Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  Michael shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, turning to go.

  “Can I have it, Mikey?” Wheez asked, trailing after him down the hall. I smiled at her retreating back, but she didn’t see.

  “Okay,” I said to myself, looking around to see what I’d forgotten. Rucksack, check. Hiking boots, on. Hat, rolled up in the outside mesh thing on the rucksack. Passport, in my hip pocket. I was ready.

  I stepped through the door of my bedroom, calling “Coming, I’m coming!” and made it halfway down the stairs before I realized that I’d forgotten my phone. Outside, I heard the station wagon engine rumble to life.

  Dammit.

  I turned and stumped back up the stairs, burst into my childhood bedroom, wrapped my fist around the phone I’d almost left on my desk, and turned to go, this time for good.

  I spotted a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye.

  On the tree branch just outside my bedroom window, almost invisible in the shadows of the summer leaves, perched a tiny yellow bird.

  POSTLUDE

  SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

  AUGUST 25, 1706

  Are you ready, Annie?” my little sister says.

  I’m loitering under an elm, hoping for coolness in the shade. It’s a scorching day, and the roads are bleached by the summer sun to utter dust.

  She holds her hand out for mine. I finger the folded paper in my pocket, pulling it out to look at it, and then thrust it back to its hiding place.

  “No,” I say, simply.

  “Well, it’s time to come anyway,” she says. Jane was always reasonable that way. She’s never been given to fancies at all. She’s better than I am in many ways.

  My brothers are there, too, but only because Jane asked them to come. They’ve stayed away from the meetinghouse also, Edward and Thomas and the others. We Putnams don’t take humbling well.

  The bell tolls in the new bell tower, a merry Sunday morning sound drawing everyone in the village to meeting. The women look fresh and cool under straw hats, and many of them are strangers to me. I’ve lived in this town my entire life. It’s nearly doubled in size in that time. But my shame keeps me low and hidden. I still walk with my shoulders drawn up, warding off the looks I’m sure I’m getting, though Jane tells me no one looks at me anymore.

  Jane and I approach the meetinghouse doors, merging with the line of worshippers, all of them gossiping together as we used to do. At the door, Reverend Green greets everyone, wearing the robes of his profession, flanked by his cheerful, robust wife. When he sees me, his entire face darkens.

  So does hers.

  “Ann,” he says, his only acknowledgment.

  “Good morning, Reverend Green,” I say.

  Jane keeps a tight hold on my arm, her eyes shifting to the villagers crowding past us, watching to make sure nothing seems amiss.

  “Did you bring it?” he asks.

  I nod. Reverend Green holds out his hand, and I put the paper in it.

  He leans to my ear and says, “I’ll read it for you after the hymn and the prayer. When I’m finished, I’ll ask you to acknowledge it. Then we’ll pray together, and it’ll be done.”

  I nod my assent as Jane says, “Thank you, Reverend Green. It means so much to Ann and me.”

  My sister and brothers steer me to a pew near the front, and this time I’m sure I feel eyes on me. When I glance over my shoulder, I find I’m right. Goody Green is glaring at me. A smile fights to bend my mouth, but I vanquish it.

  Some villagers who know us stop to greet us, expressing happy surprise at my presence. I see that Salem Village has carried on without the involvement of the Putnam family. My mother’s pride would be hurt. They’ve been more than happy to buy our land off us in parcels, to nod acknowledgment at the market and on the streets, and nothing more.

  The opening hymn and the prayer slide past me as I stare at all the faces. They’ve been happy to forget. Nobody speaks of it. Well, that’s not true. People who lost mothers and fathers, spouses, siblings, they speak plenty. They’ve been petitioning for restitution. I see Dorothy Good betimes wandering the streets, wild-eyed, muttering to herself. After a babyhood in chains and her mother hanged before her eyes, Dorothy Good, always a wild thing, took utter leave of our earth, abandoning a raving body behind. Her father struggles to care for her. There’s never enough money.

  Jane pinches me, and I return to myself. Reverend Green is talking about me.

  “Today, one among us wishes to confess herself. I beg you all to hear her. Listen. Offer her the forgiveness that Christ would offer, that he will offer when she meets him in the next life. Ann Putnam?”

  I rise, shakily, to my feet. The congregation whispers. I feel their eyes burning into my back.

  Reverend Green unfolds the paper that holds the confession my brother wrote out for me, after Reverend Green’s instruction. He skims it, clears his throat, and begins to read.

  “I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling providence that befell my father’s family in the year about ’92; that I, then being in my childhood, should, by such a providence of God, be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have been instrumental, with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood; though what was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say, before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them; but what I did was done ignorantly, being deluded by Satan. And particularly, as I was a chief instrument of accusing Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust, and to be humbled for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity to them and their families; for which cause I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence, whose relations were taken away or accused.”

  A leaden silence grips the meetinghouse. I hear a creak of someone’s weight shifting in a pew.

  “Ann Putnam, do you acknowledge this confession as yours?”

  The summer sun slants through the meetinghouse windows, and I open my mouth to speak.

  I close my eyes, and think back years ago to something Tittibe Indian said, in the early days of our delusion.

  “I’m blind. I cannot see,” I whisper. “I cannot see what’s real.”

  Author's Note

  Conversion began when I was sitting in the waiting room at the Meineke, waiting for my taillight to be fixed. It was autumn 2012, and the cable news was on in the waiting room, but I wasn’t paying much attention until the news anchor said in passing that they’d figured out what was really wrong with the girls in Le Roy, New York. According to the newscast, the Le Roy Mystery Illness of 2012 was actually just an outbreak of conversion disorder.

  “What?” I said to the television, which evoked some glares from the people also waiting for their cars.

  In the spring of 2012 a group of sixteen high school girls in Le Roy, New York, about an hour away from where I live, came down with bizarre physical symptoms that no one could explain. They were twitching, and suffering from disordered speech. Some of them, who had been very athletic, had lost the ability to walk. It was thought that they might be having a reaction to the HPV vaccine. Then it was thought they might have PANDAS, or Tourette’s. The girls and their parents went on first local, then national, then international television. Environmental pollution was blamed. And while these girls were suffering through this very strange and very public experience, I was teaching The Crucible to a group of college students in my sophomore historical fiction semin
ar.

  When the Le Roy story first broke, I arrived in class eager to discuss the parallels between the “afflicted girls” at Salem and these teenagers who lived so close to us. To my surprise, my students didn’t see a parallel. After all, the girls in the past were just crazy, whereas the girls in Le Roy had something really wrong with them. The more I watched the story unfold, however, the more struck I was by the disjuncture between what the Le Roy girls thought about their own experience and what the assorted “experts” brought in to comment on their situation had to say. I reflected at length about the Salem girls, and specifically about Ann Putnam, who was at the very center of the accusations in the Salem panic, who really did issue an apology (which is reproduced verbatim in this story), and who had been effectively written out of the most popular fictional account of that period in American history, The Crucible. In the past, as in the present, the experts had one story to tell about this unique and frightening experience, whereas the girls, I suspected, had an experience all their own, that no one but them could fully understand.

  I have taken liberties with both the Le Roy story and with the Salem girls, though many of the details remain true. The progression that I describe with the fictional Danvers Mystery Illness adheres very closely to the progression of hypotheses floated at Le Roy. Similarly, the dates, dramatis personae, and much of the dialogue in Ann Putnam’s story are adapted from historical records, including trial testimony as well as narratives written by Reverend Deodat Lawson and Reverend John Hale. The episode in which a deacon brings a copy of William Perkins’s witch-hunting manual to Samuel Parris the night between Tituba’s two confessions derives from a hypothesis explored by historian Larry Gragg in his biography of Samuel Parris, based on a nineteenth-century footnote in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. It’s unsubstantiated, but highly evocative, and would explain the differences between the real Tituba’s two confessions that I reproduce in the book. Further, in 1701 skeptic Robert Calef wrote that Tituba might have been beaten to encourage her confession. Again, unsubstantiated, but evocative.

  Although Conversion is in all respects a fictional story, and a product of my imagination, it nevertheless attempts to draw a real comparison between the difficulty of girls’ lives in the past and the pressures that teenage girls are under today. I don’t think any of us would want to return to a time when slavery was legal, eleven-year-olds were routinely bound out as servants, people could be put to death as witches based solely on reputation and rumor, and social hierarchy was defined unambiguously along race, gender, and economic lines. However, it bears considering why adolescent girls living at the dawn of the twenty-first century, with all of its technological, medical, and social advances, would still be under so much stress that their bodies, quite literally, cannot take it. We look at the afflicted girls during the Salem panic and want very much for there to be one rational explanation for their behavior. Were they faking? Was it moldy bread (the seventeenth-century equivalent of “environmental” factors)? Were they crazy? Part of our desire to identify the one “true” explanation of the Salem witch trials is that we have moved beyond hysteria. If we can consign the Salem episode safely to the past, then such a bizarre, inexplicable, potentially murderous panic can never happen again.

  But it just did.

  Acknowledgments

  My sincerest gratitude goes to Jennifer Besser, Shauna Rossano, Marisa Russell, and my team at Penguin Young Readers Group for their exquisite support for this novel. My fantastic agent Suzanne Gluck supported this idea from the moment it was a glimmer in my eye, and Laura Bonner, Ashley Fox, Eve Atterman, and all my colleagues at William Morris Endeavor remind me why I am so fortunate to be able to work with incredible people every day.

  I would like to thank the girls of Le Roy, New York, for their courage in the face of an experience no teenager should ever have to endure. While they inspired this story, I hasten to add that this story is imaginary. Their experience is theirs and theirs alone.

  Many friends have brought their expertise to bear on this manuscript, either by providing comments, reading drafts, listening to ad nauseam brainstorming, or generally cheering me on when I most needed to hear it. My love and thanks to Caroline Arden, Owen Arden, Theo Black, Elisha Cohn, Julia Glass, Connie Goodwin, Bradley Hague, Will Heinrich, Eleanor Henderson, Eric Idsvoog, Emily Kennedy, Kelley Kreitz, Ellen Leventry, Patricia Meinhardt, Jane Mendle, Kenneth Miller, Ginger Myhaver, Mary Beth Norton, Matthew Pearl, Brian Pellinen, Andrew Semans, Weston Smith, George Spisak, the denizens of End Times Island, and all members of the Third Sarah Battle Whist Club of Boston (Ithaca Chapter).

  The first draft of this novel came together in one marathon Writing Lent™, which left me a jabbering mess. My thanks to Stella’s Café in Ithaca for feeding and housing me during much of that time, and to Bob Proehl and everyone at Buffalo Street Books for letting me read from this manuscript at an event in which they thought I would be talking about another book entirely.

  Richard Trask is the steward of the Danvers Archival Center at the Peabody Institute Library, and I thank him for the vital work that he does preserving the legacy of witchcraft in Salem Village. Thank you also to Ben Ray and the University of Virginia online Salem Archive, which makes the Salem papers available to anyone who wants to see them. And thank you to Jean Marie Procious and everyone at the Salem Athenaeum for continuing the storied literary heritage of Salem, Massachusetts, in addition to providing a beautiful work space for writers like me.

  Thank you to the teenagers who let me pry into their worlds, both near and far, present and past, with special thanks to the Snits, to my Cornell historical fiction students, and to my on-site teen accuracy consultant, Eli Hyman. If I were a crueler person, I would put his Twitter handle here.

  I am fortunate to have parents who always encouraged me to follow my interests and passions when I was Colleen’s age, even when it meant I was too busy reading Sartre to do my French homework. Thank you to George and Katherine S. Howe for helping me become the person I am, and to the Kinkaid School for educating me in spite of my best efforts.

  And finally, my thanks as always to Louis Hyman. He knows why.

  KATHERINE HOWE is the New York Times bestselling author of the The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and The House of Velvet and Glass. She is a lecturer in American studies at Cornell University. She is also a direct descendant of three of the women accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials, one who was hanged and two who survived. Her books have been published around the world in twenty-three languages to date.

  Visit Katherine online at www.katherinehowe.com

  and follow her on Twitter @KatherineBHowe