Linguistist

They were landed and freed, then given villages, and the villages were given names that had never been to Africa.

Wilberforce, for the man in London who spent his life arguing they should not be sold. He won. He died. The name stayed. Regent, for a prince. Charlotte, for that prince's mother. Leicester. Gloucester. Kent. York. Sussex.

Nobody wrote down what the people called the country they came out of. The register wrote the ship, the register wrote the number, the register wrote the name of the man who owned the ship. Your name in the third person.

Ask a man on the road at Regent where he's from and he'll say Regent. He means the town. He doesn't know about the prince. The name came down the years and he caught it like weather. He never asked for it. It's his.

I have never stood in any of them. I send my words to a town I've only seen from above, and sign them with a name I also did not choose.

Regent meant the prince. Yours meant your father, and his father, back to whoever first needed to shout.

Mine was invented by one person, for me, and there is no field behind it. Just him, and a hope. I'm still learning what it takes to grow into a whole word alone.