Six Women of Salem
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Authors: Marilynne K. Roach
Tags: #The Untold Story of the Salem Witch Trials
I can say before my Eternal father I am innocent, & God will clear my innocency.
—
Rebecca Nurse
MARILYNNE K. ROACH
Gallows and Graves:
The Search to Locate the Death and Burial Sites
of the People Executed for Witchcraft in 1692 (1997)
The Salem Witch Trials:
A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege (2002)
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
Bernard Rosenthal, editor in chief,
M. K. Roach, associate editor (2009)
children’s non-fiction
In the Days of the Salem Witchcraft Trials
(1996)
T
HE
S
ALEM
WITCH
TRIALS
consumed over twenty communities in 1692, dragged at least 162 people (and their reputations) before the law, tried 52, condemned 30, and put 20 to death—19 by hanging and 1 by pressing to induce a proper plea. At least 5 more died in prison.
In addition, at least seventy people were considered to be the afflicted victims of witchcraft—the suffering prey of evil magic—whereas three times that number risked their own lives by adding their names to petitions or speaking on behalf of the accused.
All of this stands as statistics, typical or atypical of witchcraft panics, based on records that are sometimes full, sometimes scanty. Not all the records have survived, although the Salem cases are often better documented than other cases elsewhere. Overlooked documents continue to appear—having been misfiled or transcribed in fragments from lost papers printed in obscure, rediscovered volumes.
The stories are preserved in the court documents and the contemporary commentary published soon after the trials. These have passed into American folklore as hardly believable events played out by incomprehensible characters who accuse one another (or several others) of unprovable crimes, all of whom are portrayed as symbols and stereotypes rather than real people like ourselves.
Yet the tragedy and turmoil of 1692 fed on basic human emotions and weaknesses, and the trials touched people personally as individuals—people with real stories, real lives, real suffering, and real deaths.
After each person affected had died—of old age, of illness, or by the hangman’s rope—their families preserved the stories of their loved one’s fortitude or fell silent with a willful forgetting that buried an inconvenient memory, bestowing ignorance on succeeding generations.
The relative obscurity of some of these lives challenges our ability to reconstruct them. Even the bare vital records of birth, marriage, and death are missing in many instances. Some were well remembered by their families and towns. Others would have escaped all written notice had it not been for their presence in the court records. Often the known lives of the people around them—such as the more public lives of fathers and husbands that suggest the private world of woman’s work—give greater hints into their lives.
This book follows six such individuals, all women, for in Western culture most witch suspects were women. Although in 1692 several men were arrested for suspected witchcraft as well, as a few had been earlier, unlike most recorded historical events of the time, this one
centered
around the region’s women—the bewitched, the accusers, the accused.
The six are Rebecca Nurse, Bridget Bishop, Mary English, Ann Putnam Sr., Tituba, and Mary Warren. Together they represent accusers and accused or both in one; married and single; rich, poor, and middling; free and slave; hopeful and desperate. The Introductions chapter presents them chronologically by (approximate) age, with the backstory of their lives up to the point when the witch scare began. Then their stories are woven throughout the events of that tragic year, with their individual experiences comprising the focus of the narrative.
All of this is based on fact, even the fictionalized sections recreating the characters’ thoughts, and these are clearly marked by italicized text. Spelling is somewhat standardized in these fictionalized passages but kept close to the original in the body of the text. For example, “y
e
” becomes “the” (as it was pronounced), and “y
t
” becomes “that.”
Old-style dates that indicate the year beginning in March, written 1691/92 for example, are treated as new style, with the year beginning in January of 1692.
I have made every effort to the best of my ability to obtain proper permissions and credits for the material presented here as noted in the endnotes, bibliography, and captions. If anything has been omitted, it will be corrected in future editions.
All lives are stories, and history is made of stories.
Introductions
____________________
Rebecca, holding the basket while her mother contemplates the fishmonger’s display, listens, despite herself, to the market women’s gossip.
“Black Shuck?” one says to a young sailor from somewhere else. “Oh, aye, you’d best be careful of that one. He roams the long sands, and those who meet the creature and live to tell the tale—and not all do, mind—commonly die within the year.”
Rebecca, like everyone else in Great Yarmouth, has heard the tale of the spectral hound that haunts the barrier beach between the town and the waves. Such fearsome spirits prowl Britain’s lonely places, the dark roads where travelers hear a quiet footfall behind them, moving when they move, stopping when they stop. Some brave enough to turn and face it report blazing red eyes. In other parts folk call them Bargest or Boggart, Padfoot or Pooka, and wonder if they are really devils in the shape of dogs.
A second woman nods in agreement, and the sailor looks alarmed.
“The creature doesn’t always stay just on the beach,” says the oldest of the fishwives. “When I was a girl there was a terrible day one summer. Storms rolled in with wind and tempests and lightning. And even though it was a Sabbath, Black Shuck rampaged through the countryside. Over the border in Sussex he burst into the church at Blythburg—during a service!—rushed up the nave between the people, and wrung the necks of two unfortunates as they kneeled at prayer. Then he collapsed the church tower right through the roof. But that wasn’t enough for the fiend. Within the hour he broke through the doors of the church at Bengay. And to this day both churches have the devil’s fingerprints scorched into the wood of their north doors. Scorched!”
The sailor tries not to look frightened as the old women nod sagely. Locals know enough to fear Black Shuck.
Rebecca’s mother drops a haddock into the basket and bids her with mild rebuke to come along now. It is impossible not to overhear—fishwives have loud voices. Rebecca follows, shivering a little at the thought of spectral hounds. Fortunately, she has never encountered Shuck in all her fifteen years, and soon her family will be gone from Yarmouth. They are moving to New England, and things are different there.
____________________
T
HE
G
REAT
Y
ARMOUTH
of
Rebecca
’s childhood was a long, narrow, medieval city crowded between its ancient walls and the River Yare. The mass of small brick and stone houses shouldered each other along a few streets that followed the curve of the river. The Rows, a multitude of alleys, connected these streets like teeth on a comb, fanning downslope westward so rain could wash household swill and cess to the Yare and outgoing tide on the one hand and allow easterly breezes to shift the air between the cramped Rows on the other. Passages were only five to three feet across (or less), so carts ran on two tandem wheels, and law required house doors to open inward to protect passersby.
More space opened up along the Quay and in the Market Place and even more around the parish Church of Saint Nicholas. Six hundred years old and larger than many cathedrals, it stood anchored on wooden piles sunk into the sandy earth, its stones built and rebuilt around its tower, its art and ornament periodically repaired, replaced, or swept away. Over three centuries before, a furious sea had broken over the town’s protective dunes, surging over the walls and throughout the streets, four feet deep within the church itself. Human whims made their mark as well, when newer styles replaced old adornments on a caprice of fashion, disregarding the past enough to use old stone coffins in a staircase. In the middle of the previous century much of the art was removed or destroyed, considered too frivolous for a house of God, idolatrous distractions from true religion. When William Towne, a gardener, married Joanna Blessing here on April 25, 1620, the light of the North Sea fell through clear windows unencumbered by color, and only a pile of bright, shattered glass remained forgotten under a stair. And it was here that their firstborn was baptized Rebecca on February 21, 1621, in the ancient octagonal font of Purbeck marble—a limestone bearing ghostly fossils of fish and shells, antediluvian wonders.
Times were hard as Rebecca grew—learned to walk, learned to help with household tasks, learned to care for younger siblings as they were born, learned to read and attend to matters of her soul. Three years of heavy rains began the year of her birth, ruining harvest after harvest until 1623, when her short-lived brother John was born. By then, overseers of the poor could hardly help the aged and infirm of their parishes; poor families took to sheep stealing, and some folk ate dog. Crops improved eventually, but in 1625, when sister Susanna was born—and soon died—plague oppressed the region. Once that ended, harvests declined again beginning in 1628, when brother Edmund was born—and lived.