“You are not what you think you are … you are what we think you are.”
by Holly Vanderhaar, February 12, 2016
Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692, Little, Brown and Company, 2015
When I was about ten years old, my mother stitched my family tree onto a piece of linen. It’s an apple tree, with my apple on top; my parents’ apples are on the tier of branches below, and their parents’ below them, and so on. Had the canvas stretched tall and wide enough to accommodate three hundred years of my pedigree, its low-hanging genealogical fruit would be found in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At that time, the entire population numbered around a thousand people, and the neatly compartmentalized needlework names belonged to people who sat next to each other at Sunday meeting, gossiped across fences, bought and sold each other’s livestock, and—in one notable case—accused each other of witchcraft. I’m descended from George Martin of Amesbury, Massachusetts, and when I went looking for him, I discovered to my surprise that his widow, Susanna, was a victim of the Salem witch trials. This discovery led me down a rabbit hole, and led me to become something of a hobbyist on the subject.
As a result, it was with great interest—and some trepidation—that I awaited the release of Stacy Schiff’s latest book, The Witches: Salem, 1692. Interest, of course, because I’m a witch trial nerd. Trepidation because each new volume on the trials typically comes with its own theory about how such a thing could happen. There are theories of encephalitis, ergot fungus, post-traumatic stress disorder, and mass psychogenic illness. There are feminist interpretations, and Freudian ones. None of them are entirely satisfactory or sufficient to explain this event, which unfolded over a period of about eight months in 1692, resulted in the execution of nineteen innocent people, and the death by torture of a man who refused to enter a plea. I’m happy to report that, while Schiff’s book offers a lavish buffet of Colonial detail, the author mostly refrains from trying to shoehorn the Salem tragedy into a neat, unified theory.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was in a state of existential crisis in 1692. Its towns were vulnerable at any time to attacks by hostile Native Americans and the French. It was also politically vulnerable: the colony’s charter with England had expired, and its leaders were negotiating a new one in London, leaving the region without a stable government. The Puritan worldview resulted in unparalleled literacy—it was a remarkably well-read society—but it also resulted in the obligation to constantly scrutinize oneself and one’s neighbors for any hint of ungodliness. The colony was insecure physically, civically, and spiritually. It was a difficult life for men and women alike. When the Devil came to tempt the confessed witches, it’s instructive to look at what he offered them: not riches or power, but rest from labor, fine clothes, and travel. The jails filled up with accused witches because there was no government to underpin any formal indictments. The magistrates who presided over the trials had no legal background and were about as qualified to deliver a legal ruling as politicians are to dispense medical advice. The accused had no legal representation, as Massachusetts did not allow lawyers to practice for fees until 1704.
I don’t fault Schiff’s research, which included reading every extant Puritan sermon she could lay her hands on in order to get into their mindset. She lays out the stories of all the major players, and not a few of the minor ones, for decades before and after the trials. She delves deeply into the political climate of the Massachusetts Bay during the latter half of the seventeenth century. I imagine Stacy Schiff’s writing space as a kind of serial killer’s obsession wall, or the precinct bulletin board in some police procedural: a map of the Massachusetts Bay with pushpins and note cards and color-coded yarn connecting various locations and events.
But it is that very diligence that dooms The Witches to the problem that besets every thorough, well-researched book on the Salem witch trials: there are just too many players, too many variables, to make it an easy read. What’s more, the timeline feels wonky: so many things are happening to so many people that it seems to take years to unfold in the reading of it. In reality, the majority of the events took place from March to October 1692. Any truly “readable” book on the subject is so because it’s facile. When tackling what happened in Salem in 1692, it’s imperative to include some kind of timeline, or chart, or précis, some graphic organizer to help the reader keep everything straight. (Schiff includes a “cast of characters” at the beginning of her book for readers to refer to.) The full story doesn’t lend itself to a purely linear narrative, not if one wants to delve into it in any depth. It’s more like dropping a stone into a pond and trying to catalog every ripple that spreads from the point of contact.
To belabor that analogy, the stone is a mysterious affliction of nine-year-old Betty Parris, the daughter of the Salem Village minister, and her 11-year-old cousin Abigail Williams. The girls began suffering strange fits in February of 1692. The doctor was called, and couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation, so he lamely suggested that the girls were bewitched. The first ripple was the testimony—no doubt obtained under some duress—of Parris’s Indian slave Tituba. Tituba’s description of the devil’s dealings was vivid and deliciously spine chilling—and exactly what her interrogators wanted to hear. She named two other women—social outcasts—who were also in league with the Great Deluder. She knew that her story was keeping her alive; not only did it titillate a community that was starved for entertainment, but as long as she hinted that she could name accomplices, she was necessary. She was a celebrity, if only for a few months. She had power. Tituba survived the trials, but her importance vanished with the crisis, and she has been lost to history.
So in telling the story, the solution is to narrow the focus, as Arthur Miller did in The Crucible, to one or two of the many narratives. If there is one story to single out, to provide a hook for how tragic the whole nightmare was, it’s that of Rebecca Nurse. She had a large family—had never lost a single child, a remarkable enough fact for the times—and was known by all to be devout. She was frail, unwell, and hard of hearing, and if she didn’t reply to a magistrate’s question, it was due to deafness, not devilish stubbornness. Her family gathered dozens of signatures in support of her innocence. She was publicly excoriated, and excommunicated from the church that by all accounts had been her joy and her refuge. The jury originally acquitted her, but the magistrates weren’t satisfied with that verdict, and sent them back to deliberate further, urging them bluntly to convict. They did, and Rebecca Nurse was hanged on July 19, 1692. (Also hanged on that day was my ancestor, Susanna Martin. She’s compelling for different reasons: while she was also a regular churchgoer, she was sharp-tongued, acerbic, sarcastic, and argumentative. When the afflicted girls began their shenanigans during her trial, she laughed at them. For every Bible verse the magistrates threw at her, she threw one back in her own defense. But her knowledge of the gospel didn’t serve her: Cotton Mather, in his second-hand “eyewitness” account of her trial, wrote, “This woman was one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked creatures of this world; and she did now throughout her whole trial discover herself to be such an one.”)
The frustrating thing about studying the Salem witch trials—and one of the reasons it is so difficult to write a clear, compelling narrative of them—is the lack of logic. If you confessed to signing the Devil’s book, your life (in almost all cases) was spared. If you held steadfastly to your innocence, you were likely to be hanged. Confessors were kept alive in part to feed more names to the monster, and the more savvy (or cynical) of the accused turned state’s evidence and eventually walked free. Also, by Puritan logic, confession meant that you were contrite and sought God’s forgiveness. Confessed witches were God’s problem, not the court’s. So why didn’t everyone just own up to their diabolical pacts (wink wink, nudge nudge) and escape the noose? Largely because lying (under oath or not) put a Puritan’s immortal soul in jeopardy—particularly if one swore that one was in cahoots with Old Scratch. One accused woman cried, “I shall lie if I confess, and then who shall answer unto God for my lie?”
Spectral evidence was another element of the crisis that was maddeningly illogical. The afflicted girls screamed that the invisible specters of the accused tormented them, and many were convicted on the basis of evidence that no one else could see. Why, one wonders, would an accused witch torment her accusers right in front of the magistrates while protesting her innocence? Any study of the trials results in moments of jaw-clenching frustration at the layer upon layer of injustice. Accused witches were required to pay the cost of their imprisonment—including their iron shackles—and many languished in jail for months after the court was disbanded because their families couldn’t afford to pay their bill. Judges would believe any confession, but refused to believe any retractions. Schiff is at her strongest when she allows her own frustration and sense of outrage to bleed through onto the page. Most Salem witch trial authors work hard to maintain a level of scholarly detachment, and I appreciated the sense that Schiff was just as pissed off at this whole business as I was.
However, I found Schiff’s snarky asides about the nature of adolescent girls to be beneath the level of the rest of the text. This is also a subject I have a personal stake in, as the mother of two adolescent girls. I’m well aware of the hormonal mood swings and the existential angst that they’re prone to; I’m in those trenches right now. (Parents of adolescent boys tell me that this is by no means unique to the XX set.) The Salem witch hysteria was pretty much the only time and place in American history in which adolescent girls have been treated as if they had something of value to say. They’re traditionally disenfranchised, and anything they love and enjoy is viewed by society as vapid. I was disappointed when Schiff expressed her complicity with that sentiment. It was the one element of the whole period that she failed to adequately mine. There are moments when Schiff touches on the high instance of sexual abuse in Puritan society, or discusses the power imbalances at play in the accusations, or notes the ways in which the adults made use of the girls for their own ends, but then she undermines herself with glib remarks about the adolescent female’s mean-spiritedness and love of melodrama. The actions of the so-called “afflicted girls” were reprehensible, but I feel a certain sympathy for them. When you consider the inherent suspicion with which women in general were viewed in Puritan society—as inheritors of Eve’s weakness and vulnerability to Satan—it’s not hard to imagine the appeal of the power they wielded. Suddenly, they could cry out in church without reproach. People brought their ailing children to them for their spiritual evaluation. All they needed do was point a finger, and speak a name that had most likely been supplied by their parents, to finally win that decades-old family feud. Suddenly, they were listened to as if they had something of value to say. Suddenly, they—like Tituba—were central, were important, were necessary. Of course, you would think that the fun would have gone out of the whole game once the nooses went up, but any girls who tried to recant their accusations were swiftly turned on and accused by the others.
It’s not the first time people have gone along to get along; the human race is remarkably good at it.
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Holly Vanderhaar is the coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota, and a writer/researcher for “The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.” She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in The Pinch and South Loop Review. She was the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Artists Initiative grant. She lives in Saint Paul with her 12-year-old twin daughters and two familiars—er, cats.