The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  In addition to all else came the family devotions that had landed Bayley in such trouble. Morning and evening, Parris prayed and read Scripture with his household, including his slaves, their souls his charge as well. He gathered the family before the hearth for the singing of psalms and in weekly catechism. Many ministers’ children heard a preview on Saturday evening of the next day’s sermon; the Sabbath ended with a digest of the day’s service. Parris reinforced basic principles, stressing covenant obligations. Man was born in sin and embarked on a pilgrimage toward grace. A spiritual war was afoot, separating the godly from the damned. Church sacraments were paramount. Puritan parenting constituted a full-time activity; Mather was forever devising exercises for his sons and daughters. While Parris was less creative, he paid close attention to his children’s education, indistinguishable from their spiritual welfare. Well before the girls began to tense and twitch, their souls were closely monitored, daily palpated; the state of New England’s young qualified as something of a preoccupation. Parris devoutly hoped that all of his parishioners were so vigilant. He feared they were not. He took up the popular refrain that family order was disintegrating; what was the matter with kids today? At a Cambridge ministers’ meeting he led a charge to see what could be done.

  Five years older than her husband, a member of Boston’s First Church before her marriage, surrounded by five Putnam wives in her Salem pew, Elizabeth Parris would have shared in those tasks. She was expected to be constant in her devotions and compassionate toward the neighbors. Her obligations increased after the distractions of 1692; under any circumstances, she would have read and discussed the Bible with the parsonage children, whose education fell to her and whom she taught to read. Basic literacy was a New England requirement, thanks to the 1647 statute establishing schools, to which Massachusetts owes its educational eminence. That law too amounted to a defensive measure. It was understood that the “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, [was] to keep men from knowledge of the Scriptures.” The point was to outwit him, to stave off demonic ambush; even in the midst of an arctic New England winter, his hot breath could be felt on the cheek. The Salem town father who had not taught his children to read found a notice posted on the meetinghouse door offering them as servants to someone who would. And while basic literacy was a requirement, it was hardly a sufficiency. One future minister made his way three times through the Bible before he turned six. It was not unusual to have done so a dozen times before adolescence or be able to recite long passages by heart.

  The ideal Puritan wife was self-effacing, and Elizabeth Parris obliged; little trace of her survives beyond her initial on a fragment of dark pewter plate. Of Parris as a father we have a few glimmers. As he warned his congregants: “Wise parents won’t suffer children to play with their food.” The sage mother engaged “rod and reproof.” He may have sounded more ferocious in the pulpit than he did at the dinner table but it is difficult to believe that his children ever won an argument with their standard-upholding, apology-rejecting father when his parishioners so rarely did. Parris could not ignore missteps; he pried open closed issues; he never made one point when he might make three. He delivered another hint of his paternal style with the abbreviated January sermon. As the Salem villagers curled and uncurled aching fingers and toes, as the shutters rattled in the wind, Parris illuminated a dim meetinghouse with the lessons of affliction. They made one more vigilant. They humbled and instructed. The Lord delivered afflictions, preached Parris, in the same spirit that parents, “seeing their young children over-bold with fire or water,” will bring them “near to the fire, or hold them over the water, as if they would burn them or drown them.” Naturally no parent intended to do anything of the sort. He endeavored merely, Parris explained, “to awe and fright them, that they may hereafter keep farther off.”*

  The chilly parsonage was soon enough steeped both in awe and fear. In that it was not alone. Just before or just as the February witch cake introduced Abigail and Betty to their tormentors, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, the daughter of Parris’s stalwart supporter Thomas Putnam, began to shudder and choke. Three miles down the road in the other direction, Elizabeth Hubbard, Dr. Griggs’s sixteen-year-old niece, convulsed as well. A creature had followed her home from an errand, through the February snow. She now realized it had not been a wolf at all. All four girls could say with certainty who pinched and pummeled them. For the remainder of 1692 Samuel Parris left no further mention of firewood.

  III

  THE WORKING OF WONDERS

  I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  OVER THE DAYS that followed Mary Sibley’s witch-cake experiment, rainstorms gusted through Essex County, swelling rivers with snowmelt. They overspilled their banks, inundating homes, sweeping away livestock, mills, and bridges, flooding freshly tilled fields. On every count the village was a seething, muddy morass. Having consulted with his minister, Thomas Putnam braved the tempests to ride to Salem town on February 29 with three friends. The girls now understood who tormented them; that Monday, the middle-aged farmers in mud-splattered cloaks appeared before two Salem justices to press formal witchcraft charges. Hours later, his black, brass-tipped staff in hand, the village constable knocked at a door just over a mile southwest of the parsonage. He carried a warrant for Sarah Good’s arrest. She was to appear before the authorities the following morning to account for having, over the previous two months, tortured two girls in the Parris household as well as Thomas Putnam’s daughter and Dr. Griggs’s maid. Sin and crime were close cousins in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, which drew its list of capital offenses from the Bible.

  A semi-itinerant beggar, Sarah Good constituted something of a local menace. She would seem to have wandered into the village directly from the Brothers Grimm, were it not for the fact that they had not been born yet. And she came trailing a backstory of pitiless downward mobility. When she was eighteen, her French-born father, a wealthy innkeeper, committed suicide. His considerable estate passed in its entirety to her stepfather. When Sarah was in her twenties, her husband died suddenly; she inherited his debts. A series of suits followed, leaving her disaffected and destitute. To the dismay of their orderly, industrious neighbors, she and her family lived for long stretches on charity, in barns and fields. She and her second husband, William, did not appear always to share an address. Recently she had turned up at the parsonage, her five-year-old daughter in tow. Parris offered something to the youngster. Good had stalked off, muttering under her breath. The encounter with their disheveled, snarling neighbor seriously unsettled the members of the household. Relief of the poor was a chronic problem in Massachusetts, where resources were scant and where idleness posed a riddle to most minds. All preferred to drive the destitute from town. The two Salems were over these weeks contending with this very issue, especially urgent as King Philip’s War had produced an unwieldy number of widows and orphans. If they were to provide for their own poor, wondered the Salem farmers, bargaining yet again for their independence, might the town exempt them from highway maintenance?

  As it happened, Sarah Good had been unsettling Salem households for some time. Three years earlier she and her family had found themselves homeless; a well-intentioned couple lodged them. Good proved so “turbulent a spirit, spiteful, and so maliciously bent” that after six months, her hosts turned her out. They could not bear another moment of her presence. Retaliating for their kindness, Good insulted their children and threatened the family. That winter their livestock began unaccountably to fall ill and die. Told of the misfortune, Good swore she did not care if they lost every head of cattle. When another villager refused to admit her to his house for fear she carried smallpox—Good clearly carried a whiff of something foul about her—she scolded and cursed. If the family did not mean to extend their hospitality, she fumed, she would confer something on them! Sure enough, the n
ext morning the family cow died “in a sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Constable Herrick’s brother himself turned the muttering Good away when she came in search of lodging. As she continued to wander about the property, he enlisted his son to keep her from the barn. Fond as she was of her pipe—she was far from the only Massachusetts woman who had discovered tobacco—she was likely to set the place on fire. Good had promised that the Herricks too would pay for their lack of hospitality. She may have cast only dark hints; we have her words as they were heard, not as they were delivered. In no way did she make anyone feel comfortable. Several of the Herricks’ prize cows moreover subsequently vanished. All three families would have cause to review those inauspicious encounters soon enough.

  The constable delivered Sarah Good at ten in the morning on March 1 to Ingersoll’s ordinary, or tavern, where her interrogation was to take place. Insofar as the village had a nucleus, Ingersoll’s was it. Steps from the meetinghouse, just south of the parsonage, on a rise along the Salem-Andover road, the ordinary was the address at which Parris’s congregants refreshed themselves between Sunday sermons. Only the absences were notable that morning. Sarah Good’s upright neighbor Martha Corey elected not to attend. She attempted to detain her husband as well, going so far as to unsaddle his horse. She lost the battle; Giles Corey missed not a minute of the week’s examinations. By the time the town justices arrived, it was clear that Ingersoll’s could not accommodate the crowd. They moved the hearing to the village’s austere, raftered meetinghouse, a dim chamber at the best of times, dimmer now after years of neglect. The Salem farmers had long deferred repairs, boarding up broken windows and leaving others open to the air. The place was so dark as to be nearly unusable. All the same, a heady, holiday atmosphere prevailed. The colony was without theater, considered a “shameful vanity.” While all of Shakespeare’s plays existed, no copy had turned up in North America, where the first organ would not arrive for another nineteen years. In the feverish air that Tuesday the usual rules and all hierarchy evaporated, as, in the weeks to come, inhibitions, obligations, and curfews would fantastically lift. The farmers knew very well their places in the dark, planked pews—among contentious issues, seating was nearly toxic, determined by an ego-bruising, oft-contested algorithm of age, rank, and estate—and that morning they were not sitting in them.

  From a table before the pulpit, justices of the peace Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne presided. Widely respected, they counted among the first men of Salem town. A successful land speculator and quick-thinking militia captain, dark-haired Hathorne lived in a fine mansion. A skilled and harsh interrogator as his father had been before him, Hathorne had been hearing cases since 1684. He was the father of six, though as yet had no experience with teenage girls. Corwin owned sawmills, several in conjunction with Hathorne. The son of one of Salem’s wealthiest merchants, he had inherited one fortune and married another. The justices were close confederates, in their early fifties, and related by marriage. They lived a block from each other. Together they had seated the Salem town meetinghouse, where Hathorne played a leading role. They had recently traveled together to the Maine frontier to evaluate Indian defenses. And while neither had a background in the law—men with formal legal training did not immigrate to the colonies, which had no law school—both knew the business of the community, the offenders and the offenses, inside out. Hathorne had sat on the committee that five years earlier had urged the villagers to spare the town their animosities. He had devoted hours to adjudicating Putnam family disputes. No doubt with relief, both men had attended Parris’s ordination. Corwin had rescued the Parris family from the cold with the emergency October firewood delivery.

  After an opening prayer, Hathorne took charge of the hearing from the long table at which Parris and his deacons normally conducted the communion service. “Sarah Good,” Hathorne asked, “what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” She replied, “None.” Working from prepared notes, Hathorne continued as if she had said just the opposite. Had she contracted with the devil? Why did she hurt these children? What creature did she employ to do so? He proceeded less like a judge than a police interrogator; it fell to him to establish not the truth of the charges but the guilt of the suspect. When an alleged thief had appeared before Hathorne eight years earlier, he had begun: “What day of the week did you steal the money from Elizabeth Russell?” The second question was, When did you take it?; the next, Where is the money you took?

  The contest was asymmetric. For all her misdemeanors, despite the suit against her stepfather, Good had never testified before a magistrate when she stood that sodden morning—several feet and a waist-high rail separating them—before Hathorne and Corwin. It was the kind of confrontation that reduced responsible men to gibberish. All the same Hathorne got nowhere. Good continued in her sullen denials, as unforthcoming in the courtroom as she was intemperate on doorsteps. Hathorne tried a different tack. What was all that muttering about at the parsonage? She had merely thanked the Reverend Parris for his charity, she explained. She was falsely accused. She knew nothing of the devil. Hathorne directed the four girls, assembled together, to rise. Was this the woman who hurt them? Not only did all testify that she had—three had suffered at her hands that very morning—but as they came face to face with Good before the canopied pulpit, each began to thrash. Hathorne had no choice but to move them away. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you thus torment these poor children?” he chided. The wrenching and writhing continued; Good could not help but agree that something afflicted the girls. But what did she have to do with it? she asked bitingly. Like everyone else, she knew that Hathorne had arrested two other women. One of them was his culprit.

  The fourth or fifth time Hathorne asked who bewitched the children Good supplied an answer. She named Sarah Osborne, apprehended the same afternoon, her house turned upside down for evidence. Recovered, the girls clarified that Osborne and Good together tortured them. Hathorne returned to the muttering. What was it Good said when she stalked away from people’s houses? He implied that she was either tossing off an incantation or conferring with her devilish accomplices. Muttering qualified as something else too, New England code for all that was suspect and subversive. The word smacked of iniquities and insurrections. It led directly to anarchy; where murmuring broke out, mutiny could not be far behind. To the minds of their captives, Indians muttered. Cotton Mather had recently written off murmuring as “the devil’s music.”

  Good was caustic at best, insolent at worst. “Her answers were in a very wicked, spiteful manner,” noted one of the court reporters, detouring into the third person, his editorial comment supplanting Good’s voice. Appearances were on his side. Weather-beaten and bedraggled, Good looked as miserable as her reputation. A child would have taken her to be aged. She was in fact thirty-eight; she had had a baby three months earlier. She continued to resist her well-dressed examiner, who had to drag answers out of her. As for the muttering, she finally relented: “If I must tell you, I will.” She had recited the Commandments. Pressed for details, she changed her story. It had been a psalm. She paused, silent, before floundering (“muttering,” in the opinion of a clerk) through a portion of it. “Who do you serve?” persisted Hathorne, swerving slightly. “The God that made heaven and earth,” Good replied, though perversely she hesitated to pronounce the Lord’s name. She could explain her Sunday absences: she had not come to meeting as she had no proper clothes.

  If she did not seal her fate with her acrid answers, her husband did so for her. Someone in the room volunteered that William Good had voiced suspicions of his wife, submitting that she “either was a witch or would be one very quickly.” Hathorne pressed the hapless weaver for specifics. Had he witnessed any diabolical acts? He had not. But his wife had comported herself rancorously with him. Tears welling in his eyes, he felt compelled to admit “that she is an enemy to all good.” If there were gasps in the room, they went unrecorded
; Ezekiel Cheever—enlisted that day as one of several clerks—had no reason to preserve them. The years of poverty had not been kind to the marriage; the report of Sarah Good’s lack of sympathy for their hosts’ livestock had also originated with her husband. The night before his wife’s arrest, William Good would reveal, he had noticed a witch mark—a sign the devil was known to stamp on his recruits—just below her right shoulder. It had never been there before. He wondered if anyone else had seen it. Hathorne remanded Good to prison.