In the Devil's Snare (7 page)
Source: Primarily
GDMNH,
augmented by information from
York Deeds
and
MHGR
Martha Corey’s departure that Monday did not end Mercy Lewis’s torments. Mercy told those present that “she saw shadows like women but Cold not disarn [w]ho they were.” She too began to have fits: “she was Choked and blinded her neck twicted her teeth and mouth shut,” Edward Putnam reported, noting that it took two or three men to hold her down. Later that evening, Mercy was “drawn toward the fier by unseen hands as she sat in a Chare,” even though two men were holding on to it. Edward himself stepped between the chair and the fire “and lifted with my stringht together with the other two and all little enuf to prevent her from going in to the fier with her feat formost.” Not until eleven o’clock that night did Mercy’s fits cease. Eventually, Mercy dated the start of her own bewitchment from Martha Corey’s arrival at Thomas Putnam’s on March 14.
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That Monday, Abigail Williams, too, declared that Goody Corey was afflicting her, hauling her “to & fro” and pinching her. She also reiterated Ann’s earlier accusation of Elizabeth Proctor. The next day, Abigail named Rebecca Nurse, and Betty Hubbard joined the chorus against Martha Corey. By the sixteenth of March, in short, four suffering accusers had become five, and five accused witches seven. Moreover, the afflicted—with the exception of the most recent recruit, Mercy Lewis, who had not yet named anyone— concurred on the identity of those who were causing their torments. Residents of the Village must have been stunned by the extent of the devil’s assault on them.
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The repeated fits thoroughly disrupted daily household routines. Older girls and teenagers performed essential domestic labor as assistants to the female heads of their families—in these cases, a mother, a mistress, and aunts. Now their labor was either unreliable or unavailable. The maidservant Mercy Lewis had previously been “atending” the child Ann, but now she too was numbered among the afflicted. A maidservant who was being inexorably drawn into the fireplace or a niece who was being sporadically hauled “to & fro” could not make her customary contribution to the necessary work of the family. Moreover, curious and concerned neighbors—like the two anonymous men who held Mercy Lewis’s chair away from the fire on the evening of March 14—stopped by in large numbers to witness the extraordinary events and to assist in caring for the sufferers. The neighbors’ constant presence would likewise have proved a bar to the resumption of quotidian life.
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Within a short period of time, the young women became the focal points around which all other members of the households revolved. That alone was extraordinary. Usually, girls—whether daughters, nieces, or servants—resided at or near the bottom of the familial hierarchy, with brothers, mothers, and ultimately fathers ranked above them. Subordinates in seventeenth-century society commonly served their superiors, and so too had the “afflicted girls” of Salem Village. But now others, including both male and female neighbors and familial superiors, were serving
them.
Most notably, the male heads of their households and other adult men of their families gave them hours of concentrated attention, probably for the first time in their lives. Notes taken at the time by Edward Putnam later provided the court with a detailed description of his niece Ann’s and Mercy Lewis’s behavior in the presence of Martha Corey on March 14. Similarly, for months the Reverend Samuel Parris carefully observed the actions of his niece Abigail Williams, keeping precise track of her fits and accusations.
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Thus the Putnam, Parris, and Griggs households were turned upside down during that third week of March 1691/2. Girls having fits, adult men scrutinizing their every move, a myriad of bystanders at all hours of the day and night, and little or no assistance available: no wonder, then, that Ann Carr Putnam reported that by Friday, March 18, she was “wearied out in helping to tend my poor afflected Child and Maid.” When she lay down in the middle of that afternoon “to take a little Rest,” Ann Sr. was quickly “allmost prest and Choaked to death,” and, she later recalled, “had it not been for the mircy of a gratious God and the help of those that ware with me: I could not have lived many moments.” Those who were present—presumably, her neighbors—witnessed Ann Sr.’s torments at the hands of what she now recognized as Martha Corey’s specter. Goody Corey, she recounted, “fell upon me . . . with dreadfull tortors and hellish temtations,” bringing her “a little Red book in hir hand and a black pen urging me vehemently to writ in her book.” Not only did Martha Corey then return “severall times” later that day, but the apparition also reappeared on Saturday the nineteenth, as did that of Rebecca Nurse, “and they both did tortor: me agrate many times . . . because I would not yeald to their Hellish temtations.”
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Goody Putnam thereby became the first to follow Tituba in describing the devil’s book—an object that, in many guises, was eventually to appear in numerous statements by both accusers and confessors. The afflicted later referred repeatedly to being tempted to write their names in Satan’s book, while confessors typically described actually having done so. More than two decades earlier Elizabeth Knapp had been the first New Englander to indicate that the diabolic covenant was embodied in a book rather than merely a piece of paper. Samuel Willard’s account of her afflictions, widely available in published form after 1684 in Increase Mather’s
Remarkable Providences,
almost certainly influenced the statements offered eight years later during the witchcraft outbreak. The historian Jane Kamensky has cogently argued that the obsession with books (especially small, easily concealed ones) evident in the Salem records resulted from an explosion in the availability of such volumes after the mid-1680s. After decades in which the sole Bay Colony press published nothing but sermons and official documents, not only were several printers in Massachusetts and the middle colonies now producing almanacs and primers, but increasing numbers of booksellers were also importing books on such topics as astrology and fortune-telling. Because all sorts of occult practices were linked to the devil, clergymen and magistrates could readily envision the dangers potentially lurking in the pages of those volumes. Such concerns induced them to ask the leading questions of many confessors that elicited concurring responses, although Ann Sr.’s vision of the “little Red book” appears to have been her own.
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Just as the addition of Betty Hubbard to the ranks of the original sufferers helped to instigate the first formal complaints, so Ann Carr Putnam’s torments convinced Village men to take further legal action. Ann Jr. had been accusing Goody Corey for well over a week, Abigail Williams for five days, and Betty Hubbard for three, without any complaint being filed. But on Saturday, March 19, the day after Goody Putnam initially complained of Corey’s specter, Edward Putnam and Henry Kenney (a relative by marriage of Mercy Lewis) complained to Hathorne and Corwin against Martha Corey “for suspition of haveing Comitted sundry acts of Witchcraft and thereby donne much hurt and injury unto the Bodys” of the two Ann Putnams, Lewis, Williams, and Hubbard. The justices issued a warrant ordering that Goody Corey be brought in for questioning on Monday, March 21.
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That same Saturday there arrived in Salem Village its former pastor, the Reverend Deodat Lawson. Lawson, who was living in Boston in 1692, later recalled that reports of the “Very Sore and Grievous Affliction[s]” in his one-time parish had deeply concerned him. Accordingly, he “frequently consulted with them and fervently (by Divine Assistance) prayed for them,” then decided to go to the village to see for himself the “very amazing, and deplorable” condition of the afflicted.
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Lawson took lodgings at Nathaniel Ingersoll’s inn, centrally located between the meetinghouse and the parsonage. The first afflicted person he encountered was Mary Walcott—daughter of Jonathan Walcott, captain of the local militia—who was not yet numbered among the formal complainants. The seventeen-year-old came to Ingersoll’s to speak to Lawson, presumably to welcome him back to the Village. Claiming to have been bitten by a specter during their conversation, she showed him the bite marks on her wrist. Following that unsettling experience, Lawson called on his successor, Samuel Parris. In his presence Abigail Williams had what he described as a “grievous fit.” The girl, Lawson recounted, “was at first hurryed with Violence to and fro in the room,” evading another visitor’s attempts to hold on to her and “sometimes makeing as if she would fly, stretching up her arms as high as she could, and crying, ‘Whish, Whish, Whish!’ several times.” Abigail saw Goody Nurse’s specter in the room, revealing that Nurse was asking her to sign the devil’s book. She also ran near the fire, beginning “to throw Fire Brands, about the house,” while others present informed Lawson that in other fits she, like Mercy Lewis, “had attempted to go into the Fire.”
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Lawson, Parris, and any others present at the parsonage during Abigail’s fit must have been struck by the congruence of her behavior and that of one of the Lowestoft afflicted in 1662 and of the Goodwin children in Boston in 1688. The Lowestoft girl had run around the house saying “hush, hush,” and the Goodwins had waved their arms “like the Wings of a Bird” and had appeared to move “with an incredible Swiftness through the air.” Moreover, like Mercy Lewis and Abigail Williams, Martha Goodwin too had earlier been inexorably drawn toward the fire with so much “violence,” Cotton Mather wrote, that one or two people could hardly prevent her from throwing herself in. Later commentators, most notably Thomas Hutchinson, would interpret such similarities as providing evidence of fraud, but in 1692, as Hutchinson later observed, the “conformity” of the behavior of the Goodwin and Lowestoft afflicted “was urged in confirmation of the truth of both; the Old England demons and the New being so much alike.” One does not have to accept Hutchinson’s conclusion to recognize that Mercy’s and Abigail’s behavior showed their familiarity with the earlier bewitchment stories. Consciously or unconsciously, the Salem Village afflicted had incorporated the previously recorded behaviors into their own repertoires.
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The next day, the Reverend Mr. Lawson presided at Sabbath services attended by Martha Corey and the currently afflicted persons. His recollections of the day added two more names to those sufferers already identified: Bathshua Pope and Sarah Vibber (or Bibber). Mistress Pope, the Village woman said by Ann Jr. to have been attacked by Goody Corey’s specter in church the previous week, was probably in her late thirties, but little is known about her other than the high status indicated by her title. Though afflicted, she is not listed as a sufferer in any surviving legal complaint. Sarah Vibber, approximately thirty-six, must have been considerably poorer. She and her husband, John, who was most likely an immigrant from the Channel Islands, did not own land of their own but instead lived in other people’s houses in the neighboring town of Wenham.
22
Through her father’s family Mary Walcott, afflicted during her talk with Lawson on Saturday, was the great-niece of Nathaniel Ingersoll. Her mother, Mary Sibley Walcott, the sister-in-law of the woman who instigated the making of the witchcake, had died in 1683; her stepmother after 1685 was Thomas Putnam’s sister, Deliverance. Thus she and Ann Jr. were stepcousins. Mary’s oldest brother, John, had served as a militia sergeant in the war on the Maine frontier in 1689 and subsequently led a small contingent of Village volunteers northeastward in May 1690, but her family’s roots in Maine went deeper than that. Another great-uncle (Nathaniel’s older brother), George Ingersoll, lived at Casco Bay for many years and would have known members of Mercy Lewis’s natal family well. He relocated to Salem late in 1675, returned to Casco in the 1680s, but then moved his family back to Salem after September 1689 and was still living there in 1692. Although Mary had not herself lived in Maine, she must have heard many stories of the frontier and the Indian war from her brother and her Ingersoll relatives.
23
On Sunday, March 20, Lawson declared, the “several Sore Fits” the afflicted suffered during the morning service “did something interrupt me in my First Prayer; being so unusual.” Following the singing of the first psalm, Abigail Williams boldly demanded, “Now stand up, and Name your Text,” commenting after the clergyman did so that “It is a long Text.” Mistress Pope, too, interjected her opinions into the service, remarking aloud with respect to the sermon, “Now there is enough of that.” During that sermon, Abigail cried out that she saw Goody Corey sitting “on the Beam suckling her Yellow bird betwixt her fingers”—thus indicating that she was well acquainted with the details of Ann Jr.’s vision of Martha six days earlier—and Ann herself remarked that she saw a yellow bird sitting on Lawson’s hat as it hung beside the pulpit, but, he noted with relief, “those that were by, restrained her from speaking loud about it.” Matters evidently went more smoothly during the afternoon service, although Abigail again took the lead, declaring contemptuously, “I know no Doctrine you had, If you did name one, I have forgot it.”
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The disruptions Lawson described (with what must have been considerable understatement) were indeed “unusual,” to put it mildly. Normally the congregations in Puritan meetinghouses sat quietly and respectfully, often taking notes on the sermons for later study and contemplation. Only during periods of religious ferment, such as the Antinomian crisis of 1636–1637 or Quaker missionizing in the 1660s, had New England clergymen ever been so directly challenged in their pulpits. The afflicted people’s behavior on Sunday, March 20, mimicked their actions during the examinations held in the same meetinghouse almost three weeks earlier. Then their antics nominally supported authority (for the magistrates relied on them to help reveal the guilt of the accused), but on both occasions they in reality turned gender and age hierarchies upside down. Women, especially young women, were not expected to speak unbidden in either court or church—indeed, in the latter, they were often not expected to speak at all. By their intrusions into the normal ordering of Sunday services as well as by their disruptions in the makeshift courtroom, they signaled that reversals in Village life during the witchcraft crisis would not remain confined to individual households, but would extend to public spaces as well.
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