This excerpt is from my new braided memoir–historical fiction novella, A Name Unbroken: The Archive and the Body, which will be published in 2026. The work shifts between the court records of the Salem witch trials and moments from my own life, illustrating how accusation, silence, and survival leave their marks over centuries. Before I even entered the archive of Susannah Martin, I had learned how easily a life can be misunderstood, how the body holds what the record leaves out, and how long it can take to reclaim one’s name. “The Archive and the Body” stands alone as a reflection on those early lessons.
The Archive and the Body
I did not know
a name could tremble
until mine did.
December 1969—
a cold lodged in the teeth
of every windowpane.
In the boarding-school dormitory—
a white-brick mansion
never meant to house us—
I locked my door at night
for the first time,
hearing boys breathing
down the hall,
the radiator ticking beside me—
a second heart
I could not steady.
Rumor moved quicker
than breath.
Something worse,
passed behind cupped hands,
a phrase in accented English
that cracked my ribs open
where I sat:
Pied Piper to leetle boys.
Accusation
is a bitter wind
that finds its entry
even when the house
is sealed.
The headmaster
called me son—
official, practiced,
not my name,
a word borrowed
from another man’s house.
He wanted truth.
He wanted confession.
He wanted to mend
what he believed was breaking.
But I had already learned
the quiet terror
of being seen
incorrectly—
how a single glance
can warp into suspicion,
how silence
becomes evidence
against the one
whose name has begun
to tremble.
My closest friend vanished.
My accuser vanished.
The story folded itself
into another wind—
retracted,
discredited,
claimed by no tongue
that carried it.
I walked the campus
as the newly visible—
a silhouette carved
from rumor,
stitched back
with caution,
wary of every corridor
that once felt familiar.
Years later,
after the snow of that winter
had been buried,
I learned a truth
my younger self
could not imagine:
on a bus returning
from Lincoln Center,
the boy I believed
had abandoned me
took another’s face
in his hands—
the boy who once whispered
the stories that weakened
my name—
and slammed loyalty into him
with a suddenness
like judgment breaking open.
He fought
with a fury
I would never claim,
broke a tooth
for my name,
took back the rumor
by force
when I could not
shape a single word.
But I did not know.
Not then.
Not when it mattered.
The loneliness was real
even if the loyalty
was too.
This contradiction
became my first archive:
the locked door,
the whisper,
the weight loss
read as omen,
the friend who vanished,
the friend who had not,
the bruise held quietly
in another boy’s jaw
because he had spoken
my trembling name
with contempt.
I had survived
my first trial
without knowing
I was on trial.
And something in me tightened
that winter—
a thread pulled
too hard,
too long.
The body remembers
what the world forgets.
Shame stores itself
like a keepsake
we never meant to save.
Every story begins
with the wound
we do not name
until it is echoed
in another.
Joseph’s frostbitten fear
would find me later.
Susannah’s defiance,
later still.
But this—
this was the first tremor,
the first whisper teaching me
how a life can be misread
in a single season,
and how long it takes
to lift a name back
from another’s grasp
and learn to speak it
as your own.
