The Witch of Eye

by Kathryn Nuernberger

  I know it is an absurd exaggeration, but there are days when I feel like the rag woman with cobwebs in my hair muttering a shuffle at the edge of town. I’m the kind of witch that means well, but I know when someone is so invented, so off, it’s hard for someone else to say whether they mean well or not and even if they do mean well, whether they are capable of doing well with all that meaning.

  When I see the woodcuts of these hand-tied women waiting for their stick of flame, I wonder why they couldn’t just keep it to themselves. Is it really so hard to pretend?

  And that’s the reason I like these failed witches so much. It feels hard to me to resist invention because it really is. Like a moth to the flame, so many of us seek after the inventions that disturb the norms, the statutes, or the rules. I want to be kind, want to make something of that kindness, but I am an inventor and this mind can’t stop inventing, though this mouth has no mind of its own to run it more smoothly along the track of the social contract it also has no hand to sign and no will to.

  There are aspects of an inquisition I would probably enjoy. The collaborative invention of the world we might all wish were true would be one part. Adding decorative touches to the archetype of the devil would be another. It’s the kind of game my friend and I used to play every Monday at the bar. What are the names of the horses pulling your personal chariot of the apocalypse? What’s in your sack of fascist tropes tonight? What three embellishments would you devise when your turn came to host the witches’ Sabbath?

  On the mountain most of my words were answered with silence, but when I was gasping and holding my side, he offered this: “To get fast, you have to realize you aren’t going to drown. There’s air everywhere out here, so let the breathing take care of itself.” And on the way down when I was crab-crawling my way through the slipping dust he said, between a hop and a stride, “Try it like a drunken monk.”

  Driving home I excoriated myself for my so-much dumb joking about that bitch of a mountain. I had been with my friend, but I still missed him. After years and much else, your friend may be the same river, but he is not the same water. And now all of my memories were the grating sound of my own stuck gears.

  The vow of silence is not necessarily a refusal to invent. It is not necessarily a retreat into yourself. It can simply be a promise not to invent each other. On a surprising note of hope for the future of human relationships, given that he is the philosopher who proved over and again how we cannot say what we mean, Derrida concludes, “The other is what is never inventable and will never have waited for your invention.”

  Not so long ago at a family brunch I remarked that our gregarious father had tried so hard to teach me how to get along with other people. When I was a timid and awkward girl, he tried to make it seem so simple—just ask them questions about themselves and their interests, he said. People love to talk about themselves and they will feel you are being kind. I remarked that after twenty years of practice, I think I might be getting good at it.

  My brother, who is mostly a silent person but skillful at the “sports team” and “home remodeling” scripts, chuckled when he said, “Yeah, but your questions are all like”—and here he switched on his best head-cocked robot voice—“‘How does it feel to be you, Human?’”

  Would you understand me if I said I have never felt so loved and understood by another person as I did at that moment? It was like he had invented a figure of me from soft wax with his own hands and then handed me that homunculus so I could ask her all of these questions and listen to each of her ingenious new confessions.

  Titiba & the Invention of the Unknown

  The historian Michel de Certeau wants to know what makes ideas possible. He asks versions of the question over and over in The Writing of History. “What makes something thinkable?” And insists the answer is the only story historians should bother telling.

  Herrick: Titiba what evil spirit have you familiarity with.

  Titiba: None.

  H: Why do you hurt these children.

  T: I do not hurt them.

  Of all the accused witches, Titiba is the one who seems to have been the most radically transformed from who she actually was into who certain people wanted her to be. Unlike the white people of Salem, whose names, lineages, and racial identities have remained fixed since that time, hers went from Titiba in the trial records to Tituba in the popular culture. She was called “Indian” in court, but imagined in the histories that followed as African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in Giles Corey of the Salem Farms, fictionalized her into “the daughter of a man all black and fierce,” while in The Crucible, that play performed in high schools all over the country every October, Arthur Miller called into being a reckless storyteller sowing wild fancies in the minds of the village girls.

  Glamour, grammar, and grimoire all share the same root. The inquisitors imagined in one testimonial after another that they saw the transformation from person to demon before their eyes, even as they clung more fiercely to the illusion they held about themselves, that they were not the ones conjuring such nightmares. It was Goodwife Sibley who asked Titiba to perform that old English spell with bread, dirt, and urine to ease the suffering of the poor afflicted child Betty, but that moment glimmered back in court as Titiba’s idea, her spell, her fault. And though she was compelled by the violence of Samuel Parris’s open hand into this line of questions by Constable Joseph Herrick, the dominant narrative that emerged in the historiographies was that her confession was the reason for the craze that followed, that Titiba’s words conjured what we would come to know as the Salem Witch Hunt.

  H: Who is it then.

  T: The devil for ought I know.

  H: Did you never see the devil.

  T: The devil came to me and bid me serve him.

  The Arawak word for the island renamed Barbados in the late fifteenth century is Ichi-rougan-aim, which means red land/island with white teeth. In the Eurocentric propaganda masquerading as so many of the textbooks distributed in history and social studies classes in this country you will read that the Arawak people disappeared or went extinct. In those books you will not read the word “genocide” because “genocide” means a crime was committed. You will not read “survivors” because in an ethical and moral world “survivors” means restitution must still be made. Today more than ten thousand people living in northern coastal regions of South America identify as Lokono, which is the name those people the colonizers called Arawaks used to call themselves.

  H: Who have you seen.

  T: Four women sometimes hurt the children.

  H: Who were they.

  T: Goode Osburn and Sarah Good and I do not know who the others were. Sarah Good and Osburne would have me hurt the children but I would not. She further saith there was a tall man of Boston that she did see.

  It was with witch trials in mind that Certeau critiqued his profession in his manifesto calling for the creation of new histories. “What we initially call history is nothing more than a narrative,” he writes, adding with mounting frustration that “the legend provides the imaginary dimension that we need so that the elsewhere can reiterate the here and now.…”

  It was with Certeau in mind that I read Pedagogies of Crossing by M. Jacqui Alexander, who founded and directs the Tobago Center for the Study and Practice of Indigenous Spirituality. She says that to create a just and sustainable future, we must “destabilize that which hegemony has rendered coherent or fixed; reassemble that which appears to be disparate, scattered, or otherwise idiosyncratic; foreground that which is latent and therefore powerful in its apparent absence; and analyze that which is apparently self-evident, which hegemony casts as commonsensical and natural, but which we shall read as gestures of power, that deploy violence to normalize and discipline.”

  H: When did you see them.

  T: Last night at Boston.

  H: what did they say to you.

  T: They said hurt the children

  H: A
nd did you hurt them

  T: No there is 4 women and one man they hurt the children and they lay upon me and they tell me if I will not hurt the children they will hurt me.

  Elaine Breslaw, author of Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem, was the first historian I read who looked through the glamour the inquisitors cast over Titiba and saw instead the resistance she conjured in her testimony. Breslaw speculates that Titiba’s name came from the Tivitivas tribe living at the mouth of the Orinoco. Or the Tetebetana community of Arawaks living near the Amacura River. She found a 1676 inventory of a Barbados plantation owned by Samuel Thompson in which the name of a child, Tattuba, appears, along with sixty-six other names of slaves.

  The spelling of names and many other words was irregular then, and the timeline makes sense, particularly given that Samuel Parris seems to have known the Thompson family well, even lived at a plantation near theirs in Barbados before setting sail for New England to take his new position in Salem as the minister of a rural Puritan community notorious for its squabbles, discord, and tendency to fire their clergy.

  H: But did you not hurt them

  T: Yes but I will hurt them no more.

  H: Are you not sorry you did hurt them.

  T: Yes.

  H: And why then doe you hurt them.

  T: They say hurt children or wee will doe worse to you.

  I’m always surprised by the number of intellectuals I have seen throw up their hands and say we’ll never be able to understand what happened in Salem or why. It is, after all, fairly identical to what happened in Bamberg, where three mayors in ten years were executed as witches along with hundreds of others, not to mention in Lancashire and Paisley, all across Spain and its colonies, etc., etc.—there is the same line of questioning, the fear, and then the fear, hunger and drought or winter, a fungus, maybe, in the damp grain which causes delusions, something like what the DSM-5 might call PTSD from the most recent war, gaslighting gaolers and judges, a little torture, then a lot of torture.… In most of the trials you can tell nothing about the lives of the judges or the accused or afflicted or the audience feels sustainable based on how often one person will say and another person will agree that the world is surely ending soon.

  And then there is that same old faith. In general the inquisitors won’t relent until a confession includes something new. New variations reassure them that they aren’t just being told what they want to hear. This is why they torment the accused past mere confession to the point where the trembling person accuses someone else.

  So let’s observe that Titiba never points the finger at anyone else. This is the only thing about the trials in Salem that is actually unusual at all. When asked who was torturing the girls, Sarah Good said it must be the insufferable Sarah Osbourne. Sarah Osbourne said if anything Sarah Good was the bewitched one and anyway she’d had a dream of being pricked by “something like an Indian.” When pressed, Titiba, who was often referred to by her neighbors as “Indian” or “Titiba Indian” named the two already-accused Sarahs, sure—they were already in shackles and accusing each other; what could she do for them? But when asked to name more, she said she could not make out any other names or faces.

  H: What have you seen.

  T: A man came to me and say serve me.

  H: What service.

  T: Hurt the children and last night there was an appearance that said kill the children and if I would not go on hurting the children they would do worse to me.

  H: What is this appearance you see.

  T: Sometimes it is like a hog and sometimes like a great dog, this appearance she saith she did see 4 times.

  Historians typically begin the story of Salem in the woods of 1691, where the Reverend Samuel Parris’s daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail, met to use an old divination method of telling their fortunes with an egg yolk. They expected to see the faces of their future lovers, but instead saw coffins and were not right again. They turned hysterical and began barking like dogs. Later, Abigail was found dancing in those woods.

  H: What did it say to you?

  T: … The black dog said serve me but I said I am afraid he said if I did not he would doe worse to me.

  H: What did you say to it.

  T: I will serve you no longer. then he said he would hurt me and then he looked like a man and threatens to hurt me, she said that this man had a yellow bird that kept with him and he told me he had more pretty things that he would give me if I would serve him.

  Because, like Certeau, I have been trying to understand what makes certain ideas thinkable, I have been reading the Situationists between the transcripts of the Salem testimonies and walking a meandering path through my neighborhood, which is a square of unceded Dakota land that was for a time a thriving center of African American businesses, homes, and prosperity. By 1968 urban planners, who were and are overwhelmingly white and male, had poured I-94 directly through the heart of this district on purpose and by design to destabilize the community. They probably did something similar where you live.

  In the most anthologized of Situationist texts, “Elementary Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism,” the philosophers Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem write, “Modern capitalism, which organizes the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than that of our alienation.”

  H: What were these pretty things.

  T: He did not show me them.

  H: What also have you seen

  T: Two rats, a red rat and a black rat.

  Capitalism, it is widely known but seldom said, is dependent on the invention of scarcity. Salem villagers were obsessed with firewood, which had been made very scarce by their overharvesting. As it became clear it would not be so easy to simply spread European colonization north, a three-generations-old feud over a tract of land between the influential Putnam and Proctor families was more and more on everyone’s mind. It came up each time the village had to agree to hire or fire a minister, build or not build a new meeting house, issue a warrant for some new arrest. You can grow and then cut down and burn a lot of trees on one thousand disputed acres.

  Bur oak, mossy cup oak, yellow oak, chinkapin oak, sandbar willow, swamp birch, Bicknell’s hawthorn, mountain winterberry, sweet bay magnolia, swamp cottonwood, northern mountain ash, northern white cedar.

  In the negotiations conducted by letters from that Barbados plantation, Samuel Parris had secured a promise of firewood as well as a home to go along with his modest paycheck as part of his contract with the convening members of the church. But when winter arrived, neither the wood nor his paychecks were delivered.

  Everyone in that small cold household—his wife, the four children, Titiba and also the other enslaved person, John Indian—lived inside the drafting and revising of the week’s sermons, the practicing and polishing of weekly jeremiads that became increasingly preoccupied with an evil that had infected the village.

  Would any of them have remembered a view of the indigenous trees of Barbados growing scarce amidst all of the clear-cut sugar plantations stretched out across the island? Changunga, cedro, kapok, guaiacwood, sandbox tree, lemon guava, cabbage palm, false mastic, swizzlestick tree.

  H: What did they say to you.

  T: They said serve me.

  H: When did you see them.

  T: Last night and they said serve me, but I said I would not.

  “The functional is what is practical,” Kotányi and Vaneigem observe in their Situationist manifesto, in which they try to lay out the core ideas necessary to make thinkable their utopian vision of a new kind of society. “The only thing that is practical is the resolution of our fundamental problem: our self-realization (our escape from the system of isolation).”

  Salem was located in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was intended by its founders to be a utopia, organized around a deep understanding of all the ways their old home and life had failed them.

  To justify the bloodshed their utopia seemed to require, the
colonists designed a seal that was a picture of a Native American wearing a loincloth made of leaves with a banner issuing forth from his mouth that reads “Come over and help us.” A scapegoating caricature created by the same land- and power-hungry people who conjured the myth of the crone.

  H: What service.

  T: She said hurt the children.

  H: Did you not pinch Elizabeth Hubbard this morning

  T: The man brought her to me and made me pinch her

  H: Why did you goe to Thomas Putnams last night and hurt his child.

  T: They pull and hall me and make me goe

  It is all too easy for those who benefit from hegemonic powers to say there is nothing to learn from the uncertainties of these trials. That the mist of spectral evidence clouds all judgement. This is, after all, what the governor eventually said when he issued a general pardon to all of the accused who had not already been executed. But in fact there is a great deal the afflicted know quite well and anyone who cared to could learn.

  H: And what would have you doe.

  T: Kill her with a knife.

  Did you know that Titiba was likely married to John Indian? He also survived the trials. He joined the ranks of the afflicted, trembling and fainting and accusing, which was a clever way then for anyone to stay alive or exact vengeance or both in that strange year. His name was probably not really John Indian. I like to imagine he and Titiba knew each other by the names their mothers or grandmothers or aunts or fathers or brothers or whoever it was loved and cared for them had used at their beginning.

  H: How did you go?

  T: We ride upon stickes and are there presently.