The Witches: Salem, 1692 (53 page)

A great number of Americans have made the same startling discovery that Francis Dane did: They are related to witches. American presidents descend from George Jacobs, Susannah Martin, and John Procter. Nathan Hale was John Hale’s grandson. Israel “Don’t Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes” Putnam was the son of John Putnam. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louisa May Alcott descended from Samuel Sewall; Clara Barton from the Townes; Walt Disney from Burroughs. (In a nice twist, the colonial printer who founded the American Antiquarian Society, where Cotton Mather’s papers reside today, was also a Burroughs descendant.) The Nurse family includes Lucille Ball, who testified before an investigator from the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Yes, she had registered with the Communist Party. No, she was not a Communist. In 1953, a husband leaped to a wife’s defense: “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair,” Desi Arnaz explained, “and even that’s not legitimate.”)

No one reprocessed the toxic spill of 1692 as creatively as did Nathaniel Hawthorne, at whom the guilt of his great-grandfather gnawed.
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Hawthorne redeemed that most Puritan of legacies in kind: with a shelf of literature, chilly, twilit pages that fall somewhere between sermons and stories. Others had put Salem on the literary map before he wrote “Young Goodman Brown,”
The Scarlet Letter,
or his 1851 bestseller,
The House of the Seven Gables,
but Hawthorne proved that territory still radioactive. Guilt and blame have grown up lushly on the scene, attracting writers from Walt Whitman to John Updike. Arthur Miller read the court papers under the spell of McCarthyism. He discovered, as New England itself had, that events must be absorbed before monuments can be raised.
The Crucible
was not a success in 1953. Only when it outgrew the headlines and matured into allegory did the play find its audience. The Puritans come to most of us today through
The Scarlet Letter
and
The Crucible
, which we read, appropriately enough, as adolescents.

AS GENERAL WASHINGTON
was presiding over the Constitutional Convention on July 10, 1787, a mob attacked an old woman in the Philadelphia street outside. Accusing her of witchcraft, they pelted her with a slew of objects. She had cast a fatal spell on a child; weeks earlier, someone had cut her forehead “according to ancient and immemorial custom,” as a newspaper had it—and precisely as a Salem visitor had attempted to slash Bridget Bishop. The 1787 woman died from her injuries. Witches might well rank among ghosts and fairies, as the Philadelphia papers
noted, but they were not as easily dismissed. Alaska contended with a witchcraft epidemic in the late nineteenth century. In 1908 a Pennsylvania woman landed in jail for enchanting a cow. Sporadic assaults continue today, although the modern American witch is dangerous rather than malicious, more likely to exude steamy sexuality than to wield a scalding tongue. In a stunning inversion, empowered, nubile teenage witches—the new vampire-slayers—have taken over from the afflicted girls.

Salem village finally won its independence from Salem town in 1752. It renamed itself Danvers sixty years after the trials, which remained still the stuff of the recent unpleasantness. An 1895 reporter found town residents reluctant to talk about the past. When they did, it was to impress upon him that they had not
burned
a single witch. Years later Arthur Miller met with the same silence while researching
The Crucible.
“You couldn’t get anyone to say anything about it,” he complained of 1692. The two communities have since resolutely gone their separate ways. When current Danvers archivist Richard B. Trask began an excavation of the parsonage site in 1970, two elderly sisters waved fists at him from across the way, the kind of behavior that in another age elicited witchcraft accusations. “What are you bringing this up for?” they demanded. Meanwhile in Salem, Justice Corwin’s gabled home has become “the Witch House,” a misreading akin to making Dr. Frankenstein the monster. The town opted for brash commercialization, easier in the post-
Bewitched
era, when perky enchantresses twitched noses at vacuum cleaners. The mascot for Salem’s sports teams is a witch on a broom. She sails across the local newspaper masthead and along doors of police cruisers; the best bakery in town has a Caffiend Club. In a turn of events that would have mystified Ann Foster, it is easy to buy a broomstick in Salem, home to a large Wiccan community. Hotels are booking now for next Halloween.
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When Massachusetts exonerated the Salem victims in 1710 it overlooked six women. They remained missing through the 1940s and 1950s,
as the commonwealth considered pardons but could not seem to make up its legislative mind. One lawyer appearing before a Senate committee objected to “fooling with history.” Some legislators feared expensive suits for damages. Others hinted that a pardon might knock Salem’s witches from their tourist-bewitching brooms. As the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had not existed in 1692, it surely had no jurisdiction over a verdict of Massachusetts Bay. On Halloween 2001—weeks after we began to wonder anew about unseen evils—Massachusetts pardoned the last of the condemned. They included Susannah Martin and Bridget Bishop, who had transformed themselves into gleaming lights and disturbed men in their beds, afterward spending weeks together in a stifling prison. Parris had testified and Mather had written against both women. Bishop was not entirely sure she knew what a witch was. The convulsing girls wholly mystified her. “Do you think they are bewitched?” Hathorne asked Susannah Martin. “No,” she had replied, three hundred and nine years before her pardon. “I do not think they are.”

Frontispiece to Joseph Glanvill’s much consulted 1681 volume. With unassailable logic, the Royal Society fellow proved the existence of witchcraft; nothing so preposterous could be a sham. And how was it possible, asked Glanvill, “that imagination, which is the most various thing in the world, should infinitely repeat the same conceit in all times and places?” The “wonderful story of certain Swedish witches” traveled to New England with Glanvill as well.
(© The British Library Board 084228)

From a pamphlet on a sixteenth-century English witchcraft case. Four women stood accused of various misdeeds; three hanged within weeks of their arrest. English witches in particular maintained menageries of “familiars,” demonic mascots that did their bidding. This one feeds her blood to her diabolical toads.

A sixteenth-century French woodcut, probably from a text that argued that witches could not perform magical feats but deserved to be prosecuted anyway as heretics. The prying neighbor observes a sort of time-lapse sequence as the witch spirits herself up the chimney.
(The Bridgeman Art Library)

The cover of a pamphlet on a Northamptonshire trial, at which several women were accused of murder and pig-bewitching. One of their victims suffered “such a gripping and gnawing in her body that she cried out and could scarce be held by such as came unto her.”

A late-arriving, probably eighteenth-century set of English broomsticks. The devil rides along with two confederates; the woman on the ground is either an accomplice or a potential recruit.
(© The British Library Board C13724-46, T. 1855 [19]).

Reverend Samuel Parris, in whose contested meadow the witches congregated. The miniature probably dates from just before the move to Salem. Parris had the proclivity for tidiness that creates a shambles. He could be sharp. “I cannot preach without study, I cannot study without fire, I cannot live quietly without study,” he warned his disobliging parishioners, slow to provide firewood over the wretched winter of 1691–1692.
(The Bridgeman Art Library/Massachusetts Historical Society)

Fragment of a monogrammed pewter plate—a rarity in seventeenth-century Salem village—excavated at the parsonage site. It is the only physical trace of Elizabeth Parris’s existence.
(Photograph by Richard B. Trask)