There is often a before and after when a traumatic experience overtakes your life. And It can take a long time to learn what living in the “after” will be like.

Novelist Toni Morrison called it a “rememory,” the imprint of the violence so deep that it exists beyond one’s consciousness.

In 2017, writer Edwidge Danticat had an experience like that. And her new novel is an indication that she is still figuring out what the “after” is.

In the book, titled, “Dèy,” a Haitian word for mourning, Magnolia is caught in a mass shooting in a mall. Although she assures her family that she has come through “unscathed,” she struggles to slip back into the slipstream of her life with her husband and child.

“I had to move through it all, for Zoe.  Maybe even for him.  I’m still learning how,” Danticat writes. 

Did you know that in 1950, a Delaware woman was arrested for practicing witchcraft? According to the book “Witches of New England: Stories About the Accused, the Trials, and the Fear That Swept the Region,” authorities dismissed the charges against her, but later charged her with fortune-telling. Not much is known about the surprisingly recent case after that.

I picked up the book by authors Jessica Freeburg and Natalie Fowler (who, unknowingly to me at the time, both live in Minnesota) while on vacation in August. I spent a week in Boston, a city I had called home for many years, and did what I hadn’t thought to do all that time — go on a trolley tour. My spouse and I chose a spooky version that brought us to graveyards around town. The guide recounted tales of witch trials and hauntings. But she was very deliberate in pointing out how the stories of the people who died or whose lives were severely affected by the trials were very real.

That’s what the book did for me: it helped make their stories real. Starting with the preface, we read how the witch trials began in Europe in the early 1400s and how they crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the colonies. The first story is from 1647, in Connecticut, where witchcraft was a capital crime punishable by death. Alice Young, a mother in her early 30s, was accused of being a witch and was hanged. The exact motivation for the accusation is unknown, but her family was spared from a recent flu epidemic while many other families suffered losses. One possible reason the book gives is that some may have blamed her for their family’s illness.

I checked out the state of Connecticut’s judicial website, and it says witchcraft was no longer on the list of capital crimes in 1750. It also says Young was formally exonerated in 2017. In fact, many names have been cleared.

As I read the book, traveling through 140 years of New England witch trial history (plus the 1950 Delaware case!), each story felt like a warning against rumors and gossip, fear of the unknown and scapegoating. Weak evidence sealed the fate of many of the accused. Those lessons are still relevant today.