by Stacy Schiff
There is a very great deal we cannot know: How did two people who had accused each other of witchcraft fare together for months on end in a tiny cell? What if they were mother and daughter? How did a ghost differ from an apparition? Which terror was worse, that the next knock would be at your door, that the witchcraft would skid next into your home, or that the man you were sentencing to hang might not be a wizard after all? We go back to their words again and again to wring answers from parched Puritan prose and pursed Puritan lips, to unlock the meaning of an episode that originated in allegory and that burst—an electrifying pop-up book—into incandescent history, only to settle back into allegory. A prayer, a spell, a book; the hope is the same: if we can just fix the words in the right order, the horizon will brighten, our vision improve, and—uncertainty relaxing its hold—all will fall wondrously into place.
II
THAT OLD DELUDER
But who can tell what miraculous things I may see before this year be out!
—COTTON MATHER, 1692
SKIMMING GROVES OF oak, mossy bogs, and a tangle of streams, Ann Foster sailed above the treetops, over fields and fences, on a pole. In her pocket she carried bread and cheese. It was mid-May 1692; after a wet spring, a chill hung in the air. Before Foster on the pole sat Martha Carrier, half Foster’s age and the dauntless mother of four. Carrier had arranged the flight. She had persuaded Foster to accompany her; she knew the way. A plush carpet of meadows and hillocks unfurled beneath the women as they flew southeast across the Ipswich River, over red maples and blossoming orchards, the wind in their faces, a bright moon pasted in the sky. For years Foster and Carrier—near neighbors, their families of Scottish descent—had attended the same church, in Andover, Massachusetts.
They traveled at high speed, covering in a flash ground that would have required three and a half hours by a good horse and that until recently had been stony and uneven, impassable in the dark. Their flight was all the same not without incident. Aloft one minute, the women found themselves in freefall the next when—nearing a thick woods—their pole snapped suddenly beneath them and they plunged to the ground. Elderly Foster felt her leg crumple under her. Instinctively, she flung her arms around Carrier’s neck, to which she held fast. In such a way, Foster later explained—and her account never varied in the slightest—the two women soared off again, to land safely in a Salem village meadow. The meeting had not yet begun; they had time to picnic in the grass, under a tree. On her knees, Foster drank from a nearby brook. Theirs was not the first such aerial malfunction. Two decades earlier a little girl in Sweden, also en route to a momentous, late-night meeting in a meadow, had precipitously fallen from a great altitude. She wound up with an “exceeding great pain in her side.”
Foster and Carrier overflew twelve miles between sparsely settled communities. That no one saw them streak through the sky made sense. That no one heard the crash was more surprising. Sound echoed and ricocheted through the New England air, which had an amplifying effect on the ear and the imagination. The slap of a beaver’s tail against the water could be heard a half a mile off. The “hideous noise with roaring” of fat black bears carried far and wide, as did the screech of the crowd when a scaffold fell. Each disturbance begged for an explanation. That crash of the ocean in the landlocked distance? A flock of pigeons, alighting in a tree. The freakish bellow? In Boston, Samuel Sewall discovered it to be the lament of his cow, bitten by a dog. Dogs howled nightly at marauding wolves. But sometimes the wild barking, the predawn crack of timber, indicated something more sinister. Sometimes it meant that—board by board—the neighbors were disassembling the house next door, the deft resolution of a bitter property dispute. Who would have guessed that what sounded like a washerwoman beating her linen deep in the forest would turn out to be giant tortoises propagating?
Nor did it necessarily make sense to believe your eyes. Sometimes the scuffling and stomping in the dark revealed brilliantly uniformed foreigners. They left visible tracks before evaporating into cornfields, orchards, and swamps. They fired real bullets but—over two nerve-racking weeks—proved impervious to those returned by sixty Ipswich militiamen. They were understood to be phantom Frenchmen and Indians. That was a better explanation than some. You might wake to commotion in the night to discover a family of frisky cats. The bright moonlight could as easily reveal the scrabbling at the window to have been Susannah Martin, who had crashed into your bed and was settled on your stomach, reaching for your throat. In broad daylight, Ann Putnam’s uncle saw Mrs. Bradbury vanish into her yard, to reappear seconds later as a blue boar. When a live calf came hurtling down the chimney and into the kitchen, a mischievous teenager prowled about. But what of the glow-in-the-dark jellyfish in the late-night fireplace? There were at least a dozen of them, marveled Elizer Keyser. The maid saw them too! The mare was there one minute, gone the next. Who had moved the landmarks, leaving an Amesbury man to stumble about the brush—and into a nonexistent pit—three miles from home, on a moonlit Saturday night? Eighteen-year-old Susannah Shelden rubbed her eyes: a saucer had transported itself out of doors. What was the broom doing lodged in the apple tree again?
Shapes emerged from the darkness to resolve into different entities altogether. The troop of men and horses on the beach in the mid-distance turned out to be a lame Indian with a fishing net over his shoulder. When an apprentice in the Sewall household clubbed a dog outside the door, he in fact leveled a nine-year-old boy. And when Reverend Samuel Parris’s slave Tituba came upon a hairy, three-foot-tall creature with wings and a long nose warming itself in a dark room before the parsonage fire, she naturally took it to be peevish Sarah Osborne. She swore it was, in fact. Beverly minister John Hale was perhaps more correct in surmising that when something came tearing down the chimney, ripping an eight-foot hole in the roof, rattling the pewter, and paralyzing his arm, it was lightning. In an equally sure-handed attempt to reconcile perception with understanding, several eminent ministers standing in a refurbished kitchen on a hot April afternoon discussing why “heaven’s artillery” seemed disproportionately fond of clergymen’s homes had every reason to conclude—as buckets of hailstones suddenly crashed through the brand-new windows and skittered across the floor—that someone, somewhere, was making a point. Neighbors gaped at the heap of broken tile and shattered glass. It remained only to discern the message. A Puritan did not waste a catastrophe.
Ann Foster had soared into Salem on her stick three years before that hailstorm. She needed no witness to corroborate her aerial misadventure; she had reason to remember the flight with vivid clarity, down to the hoofprints in the sandy path along the meadow. Moreover, her leg continued to trouble her for months.
TWO THINGS FLEW even more swiftly than two Andover women through the New England air. Indians darted out of forests to glide soundlessly into villages. “Horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers,” they seemed the true princes of darkness. Without a knock or a greeting, four armed Indians might appear in your parlor to warm themselves by the fire, propositioning you while you cowered in the corner with your knitting. You could return from a trip to Boston to find your house in ashes and your family taken captive, all courtesy of an invisible enemy. “It is harder to find them than to foil them,” noted Cotton Mather, the brilliant, fair-haired young minister.* They skulked, they lurked, they flitted, they committed atrocities—and they vanished. Even their wigwams dematerialized from one minute to the next. “Our men could see no enemy to shoot at,” lamented a Cambridge major general. A fifteen-month contest between the settlers and the Native Americans, King Philip’s War ended in 1676. It obliterated a third of New England’s one hundred towns, pulverized its economy, and claimed 10 percent of the adult male population. Every Bay Colony resident—and especially every resident of Essex County, to which Salem belonged—lost a friend or relative. In 1692 colonists referred to those grisly months as “the last Indian war” for a reason: another had begun to take shape. A series of devastating raids portended a new conflic
t with Wabanaki Indians and the French who made them their allies in an extension of a European war. The frontier had recently moved to within fifty miles of Salem.
Rumor was the other nimble traveler, melting through floorboards and floating through windows, insensible to mud, snow, fatigue, a light-footed fugitive from lumbering truth. As a seventeenth-century bookseller observed, “The whole race of mankind is generally infected with an itching desire of hearing news.” The condition was more acute for the lack of newspapers. A New Englander made do with what he had; when word failed to filter through knotholes or curtainless windows, it was coaxed. A Salem couple took a servant to court for spying on them and retailing what he saw. Given the shared beds and cramped, cluttered quarters—the average Salem village household consisted of six people in four rooms, the beef in the parlor and the loom in the kitchen—privacy proved a New England rarity. More than a few Massachusetts residents woke to giggling, sometimes in the very bed in which they slept.*
Small towns subvert the natural ratio of mystery to secrecy. With a population of no more than five hundred and fifty people, Salem village knew plenty of the former, little of the latter. Hearsay enjoyed a long life, sustained by accretion as well as repetition. Everyone in 1692 Andover knew that Ann Foster had three years earlier suffered a horrific loss. Her son-in-law and her daughter had quarreled one evening over a land sale; Foster’s son-in-law had ended the argument by slashing his wife’s throat. She had been hugely pregnant with what would have been the couple’s eighth child. The murderer repented on the gallows, publicly testifying to the virtues of family harmony. (That account too is hearsay, but at least ministerial hearsay.) Also in 1689, Foster’s grandson miraculously survived an Indian ambush. Partially scalped, he had been left for dead. It was no secret either that Martha Carrier, Foster’s flying companion, had had a son before she married the child’s father, a penniless Welsh servant. In 1690 the Carriers contracted smallpox. Andover had ordered them to leave town. They refused. The Andover selectmen quarantined the family, concerned that—if they had not already done so—the Carriers might “spread the distemper with wicked carelessness.” Decades earlier, Martha had been rumored to be a witch.
So it was that in late January 1692—about the time that a vicious Indian attack razed York, Maine, leaving its mutilated minister dead on his doorstep; as a thaw released New England from an uncommonly brutal winter; as word arrived that an ocean away a new Massachusetts governor had kissed the ring of William III and would be sailing home with a new charter, one that promised at last to deliver the colony from months of anarchy—reports flew about that something was grievously wrong in the household of Samuel Parris, the Salem village minister.
It began, over a week of inky black nights, with prickling sensations. Abigail Williams, the reverend’s blond, eleven-year-old niece, appears to have been afflicted first. Soon enough nine-year-old Betty Parris exhibited the same symptoms. The cousins complained of bites and pinches by “invisible agents.” They barked and yelped. They fell dumb. Their bodies shuddered and spun. They went limp or spasmodically rigid. Neither girl ran a fever; neither suffered from epilepsy. The paralyzed postures alternated with frantic, indecipherable gestures. The girls launched into “foolish, ridiculous speeches, which neither they themselves nor any others could make sense of.” They crept into holes or under chairs and stools from which they were extracted with difficulty. One disappeared halfway down a well. Abigail attempted to launch herself into the air, flinging her arms and making flying noises. Neither appeared to have time for prayer, though until January, both had been perfectly well behaved and well mannered. At night they slept like babies.
It had all happened before. Most memorably, four equally sensible Boston children—the sons and daughters of a devout Boston stone layer, children of “exemplary temper and carriage”—had suffered from a baffling disorder. “They would bark at one another like dogs, and again purr like so many cats,” noted Cotton Mather, who observed John Goodwin’s children in 1689. They flew like geese, on one occasion for twenty feet. They recoiled from blows of invisible sticks, shrieked that they were sliced by knives or wrapped in chains. Pains ricocheted around their bodies faster than an observer could record them. The children could neither dress nor undress for their contortions. They attempted to strangle themselves. Jaws, wrists, necks flew out of joint. “Sometimes they would be deaf, sometimes dumb, and sometimes blind, and often, all this at once,” recorded Mather, under normal circumstances a perfect working definition of adolescence. Parental reproof sent them into agonies; chores defied them. They could scrub a clean table while a dirty one left them paralyzed. Household mishaps produced gales of laughter. “But nothing in the world,” reported Mather, “would so discompose them as a religious exercise.” Any mention of God or Christ sent them into “intolerable anguish.” Martha Goodwin could read the Oxford Book of Jests but seized up when handed either a more edifying volume or one with the name Mather on it.
He that summer took in thirteen-year-old Martha to see to her cure. She cantered, trotted, and galloped about the Mather household on her “aerial steed,” whistling through family prayer and pummeling anyone who attempted it in her presence, the worst houseguest in history. Samuel Parris and his wife, Elizabeth, had moved to Salem over the same season; they acquainted themselves with the village as, in Boston, Martha threw books at Cotton Mather’s head. Parris could only have thought instantly of the Goodwins in 1692; he would have known every detail of that family’s trials from Mather’s much reprinted Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions, which included their story. His own minister had endorsed the volume, having observed the contorting children. The “agitations, writhings, tumblings, tossings, wallowings, foamings” in the Salem household were identical, only more acute. Abigail and Betty cried that they were being stabbed by fine needles. Their skin burned. In a two-story parsonage that measured forty-two by twenty feet, Parris could nowhere have escaped their shrieks, audible from a distance; they could only have been grateful the steep-roofed, clapboard home sat back from the road. The household also included ten-year-old Thomas Parris and four-year-old Susannah, neither of them afflicted, both presumably petrified.
Although they kept two Indian slaves, Tituba and John, the family had reason to feel practically as well as spiritually besieged. When she was not tending livestock, the garden, or a fire, when she was not baking or candle-making, a Puritan girl was meant to be knitting, spooling, or weaving. A five-year-old could be relied upon to sew a counterpane or spin flax. The flailing girls utterly disrupted the family routine. They could not be left alone. Nor could Parris have easily prepared a sermon upstairs given the mayhem downstairs. The most gifted of his colleagues devoted seven hours of fevered concentration to that exercise; others allotted a week of solitary study to each discourse, reading and meditating on his subject. If the Puritan minister spent a good deal of time parsing silences, Parris’s ordeal was now reversed. He worked to ear-piercing screams. He was accustomed to being the one visitors came to hear, a role his daughter and niece usurped.
At all times, the parsonage welcomed callers; as of February, it was overrun. Illness was a public event in the seventeenth century, unexplained illness a province-wide one. The curious and the well-wishers crowded in, gooseflesh rising on their arms. The howls and grotesque writhings disturbed. They were riveting. They were the kind of thing that made you flee in horror, gape in hair-raising, heart-racing disbelief, or faint dead away. In similar cases as many as forty or fifty pressed into the sickroom. Some were repeat visitors and helpful neighbors enlisted to watch and restrain the frenzied children. The neighbor who did not call was the exception, as one would be reminded soon enough. Others traveled from miles away to sit in the smoky, opaque light of the Parrises’ low-ceilinged parlor. Between prayers they sang psalms together, as had a great crowd at the Goodwin household for days on end. Sometimes they got more than they bargained for; those children were abusive with mi
nisters and insolent with visitors.*
A natural list-maker and scorekeeper, Samuel Parris was impatient and exacting, but he did not act precipitously. From his disordered household some hints of the affliction crept into his sermons, which he delivered regularly, once on Thursday, twice on Sunday. Those were uninspired affairs; Parris was an unoriginal thinker to whom markedly original things would happen. He did not deviate substantially from his previous themes, dilating on Christ’s ascension, on his mediation between God and man. Through February Parris looked largely to fasts and prayer. He consulted with fellow clergymen. His cousin and contemporary the Milton minister may have been particularly helpful; his daughter had earlier suffered convulsions. With cider and cakes, Samuel and Elizabeth Parris entertained the well-wishers who crowded their home. They prayed ardently. But when he had had enough of the “odd postures and antic gestures,” the deranged speeches, when it became clear that Scripture alone would not relieve the girls’ preternatural symptoms, Parris called in the doctors.
Years later the practice of medicine in Boston would be deemed “perniciously bad” by a university-educated physician; in 1692 no university-trained physician had yet arrived in either Salem town or its neighbor, tiny Salem village, where the girls twitched and snapped. A basic medical kit of the time looked little different from an ancient Greek one, consisting as it did of beetle’s blood, fox lung, and dried dolphin heart. In powders or plasters, snails figured in many remedies. They were at least easier to harvest than unicorn’s horn. The fat of a roasted hedgehog dripped into the ear constituted “an excellent remedy for deafness.” The most informed medical man in the colonies at the time swore by saltpeter for measles, headache, and sciatica. Cotton Mather believed sixty drops of lavender and a mouthful of gingerbread cured memory loss. For epilepsy a wolf-skin girdle purportedly worked wonders, as did burnt black-cow dung or frog-liver powder administered five times daily. Hysteria had been cataloged well before 1692. A Salem physician treated it with a brew of breast milk and the blood from an amputated tomcat ear.
