The Witches: Salem, 1692 (4 page)

At all times, the parsonage welcomed callers; as of February, it was overrun. Illness was a public event in the seventeenth century, unexplained illness a province-wide one. The curious and the well-wishers crowded in, gooseflesh rising on their arms. The howls and grotesque writhings disturbed. They were riveting. They were the kind of thing that made you flee in horror, gape in hair-raising, heart-racing disbelief, or faint dead away. In similar cases as many as forty or fifty pressed into the sickroom. Some were repeat visitors and helpful neighbors enlisted to watch and restrain the frenzied children. The neighbor who did not call was the exception, as one would be reminded soon enough. Others traveled from miles away to sit in the smoky, opaque light of the Parrises’ low-ceilinged parlor. Between prayers they sang psalms together, as had a great crowd at the Goodwin household for days on end. Sometimes
they got more than they bargained for; those children were abusive with ministers and insolent with visitors.
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A natural list-maker and scorekeeper, Samuel Parris was impatient and exacting, but he did not act precipitously. From his disordered household some hints of the affliction crept into his sermons, which he delivered regularly, once on Thursday, twice on Sunday. Those were uninspired affairs; Parris was an unoriginal thinker to whom markedly original things would happen. He did not deviate substantially from his previous themes, dilating on Christ’s ascension, on his mediation between God and man. Through February Parris looked largely to fasts and prayer. He consulted with fellow clergymen. His cousin and contemporary the Milton minister may have been particularly helpful; his daughter had earlier suffered convulsions. With cider and cakes, Samuel and Elizabeth Parris entertained the well-wishers who crowded their home. They prayed ardently. But when he had had enough of the “odd postures and antic gestures,” the deranged speeches, when it became clear that Scripture alone would not relieve the girls’ preternatural symptoms, Parris called in the doctors.

Years later the practice of medicine in Boston would be deemed “perniciously bad” by a university-educated physician; in 1692 no university-trained physician had yet arrived in either Salem town or its neighbor, tiny Salem village, where the girls twitched and snapped. A basic medical kit of the time looked little different from an ancient Greek one, consisting as it did of beetle’s blood, fox lung, and dried dolphin heart. In powders or plasters, snails figured in many remedies. They were at least easier to harvest than unicorn’s horn. The fat of a roasted hedgehog dripped into the ear constituted “an excellent remedy for deafness.” The most informed medical man in the colonies at the time swore by saltpeter for measles, headache, and sciatica. Cotton Mather believed sixty
drops of lavender and a mouthful of gingerbread cured memory loss. For epilepsy a wolf-skin girdle purportedly worked wonders, as did burnt black-cow dung or frog-liver powder administered five times daily. Hysteria had been cataloged well before 1692. A Salem physician treated it with a brew of breast milk and the blood from an amputated tomcat ear.

Salem village consisted of some ninety families; it had one practicing physician that January. William Griggs was new to the community, having recently bought a farm about a mile and a half from the parsonage. An active, pious citizen, he had complained of taverns near meetinghouses; he had testified against those who absented themselves from worship. Griggs owned nine medical texts. He could read but not write. He is the likely candidate—or among the likely candidates, as Parris evidently reached out to several—to have examined the girls. Years earlier Griggs had been a member of Parris’s Boston congregation; the two were close to the same Salem families. There is at least one concrete reason to assume Parris called for the seventy-one-year-old: the contagion followed Griggs home. Better traveled, more sophisticated physicians had examined the Goodwin children, who had turned blue in the face and complained of being roasted alive on invisible spits. Prolonged, violent fits were assumed to be sent by the devil; the first question a victim asked under the circumstances was “Am I bewitched?” The doctor who had examined a seizing, strangled Groton girl a generation earlier initially diagnosed a stomach disorder. On a second visit he refused to administer to her further. The distemper was diabolical; he prescribed a town-wide fast. Whoever examined Abigail and Betty came to the same conclusion. Clearly the supernatural explanation was already the one on the street. The “evil hand” was a diagnosis “the neighbors quickly took up,” noted Reverend Hale, the only chronicler to observe the girls’ initial pinches and pricks. It likely terrified the cousins, whose symptoms worsened.

Hale had some experience in that realm, having as a child joined a delegation that visited a jailed witch on her execution day in the hope of eliciting a confession. The suspect was a neighbor, the first woman to be hanged for witchcraft in Massachusetts. She denied her guilt all the way
to the gallows. Hale had spoken with another accused witch after her 1680 reprieve. Officiating in nearby Beverly, the amiable fifty-six-year-old counted himself as among Parris’s closest colleagues. As did most everyone in New England at the time, he believed in witches, if not also in angels, unicorns, and mermen. How did he receive the diagnosis? He could not have been surprised; he may well have been relieved. “Hellish operations,” as he termed them, dissolved any doubts about the girls’ souls and absolved him of responsibility. He had every reason to prefer satanic mischief to a divine frown; possession would have been more problematic.
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As alarming as was the diagnosis, it was also pulse-quickening. Witchcraft was portentous, a Puritan favorite. Never before had it broken out in a parsonage. On the scale of ministerial humiliations, a diabolical invasion was at least more exciting than the birth of an illegitimate grandson, a stain with which Cotton Mather would later contend. A decade younger than Parris, Mather was only twenty-nine in 1692. He was also already ubiquitous, on his way to becoming the best-known man in New England, which is what happens when you are handsome, tall, gifted, and tireless, enter Harvard at eleven, preach your first sermon at sixteen, and combine in your very name two legends of the early Massachusetts ministry.

Parris made no attempt to shrink from the celestial drama in which he found himself; divine love could be glimpsed behind every misfortune. From his upstairs study in a bewitched house he continued his meditations on the 110th Psalm. God was “angry and sending forth
destroyers,” he alerted his parishioners. It was essential to persevere, “to beware of fainting when we are chastened,” to battle bravely against “all our spiritual enemies.” The explanation was to some degree satisfying. It was perversely flattering to be singled out to combat evil; there was a reason for those selective lightning strikes, the bolts from the blue, through the window, down the chimney. “I am a man greatly assaulted by Satan,” Mather would observe privately, sounding nearly boastful. “Is it because I have done much against that enemy?” Or as the father of the Goodwin children had phrased it, playing the adversity-shouldering game with grace, a dangerous condition was—spiritually speaking—a profitable one. “If we want afflictions we shall have them, and sanctified afflictions are choice mercies,” concluded the godly mason. Simultaneously he wrung his hands over a question that must have haunted Parris as well: What had he done to incite this heavenly rebuke? A minister’s home was meant to be a “school of piety,” not “a den for devils.”

How the village received the diagnosis was clear from what came next. On February 25, Parris and his wife left Salem under teeming rain. In their absence a close neighbor paid a call. The Parrises presumably asked Mary Sibley to look in on Abigail and Betty, roaring now for over a month. The mother of five, Mary Sibley was six months pregnant. Among the wealthier couples in the community, she and her cooper husband were pillars of the church; Samuel Sibley stepped in when an estate needed to be settled or a bond guaranteed. His wife felt comfortable in the Parris household. Less comfortable with the pace at which her minister resolved the mystery there, she arranged a furtive experiment. The question was no longer what afflicted the children but who; Sibley determined to catch a witch. At her instruction, John, the Parrises’ Indian slave, mixed the girls’ urine into a rye-flour cake, baked amid the embers on the hearth. Sibley then fed the concoction to the family dog. There was some fogginess about how the countermagic worked—by drawing the witch to the animal, by transferring the spell to it, or by scalding the witch—but the old English recipe could be trusted to reveal the guilty party.

Parris was livid to learn of the experiment. Countermagic had no place in a parsonage. He remained intent on the scourge not escaping his home; in his place, Boston ministers had taken great pains to suppress the names of alleged witches. Sibley courted greater perils as well. She had favored superstition over religion, a practice Parris decried as “going to the devil for help against the devil.” Her meddling unleashed occult, little-understood forces; she had set up a kind of satanic lightning rod. A month later—the intervening weeks proved tumultuous—the beleaguered minister would summon her to an interview in his study. He reproached her severely. Sobbing, she offered abject apologies. She had acted only unthinkingly, Sibley explained, “from what she had heard of this nature from other ignorant, or worse, persons.” She would be circumspect in the future. Parris read her the stiff reprimand he intended to share with the congregation after Sunday’s sermon. Her cake had occasioned much mischief. “By this means (it seems) the Devil has been raised amongst us,” Parris announced before administering communion on March 27, “and his rage is vehement and terrible, and when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows.” He warned his congregants to be on the alert against “Satan’s wiles and devices.” From the pulpit, in a dark gown and a flat white linen collar, Parris asked them to bear collective witness to Mary Sibley’s misdeed, to call “our sister to deep humiliation for what she has done.” Might he have a show of hands? All agreed. Turning to the heavily pregnant Sibley, Parris asked if—assuming she admitted to her sin and repented for it—they might hear as much from her own mouth. Public expiation was essential. Sibley offered an emotional apology. Parris continued: “Brethren, if herein you have received satisfaction, testify by lifting up your hands.” Every (male) hand in the room went up, the last time a consensus would prove possible in the 1692 village meetinghouse.

At the parsonage Parris reproached the servants as well. Already charged, the atmosphere there must have crackled with resentment. By that time the minister had larger matters with which to contend, however. While his niece and daughter made a great deal of noise, it had been
impossible to decipher what precisely they meant to say. The cake worked its diabolical magic; within days, Betty and Abigail named names. Not one but three witches were loose in Salem. The girls could see them perfectly. And by the sodden end of February—sheets of rain fell all week, flooding fields and turning the village into a coursing river of mud—those witches were on a pole flying through the air.

SALEM VILLAGE OWED
its existence in part to its fear of ambush. The oldest settlement in Massachusetts Bay and very nearly New England’s capital, the town of Salem had been named in 1629. A fine, flourishing community about a mile long, scented by salty sea air and the rich, crisp hint of pine, it counted among the most agreeable addresses in the colony. Salem’s gem of a harbor was second only to Boston’s; the town enjoyed a brisk trade with Europe and the West Indies. Built on a peninsula, surrounded by velvety green hills and idyllic coves, it was home to thriving fisheries and shipyards. When a new king ascended to the English throne in 1685, he did so with acclamations and celebrations in Boston but with proclamations as well in Salem, the only other Massachusetts town of more than two thousand people. Quieter and less cosmopolitan, Salem was every bit as refined as Boston, with an array of painted, gabled, multiple-storied homes and a number of newly minted fortunes.

As early as 1640, farmers had begun to venture north and west, away from the prosperous port, beyond the town’s rolling hills, in search of more arable land. Their loose-limbed settlement became Salem village (and modern-day Danvers). Soon enough, those enterprising villagers—known locally as the Salem farmers—began to lobby for institutions of their own. While their families disliked making the five-to ten-mile trek through driving snow to attend meeting, there were additional considerations as well. In 1667 the villagers petitioned the general court in Boston. Did it really make sense for them to trudge to Salem town to take their turns at military watch? It was awfully far for them, particularly onerous after dark, “in a wilderness that is so little cleared and [by] ways
so unpassable.” Many of them lived a full mile from their nearest neighbors. The farmers’ departures struck terror in the hearts of their wives, “especially considering what dreadful examples former times have afforded in that respect, in this country, from Indians (and from others also), in the night season, when their husbands have been absent.”

Moreover, they continued with unassailable logic, was it not profaning the Lord to travel so far armed to watch a town in peacetime? The older community insisted on the unceasing danger. (Its leaders preferred to reduce neither its tax base nor its territory.) But were the farmers—in a rustic settlement of fifty isolated farmsteads, then without even a meetinghouse at their center—not more vulnerable than those in the compact, commercial lanes of Salem, with its larger population and its many fine homes? Surely the town could keep watch without the villagers. Its leaders balked, countering that only recently a French ship had somehow managed to sail undetected into port after nightfall. How was that possible? scoffed the farmers, who knew well that the innocuous ship had been sighted well before dark. They occupied the front lines. Would it not make more sense for the townspeople to come watch them rather than the other way around? The farmers prevailed, though not without Nathaniel Putnam, one of the wealthiest villagers, being fined for “bitterly affronting and abusing” the town officials.