Six Women of Salem

by Marilynne K. Roach

  ____________________

  Tituba and John Indian kneel with the rest of the Parris family for evening prayers. They do this every day, but tonight concentration is impossible. Her master continues to address the Almighty aloud, but sudden shouts from Abigail and Betty drown out whatever he has to say. Betty and Abigail cringe and cower from specters they say are pinching them, stabbing them, tearing them away from prayer. Young Thomas and little Susanna are silent, the boy nervous but keeping apart from the girls, as Susanna starts to cry.

  Abigail points to a swarm of invisible familiars that, to judge from the way she bats at the air, must surround her like a cloud of summer mosquitoes.

  “The witches brought them!” she shouts.

  Betty shrieks in terror again and again. Both girls topple as if struck, and they writhe under the table in a desperate attempt to escape . . . what?

  Tituba’s ears hurt from the piercing noises. She glances toward John, but his head is down. He is in no position to do much about any of this madness, much less to protect her. She cannot attend to Parris’s prayers for fear of what these people mean to do next. None of the family trust her now. The girls react to her presence as they would to a rattlesnake in the house. She has no idea what to do about it.

  ( 3 )

  March 1 to Mid-March 1692

  Tituba learns what will happen early the next morning. While the girls are twitching as usual, the constable and some deputies arrive at the door, and Reverend Parris looks relieved but not surprised. She has barely enough time to snatch her cloak before they bind her hands and lead her outdoors into the cold. With a deputy on either side, she is marched down the road to the nearby ordinary—Deacon Ingersoll’s home. They hold her arms firmly but seem jumpy, as if she might use magic to overpower them and escape. No one explains anything to her, but she gathers that the magistrates will question her here. So, she comes to understand, they do believe the children’s accusations after all.

  People are already loitering in the ordinary’s yard, filling the tap room, where the magistrates will sit. They take her into another smaller room and leave her with Goodwife Ingersoll and some other women, but they stay within earshot. If Goody Ingersoll calls for help, they will rush in, but Tituba knows that no one will come if she cries out. She feels trapped and knows she must keep her wits about her if she is to find a chance to help herself.

  She is to be searched for witch-marks and must remove her clothing. Shivering from more than drafts, Tituba removes her cloak and bodice and then pulls down her shift so Goody Ingersoll can look. No one seems to comment on any marks—something the Devil brands his witches with, Tituba understands, just as some slave masters brand runaways. There are no comments on anything from the waist down either. She tugs her clothes back together as Goody Ingersoll slips out. The two remaining women are also prisoners: an old woman who looks none too strong—Goodwife Sarah Osborn—and the ragged woman with a pipe who came begging at the parsonage—Sarah Good. Osborn looks desperate. Good glares. Outside the door they hear the voice of Good’s husband asking Goody Ingersoll if she saw a certain wart below his wife’s right shoulder. He is precise when giving its location, though he is sure it was not there before. Good scowls all the more.

  Sounds of the crowd increase, and time passes with no conversation among the three. They have nothing in common except their current captivity. At last a guard enters and tells them they’re moving down the hill to the meeting house. Guards lead the three out, and the crowd parts but does not retreat far. Already too many people have swarmed to the site to fit in Ingersoll’s ordinary, too many even for the large meeting house. Figures jostle at the windows as more pack the interior—more than those who attend on the Sabbath, Tituba notices.

  Several strangers await them, men from Salem town: two magistrates, more deputies, and the constables. Reverend Parris and another man prepare to take notes. The four afflicted girls, clustered to one side, recoil at the sight of the prisoners. The magistrates say something, introducing the proceedings, then Good is brought forward to be questioned first while Tituba and Osborn are taken out of the room to wait their turns.

  After a time Osborn is next. Nothing about the examination is a secret.

  The rumble of voices carries through the unshuttered windows: demanding and questioning from the magistrates; lower tones from others in the room; higher tones of the accused women denying the charges, angry (in Good’s case) or pleading (as Osborn is desperate to be believed); and the shrieks of the bewitched girls and thumps as they fall on the floor in convulsions.

  Details trickle out, passed from one onlooker to another: neither woman confesses, neither admits she is a witch as charged, although Good is quick to believe that the other two may well be. Both say they are innocent, and neither is believed.

  The court recesses for a noon meal, and with all three prisoners guarded together, it becomes plain that the other two think Tituba is the witch. Good glares daggers at her. Osborn cringes away fearfully. Even they, who know the charges against themselves are wrong, believe Tituba to be the Devil’s servant. The magistrates must be even more convinced.

  Soon enough Tituba is summoned to the meeting house. All eyes in the room fix on her, pinning her to the spot. She has sat in the gallery so many hours, as good as invisible to the better sort below, as she listened to Mr. Parris deliver his sermons. Now the crowd is looking at her, expecting her to speak in that place, before so many people. The four bewitched girls huddle to one side, witnesses, recoiling when she looks their way.

  “Tituba,” one of the magistrates demands, “what evil spirit have you familiarity with?”

  “None.” It is only the truth, but the magistrate regards the afflicted girls as they moan and flinch.

  “Why do you hurt these poor children?” he continues, ignoring her denial. “What harm have they done unto you?”

  “They do no harm to me. I no hurt them at all.” She does not try to explain that whether the girls lie or if they are genuinely mistaken, their accusations cause her prodigious harm. The magistrates must be made to believe that whatever is happening, she is not the cause of it. If evil spirits are at work, she knows nothing about it. But they do not believe her.

  “Why have you done it?”

  “I have done nothing. I can’t tell when the Devil works.”

  “What? Doth the Devil tell you he hurts them?”

  “No, he tells me nothing.” But this makes it sound as if she has at least encountered the Devil, so the magistrate pounces on it.

  “Do you ever see something appear in some shape?”

  “No. Never see anything.”

  “What familiarity have you with the Devil, or what is it you converse withal? Tell the truth. Who is it that hurts them?”

  “The Devil for aught I know.” From what she has heard from these people, the Devil does not need her help to hurt anyone, being quite strong on his own.

  “What appearance or how doth he appear when he hurts them?” The man will not let up, will not listen to her. The afflicted witnesses continue to twitch and squirm. “With what shape or what is he like that hurts them?”

  Slaves are expected not only to obey their owners’ orders but also to conform to their expectations. This man—and her master, the whole room full of people—expect her to confess to what they already believe to be true. Very well then. She would obey their expectations if that would make the questions stop.

  “Like a man, I think,” she says cautiously. “Yesterday, I being in the lean-to chamber, I saw a thing like a man that told me serve him. And I told him no, I would not do such a thing.” (Something she cannot say to Mr. Parris.) This is not a confession. She has not admitted to doing or seeing anything more than what the girls have described. Let them think the Devil also plagues her.

  The girls begin to relax and be still, their pains stopping as Tituba speaks, as the court assumes she is confessing.

  Had she seen anyone else? the man asks.

&
nbsp; Four women, she says, and when pressed, she names the two other suspects. “Goody Osborn and Sarah Good, and I do not know who the others were.” A tall man from Boston was with them, she adds. The room is hanging on her words, the afflicted remain quiet. Yes, Boston—they were there last night. The witches took her and brought her back. They told her to hurt the children, but she would not.

  And then? The magistrates want to hear more.

  The four witches and the man hurt the children, she says, and put the blame on her. This would explain why the girls said she hurt them, but when she continued to resist the witches’ orders they told her flatly that they will do worse to her than they do to the girls.

  “But did you not hurt them?” asks the magistrate.

  “Yes,” Tituba says, “but I will hurt them no more.”

  And then?

  So Tituba continues her tale of how the spirit appeared more than once, many times in the past few months. Sometimes it took the form of a man, sometimes of a hog, and at least four times like a great black dog. The dog demanded she serve him and threatened violence if she refused, then turned into a man who threatened her again before trying bribery. A yellow bird accompanied him. He would give this to her, he said, if she would serve him; he would give her the bird and other pretty things. But he did not show her what those were.

  “What also have you seen?” The questions would not stop.

  Cats, she says, a red one and a black one, both demanding she serve them, demanding she hurt the children. Yes, she had pinched Elizabeth Hubbard this very morning. The man in black took Tituba to the girl invisibly.

  “Why did you go to Thomas Putnam’s last night and hurt his child?”

  She has heard the gossip about goings-on at the Putnam’s.

  “They pull and haul me and make me go,” she says. She describes being dragged from the parsonage (as the guards had done that very morning) and flown through the air over the treetops to the Putnam’s house. Concealed by a spell of invisibility, they entered seen only by the afflicted girl and ordered Tituba to cut off the child’s head with a knife.

  Men in the crowd speak up to verify that Putnam’s daughter had described this very scene with the knife.

  Yes, says Tituba, but she refused to comply with the witches even though they threatened to slit her own throat; instead, they flew her back to the parsonage. This was her spirit, of course. Family prayers were still in progress on her return, interrupted by a swarm of the witches’ familiars: a bird with a woman’s head, the yellow bird, a three-foot-tall creature on two legs and hairy all over, Osborn’s yellow dog, Good’s cat.

  Abigail Williams interrupts to say that was the very bird-woman she saw last evening in her uncle’s house.

  “Why did you not tell your master?” the magistrate asks. Reverend Parris looks as if he wonders as well.

  “I was afraid. They said they would cut off my head if I told.”

  Magistrate Corwin’s own son had been hurt recently, but she denies any involvement.

  “Did you never practice witchcraft in your own country?”

  “No. Never before now.” Somehow she has gotten around to confessing, to being not just the witches’ victim but also a collaborator. Yes, she had seen Good and Osborn work evil magic earlier this morning but not now in court. Yes, Sarah Good sent the wolf to chase Elizabeth Hubbard. The questions go on and on. Yes, yes, to whatever they ask. She hardly hears what they say anymore.

  “What clothes doth the man appear unto you in?”

  “Black clothes sometimes”—not unlike a minister’s garb—“sometimes a serge coat of another color. A tall man with white hair, I think.”

  “What apparel does the woman wear?” Who were the specters from Boston?

  “I don’t know what color.” Would these questions never stop?

  “What kind of clothes hath she?”

  Tituba has to tell them something. “A black silk hood with a white silk hood under it, with top knots. Which woman I know not, but have seen her in Boston when I lived there.”

  “What clothes the little woman?”

  “A serge coat,” she says, meaning a petticoat, “with a white cap, as I think.”

  Despite her cooperation, the afflicted girls begin to writhe again.

  “Do you see who it is that torments these children now?”

  “Yes, it is Goody Good. She hurts them in her own shape.”

  The girls agree, and Elizabeth Hubbard contorts again.

  “And who is it that hurts them now?”

  “I am blind now. I cannot see.” And she is mute as well to their endless questions. She too convulses in imitation or in fear, unable to go on, as afflicted as the girls. When she calms she tells them that Good and Osborn had attacked her, punishing her for her story.

  The magistrates order Tituba and the other two prisoners held for future trial. Osborn and Tituba are to be taken to the jail in Salem town and Good to the other county jail in Ipswich on the morrow.

  From her seat on a bench in the crowded meeting house Mrs. Ann Putnam has had an entirely different view of the proceedings from Tituba.

  For days she has had to watch while her daughter fought off invisible spirits, as she cried in pain and terror at what her parents could not protect her from. Annie had been attacked again this morning before the hearing and then again in court when those three dreadful women came in. It breaks her heart to think her child has to endure this, yet she feels proud that Annie stands up to the witches even so. Stands up and speaks her mind—she is so like her father in that, like Thomas, who works tirelessly to bring the culprits to justice.

  Those women—the first two with the brass to deny what was so obvious to all the onlookers, what was evident before their very eyes. Only the heathen slave had the decency to confess, which was a mercy, as it gave the victims some relief and verified Annie’s tale of the knife. But the two unnamed women and the man from Boston—who are they? The thought that more of the Devil’s helpers are out there, somewhere, makes her shiver. Today’s ordeal did not end the problem—what more must they face?

  As the meeting house empties, Anne pulls her daughter to her, wishing she could protect her from the unseen terrors, as they watch the prisoners be taken away. A deputy struggles to balance Sarah Good on the back of his horse while she yells insults and resists, hampered by the infant in her arms. Will Good, looking sheepish, holds their older girl’s hand. The child tries to break free, calling for her mother, then stamps her foot—her mother in miniature—demanding to be let go. As the deputy carries Sarah away, the little girl bursts into desperate tears, calling and calling. Watching the scene would break a heart of stone—if you didn’t know what those Goods are.

  ____________________

  At least four people took notes during the hearings of March 1: farmer Ezekiel Cheever, Thomas Putnam’s young half-brother Joseph Putnam, and magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. The written records would be used in the women’s eventual trials, whenever those could take place. Massachusetts would have to wait for its government to reform before it would be legal, or at least wise, to do more than a preliminary legal investigation while the original Charter of Massachusetts Bay was still in suspension and England deemed the province as lacking a recognized government. Some prisoners, found guilty of capital crimes back when Andros was in charge, still waited in the Boston jail for sentencing.

  Rebecca Nurse’s children brought the news home to her, who was likely still as concerned as the rest of the Villagers at the unusual prospect of multiple witches. Details of Tituba’s confession describing the Devil as a black dog must have sounded alarmingly familiar. Four times the Devil had appeared to Tituba as the dog, they told their mother. The beast demanded that she serve him, but the slave had been afraid and resisted. “He said,” Tituba had explained at the hearing, that “if I did not, he would do worse to me.” It sounded all too plausible, so like the tales of Black Shuck back in Yarmouth.

  Sarah Good w
as kept overnight at Constable Joseph Herrick’s place before being transferred to the Ipswich jail, but Tituba and Goody Osborn were carted off to Salem.

  Once the prisoners reached the harbor, word of their arrival would spread as swiftly as gossip, drawing idlers and concerned citizens alike to watch them pass through the gate into the jail’s yard and leaving the town wondering at the presence of evil in their midst. Those who missed the hearing could quiz those who had been there for the particulars. If Bridget Bishop saw the cart pass, she would be right to wonder what comparisons her neighbors might draw between those prisoners and herself, considering her past problems with the law. Mary English, living further along the peninsula than the cart’s path, would hear the news soon enough, but did she think of the insults long since flung at her own mother and worry about her own reputation, or did she worry only about the spiritual safety of her own small children?

  Salem’s jail was a square wooden building 20 feet to a side with 13-foot studs (so it may have accommodated two stories) set inside a yard measuring 70 feet along the lane and extending 280 feet back, with a fence surrounding it all. A brick chimney with one fireplace heated the building in winter. Iron bars on the windows and a lock on the door kept the prisoners in—although one man had dug himself free under the building’s sill a few years earlier, suggesting the lack of a basement level. The dungeon mentioned in some records probably meant the common room on the ground floor. Judging from various testimony, the jail certainly had more than one room. The jailer, William Dounton, and his family lived nearby in the house of correction, where minor wrong-doers were taught the value of hard work and where the jailer rented a chamber or two to prisoners who could afford to pay for better lodgings. Less dangerous prisoners could exercise within the yard. Ordinarily prisoners remained incarcerated only until the next Quarterly Court sitting if they were not released on bail. The whole complex was only nine years old and in relatively good repair.