The Enemy Within (20 page)

Considered as a whole, this was a success story matched by few others in 17th-century New England. And, as Joseph rose toward greater and greater heights, Mary rose right alongside him. There are hints scattered through the surviving records that the Parsonses' ascent aroused widespread comment and jealousy. Joseph was frequently in court, mostly as a plaintiff (claiming debts, enforcing contracts), but sometimes, too, as a defendant. He was prosecuted more than once for “contemptuous behavior” toward local authorities; this included episodes of “scuffling” with the constable “whereby blood was drawn between them.” Mary, for her part, was resented for having a rough and “challenging” style with others. Many years later, she would be remembered as a woman “of great beauty and talents, but . . . not very amiable . . . exclusive in the choice of her associates, and . . . of haughty manners.”

Their life together had its own difficulties. Testimony given in the 1656 slander trial made much of their marital quarrels. (In one such, “he had in a sort beaten [her]”; in another, he “locked her into the cellar.”) However, they were notably prolific as parents. Mary's pregnancies totaled an even dozen, including two sets of twins; the last came when she was well past age 40 and already a grandmother. Her twins, all four, died young, but nine of her ten other children survived to adulthood. The latter, in turn, would populate various parts of New England with a multitude of Parsons descendants.

Whatever advantages she may have enjoyed, Mary seems to have been something of a tormented soul. In 1652, when still living in Springfield, she and the daughters of that town's minister simultaneously succumbed to “fits”; an eyewitness recalled that “just as Mr. Moxon's children acted [Moxon being the minister], so did Mary Parsons—just all one.” Together, in their “afflicted” state, they were “carried out of the meeting, it being a Sabbath day.” (In fact, such fits were unusual in a fully grown person; for the most part, they happened to children. Mary was 24 or 25 at the time, the Moxon daughters a good 10 to 15 years younger.) Around the same time, Mary began to speak of harassing encounters with “spirits.” Once she had been accosted “as she was washing her clothes at the brook . . . [when] they appeared . . . like poppets.” On another occasion they entered her house, “and she threw the bedstaff at them and her bedclothes and the pillow, and yet they would not be gone.” Such claims, from her own mouth, helped fuel additional rumor and gossip among her fellow townspeople. For example, it was said by some that she could walk on water “and not [be] wet.” In this way she would come to seem less a victim than a perpetrator of magic. Even her husband supposedly remarked “that she was led by an evil spirit.”

In sum, her own career was scarcely less remarkable than Joseph's. From troubled beginnings, when driven out of her English home as the child of reviled radicals (Puritans), and losing at an early age a life situation of considerable ease and high social rank, she had traveled across the wide ocean to an utterly strange “wilderness.” There she passed through a seemingly modest later childhood, on a farmstead in a newly founded village—then to begin a process of recouping when, as a young bride, she shared in the mounting successes of her entrepreneurial husband, and when, too, she entered a long, fecund stretch of motherhood. But this coincided with several years of deep personal difficulty, including marital discord and the sense of being directly targeted by malign, occult forces. Finally, she arrived at the status of a woman admired for her “beauty and talents,” respected for her elevated social position, envied for the same reasons, resented for her abrasive manner, and feared for her own alleged involvement with the malign and the occult.

What seemed to run through it all was the element of extreme dislocation—social, economic, psychological, and geographic dislocation. Up, down, up again; here, there, everywhere; family troubles, angry neighbors, “spirits”; a woman, a life, in zigzag motion.

 
Did this distinctive biographical profile, this unique package of behavior and circumstance, predestine Mary to the role of “witch”? Perhaps. However, we should not scant the complementary role of “accuser”—filled most effectively by her neighbor Sarah Bridgman. Suspicions about Mary were held, in varying degrees, throughout the Northampton community. But again and again the record shows Sarah's primacy in fueling them. Hence her story, too, deserves careful attention.

She was born Sarah Lyman, into a locally prominent family in the English town of High Ongar, county Essex, and baptized there in February 1620. Her kin included people of real distinction—for example, a lord mayor of London. Her parents, like many of their Essex neighbors, had become Puritans; hence, in 1629 her father Richard sold the family lands, in anticipation of removing to New England. The Lymans reached Massachusetts in 1631, and lived for a time in Roxbury. But five years later they again pulled up stakes, joined one of the first migrant parties to Connecticut, and resettled at Hartford.

According to later accounts, Richard Lyman had crossed the ocean “with considerable estate, keeping two servants.” And his sizable land allotments at Hartford placed him in the upper tier of that town's inhabitants. However, his several moves seem to have taken a toll—first on his property, then on his morale. His Roxbury pastor described him as “an ancient Christian but weak [doubt-ridden]”; moreover, while en route to Connecticut he “underwent much affliction, for . . . his cattle were lost in driving . . . And the winter being cold, and [the settlers] ill-provided, he was sick and melancholy.” Indeed, he would not survive much longer. Death took him in 1640 and his wife a few months later; thus their several children, the eldest just now reaching adulthood, were left to fend for themselves. Sarah soon married one of their Hartford neighbors, a farmer and carpenter named James Bridgman. She and James moved twice more in the ensuing years, first to Springfield (1644), then to Northampton (1654).

So far, Sarah's life track had roughly paralleled that of Mary Parsons: high-status family background, followed by a kind of plunge (just before or just after resettlement in New England), parental death, marriage at a young age, frequent removals. Indeed, their respective tracks had also
converged;
for surely they became personally acquainted, either at Hartford or at Springfield, somewhat before they both moved (in the same year) to Northampton.

But from here on, their experiences would differ dramatically. Sarah did
not
recoup and regain her birthright prominence; she and James remained in the ranks of ordinary folk, of modest means and standing. (Two of her Lyman brothers fared much better, rising to become pillars of Northampton's local elite, while a third spiraled sharply downward into “distemperature”—mental incompetence—and a “very low condition.”) Nor was Sarah fortunate in her childbearing. Four of her five eldest children died young, including the infant son whose illness would figure in the 1656 slander trial.

The extant records will not disclose whatever it was that Mary and Sarah held deepest in their heads and hearts. But if witchcraft cases were typically thought to involve envy, which they were—and if Mary Parsons was later remembered as being “haughty” and a magnet for “jealousy,” which she was—then the grounds for the building suspicion against her do come at least partially into focus.

And Sarah Bridgman was especially well positioned to make the most painful of personal comparisons here.
Why,
Sarah might well have asked herself,
why
had Mary prospered, both materially and maternally, so much more than she? Was it just God's will? Or was it, perhaps, Satan's?

A young woman of the town has died rather suddenly—and, in the opinion of many, “very strangely.” She was only 22 at the time of death, married a year or so before, the mother of an infant son. Her given name
?
Mary (yet another). Her surname ? Bartlett (from Samuel Bartlett, her husband). Her maiden name (from her birth family)? Bridgman. Mary Bartlett was the daughter of Sarah and James Bridgman.

After all this is done, the case passes to the colony's highest legal authority, the Court of Assistants in Boston. And there, in the following spring, it enters its final stage. An imposing lineup of magistrates presides, including
business associates and (presumably) friends of her husband; but her fate rests with a trial jury of ordinary citizens. The indictment is formally read: “Mary Parsons, the wife of Joseph Parsons . . . being instigated by the Devil hath . . . entered into familiarity with the Devil, and committed several acts of witchcraft on the person or persons of one or more.” The evidence is reviewed yet again. And Mary, standing “at the bar, holding up her hand,” again declares her innocence. After careful deliberation the jury returns its verdict: “not guilty . . . And so she
[
is
]
discharged.”

 
Did this put an end to it? Would the long-running suspicions against Mary Parsons at last dry up? Or would they be sustained, in spite of a pair of court decisions to the contrary nearly two decades apart?

Mary had reached middle age. Joseph, considerably her senior, would die within a few more years; but she herself would live on for another 30. Throughout her widowhood, she would be more than amply provided for. Joseph's estate was one of the largest to have been probated so far anywhere in Massachusetts; it included land holdings in six different townships, together with goods, cash, and credit to a value of more than 2,000 pounds. And Mary was a chief beneficiary. Meanwhile, her grown sons and daughters were themselves moving quickly and easily into the tight circle of the provincial elite.

Might not all this wealth and social standing have served as a barrier, a shield, against further accusation? In fact, there would be no more official action linking Mary to witchcraft—no court prosecutions, certainly. She may, just possibly, have been suspected of causing the “mysterious” illness and death of a Northampton neighbor in 1678; the evidence seems murky. But
un
official action is, in any case, a different matter: consider the following.

 
In January 1702, two magistrates at Spring field hear a complaint by a certain Mr. Peletiah Glover against a slavewoman named Betty Negro, for using “bad language” to his young son. Betty has told the boy “that his grandmother . . . killed two persons over the river, and . . . killed Mrs.
Pynchon and half-killed the colonel, and his mother was half a witch.” The mother in question is Hannah Glover, née Parsons—wife of Peletiah Glover, and daughter of Mary Parsons. If the daughter is rated “half a witch,” this can only mean that Mary herself counts even now—in local gossip and rumor—as a full-fledged example.

PART THREE

Chapter VII approaches the notorious witch-hunt at Salem through the experience of one of its first targets, the elderly and exemplary matriarch Rebecca Nurse. Few stories in this entire array are more poignant than hers.

 
Chapter VIII takes a long view of the same subject, following the train of witchcraft-related events from their seemingly modest beginning, through an extraordinary peak of “panic fear,” to eventual, uncertain retreat. It offers as well a survey, and summary, of the numerous different ways Americans have tried ever since to understand this dark moment in their history.

 
Chapter IX traces the career of Reverend Cotton Mather, a widely acknowledged leader of New England Puritanism. Long excoriated for his role at Salem, Mather emerges here as a highly complex figure—an advocate for forceful prosecution at some points, a voice of caution at others, and a rueful (though not personally apologetic) part of the community-wide postmortem that followed the end of the trials phase.

CHAPTER VII