A Teaser from Andrew Hunter’s It Was Dark There All the Time
She carries three names. The first, Sophia, is common. Its Christian meaning is “divine wisdom.” To Muslims, it means “beautiful.” Let’s think of her in these dignified terms. Her last name, Pooley, she took from the man she married in freedom. Pooley refers to a pond or a pool of water (from Old English pōl, from Dutch poel) that is located next to a ley—an area of pasture or grassland. Ley can also refer to a ley line, “a supposed straight line connecting three or more prehistoric or ancient sites, sometimes regarded as the line of a former track and associated by some with lines of energy and other paranormal phenomena.” Pooley is riparian, as in fed by or living near the banks of a river. Wise and beautiful, she sits by water, at the edge of a field. I am searching for the ley lines which still pulse, linking her across time and space to this moment. It is her maiden name, her enslaved name, Burthen, that carries the most weight and casts the longest shadow.
Burthen is an archaic English word that will become burden, the th morphing into a single d. It now means a physical thing one carries or a psychological weight (of anxiety, trauma, or depression) that can or will be passed on to others, becoming a responsibility (“the burden of proof”) and maybe a curse lingering in the past and shading the future.
—Excerpted from It Was Dark There All the Time by Andrew Hunter. Published by Goose Lane Editions. gooselane.com
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