The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  What they developed sounds to have been a form of emotional laryngitis; a sense of suffocation tends to accompany hysteria. The girls expressed in fits what they could not communicate in words, or what no one seemed to hear when they entrusted it to words.* Mather and Sewall were mistaken about lightning and its preference for parsonages.† But Parris was correct in noting that the devil targeted the most pious. Hysteria prefers decorous, sober households, where tensions puddle more deeply; it made sense that the Salem minister wound up with more witchcraft victims under his roof than anyone else. (The surprise was that he did not wind up with more. Two Parris children soldiered on, forgotten by history.) Instructed not to fidget, well-mannered, well-behaved Betty and Abigail writhed. They could not unburden themselves as did those loudmouthed, plot-propelling bad girls Abigail Hobbs and Mary Lacey Jr., who may actually have believed they had signed pacts with the devil and sound as if they would have if they could. It would have been easier at the parsonage to have a vision than an opinion.

  Conversion disorder also favors backwaters, women (especially young women), and the fatherless. It tends to break out in convents, schools, and hospitals, in tight-knit, emotionally charged environments. Freud noted that the especially visual, intellectually astute child will suffer first. Her symptoms are infectious, no doubt more so when she hails from the most conspicuous family in town. (By the same token, the devout tend to glimpse the devil more frequently. Possession rarely occurs in the absence of intense piety.) It was a full church member who introduced the witch cake, forcing Parris’s hand, as it would be the more devout members of the community—and the more orthodox ministers—who leaped at the sacrament-subverting ceremony in the parsonage field. The girls may have been aware of the Goodwin case. The adults certainly were. And when your elders inform you that you are bewitched, you are unlikely to experience immediate relief of your symptoms. The pricks along your arms may grow just a little more intense, as the scalp tingles at the mention of lice.

  Already at the center of the community, Betty and Abigail claimed its rapt attention, something others obviously craved. Mary Rowlandson was candid on that subject. “Before I knew what affliction meant,” she admitted in her captivity narrative, “I was ready sometimes to wish for it.” She could not have been the only New England woman who longed for a test by which to prove her holiness. Elizabeth Knapp sobbed not only that she led a spiritually unprofitable life, but that her “labor was burdensome to her.” No one chastened an afflicted girl or sent her to gather firewood. Elizabeth Hubbard set off on no further terrifying errands, wolves nipping at her heels; any number of Cinderellas were relieved of their chores. (Ann Putnam Sr.—the first adult woman to be afflicted—wore herself out precisely because the girls on whose labor she relied contorted. She had cause for grief, for which there was little place in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Elsewhere it manifested as crippling distress.) Parents looked on with tender concern, siblings no doubt with raging jealousy. In another outbreak, a young girl observed that her convulsing sisters “seemed to be more the object of their parents’ care and love, as well as pity, than ever.” It was not long before she assumed their symptoms.

  Indictments described the bewitched as “consumed, pined, wasted, and tormented.” No one who set eyes on the girls would have noticed the first three; never before had they been so cosseted. Doubtless that was a seduction in itself, an invitation to malingering. One witness for the defense noted that an afflicted girl fell into fits each time “her mother spoke to her with tartness.” Not only did she remain healthy, but Elizabeth Knapp put on weight as her agonies increased. (Like the ministers, the girls appreciated a full house and a large theater. In 1693 an afflicted girl summoned the governor himself. Elizabeth warned she would not recover until a conclave of ministers met to pray over her in Boston, her own version of a trip to the Golden City.) She made clear that there was plenty of self-reproach and spiritual confusion and devilish temptation to discharge, the kind of anguish that left Sewall and the Goodwin children to sob they had squandered their lives. Already there was an Indian behind every bush, a spectral Frenchman in the yard.* Every child is on intimate terms with the raging monster inside. But adults too have awoken to discover an arm attached not to the comely hand of Henry Jekyll, but to the dusky, gnarled paw of Edward Hyde.

  Did the afflicted truly feel pinched and pricked? The hysteric’s skin is said to be uncommonly sensitive, especially late at night. It bruises easily. On two other counts, a seventeenth-century villager might feel metaphorically bitten or stabbed. You were meant to be pierced to the marrow by good preaching. And Cotton Mather termed winters “very pinching and piercing things.”* There seemed, he noted, to be more hours in a winter day, allowing more time to reflect. The Puritans had stripped the calendar of every festival and holiday, to wind up with a work year of three hundred days. It contributed to their astonishing productivity. And it also left them with what has been deemed the “dullest calendar in Western civilization.” The girls knew no respite during the most desolate, most interior months, the horizon low, the family oppressively close at hand.

  Did they believe they saw Deliverance Hobbs on the beam, John Procter on the marshal’s lap? They had spent a claustrophobic winter housebound, under ashen skies and drifted snow, between whitewashed walls, amid undecorated surroundings. Visual monotony has been known to produce hallucinations. (It is interesting that there were no olfactory hallucinations and only a rare disembodied voice.) It could not have been difficult to cough up visions under the feverish circumstances. On intimate terms with the supernatural, a girl well versed in Scripture supplied them all the more readily. Prayer works to clarify the mental imagery, to privilege the imaginary world over the actual one, at which the adolescent excels already. It was probably no accident that the best-educated village girls participated most ardently in the crisis. In Sweden, too, an intelligent, outspoken, orphaned eleven-year-old stood at the center of the outbreak. Past the window flew warped versions of the girls’ fears, floating scenes from Scripture, linty household grudges, gurgling sins and guilts, the detritus of dreams and nightmares, scraps of gossip and political darts, a veritable Chagall of cats in the doorway and neighbors in the orchard. In a sense the afflicted engaged in a responsive reading; having been fed a liturgical diet of tigers and dragons, they answered with black cats and wild beasts. In other words, as a modern historian has noted of our synchronized imaginations, “the Virgin Mary was more likely to appear to a French peasant in the seventeenth century than to a lowland Scot.” The “bewitched” moreover made the imagery rhyme with their own stories. Susannah Shelden had survived Indian attack. She reported atrocities where Ann Putnam Sr. saw dead babies. Both delivered effigies of their apprehensions. It is true, as Brattle pointed out, that it is impossible to see with our eyes shut. But who can attest to what we see when we close them?

  By the time the older girls began to contort, additional forces had come into play. The five who were to become the most vociferous accusers stepped in only after Tituba’s high-voltage testimony. Every one was a servant. They had reached the age when one ecstatically ambushes the grown-ups, when dependence grades into revolt. They may have had an agenda, which they pursued more subtly than did Abigail Hobbs. They knew stresses the younger girls did not, having ventured farther into the forest of sin and temptation that Elizabeth Knapp so brilliantly charted. They were more attuned to adult collisions, demands, confidences, advances, to wolves in sheep’s clothing. Was there a sexual element at play? One can make what one will of the piercing and pecking and pricking, of pitchforks thrown down, of backs arched suggestively upward and knees locked fiercely together. No concrete evidence survives. For the most part, men were the ones who complained of witches in their beds. But what about adolescence is not fraught with erotic fear and longing? The battle for a thrashing, moaning young woman’s soul certainly titillated some at her bedside. And male, ministering hands were by no means undesirable. In 1693 Margare
t Rule dismissed the women gathered around her, but not the men. She pleaded with one young caller in particular; grasping his hands, she maneuvered him back into his seat.

  Hysteria is contagious and attention addictive; wanton self-abuse comes naturally to a teenager. It may have been difficult for a discontented, disenfranchised nineteen-year-old like Mercy Lewis to pass up the pleasure of planting herself in the spotlight.* Had anyone ever hung on her every pronouncement? George Burroughs certainly had not. For fatherless girls, the bewitched managed brilliantly, winning the company and compassion of every man they knew. (John Indian aside, no male accuser stepped in before Andover.) Many had cause for trauma; some surely played at their afflictions. Theater has long been the refuge of an unhappy childhood. It is possible that when Mary Walcott greeted Reverend Lawson on his return to the village she carried a message from a former parishioner. It is equally possible that she landed on Lawson’s doorstep as a preview of the wonders at work; she was one of the two girls on whose spectral sight Parris particularly relied. The older girls colluded in some calculated way, with one another and with several adults. The telepathic courtroom displays could not have been orchestrated otherwise. Susannah Shelden had not bound her own wrists together. Ann Putnam Jr. and Elizabeth Hubbard did not arrive separately at the conclusion that the conjuring Burroughs ranked above a wizard, an unprecedented Massachusetts distinction. Despite her afflictions, Parris’s niece managed to convey herself about a tavern and locate a young man who, with his rapier, might save her from a specter.

  We will never know the extent of the counterfeiting. The bold prophecies doubled as stage directions, a touch of genius. They were not difficult to manage, at least for a persuasive child with a gift for words. In 1720, an identical case of witchcraft broke out thirty miles west of Salem village. At its center was a well-read eleven-year-old with a tenacious memory, a loyal younger sister, a pact of secrecy, and a ladder for the flying scenes. It turns out not to be so very difficult to pinch your own forehead or sink your teeth into your own arm. When you launch a muff across a meetinghouse—when you squarely hit your target with your shoe—you are more likely settling a score than suffering from either witchcraft or hysteria. And the loud hints endure: Accusers had attempted to recant. The girls admitted that they hungered for sport.* They were for once not cowering before their masters but running the show—or seemed to be; one justice broke his cane striking at a specter. In that respect too Salem upends convention. It is a cautionary tale turned on its head: a child misbehaves, and the world around her is punished.

  Whether hallucinating or confabulating, the afflicted offered up what they absorbed from the adult world in warnings of invasion, in historical prophecies, in biblical imagery, in local gossip. They knew Sarah Good had a hole in her coat and Deliverance Hobbs a wound in her side, one she had incurred before the alleged tavern stabbing. They knew the names of eminent, unsavory, or adversarial members of other communities, including those of obstreperous Topsfield teenagers. The question is not why they retailed preposterous stories but why in 1692 they were believed; it is easier to understand their real or artificial visions than the vertiginous tales of everyone else. (“Indeed,” notes a modern psychiatrist, “a sane adolescent would have something wrong with her.”) Tituba’s initial testimony had been largely religion-free. It was also rather vague. The adults transfigured the adolescent distress, attaching to it agendas (Putnam), convictions (Hathorne), obsessions (Mather, with his Swedish fixation), bestowing on the girls powers of which the teenagers may have been unaware.† Fairy tales too are collaborative exercises, old wives’ tales polished and preserved by men. Hathorne asked leading questions and supplied partial answers, ghostwriting a familiar story, one reverse-engineered from all that was sacred, having originated in the Massachusetts pulpit. Was it coincidence that Hathorne happened to have taken down the 1689 affidavits regarding the alleged Andros conspiracy, that sinister plot to destroy Boston, win over all Massachusetts towns, and sacrifice the colonists to their heathen adversaries? Hathorne discovered when he did so that Andros had bribed Indians to help him, distributing gold rings, money, and the text he insisted “was better than the Bible.” That “horrid design” echoes throughout the Salem testimony, a political conspiracy recast as a religious one. Blind superstition delivered up the accusations. Deft politics—and close, patient, informed reading—accounted for the prosecutions.

  Thomas Putnam’s shoes stick out just a little too conspicuously from behind the curtain. Before he rode off that muddy late-February Monday to press witchcraft charges, he may have felt himself cursed, having lost two inheritances, land, children, a cow. He stood only to profit from wheels within wheels. He resented his encroaching Topsfield neighbors. H. L. Mencken’s crack about the genius of Puritanism—“summoning the massive forces of the law to help in a private feud”—belongs to him. At the same time, Putnam had a much-loved, perceptive, desperately convulsing twelve-year-old at home. He was soon to have a deranged wife as well. It is difficult to believe he had a long-range strategy at the start. Certainly he intensified matters in person as he did on the page, layering on the adverbs, inserting exclamation marks with his letters to authorities. He complained against at least thirty-five and testified against seventeen, transcribing more than a hundred depositions. He appears to have written out all of his daughter’s, Mercy Lewis’s, and Mary Walcott’s testimony. His minister shared his worldview, “believing the devil’s accusations, and readily departing from all charity,” as his detractors charged. It is difficult to say who served as whose proxy, the convulsing girls or the crusading parents.

  The convulsions ratified the witchcraft, but the story belonged to the bench. Once in court, the women played secondary roles, as to some extent they may have done in the first place; sorcery allowed men to attack other men through wives or by way of daughters. (It is interesting that no one accused Francis Nurse.) All three town justices had suffered financial reverses; Putnam’s February complaint may have found them in a score-settling mood. Hathorne did a great deal to see to it that the evidence fit his ideas, hanging political preoccupations on the clothesline of lore. Only after several weeks did a different brand of evidence emerge, when the girls began to produce tortured dead wives. Those revenants were another New England first. What men fear most came next: Wild beasts and devious, difficult women who took their breath away. The succubus—the suffocating, bed-invading female—is as ancient and pancultural as time itself. That heavy pressure—what Bishop evidently imposed on those men into whose beds she hopped—gives us the very word “nightmare.”

  The ministers added the apocalyptic overtones, buttressing context and extracting lessons. In their hands the witchcraft supplied a familiar tale of temptation and deliverance. They imposed design where there was none, but at a conspiracy-weaving, body-snatching moment they did not do so out of ignorance. The Massachusetts elite had read everything in sight, some of it too closely. As would be said of logic-loving Ipswich minister John Wise, those men were not so much the masters as the victims of their learning.* They had read and reread bushels of witchcraft texts. They parsed legal code. They knew their history. They worked in the sterling name of reason. They were less out of their depths than they were swimming in information, “poisoned,” as Calef sniffed, “in their education.”†

  New England came to resemble Sweden primarily because Cotton Mather made sure that it did.‡ The Swedish epidemic began with a nine-year-old and an eleven-year-old. It moved from mischief to heresy and—by way of satanic pacts and witches’ meetings—to a kingdom-upending diabolical plot. Mather missed another similarity: the authorities shaped that story, inviting popular lore and local grudges into the courtroom, to be loaded with political and religious freight. The details Mather chose not to import—the devil’s red beard, the brightly colored scarf around his high-crowned hat, the carnal Sabbath practices, the cat-transported milk pails, the golden witches’ butter—never turned up in Massachusetts. Mather
did touch on another affinity when describing the Swedish plague. “There is no public calamity,” he cited from that report, “but some ill people will serve themselves of the sad providence, and make use of it for their own ends, as thieves when a house or town is on fire, will steal what they can.”

  He omitted the rest of that line, a nod to the truth in fables, the validity of rumors. People land in court because they are guilty, if not necessarily of the crime at hand. Had Salem village been asked to vote someone off the island, they would no doubt have settled on Sarah Good. They might soon enough have ejected Sarah Osborne as well. How Tituba wound up on the initial list is unclear. She may have exercised some unwelcome authority over the girls. She looked different from nearly everyone else in the community, where there were other slaves but few Indians. She had a magical narrative touch. The circle widened easily as the prosecution channeled fears, griefs, and antipathies, the gristle of communal life. Who doesn’t have a bone to pick with a neighbor? There were as many reasons to accuse someone of witchcraft in 1692 as there were to denounce him under the Nazi occupation of France: envy, insecurity, political enmity, unrequited love, love that had run its course. Unruly households found themselves targeted, as did men who bludgeoned wives. Some wound up in court purely for their refusal to join in the proceedings. (Elizabeth Procter may have been sacrificed for her husband’s misdeeds. There are few other ways to explain the fists jammed in mouths at her preliminary hearing. The girls had not expected to testify against her.) The unsavory, the meddlesome, the touchy and peevish fared poorly. So did the pillars of the community, the constables, jury members, fence surveyors and their wives, those men who had told people what they preferred not to hear. John Alden consorted too freely, and too profitably, with Maine Indians; he left Essex County feeling insecure. Witchcraft provided a means to eradicate all malignancies at once. One could not litigate thwarted wills or crumpled egos. But one could electrify a courtroom with tales of blighted animals and dancing hay.