The Enemy Within (17 page)

There is another case from the 1660s that offers an especially clear view of the predicament to which a supposed witch might come. The principal was a Connecticut woman named Katherine Harrison. Wife of a well-to-do merchant, mother of three, and a longtime adept at fortune-telling and folk healing, she was also reputed to have been (in years previous) a “sabbath breaker,” a “notorious liar,” and “one who followed the army in England” (in short, a prostitute). In 1666 her husband died suddenly, and Katherine was exposed to a withering blast of local antagonism. Almost immediately she endured a flurry of lawsuits: three or four around questions of property, two more on charges of slander. She lost them all, and was ordered to pay large fines and damages. In pleading her side, she asked the court for special consideration, “being a distressed widow, a female, a weaker vessel meeting with overbearing experiences.” The latter were detailed in a separate declaration under the heading of “many injuries which have happened since my husband's death”—chiefly, assaults on her property. They included: “A yoke of oxen . . . spoiled . . . before our door, with blows upon the back and side . . . A cow spoiled, her back broke and two of her ribs . . . 30 poles of hops cut and spoiled . . . A cow at the side of my yard, her jawbone broke . . . and a hole bored in her side . . . A three-year-old heifer . . . stuck with a knife . . .” The list continued through 13 separate incidents. Read today, it suggests the profound vulnerability of a woman struggling to carry on alone amidst a throng of bitterly hostile foes. (How could she sleep at night, knowing what threatened on every side? Maybe she couldn't. To whom might she turn for help? Apparently there was no one.)

Witchcraft charges followed soon enough. And Katherine was subjected to three separate court proceedings over a span of roughly 18 months. The first ended in her acquittal, the second in a hung jury, the third in a conviction that was, however, reversed by the magistrates. (“This court cannot concur . . . so as to sentence her to death.”) By then she had apparently decided to pack up and leave, “having disposed of the great part of her estate.” The court added a further nudge of its own, directing her “to mind the fulfillment of removing from Wethersfield, which is what will lend most to her own safety and the contentment of the people who are her neighbors”; this may have been a politely worded form of banishment. Several weeks later she appeared in Westchester, New York. But her reputation had preceded her, and her wish to resettle there was immediately opposed. New litigation began, and dragged on for months. This time she would eventually be vindicated—cleared of “suspicion,” and allowed to “remain . . . where she now resides.” Even so, there is a strong possibility that she was again deemed a witch by her neighbors. And here her trail peters out.

The 1670s began with no sign that the tempo of witch-hunting would slacken. There were new cases in Massachusetts, in Connecticut, and even in rarely affected Rhode Island. One, in particular, stands out, although it did not produce an actual court proceeding. Its focus was “diabolical possession,” with the Devil apparently invading his victim's very person and taking control of her from the inside. This was always a possibility with witchcraft, and at least occasionally a key element. And when it happened, it could be sensational.

Such was the case at Groton, Massachusetts, toward the end of the year 1671. A teenage girl named Elizabeth Knapp had for some time been living and working as a maidservant in the home of the town's minister, Samuel Willard. There, as autumn came on, Elizabeth began to experience fits of steadily increasing intensity. Luckily for historians, Reverend Willard decided to keep a written account of her difficulties. (He did not, to be sure, have historians in mind; rather, he wished to create a record that would be useful to other clergy confronting similar situations.) He was meticulous to a fault in noting the many baffling and unsettling details. At one point, he described Elizabeth being “seized . . . in such ways that six persons could hardly hold her; but she leaped and skipped about the house perforce, roaring and yelling extremely and fetching deadly sighs as if her heartstrings would have broken, and looking with a frightful aspect, to the amazement and astonishment of all the beholders.” At another, “she was . . . suddenly thrown down into the midst of the floor . . . and with much ado . . . kept out of the fire from destroying herself.” At still another, “she was hurried into . . . striking those that held her [and] spitting in their faces.” Willard noted, too, how “her tongue [would be] for many hours drawn into a semicircle up to the roof of her mouth, and not to be removed (for some tried with fingers to do it).” And he especially remarked the times when she “barked like a dog and bleated like a calf, in which her organs were visibly made use of.” By the time he was done, descriptions like these filled dozens of pages.

As both her minister and her master, Willard had a special responsibility for Elizabeth; thus, he sought repeatedly to calm her, to converse with her, to pray over her. He, and many others who came to lend a hand or simply to gape at the spectacle, wished most of all to discover the source of Elizabeth's troubles. Near the start she “seemed to impeach one of the neighbors” as a witch (and thus as her presumed tormentor). But, for reasons the minister did not explain, this accusation was disregarded. Some time later she “cried out” against a second person, but that too failed to convince. Henceforth, suspicion would shift to the possibility of her own guilt. Pressed hard by Willard, she conceded to having met with the Devil, and “given of her blood . . . and made a covenant with him.” She quickly regretted these admissions, and tried unsuccessfully to retract them. Her fits grew stronger and stronger. Bystanders crowded around in ever increasing numbers. Finally came the climax—on a Sabbath day, in front of a large, frightened, utterly fascinated audience of local townspeople. Her body assumed a succession of “amazing postures.” Then a strange “grum” voice—nothing like her own—erupted from somewhere deep inside her, reviling the minister in terms such as the following: “Hold your tongue! Hold your tongue! Get you gone, you black rogue! What are you going to do! You have nothing to do with me! . . . I am a pretty black boy, and this is my pretty girl.” It was blasphemy, all blasphemy, from start to finish.

In Willard's mind, this appalling scene resolved any doubt “whether she might properly be called a demoniac, or person possessed by the Devil”; there could be no other explanation. Elizabeth's troubles waxed and waned for several weeks longer, and “the same voice” produced at least one more bravura performance. “Thus she continues . . . to this instant . . . followed with fits,” wrote the minister. But here his narrative abruptly broke off. Sooner or later she must have recovered. She remained a resident of Groton. Within a few years she married, and began to bear children. Supremely notorious at one point in her girlhood, she now settled back into the ranks of ordinary folk in her village community.

Reverend Willard, meanwhile, would soon leave Groton for a far more prestigious pastorate in Boston. There he became a leader of the ministry at large. And there, some two decades later, he again came face-to-face with “diabolical” forces as a riptide of terror rolled down from Salem. This time he would advocate on the side of caution. His sermons warned of the danger that innocent parties might be impersonated—their “shapes” unwittingly assumed, their identities simulated—by the Devil. Here was an implicit challenge to Salem's “afflicted” accusers, whose lethal charges rested mainly on “spectral” evidence. For such temerity he would himself be denounced as a witch by some of those same accusers; fortunately, his friends among the judges refused to listen. And through it all, one cannot help but wonder: Did he perhaps hear echoes, from years before at Groton, of his long and difficult struggles over poor, possessed Elizabeth?

The middle part of the same decade brought new forces and new preoccupations suddenly to the center. The largest of these was a truly horrific race war—“white versus red,” colonists versus Indians—known to succeeding generations as King Philip's War. The human toll was unparalleled before or since in American history, with a casualty rate approaching 10 percent of total population on the side of the colonists, and even higher among the Indians. Warfare drew attention away from witchcraft: what there was of that remained mostly at the level of local suspicion. In the four years from 1675 through 1678, only one witchcraft accusation generated an actual indictment. But at war's end the pace picked up again, with nine indictments and six full-fledged trials (five resulting in acquittal, one in a conviction that was subsequently reversed) during the next four-year span (1679-82). There was additional activity in the half-dozen years after that, but without trial convictions. It is worth noting, and underscoring, that no one was executed for witchcraft anywhere in New England between 1663 and 1688.

Was this history, then, gradually playing itself out? At the time it might have seemed so. But in 1688 an especially strong prosecution developed in Boston against a supposed witch surnamed Glover. (Her given name is not recorded.) She was Irish, Gaelic-speaking, and presumably Catholic—all of which would, from the start, have placed her in a dubious light for most New Englanders. Her leading accusers, and putative victims, were members of a neighboring family who had employed her as a laundress. The sequence was familiar enough: dispute, angry exchanges, fear of retaliation—and then, crucially, “fits” in several of the neighboring family's children. The upshot was a full-blown trial, ending with Glover's conviction, confession, and execution. There were other suspects as well, and Bostonians at large grew more and more alarmed. The local clergy was much involved, especially Cotton Mather. Eventually, the children's fits abated, and a kind of normalcy returned. Glover's was the first New England witchcraft case in 25 years to reach the point of capital punishment. Of course, it would not be the last.

 
To describe the history of witchcraft is one thing; to explain it is quite another. New England affords an unusual opportunity in both connections. Because so many hands have written about it, both then and since, and because records from the time are so copious, New England allows us to see in remarkable detail the personal, social, and historical sources of witch-hunting. On the personal level, every witchcraft case involved a clash between accusers and supposed perpetrators—one or more in each category. Always, too, there had to be victims, who might or might not act also as accusers. (Without a victim, there wouldn't be sufficient motive to pursue a case into, and through, the stage of formal prosecution.) Witch, accuser, victim: such were the essential roles in an oft-repeated, loosely scripted, real-life drama.

In many respects, the profile of the typical New England witch followed long-standing European precedent. She was
female,
first of all. On both sides of the Atlantic the ratio among the accused of women to men was roughly four to one. On both sides, too, the minority of male witches included quite a few whose status as suspect was clearly secondary—derived, that is, from connection to a previously accused woman (her husband or, less often, her son). With rare exceptions, then, the primary witches were women. The reasons for this certainly included the same female-inferiority principle that held throughout the early modern English and European world, where women were seen as inherently “weak,” especially from a moral standpoint, and thus liable to “seduction” by the Devil. Deeper still lay the fundamentally misogynous substrate that appears quite generally in “mother raised children”: a kind of price women are forced to pay for being chief caretakers of the very young and the reference point for the earliest, most primitive, experiences of self and other. Thus did witches serve, worldwide, as a variant of the “bad mother.”

In addition, she was
of middle age;
here, too, the New England pattern mirrored Europe's. A reputation for involvement with witchcraft began, most commonly, within the life decades of the 40s and 50s. To be sure, actual prosecution in court might only come years later, after the underlying suspicions had grown and solidified. But even at this more advanced point, when legally charged and indicted, accused witches cannot be fitted to current notions emphasizing extreme old age.

She was
of English and Puritan
stock. New England colonists did not, on the whole, comprise an ethnically or racially diverse population; neither did their population of accused witches. Goodwife Glover's Irish background was exceptional; so, too, with a handful of others (a Dutchwoman accused at Hartford, a French Huguenot on Long Island). The same was true of religion; suspicion went not against members of marginal groups (Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, Jews), but rather toward people in the Protestant mainstream.

She was
married or widowed.
“Spinsters” were, in any case, a rarity in early New England—and were never found in the ranks of accused witches. Virtually all of the latter were, or had been, “goodwives.”

But, goodwife or not, her life history was likely to show a tangle of
troubled family relationships.
Many witch suspects were chronically at odds with their spouses and children. This could mean open disagreements, public disputes, even physical violence; not for them the Puritan ideal of a “well-ordered household.”

Her family experience might also include
childbearing that fell signficantly below expectation.
Accused witches often had fewer children than the typical woman; sometimes they had none at all. Thus, in the eyes of their peers, they would seem relatively (or entirely) “barren.” This may help to explain a recurrent theme in the accusations lodged against them: their supposedly “strange,” envious, perhaps malign interest in the children of others. Indeed, connections between childbearing (and -rearing) on the one hand, and witchcraft on the other, are everywhere apparent in the record: children made ill, or murdered, by witchcraft; mothers bewitched while nursing or otherwise caring for infants; witches who suckled “imps” or “familiars” (in implicit parody of normal maternal function).