Hester

But there's another kind of strength we've got...It comes from knowing the difference between who you are and who they think you are.

...history isn't what's written or told. History is hidden away in dark corners and shadows...

They say witch, but what do they mean? Witch is a reason to kill you; witch might be someone to heal you; witch can be the Devil, or witch can be a woman so beautiful she makes you lose your sense. They've got so many ways of calling you a witch, they just change it to how it suits them.

What’s true is often hidden from sight—religious fervor disguises cruelty, dark desires hide behind a mask of conformity.

I lived in a world of magic and color then—my mother’s voice a sapphire stream flecked with emeralds, my father’s a soft caramel. In summer I ran barefoot through the valleys with my cousins and kin and saw their voices rise up in vibrant wisps of yellow and gold. The wind was sometimes fierce pink, and the sound of the waterfall on rocks glistened silver.

Reading brings the Devil into a girl’s mind too easily.

When my fingers are moving, my mind is free...I've stitched through sadness and through fear; I've stitched through joy, trepidation and hope. And so I find comfort the only way I know how: I work.

It is how the world is, and I tried to teach my daughter this as well: you must love what is close and true; you must look to the present and future and not to the past.

when women bind themselves to passion and love? Why do men fixate on the past when every woman I have ever known is trying to remedy the present while she builds hope for what is to come?

And if I told it right, she would learn everything that I know about love and desire and the colors, about this world and the hidden world, about the man with the red-and-gold voice who was almost the ruin of me. And she would know how I survived.

Any man who owns or sells another man is cruel, Isobel. Can you imagine it otherwise?

To clothe a woman is to hide her failings and frailties,” Auntie Aileen told me. “A dressmaker is talented with the needle, but above all she is a secret keeper.

noticed. That’s when you use your power. Sometimes you got to act like you are nothing—so long as you remember that it’s a lie. So long as you remember you’re as strong as you believe you are.” Salem, 1693 Tituba, little Dorcas Good, Sarah Carrier, and ninety-three other falsely accused women, men, and children stumble out of Salem and Boston jails when the court of Oyer and Terminer is suspended by the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Judge Hathorne watches them limp back into Salem—the orphaned children, the widows, the daughter who testified against her mother. He rages at the magistrates who recant their verdicts and at the accusers—Betty Parris and Ann Putnam first among them—who apologize for the terror they wrought. “The victims believed Satan was here and I still believe it,” Hathorne tells his wife. “You

Folks fail you even when you love them-- leave you when you need them. But you've got to be strong even with all that-- you hear me?

The letter A is red,” I say. “Red like an apple?” He scribbles something in his notebook. “No,” I say. “A is a scarlet letter.

You’re foolish, but you’re brave and strong—that’s what you’ve got to remember

All of us standing, sitting, praying, and living with the weight of all that came before. All of us holding secret longings and desires.

The best dresses offer secrets but no surprises,” Aileen said when we were alone. “Little pockets and camouflage for flaws with no hint of what’s hidden beneath the flare of a bell sleeve, the bones of a corset, or the inset of a shorting.

Is Nat a cruel man or is he a weak man?, I wonder for the hundreth time. Perhaps he is both. Without my name I’d be nothing, he said. Perhaps one leads to the other, although I cannot think of what might come first, cowardice or cruelty.

Now the captain is smiling and his blue words remind me that I came to America full of hope. His words were the first to have color for me during the crossing and here they are again, the color of a turquoise gemstone or the trim around the eye of a peacock feather.

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.

Perhaps he feels liberated and unclaimed here, where the earth is like a bowl of blue water and blue sky. But I’m not free.

It comes from knowing the difference between who you are and who they think you are.

If I have learned anything these months in Salem it’s that history isn’t what’s written or told. History is hidden away in dark corners and shadows, just as Nat

And this is what I think of now—not God or the minister or the sermon or even the colors and my needle, but the accused and the accusers living side by side after the witch trials were over.

I’ll decorate gloves for her, too.” I rush to say it, for I don’t want him to pity me. I don’t want folks knowing I’m in a precarious situation.

Now my rage is fuel and fire.

I wanted color in all its forms, for I missed the beauty it had brought to my dreams and waking hours.

Isobel Gowdie, Queen of Witches—she’s your namesake.” Her words were still yellow, which I came to know as the color of truth. “She knew when evil was right there in front of her in the shape of man, and she knew when to be silent and when to raise hell to the heavens.

To clothe a woman is to hide her failings and frailties,