be to take away everything I want to put down on paper. I wouldn’t know myself without it.”

I’m not Isobel Gowdie standing on a blazing rooftop screaming at the evil men. I am alone and frightened. I have lost my job and perhaps my entire reputation here in Salem.

I'm lonely but I'm good/ I'm bitter but I swear I'm fine/ I'll save all my romanticism for my inner life and I'll get lost on purpose / this place made me feel worthless

I’ve seen how justice and the law work for some and not for others. Even in Scotland there was rich man’s law and poor man’s law.

“Not magic,” she says. “I told you before: if you think you’ve got power, then you got power. And if you think you don’t, then you don’t.

I smell cinnamon and coffee and pepper in the air, the same sweet and bitter scents that first greeted me in this harbor.

Everything that had hurt me in Salem was behind me now. I was not that girl anymore; I had long ago stopped living in the past or fearing it. Free of it, I could see what was true—what had always been true, in a way.

Lucid dreams like electricity the current flies through me/ and in my fantasies I rise above it/ and way up here I actually love it

Hester is our American Eve and our original badass single mother. She is still relevant today, especially as women’s reproductive rights are being challenged. She deserved her own voice.

Two of my favorite Hawthorne quotes are: “What a trustful guardian of secret matters fire is!” and “In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon” (Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life, 2003).

John Hathorne, Nathaniel’s great-great-grandfather, was the only judge in the 1692 Salem witch trials who never recanted his verdicts. Even after the court of Oyer and Terminer was abolished in 1693, the accusers apologized, and more than one hundred accused were released from prisons, Hathorne would not admit it was a mistake to hang the nineteen women and men accused of witchcraft.

Synesthesia was not widely documented or understood until the early twentieth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eldest daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, is perhaps the first American child known to have experienced synesthesia. While caring for the Emerson children in their father’s absence, Henry David Thoreau wrote in a letter to Emerson, “I was struck by Ellen’s asking me, yesterday … if I did not use ‘colored’ words. She said that she could tell the color of a great many words, and amused the children at school by doing so” (F. B. Sanborn, “The Emerson-Thoreau Correspondence,” The Atlantic, June 1892, 745).