by Ami McKay
Much gratitude and appreciation goes to the amazing team at Knopf Canada for their enduring dedication to the written word, especially my editor, Anne Collins, whose sublime intuition for finding truth in language always feels like magic.
Thanks also to Claire Wachtel for lunch at Saks, for quoting Frost and for pointing the way; and to Genevieve Pegg at Orion, who saw the heart of the story from the start.
Special thanks to my agent, Helen Heller, for championing my work, and for her archaeological encouragement “to always dig deeper.”
Thank you to my friends and family, far and near who have given me such incredible support and love over the years—Skip, Doug and Lori, for cheering me on through scraped knees and spilt milk; Chris O’Neill and Ken Schwartz at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts and Two Planks and Passion Theatre for your friendship and for building an artistic haven on the mountain; Marta Pelrine-Bacon, Dawn Jones-Graham and Jon Hyneman for late night conversations, cups of tea and witchy consultations.
As always, the most thanks and all my love go to my nearest and dearest: my sons, Ian and Jonah, who have brought more laughter, joy and wonder to my life than I ever imagined possible; and to my beloved husband, Ian, who is my guiding star, my heart and my “yes and” to everything.
Author’s Note
While writing this book I stumbled upon a startling fact—my nine times great-aunt Mary Ayer Parker was executed for witchcraft. In the midst of the turmoil that was the Salem witch trials, she and her daughter Sarah were accused and imprisoned. Mary, a fifty-five-year-old widow, was later tried and convicted, and on September 22, 1692, she was hanged at Gallows Hill. Thanks to an edict that put a stop to subsequent hangings, Sarah’s life was spared.
As you might imagine, discovering this tragic bit of my family history inevitably shaped the narrative of The Witches of New York. So many questions now came to my mind as I wrote—What does the word “witch” truly mean? Had any vestiges of folk magic survived the witch trials? What had happened between the witch hunts (of both Europe and North America) and the constraining, patronizing view of womanhood held in the Victorian era? Surely there were connections to be made.
As a child who loved to play make-believe, I always preferred to pretend to be a witch rather than a princess—specifically, Glinda, the good sorceress of Oz. Not the glitzy film version of Glinda, but the mighty witch that L. Frank Baum originally created for his wonderful series of Oz books. That Glinda was wise and savvy, kind yet firm, and always erred on the side of letting Dorothy find her own way. In hindsight, I suppose I loved her because she reminded me a lot of my own mother, a woman who never failed to encourage me to find magic in the world whenever and wherever I could. My mother, like Glinda, believed in the powers of intellect, tenacity and intuition (“you’ve always had the power my dear…you just had to learn it for yourself”), and taught me that no girl or woman should ever apologize for such gifts.
L. Frank Baum’s vision of Glinda (as well as Ozma, the fairy-touched girl who was the rightful ruler of Oz) was inspired by conversations he had with his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, a woman who was a staunch abolitionist, an unapologetic suffragist and a leading voice in the fight for aboriginal rights in the United States. Also a prolific writer, she encouraged her son-in-law to inhabit his Land of Oz with strong female characters so that his four sons might grow up with role models in their fairy tales that would prepare them for a new, enlightened age. In her seminal work, Women, Church and State, published in 1893, Matilda boldly addressed the history of witchcraft and the persecution of women accused of it, drawing many parallels to her own time.
The church degraded woman by destroying her self-respect and teaching her to feel consciousness of guilt in the very fact of her existence.
To this day, an open, confident look upon a woman’s face is deprecated as evil.
Death by torture was the method of the church for the repression of woman’s intellect, knowledge being held as evil and dangerous in her hands.
The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages.
The testimony of the ages entirely destroys the assertion sometimes made that witchcraft was merely a species of hysteria.
The treatise was a call to action, a rallying cry to women to reclaim the word “witch.” She was tired of female voices being silenced (for being too intelligent, too wise, too feminine, too different). She was tired of seeing women get cast aside—dismissed, ostracized or sent off to asylums. This was the era of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Jean-Martin Charcot’s weekly lectures at the Salpêtrière where he paraded his “hysterical” female subjects before the general public. It seemed the hunts hadn’t ended, they’d just taken on a more subversive, sinister form.
Sadly, Matilda’s work was met with sneers and skepticism, even among a few of her sister suffragists. “Too radical,” they said, “too divisive.” Yet she persisted, speaking out for the suffragist cause until her death in 1898. I wonder what she’d make of the women’s movement today.
I’m guessing she’d say there’s still plenty of work to be done. How many times are women still told that their stories, their testimonies, their ideas don’t matter? Or that they’re only meant for our own gender? How many girls are scolded each day for not smiling? Or shamed for the clothes she chose to wear? Or teased for being too smart? Or refused admittance to school?
Ray Bradbury once wrote, “A witch is born out of the true hungers of her time.”
I believe that’s true for the witches in this book, for their time as well as mine.
Get ready world, something witchy this way comes.
May 16, 2016,
Scots Bay, NS
AMI McKAY’s debut novel, The Birth House, was a #1 bestseller in Canada, winner of three CBA Libris Awards, nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a finalist for Canada Reads and a book-club favourite around the world. Her second novel, The Virgin Cure, also a national bestseller and a Best Book pick across numerous lists, was inspired by the life of her great-great-grandmother, Dr. Sarah Fonda Mackintosh, a female physician in nineteenth-century New York. Born and raised in Indiana, McKay now lives in Nova Scotia.
