The Witches: Salem, 1692 (18 page)

Why Burroughs allowed Ann to converse with his articulate, avenging dead wives was not discussed; he worked in strange and mysterious ways. Nor would the record include another word from the faithful
militia captain who had insisted the village tanner look in on Burroughs, assuring Keyser that he had nothing to fear as their ex-minister was “a child of God, a choice child of God, and that God would clear up his innocence.”

FROM THOSE THINGS
the devil promised we can glimpse what the seventeenth-century girl dreamed of: splendid finery, travel abroad, fashion books, leisure, gold, a husband, help with the housework. Her longings differed little from those of any other orphaned semi-adolescent farm girl stalled in a bleak, storm-prone landscape where animals strayed into the gardens of peevish neighbors who turned up on the doorstep to fulminate, disabling the adults of the house. Insofar as they dared to dream, these girls dreamed—at the ashen end of a New England winter—of journeys to exotic realms and in supersaturated color. From Tituba’s on down, the Salem testimony explodes with invigorating, over-the-rainbow intensity. It is all bluebirds and canaries, yellow dogs, red rats, red meat, red bread, red books. Deprivation, however, had its limits. Even with the regular fasts, there was no hungering after (or enticing with) food. No daughter, niece, cousin, servant, or slave longed for a roast beef with pumpkin sauce or a luscious apple pudding or a dish of sugared almonds. Rather the girls appeared starved for color, expressionist splashes of which light up their testimonies, nearly conjuring ruby slippers.

At twelve and eleven, Ann Putnam Jr. and Abigail Williams, Parris’s niece, were the youngest of those under Satan’s supernatural spell. Nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, the Putnam maid, and twenty-year-old Mary Warren, the wavering Procter maid, were among the eldest. None of the four left a diary. Nor did any other Puritan girl. Even assuming she had paper and could write, she would have had little opportunity to do so in the course of a day spent milking and spooling, churning, weeding, washing, and candle-making. Only in the devil’s presence did the girls enunciate their desires, which come to us by way of the court clerks; we
get the girls’ hankerings under duress and at a remove.
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In the rare cases where their words come to us directly, the bewitched speak in what sounds like borrowed syntax and vocabulary. It is doubtful that Griggs’s niece actually said that an Andover matron “did most grievously torment” her with such tortures “as no tongue can express”—especially as Mary Walcott used identical words in denouncing the same woman, whom both girls pronounced “a most dreadful witch.” (Thomas Putnam, the adverbial master, drafted both complaints.) Ventriloquism aside, the bewitched girls exercised uncommon power, the small and the meek displacing the great and the powerful. History is not rich in unruly young women; with the exception of Joan of Arc and a few underage sovereigns, it would be difficult to name another historical moment so dominated by teenage virgins, traditionally a vulnerable, mute, and disenfranchised cohort. From the start, the Salem girls made themselves heard. Theirs quickly proved the decisive voices. By April a core group of eight girls assumed oracular import. Twitching and thrusting, they played the role of bloodhounds, soothsayers, folk healers, moral authorities, martyrs to a cause.

From any number of clergymen we know what the ideal Puritan girl looked like. She was a sterling amalgam of modesty, piety, and tireless industry. She spoke neither too soon nor too much. She read her Scripture twice daily. Her father was her prince and judge; his authority was understood to be absolute. She deferred to him as she would to the man she would marry, in her early twenties. The father was the master of the family, its soul, the governor of all the governed. He was often an active
and engaged parent. He sat vigil in the sickroom; he fretted over his children’s bodies and souls. It is not difficult to imagine how deeply his absence would be felt. A majority of the bewitched girls had lost fathers, most of them to Indian attacks. It left them unsteady on their feet in terms of marriage and inheritance, if not starved for male attention; an afflicted girl in 1693 begged the young man at her bedside who tried to bid her good night to stay. She would die if he left. Another challenged the devil directly, when he mentioned the matter one too many times: “Well; and what if I am fatherless?” Mothers were less visible but equally sovereign. Youths who disregarded them could expect to “come to the gallows, and be hanged up in gibbets for the ravens and eagles to feed upon them,” warned Increase Mather. For all of the emphasis on discipline, for all the indictments of juvenile willfulness, there was plenty of seventeenth-century tenderness. “Charm the children of New England unto the fear of God,” urged Cotton Mather, a champion of sweet authority. Lawson too discouraged harshness and formality in child-rearing. Stiffer than his predecessor, even Parris advocated not “penal and wrathful blows, but strokes issuing from parental love.” There was indeed a New England statute against disobedience to one’s parents; the child over sixteen who struck or cursed a father was to be executed. The law was never invoked.

A mother dispatching her daughter in 1680 reminded her that she was to carry herself respectfully, dutifully, soberly. She was to pray regularly and—above all—work diligently. The idea was smilingly to outlabor the industrious; already the idle brain qualified as the devil’s tool.
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If Mather can be used as a measure, the attention to a youngster’s spiritual state, unflagging from the start, intensified at Ann Putnam Jr. and Abigail Williams’s age, when children became simultaneously more capable of reason and less reasonable. Fourteen stood as the dividing line in law, for slander among other matters. After it, one was meant to embrace
sobriety and “put away childish things,” as a father reminded his Harvard-bound son. A boy’s seven-year apprenticeship commonly began at that age. As fourteen-year-old Abigail Hobbs demonstrated, the regular hand-wringing over disobedience—like the reminders to dispense with frivolities and the frequent inveighing against the occult—indicated a certain degree of noncompliance with the Puritan ideal. As occupied as she was with her spinning and weaving, the seventeenth-century Massachusetts daughter wound up on occasion in taverns, an address at which the bonds of propriety relaxed, even for clergymen; where a rate-collecting constable might be informed that a man would prefer to hang than contribute to the Salem senior minister’s salary; where plenty of flirting went on, with and without rapiers.

The dream of a perfect woman—the pious, industrious, and blushingly submissive female—was as venerable as the seventeenth-century medical chest. What set the early New England girl apart was her nightmares. Samuel Sewall would return to his beautifully furnished home early one winter evening in 1696 to find his wife anxiously awaiting him in the entry. Fifteen-year-old Betty Sewall had burst out sobbing just after dinner, upsetting her siblings. A line from the Gospel according to John ran over and over in her precocious mind; some Mather pages haunted her. She concluded she would go to hell, her prayers unheard, her sins unpardoned. (Again, the account is her father’s.) It was not Betty’s first yelp of terror. When she was seven, the tumultuous Judgment Day scenes in Isaiah had undone her. Her brother was similarly fretful when advised, at eleven, to prepare for death.

In Betty’s collision with John 8:21, Sewall sent for the eminent Samuel Willard, minister of Boston’s Third Church. Willard prayed for Betty, confused in her thinking and long in recovering. Six weeks later she sought out her father at dawn to report that she was destined for hell. For what should they pray? Sewall asked the distraught teenager at his bedside. In a rare case of a desire articulated out of the devil’s hearing, Betty wished for God to “give her a new heart.” In tears, on their knees, father and daughter together beseeched the heavens. Betty remained
inconsolable. In August she was packed off to Salem to recover at the home of her uncle Stephen, who several years earlier had taken in a girl suffering other agonies, nine-year-old Betty Parris. (Sewall made no connection between the muffled cries of one child and the piercing screams of another.) Betty Sewall wept through November. She was a reprobate. She did not love God’s people as she should. There was, she warned her father, no shred of hope for her salvation.

The distress was not altogether unwelcome. “I had rather find my children praying and weeping in a corner that they cannot love God more, than to have all the wealth in the world,” declared one minister in a popular text. Nor was Betty Sewall alone in her distress, part and parcel of a Puritan upbringing.
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The idea that life constituted a pilgrimage from sin to grace did not bode well for the formative years. It was never too soon to address one’s depravity, to meditate on death and damnation. The few early New England children’s books were accounts of the holy lives and exemplary deaths of the preteen set: the little girl who at four wept for her everlasting soul, the boy who repented at nine for his life of sin. The spasms of despair were frequent; a seventeenth-century New Englander knew as well as anyone ever has that we are all guilty of something. Lost in the 1688 witchcraft shuffle was John Goodwin’s remark on his daughter’s initial anguish; weeks before the phantom horseback riding, the teenager had groaned “that she was in the dark concerning her soul’s estate, and that she had misspent her precious time.” In respites between fits, a violently convulsing Groton sixteen-year-old admonished those gathered around to use their time to better purpose than she had done.

Piety correlated to literacy; especially in religious homes, mothers taught the children, servants, and slaves of the house to read. Writing
came later, if it came at all. Elizabeth Parris could write, a skill she likely passed on to the parsonage dependents. The village girls freely deciphered the diabolical books proffered them. Mary Warren could write well enough to fix the news of her (short-lived) recovery on the meetinghouse post. Young minds were suffused with the language and imagery of the book they knew best. And the disquieting sermons and baleful visions endured, as they were meant to; one did not easily tame the apocalyptic horses and blood-vomiting dragons of one’s youth. The great error came not in fixating on one’s miserable condition but in feeling secure. As ever, the thorny paradox of Puritanism loomed: to be confident of one’s salvation was to prove unworthy of it. As a modern scholar has noted, “To fail to be frightened was a sure sign that one was either spiritually lost, or stupid, or both.”
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The orthodox childhood may have been particularly steeped in fear; it is difficult to say if pious homes bore higher-strung children, as the ministers are the ones who left the diaries. Certainly the girls of the Salem village parsonage would have felt especially constrained, held to a higher standard by Parris’s expectations and the village’s attention. They made for a little city on a hill unto themselves, even if Parris did not devise the kind of incessant exercises Mather did. He never left the house without a parable or crossed a youngster’s path without a monitory word. He saw his children’s birthdays as occasions to offer up “lively and pungent admonitions”: What were their earthly errands, and how had they addressed them? When he warned five-year-old Katy that she should prepare for his imminent death he cautioned too that, as an orphan, she should brace herself for far greater trials.
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Like any besieged minority,
the Puritans paid emphatic, extravagant attention to their progeny, on whom their survival rested. They wrote compulsively on the subject.

Along with the apocalyptic imagery and the vivid descriptions of hell (if one night’s toothache was painful, imagine what it would feel like to roast for millions upon millions of years over everlasting fire!) were grisly tales like Mary Rowlandson’s, a kind of martyrdom porn to the impressionable youngster. Everyone knew a story about a dismembering or an abduction. That was especially true of the convulsing Salem girls, of whom at least half were refugees from or had been orphaned by attacks in “the last Indian war.” Mercy Lewis, the Putnam maid, had twice known tragedy, at three, when the Wabanaki torched her Maine town and abducted the women and children, again at sixteen, when she was orphaned in a second raid. (She dated her compact with Satan to just before that crisis.) A two-year-old might well recite stories from Scripture. But a three-year-old was sufficiently schooled in adult anxieties that he was said to warn from his cradle that the French—at war with England after 1689—were coming.

Terror rumbled close to the surface, erupting regularly. A neighbor who came to the doorstep with a carpet over his head could send the panicked children screaming through the house to their mother. And a full catalog of dangers beckoned close to home. As obsessively attentive as was a New England parent, she was also short-armed. Children swallowed pins, fell down wells, through ice, beneath barrels, under horses, upon knives, into fires, ponds, washtubs. For good reason, parents had nightmares about their children. (Samuel Sewall dreamed in 1695 that all but one were dead. He would bury eight.) Though healthier than their English counterparts, they regularly succumbed to disease; a Salem mother could count on losing two or three of her sons and daughters. Rebecca Nurse was a remarkable, possibly unforgivable, exception to that rule.

Thrifty with names, the Puritans bestowed few and recycled often; several children in a family might bear the name of a parent. It was not
uncommon to share one with a dead sibling.
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If that did not make you feel replaceable, the brother or sister who came along just behind you might. At twelve, Ann Putnam had lost her mother’s attention to younger siblings six times. She had viewed and sat vigil over miniature corpses and attended funerals, most recently one late in 1691 for her six-week-old sister. They were no less emotional for their regularity; the Sewall children wept freely on the return from burying a baby brother. A village girl could ably describe the dead as they lay in their coffins.