by Stacy Schiff
Ann Putnam Jr. saved the day, correctly identifying Abigail Hobbs’s stepmother, Deliverance Hobbs. Ann claimed the Topsfield woman had tortured her. Turning to the accused, Hathorne posed the usual round of questions: Why did Hobbs hurt these people, how had she come to practice witchcraft, whom did she suppose afflicted them if she did not? He had tried to trip up the girls. Having succeeded, he moved on. Meanwhile, in the half-light, the suspect engaged in some table-turning of her own. She too was afflicted! In that very room a week earlier she had seen birds, cats, dogs, and a human apparition—who happened to be none other than Mercy Lewis, the Putnam maid. Deliverance Hobbs proceeded to reject each of Hathorne’s prompts. No apparition had introduced a book or demanded she sign one. A tug-of-narrative-war ensued, Hathorne growing irritable as the story slipped from him. He prodded Hobbs, dubious that in a matter of days she had gone from tormentor to tormented. She was spared having to explain by the girls’ assertion—the two youngest pointed excitedly to the ceiling—that Hobbs was at that moment not before the bar, where they could not see her at all, but above their heads, on the meetinghouse beam. This made more sense to Hathorne, who returned to his familiar line of inquiry. He left the incriminating Mercy Lewis comment to fall by the wayside, where it remained.
What did Hobbs have to say about the apparition above their heads? Who threatened her if she confessed her pact? Hathorne pounded the Topsfield woman with questions. “I have done nothing” were her last words before she swerved again. If something happened in the room to change her course, Parris did not record it. Hobbs may have deemed it futile to attempt to outmaneuver Hathorne; plenty of defendants admitted to having been overawed by magistrates. She had lost contests to her stepdaughter before. She now blurted that Sarah Wilds, the Topsfield constable’s mother, had two nights earlier brought her a book, with pen and ink; that with pins and images, Deliverance Hobbs had afflicted the girls; that she had made the acquaintance of “a tall black man, with a high-crowned hat.” Hathorne had his confession. He was very soon to have a good deal more. Over the next twenty-four hours, Hobbs lent the conspiracy its binding logic, connecting the village afflictions, Putnam’s prophecies, Tituba’s black man, and Abigail’s insidious reference to the Maine woods.
Hobbs managed as well to make sense of the bloody battle waged the previous afternoon at Ingersoll’s. Following her testimony, Hathorne asked her privately if she had suffered any pains that Thursday. She reported a sharp stab to her right side, still sore. The justices ordered several women to examine her. Hobbs undressed behind closed doors, revealing evidence of a rapier wound. She now learned how she had acquired it: it seemed she was the woman into whom—at Abigail’s direction—Hutchinson had sunk his dagger at the inn. William Hobbs resurrected himself from that battle to appear before Hathorne on the twenty-second. He professed himself as innocent as a newborn babe. How, asked Hathorne, did he explain his ability to strike people down with his eyes? At this, Abigail called out that Hobbs intended to assault Mercy Lewis, who began to writhe. Could William Hobbs truly deny his complicity? demanded Hathorne. “I can deny it to my dying day,” vowed the middle-aged farmer, one of Topsfield’s earliest settlers, a man whose wife had now confessed to witchcraft and whose wayward daughter had testified against him, asserting that he read no Scripture at home. Had he not known for some time that his daughter was a witch? Hathorne asked. Hobbs had not. He agreed that something preternatural ailed the girls. “Do you think they are bewitched?” asked Hathorne. That Hobbs could not say. Constable Herrick carted Abigail’s parents, along with six additional suspects, to jail that afternoon.*
The following day the justices interrogated Deliverance in prison. They could not have done so out of earshot of the others, closely confined in the cramped space. Expanding on her confession, the Topsfield woman described the other Salem assembly that Friday. Summoned by a diabolical trumpet, a group of witches had descended on the village, to hold a parody of a communion service. Deliverance eventually produced eleven names. The numbers rarely agreed but steadily increased, from Tituba’s nine to the twenty-three or twenty-four of whom Deodat Lawson heard to Abigail’s forty. Later reports would put attendance at one hundred, a tally that rose to three hundred and seven, ultimately to an eye-popping five hundred, nearly the population of the village itself. The witches assembled in Parris’s pasture, not too derelict for their diabolical purposes, which Hobbs revealed: they were to bewitch each of the villagers, although they were instructed to do so gradually. Parris’s niece had emerged from the parsonage in time to see the witches assembled at a long table, tankards in hand. For their sacrament, they took “red bread, and red wine like blood.” Deliverance Hobbs affirmed that those previously accused were in attendance, omitting only the names of the confessed witches.
Most crucially, Hobbs explicated her stepdaughter’s reference to the Maine frontier and the visit Ann Putnam Jr. had received just before her father composed his loaded letter. A terrifying, dark-coated apparition had alighted in the village. “What, are ministers witches, too?” Ann demanded of the specter. He racked and choked her and nearly tore her to pieces, only then introducing himself. He had murdered several women and—evidently a secret agent, in the employ of the French and Indians—dispatched a number of frontier soldiers. He had murdered Lawson’s child and wife. He had bewitched Parris’s niece. He confided that his mission was a frightful one: he who should have been teaching children to fear God had now “come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the devil.” Witches not only identified themselves to their victims but preened a little, like the James Bond villain who inventories the tortures to which he is about to subject his prey.
The figure impaled by the pitchfork outside Ingersoll’s, Ann Putnam’s self-pitying minister, the officiant at the witches’ Sabbath, and the mastermind behind Thomas Putnam’s conspiracy turned out to be the same person. He was no mere wizard, warned Ann Putnam. A New England child had every reason to be acutely sensitive to hierarchy; it permeated all. Ann’s April visitor bragged that he outranked a witch. More powerful yet, he was a conjurer. (Days later, he introduced himself to Abigail with the same credentials.) He happened also to be a little black man who lived in the woods. He was strong, devious, and omniscient. And he was familiar. While Ann Putnam Jr. knew him as a bloodthirsty conjurer, she had also met him as a child of four. Mercy Lewis knew him as her ex-employer, having served in his household in the 1680s. Abigail Hobbs knew him as a leading citizen of Casco, Maine, before the Indian raid of 1688. Hathorne knew him as his former brother-in-law. Everyone in Salem village—where he had never administered any kind of sacrament to his congregants, who had never ordained him—knew him as their former minister. On April 30, a warrant went out for the arrest of Lawson’s predecessor. By the time a constable delivered George Burroughs to Salem from the far reaches of Maine a week later he could not be incarcerated. The jail would not accommodate another prisoner.
Under close supervision, Burroughs lodged in an upstairs room at a Salem town tavern. Despite his preternatural powers, he was allowed visitors; the handsome, headstrong minister still had friends in Essex County. Urged to visit by a local militia captain, Elizer Keyser begged off. A forty-five-year-old tanner, Keyser was terrified, convinced Burroughs was “the chief of all the persons accused for witchcraft or the ringleader of them all.” Under duress, he ventured a peek at the superhuman mastermind. Burroughs stared steadily back at him. Later that evening in a pitch-black room, twelve quivering, glow-in-the-dark jellyfish swam up Keyser’s fireplace. He called excitedly to his servant. Tilting her head, she marveled at the creatures gliding up the immense chimney. They remained invisible to Keyser’s wife, proof they were “some diabolical apparition.”
As Keyser collected himself before his village hearth, Burroughs paid a second spectral visit to the Putnam household, an address where—in corporeal form—he had never been entirely welcome; he had after all supplanted Ann Putnam Sr.’s brother-in-law, Reverend
Bayley. On May 8 Burroughs warned twelve-year-old Ann that his first two wives would soon appear to tell a great many lies. She was to pay them no heed. Sure enough, two chalk-white women disturbed the air, dressed in linen burial shrouds; ghosts now fluttered freely about amid wizards and witches. Red with fury, “as if the blood would fly out of their faces,” the spirits demanded justice. Burroughs should be “cast into hell.” At these words the minister vanished. His wives explained that he had murdered them. One unwound her shroud to display the fatal wound under her left arm; the next morning Ann saw Deodat Lawson’s dead wife and young daughter, with whom she had been friends. Burroughs had killed them as well. These were the crimes to which Abigail had alluded in recruiting Hutchinson and his pitchfork two weeks earlier.
Why Burroughs allowed Ann to converse with his articulate, avenging dead wives was not discussed; he worked in strange and mysterious ways. Nor would the record include another word from the faithful militia captain who had insisted the village tanner look in on Burroughs, assuring Keyser that he had nothing to fear as their ex-minister was “a child of God, a choice child of God, and that God would clear up his innocence.”
FROM THOSE THINGS the devil promised we can glimpse what the seventeenth-century girl dreamed of: splendid finery, travel abroad, fashion books, leisure, gold, a husband, help with the housework. Her longings differed little from those of any other orphaned semi-adolescent farm girl stalled in a bleak, storm-prone landscape where animals strayed into the gardens of peevish neighbors who turned up on the doorstep to fulminate, disabling the adults of the house. Insofar as they dared to dream, these girls dreamed—at the ashen end of a New England winter—of journeys to exotic realms and in supersaturated color. From Tituba’s on down, the Salem testimony explodes with invigorating, over-the-rainbow intensity. It is all bluebirds and canaries, yellow dogs, red rats, red meat, red bread, red books. Deprivation, however, had its limits. Even with the regular fasts, there was no hungering after (or enticing with) food. No daughter, niece, cousin, servant, or slave longed for a roast beef with pumpkin sauce or a luscious apple pudding or a dish of sugared almonds. Rather the girls appeared starved for color, expressionist splashes of which light up their testimonies, nearly conjuring ruby slippers.
At twelve and eleven, Ann Putnam Jr. and Abigail Williams, Parris’s niece, were the youngest of those under Satan’s supernatural spell. Nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, the Putnam maid, and twenty-year-old Mary Warren, the wavering Procter maid, were among the eldest. None of the four left a diary. Nor did any other Puritan girl. Even assuming she had paper and could write, she would have had little opportunity to do so in the course of a day spent milking and spooling, churning, weeding, washing, and candle-making. Only in the devil’s presence did the girls enunciate their desires, which come to us by way of the court clerks; we get the girls’ hankerings under duress and at a remove.* In the rare cases where their words come to us directly, the bewitched speak in what sounds like borrowed syntax and vocabulary. It is doubtful that Griggs’s niece actually said that an Andover matron “did most grievously torment” her with such tortures “as no tongue can express”—especially as Mary Walcott used identical words in denouncing the same woman, whom both girls pronounced “a most dreadful witch.” (Thomas Putnam, the adverbial master, drafted both complaints.) Ventriloquism aside, the bewitched girls exercised uncommon power, the small and the meek displacing the great and the powerful. History is not rich in unruly young women; with the exception of Joan of Arc and a few underage sovereigns, it would be difficult to name another historical moment so dominated by teenage virgins, traditionally a vulnerable, mute, and disenfranchised cohort. From the start, the Salem girls made themselves heard. Theirs quickly proved the decisive voices. By April a core group of eight girls assumed oracular import. Twitching and thrusting, they played the role of bloodhounds, soothsayers, folk healers, moral authorities, martyrs to a cause.
From any number of clergymen we know what the ideal Puritan girl looked like. She was a sterling amalgam of modesty, piety, and tireless industry. She spoke neither too soon nor too much. She read her Scripture twice daily. Her father was her prince and judge; his authority was understood to be absolute. She deferred to him as she would to the man she would marry, in her early twenties. The father was the master of the family, its soul, the governor of all the governed. He was often an active and engaged parent. He sat vigil in the sickroom; he fretted over his children’s bodies and souls. It is not difficult to imagine how deeply his absence would be felt. A majority of the bewitched girls had lost fathers, most of them to Indian attacks. It left them unsteady on their feet in terms of marriage and inheritance, if not starved for male attention; an afflicted girl in 1693 begged the young man at her bedside who tried to bid her good night to stay. She would die if he left. Another challenged the devil directly, when he mentioned the matter one too many times: “Well; and what if I am fatherless?” Mothers were less visible but equally sovereign. Youths who disregarded them could expect to “come to the gallows, and be hanged up in gibbets for the ravens and eagles to feed upon them,” warned Increase Mather. For all of the emphasis on discipline, for all the indictments of juvenile willfulness, there was plenty of seventeenth-century tenderness. “Charm the children of New England unto the fear of God,” urged Cotton Mather, a champion of sweet authority. Lawson too discouraged harshness and formality in child-rearing. Stiffer than his predecessor, even Parris advocated not “penal and wrathful blows, but strokes issuing from parental love.” There was indeed a New England statute against disobedience to one’s parents; the child over sixteen who struck or cursed a father was to be executed. The law was never invoked.
A mother dispatching her daughter in 1680 reminded her that she was to carry herself respectfully, dutifully, soberly. She was to pray regularly and—above all—work diligently. The idea was smilingly to outlabor the industrious; already the idle brain qualified as the devil’s tool.* If Mather can be used as a measure, the attention to a youngster’s spiritual state, unflagging from the start, intensified at Ann Putnam Jr. and Abigail Williams’s age, when children became simultaneously more capable of reason and less reasonable. Fourteen stood as the dividing line in law, for slander among other matters. After it, one was meant to embrace sobriety and “put away childish things,” as a father reminded his Harvard-bound son. A boy’s seven-year apprenticeship commonly began at that age. As fourteen-year-old Abigail Hobbs demonstrated, the regular hand-wringing over disobedience—like the reminders to dispense with frivolities and the frequent inveighing against the occult—indicated a certain degree of noncompliance with the Puritan ideal. As occupied as she was with her spinning and weaving, the seventeenth-century Massachusetts daughter wound up on occasion in taverns, an address at which the bonds of propriety relaxed, even for clergymen; where a rate-collecting constable might be informed that a man would prefer to hang than contribute to the Salem senior minister’s salary; where plenty of flirting went on, with and without rapiers.
The dream of a perfect woman—the pious, industrious, and blushingly submissive female—was as venerable as the seventeenth-century medical chest. What set the early New England girl apart was her nightmares. Samuel Sewall would return to his beautifully furnished home early one winter evening in 1696 to find his wife anxiously awaiting him in the entry. Fifteen-year-old Betty Sewall had burst out sobbing just after dinner, upsetting her siblings. A line from the Gospel according to John ran over and over in her precocious mind; some Mather pages haunted her. She concluded she would go to hell, her prayers unheard, her sins unpardoned. (Again, the account is her father’s.) It was not Betty’s first yelp of terror. When she was seven, the tumultuous Judgment Day scenes in Isaiah had undone her. Her brother was similarly fretful when advised, at eleven, to prepare for death.
In Betty’s collision with John 8:21, Sewall sent for the eminent Samuel Willard, minister of Boston’s Third Church. Willard prayed for Betty, confused in her thinking and lon
g in recovering. Six weeks later she sought out her father at dawn to report that she was destined for hell. For what should they pray? Sewall asked the distraught teenager at his bedside. In a rare case of a desire articulated out of the devil’s hearing, Betty wished for God to “give her a new heart.” In tears, on their knees, father and daughter together beseeched the heavens. Betty remained inconsolable. In August she was packed off to Salem to recover at the home of her uncle Stephen, who several years earlier had taken in a girl suffering other agonies, nine-year-old Betty Parris. (Sewall made no connection between the muffled cries of one child and the piercing screams of another.) Betty Sewall wept through November. She was a reprobate. She did not love God’s people as she should. There was, she warned her father, no shred of hope for her salvation.
The distress was not altogether unwelcome. “I had rather find my children praying and weeping in a corner that they cannot love God more, than to have all the wealth in the world,” declared one minister in a popular text. Nor was Betty Sewall alone in her distress, part and parcel of a Puritan upbringing.* The idea that life constituted a pilgrimage from sin to grace did not bode well for the formative years. It was never too soon to address one’s depravity, to meditate on death and damnation. The few early New England children’s books were accounts of the holy lives and exemplary deaths of the preteen set: the little girl who at four wept for her everlasting soul, the boy who repented at nine for his life of sin. The spasms of despair were frequent; a seventeenth-century New Englander knew as well as anyone ever has that we are all guilty of something. Lost in the 1688 witchcraft shuffle was John Goodwin’s remark on his daughter’s initial anguish; weeks before the phantom horseback riding, the teenager had groaned “that she was in the dark concerning her soul’s estate, and that she had misspent her precious time.” In respites between fits, a violently convulsing Groton sixteen-year-old admonished those gathered around to use their time to better purpose than she had done.
