The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (36 page)

The headstone itself, now receding behind the coming night, was slate, chipped at the edges and leaning, and all of the carving on it had melted away, carried by rain and the passage of time. Though if one looked closely, the first letter of the name on the headstone might have been a
D
.

Real Witches, Real Life

The Salem witch trials of 1692 are hardly new territory, either for a historian or for a novelist. However, when the trials appear in literature or in history, it is generally assumed that they are acting as a proxy for something else. Either the trials exploded out of social rivalries in Salem and present-day Danvers (the former Salem Village), or else they articulated tensions around the changing role of women in colonial culture, or else the afflicted little girls had all eaten moldy bread, which caused them to hallucinate. What is usually overlooked in these accounts is that, to the people who experienced the Salem panic, the trials were
really about witchcraft
. Everyone involved—judges, jury, clergymen, accusers, and defendants—lived in a religious system that held no doubt whatsoever that witches existed, and that the Devil could make mischief on earth through human interlocutors. When I started thinking about the story in
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
, I decided to take the Salem villagers at their word for once: what if witchcraft was real?

And to some extent, witchcraft
was
real, though not in the ways that we think of it today. Medieval and early modern England held a long tradition of so-called cunning folk, local wise people who sold occult services ranging
from basic divination, to the location of lost property, to the healing of assorted illnesses. Specifically, the cunning person specialized in un-bewitchment; if you suspected that a witch had cast a spell on you, the cunning person was your best hope for redress. They were usually canny business-people, and their reputations were always rather suspect; after all, anyone with the power to remove spells could be assumed to have the ability to cast them, too.

Most cunning folk came from the artisan, rather than the laboring, class, in part because tradespeople had more flexible time for seeing clients, but also because they were more likely to be literate. The charms on offer derived both from published grimoires, or spell books translated from Latin into English, and from practices dating from pre-Reformation Christianity. It is thought that the cunning folk tradition did not travel to New England with the colonists, both because of the extreme form of Protestantism that they practiced, in which even Christmas was considered too pagan, and because of the newness of the physical space of the New World. The tangible qualities of magic, derived from special objects, special prayers, and special places, were rooted inextricably in the haunted realms of the Old World.

Or were they? When the Salem panic first broke out, villager Mary Sibley suggested that the culprit might be revealed through a witch cake, a biscuit made of rye meal and urine from the afflicted girls that was baked and then fed to a dog. Though her personality in the story is the product of my imagination, her actions are not. The real Mary Sibley was chastised for resorting to diabolical means to ascertain diabolical actions, but she nevertheless was confident that this popular magic technique held real power to address Salem’s witchcraft problem. Similarly, the mysterious charmed boundary marker in the story is based on a real charmed boundary stone, located in Newbury, Massachusetts. Magic still lurked in the daily lives of colonial New Englanders, though its face was hidden.

I have endeavored to be as accurate as possible in my rendition of the historical world of Deliverance and her family, paying special attention to details of dress and room interior. In addition, numerous real people pepper
the narrative, though I hasten to add that they are used fictitiously and that some details of their lives have been embellished or changed. The judge and jurymen during Deliverance’s 1682 slander trial are all real, as is Robert “King” Hooper, the wealthy Marblehead merchant. My description of Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, who presided over the Salem witch trial, derives from an extant portrait of him.

The nature of the evidence entered against the accused witches is also accurate, including the so-called witches teat for suckling imps and familiars. This phenomenon provided the only reliable form of physical evidence against an accused witch; almost all other evidence was “spectral,” or claims by witnesses that they had seen the accused’s specter doing malefic work. Historians differ on what the witches teat might have really been, arguing variously for anomalous third nipples, for skin tags, for moles, and most notoriously, for the clitoris. In a world lacking in artificial light, hand mirrors, private bedrooms, or bathrooms, the suggestion that women might have been somewhat alienated from their own bodies seems less incredible.

Most important, Deliverance’s codefendants in the witchcraft trial—Sarah Wildes, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Sarah Good, and Elizabeth Howe—together with the dates on which they were tried and executed, are all correct. I have attempted to be true to these women’s personalities insofar as they are known, though I took some liberties with Sarah Good. Other real accused witches make passing appearances: Wilmott Redd of Marblehead; Sarah Osborne, who died in prison; and deposed minister George Burroughs. Sarah Good really did threaten from the gallows that “
I
am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Interestingly, local tradition holds that the man on the receiving end of this threat, Nicholas Noyes, died years later of a hemorrhage, so in a sense Sarah’s prediction came true.

Sarah Good’s daughter Dorcas, meanwhile, inspired my illustration of how the effects of the trial echoed years later for the families involved. The real Dorcas, at about four or five years old, spent eight months imprisoned in Boston, and her mother was hanged. As a result of these twin horrors,
little Dorcas lost her mind. In 1710, her father, William Good, sued the town for help with her support and maintenance, claiming that Dorcas “being chain’d in the dungeon was so hardly used and terrifyed that she hath ever since been very chargeable having little or no reason to govern herself.” Association with the trials, even for those who were ultimately acquitted, caused entire families to suffer economic and social aftershocks until well into the eighteenth century, a harsh reality that informed the reduced circumstances of Mercy and Prudence in the story.

The representation of Prudence Bartlett as an eighteenth-century Marblehead midwife who keeps a daily log I owe directly to the scholarship of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on Martha Ballard, an eighteenth-century Maine midwife (though not a witch, it must be said) who kept a diary of her quotidian activities.

The assorted magical elements woven throughout the story are based on research into grimoires held at the British Museum, in particular a text of disputed age and authorship called the
Key of Solomon
. (No North American colonial-era grimoires have been found—at least, not yet.) The magical circle conjured on the door of the Milk Street house is based on a circle drawn in a manuscript in the Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal in Paris, reproduced in a contemporary book of occult history. Similarly, the “Abracadabra” healing charm derives from a Roman talisman, the triangular shape of which was thought to draw illness out of the body, and discussed in a different modern source on vernacular magic. Urine and witch bottles were a common tool of cunning folk, following the widespread logic that a small part of the body can be made to stand in for the whole. And finally, the “key and Bible” and “sieve and scissors” were both widespread, mainstream divination techniques in use as late as the nineteenth century. Anyone who has flipped a coin or shaken a magic eight ball in the course of making a decision has touched the modern descendants of these techniques.

And what of Deliverance Dane herself? The real Deliverance Dane was accused near the end of the Salem panic, when the accusations were spreading deeper into the Essex County countryside. She lived with her husband,
Nathaniel, in Andover, Massachusetts, and she was imprisoned on suspicion of witchcraft for thirteen weeks in 1692. Little is known about her, apart from the fact that she survived the trials, and unlike some of her contemporaries, there is no evidence that she was actually a cunning woman. The only record that I have been able to find is an account listing how much Nathaniel owed for her maintenance while she was in jail. This document, along with transcripts and digital images of the actual court documents, can be viewed in the Salem witchcraft papers digital archive maintained by the University of Virginia.

And then there is me. Family genealogical research by successive generations of Howe women indicates our connection both to condemned witch Elizabeth Howe, who appears briefly here, and to accused witch Elizabeth Proctor. The latter connection is thought to be more direct, as she survived the trials, while Elizabeth Howe, as you know, did not.

For a long while this knowledge was just one of those weird, amusing details about me that not many people knew. Then after a few years working and living in Cambridge, I arrived in Essex County, Massachusetts. As we settled into life on the North Shore, I was moved both by how fully the past in New England still haunts the present, especially in its small, long-memoried towns, and also by how the idiosyncratic personhood of the early colonists seems to have been lost in nationalist myth. In the bedroom of our little antique rental house my husband and I even found a tiny horseshoe, caked in paint, nailed over the rear door for luck, or to ward off evil, we were not sure which.

I began telling myself this story while studying for my own PhD qualifying exams, in American and New England studies at Boston University, taking my own dog on rambles through the woods between Salem and Marblehead. I honed it further while teaching an introductory research and writing seminar on New England witchcraft to two groups of BU freshmen. (They especially liked the extra-credit assignment, which was to look up two different methods of un-bewitching a cow and explain the pros and cons of each.)

The narrative offered a unique opportunity to restore individuality, albeit fictional, to some of these distant people. I was also drawn to Deliverance’s story by my sympathy with the New England legacy of difficult, and sometimes overly bookish, women. Did the knowledge of my distant ancestors’ unconventional pasts help steer me toward graduate work in American culture? I feel certain that it did. But even lacking that knowledge, I suspect that their witchiness, however we understand it, contributed to my being the kind of person I am. I am grateful to those vanished people for whatever fragments of them may persist within myself.

—Katherine Howe
Marblehead, Massachusetts

That this story was able to travel from an idle thought experiment to a finished manuscript is due entirely to the involvement of the following people: my literary agent, Suzanne Gluck, whose brilliance, friendship, and insight has informed every aspect of this project from its inception; Ellen Archer at Hyperion, whose vision, kindness, and confidence in the book encouraged me at every turn; my editor, Leslie Wells, who ushered the manuscript from rough draft to completion with marvelous attentiveness, precision, and care; Pamela Dorman, whose belief in the book helped to make it a reality; and Matthew Pearl, my sensei, without whose guidance, cheerleading, and mentorship this book would never have come into being.

I have been fortunate to work with some amazing people in the publishing world whose support and advice eased every stage of this project. At William Morris, I would like to thank Sarah Ceglarski, Bill Clegg, Rob Clyne, Georgia Cool, Raffaella De Angelis, Michelle Feehan, Tracy Fisher, Erin Malone, Cathryn Summerhayes, Elizabeth Tingue, and Eric Zohn. At Hyperion and Voice, my appreciation and thanks go to Anna Bromley Campbell, Marie Coolman, Barbara Jones, Kristin Kiser, Sarah Landis, Allison McGeehon, Claire McKean, Linda Prather, Shubhani Sarkar, Nina
Shield, Betsy Spigelman, Mindy Stockfield, Katherine Tasheff, and Jessica Wiener. My thanks also go to Mari Evans at Penguin UK for her splendid feedback, enthusiasm, and warmth.

A book this grounded in history would be nothing without its source base, and I am grateful to the many historians whose work has guided me through this project. In particular, Anthony Aveni, whose
Behind the Crystal Ball
provided the “abracadabra” charm; Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, for their definitive books
Salem Possessed
and
Salem-Village Witchcraft
; Owen Davies, for
Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History
; John Demos, for
Entertaining Satan
; Cornelia Hughes Dayton’s history of the early colonial legal system,
Women Before the Bar; Grillot de Givry, for Witchcraft, Magic, and Alchemy,
the source of the magic circle symbol in the story; Carol Karlsen, for the feminist history
Devil in the Shape of a Woman
; Mary Beth Norton, for
In the Devil’s Snare;
Keith Thomas’s
Religion and the Decline of Magic
; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s
A Midwife’s Tale
, which directly inspired the journal-keeping midwife in my narrative; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s exhibition catalogue
New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century
. The University of Virginia online archive of Salem witchcraft papers held in special collections all over New England enables an ease of research that an earlier generation of scholars could only dream about; see http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/.

In addition, many friends and colleagues have offered reading notes, brainstorming, and encouragement when it was most needed, especially Mike Godwin, Greg Howard, Eric Idsvoog, Emily Kennedy, Kelley Kreitz, Brian Pellinen, Shannon Shaper, Weston Smith, Raphaelle Steinzig, Michelle Syba, and Tobey Wiggins. I am indebted to the students and faculty of the American and New England Studies Program and the Writing Program at Boston University, with special thanks to Roy Grundmann, Virginia Myhaver, Michael Prince, Bruce Schulman, and especially my students in WR 150 “New England Witchcraft.” Justin Lake at Texas A&M lent me his considerable Latin expertise and taught me how to gamble. Alice Jardine in the Committee on Degrees in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at
Harvard gave me that rarest of things in graduate school: a steady teaching job. Will Heinrich helped me to imagine what was possible, in writing as well as life, and forbade me from letting fear stand in the way. I am also deeply grateful to my advisor, Patricia Hills, whose scholarship in art history and American studies brought me to graduate school in the first place, and whose friendship and support kept me there.

Finally, as this is a book essentially about families changing over time, I would like to thank my own, both extended and immediate: especially Grandmother and Grandfather, Mere and Charles, all of whom haunt this story in their own secret ways; Julia Bates, poet, musician, New Englander, great-aunt, and dear friend; Greg and Patty Kuzbida; and Rachel Hyman. Most important, thanks to my parents, George and Katherine S. Howe, whose influence and significance in my life are difficult to summarize in such a narrow space. And lastly, Louis Hyman, partner in all things, both life and crime, inspiration, muse, chef, counselor, and nag, who every day makes me realize that I somehow managed to win a contest that I didn’t know I had entered.