Six Women of Salem (12 page)

Wherever she originated from, she was certainly in Boston, where Samuel Parris moved after renting out his remaining plantation and leaving the Indies. In Boston he continued as a merchant of West India goods and, in 1680, married Elizabeth Eldridge, a woman a few years older than himself and a fellow member of Boston’s First Church. Their first child Thomas (named for Samuel’s father) was born 1681; the second, Elizabeth (called Betty) followed in 1682. Parris sought to change his career to minister, and for a time he delivered sermons to the congregation at Stow, which was temporarily between pastors after a dispute with a former minister over ownership of the parsonage. (Salem Village’s problems were not unique.)

Susanna Parris was born in Boston in January 1688, and by June the family seems to have moved to Salem Village. Now Tituba was responsible for keeping house (under Mistress Parris’s authority) in the parsonage on the Andover Road originally built for Reverend Burroughs. Set back from this dirt track and facing south to put its back against the winter winds, the house, with two rooms on each of two floors, four hearths, plus a garret and a cellar, was larger than many of the area houses, but it was a constrained space nonetheless.

Parris used one of the upstairs rooms for his study—meaning that John would have to carry firewood up there in the winter. To the left of the front entry was the parlor, which was also used as the master bedroom. To the right was the hall (the main room), and at some point a lean-to was added behind this. A door led from the hall down field-stone steps into the storage cellar that lay under the parlor. Tituba and John Indian, being slaves, probably slept in the garret.

At this time Parris owned three slaves: John Indian and Tituba as well as a young boy who died the following March. Parris noted this in his records but omitted a name—breathing property that had ceased to breathe. Under March 25, 1689, he wrote in the list of Village deaths: “My Negroe lad,” age fifteen.

There is some question whether, officially or informally, Tituba was married to John Indian, the other slave in the Parris household, or whether they simply worked in the same place. As Reverend Parris was unlikely to have countenanced extramarital goings-on under his roof, it is reasonable to assume that his slaves were properly married (as was legal, despite their vulnerable status). Reverend John Hale, an eye witness from the neighboring town of Beverly, referred to Parris’s “Indian Man servant, and his Wife.” (The presence of a “young John” in the same Barbadian inventory list of slave children as “Tattuba” invites speculation, but John was an exceedingly common name.)

The family had moved from Boston just when John Goodwin’s children were acting bewitched, blaming an old woman in their neighborhood for sending tormenting spirits after them. News of Goody Glover’s arrest and trial (in Governor Andros’s courts) reached Salem Village along with news that she had confessed. The woman was hanged the following November, though the afflicted children did not recover for some months afterward.

What did Tituba think of this?

The native West Indians, Africans, Algonquians, and Europeans shared an acceptance of the spirit world’s reality. How far any of the spirits might be trusted was another matter, however. The general Christian view was that good angels looked after humans in secret, that fallen evil angels (devils) worked their harm in a multitude of ways, that the souls of the dead went on to judgment, and that wandering spirits who were trying to get a mortal’s attention were not to be trusted, no matter what they pretended. In folk belief, however, people assumed that occasional contact between humans and good (or, at least, neutral) spirits was safe enough. Living humans ran the gamut from good to evil, with most in between—so why not disembodied spirits?

In European and non-European cultures some experts trafficked in magic, with the intention to do good or at least to counteract someone else’s harm. Some in England called them white witches or cunning folk. In New England that was too close to witches of the evil kind, people who allied themselves to the Devil and swore to do the Devil’s work. But even people who did not think that what they did fell under the risky category of magic worked countercharms to ward off evil that others sent—to the exasperation of their ministers, who warned them that such foolery encouraged the imps they should avoid.

In Barbados once, at Newton Plantation in the southern part of the island, a slave woman about twenty years old died of lead poisoning. Her fellow slaves were allowed to bury their own dead, which they did in a series of mounds in the burying ground. Yet they placed her body apart from all the others, without a coffin or grave goods, face down in the earth, with the grave cut into the bedrock itself to prevent her from sitting up and escaping. In life she probably experienced painful cramps and spasms, which sound more like the symptoms of being bewitched than bewitching. Nonetheless, unlike the other mounds in that place, this one was never used to bury anyone else. Thus, witchcraft was feared in Barbados as well as in New England.

Besides avoiding the Boston witch scare, Samuel’s relocation of his family allowed them to avoid the turmoil of April 1689, when the town revolted against Sir Edmund Andros. Parris, meanwhile, was negotiating a contract with the Village to determine what material support he would receive in return for ministering to the Village’s spiritual needs on a permanent basis. Parris and the committees met again and again as they discussed firewood, provisions, and, at last, ownership of the parsonage, a recurring difficult matter not unique to Salem Village. Because Parris planned to remain with the Village permanently, the committee granted him ownership of the parsonage. He then purchased more acreage in the Village, probably building the lean-to off the back of the hall around this time.

Finally, on November 19, 1689, Parris was at last ordained in the meetinghouse. That cold day, if Tituba did not have to stay at home to tend the baby, then she may have sat in the gallery with the other slaves, servants, and hired help. Some chilled folk may have brought little foot-warmer fire boxes or a warm dog to ward against the uncompromising draughts as the Village watched the neighboring ­ministers—Nicholas Noyes of Salem, Samuel Phillips of Rowley, and John Hale of Beverly—place their hands upon Parris’s head in blessing and charge him to serve faithfully before they offered the right hand of fellowship. Parris had to shorten his ordination sermon, however, because the weather was so bitter, in order to allow the new members of this just-formed church to sign their names in the church record book before the ink froze.

Later that same winter Canadian forces began making deadly forays against New York, New Hampshire, and Maine, leaving the rest of the region fearful of attack. While Sir William Phips led a fleet of Massachusetts militia to take Port Royal in April 1690, locals worried not only about possible raiding parties but also about the French-speaking Jersey folk among them and the possibility of a slave revolt. (Both Reverend Parris and Tituba would have been mindful of the thwarted slave revolt in Barbados.) Some people in Newbury thought Isaac Morrell, a local blacksmith, should
not
have been put in charge of one of the garrisons, and their worry grew into rumors that he and other Jerseymen intended to join with fellow French-speaking Canadians and local slaves to destroy the province.

Tituba and John must have heard these rumors as well as that “Isaac Morrell the Jerseyman” was arrested for treason. Several people from Newbury, both free and slave, testified against him, including thirty-year-old James, who had run away from Richard Dole. Caught by the watch, James claimed that Morrell and George Mosher, another Jerseyman, had tempted him to join the rebels. “Mr. Moodey’s Indian servant Joseph” likewise named Mosher and described how the man had said that a ship would sail into the river the following summer to take him to freedom. Twenty-year-old Robert Negro, nicknamed Robin, said that Morrell had told him in 1689 “that all the English should be cut off and the Negroes should be free.” He also said that in April, when the local fleet was heading for Nova Scotia, that Morrell and Mosher “persuaded me and all the Negroes to go away with him and George Mosher for they intended to take a vessel out of the dock at Newbury and go for Canada and join with the French against the English, and so come down with the French and Indians upon the backside of the country and destroy all the English and save none but only the Negro and Indian servants.”

Despite these allegations, Morrell and Mosher were evidently
not
found guilty, and no such attack ensued. Was any part of it true? Or was it wishful thinking on the part of Robin Negro and his fellow slaves? Or did the story escalate when local slaves took what seemed a real opportunity to escape and then, once captured, spun a story built on current neighborhood fears in order to deflect punishment? Even if they did not believe the plot rumor themselves, their stories could work some kind of secondhand revenge or at least make life more difficult for a community who considered them chattel. After all, slaves could not easily play fair in so unfair a circumstance as enslavement.

This would give all the local slaves something to think about. Although servants, whether slave or free, could legally take their masters to court, this was seldom practical. Yet they had ample opportunity to make their masters’ lives miserable. Some pilfered, some committed arson, and some slipped ratsbane into the family’s food. But most did none of these things—the risks were too high; any rebellious servant, slave or free, could be “corrected” with a blow or a beating. Few masters, however, were as brutal as Peter Tufts of Malden, who tied a free, white, male servant to a tree and beat him with the thick end of an ox goad, a rod used to urge on cattle.
(Neighbors reported this, and Tufts ended up in court.)

The term “servant” included any employee (like hired mariners and fisherman or shop clerks); field hands and domestic help; bond servants obliged to serve for a specified length of time, usually to repay a debt; apprentices learning a trade; and people permanently or indefinitely enslaved. Freedom
was
possible for this last category, though it was rare; a few free black families lived in Boston at least.

The number of slaves in Massachusetts was far fewer than in the West Indies, with its massive sugar industry, and their offspring were less an increase on an investment than just another mouth to feed. Some estimates suggest that, by 1700, there was one slave to every ninety free folk in Massachusetts. The earliest definite reference to their presence is 1638, when Governor John Winthrop noted that the Salem ship
Desire
had returned from the West Indies (where it had sold captured Pequot men, prisoners of war) and brought back “salt, cotton, tobacco and Negroes.” Most slaves seem to have lived in the few towns, two or three at most in the households that owned them. The women worked at domestic tasks, the men at farming and crafts or as deckhands or cooks on fishing voyages. Owners might rent or lend a slave to friend, family member, or neighbor. Individual slaves are difficult to trace, with their presence known randomly in court records or probate inventories, itemized with other “property.”

After an uneasy truce, more frontier raids struck Eastward in 1691, just as Tituba went about her work at the parsonage and John tended to the crops and livestock in the barn and fields.

Alongside Mistress Parris at times and always under her direction, Tituba worked in and around the ministry house. She cleaned for the family—swept and scrubbed floors, polished the copper pots in the lean-to, and boiled and scrubbed and wrung out laundry and spread it to dry over bushes. She worked in the kitchen garden in season, tended the hens and milked the cow, and set the milk in pans to separate the cream, which she then churned into butter.

Tituba cooked for the family—sallets and stews (but not the pepper-pot of the islands), fresh peas in season, and pease porridge the rest of the year. She baked bread and maybe even set beer and cider to ferment in the cellar beneath the hall.

In Barbados the task was to keep a house and its inhabitants cool. In New England, however, though summer had spells of tropical ­humidity, keeping a household warm in the winter was the great ­concern.

That same year Parris discovered that the committees with which he had negotiated were no longer in charge, having been replaced by men who disagreed with what had seemed to be settled. Taxes everywhere in the province fell behind during the uncertain times, and the local rates that ought to have paid to Parris as his yearly salary went largely uncollected. By the fall of 1691 the parsonage began to run out of wood—the only fuel supply.

Parris had to remind his parishioners of this as the weather grew colder. Sleet and freezing rain at the beginning of November was replaced by bitter wind-driven snow at midmonth, followed by more snow and more hail. Fires in the parsonage hearths grew scant.

The rates committee decided that the parsonage did
not
belong to Parris after all and that his pay might be raised by
voluntary
donations instead of the agreed-upon amount, which was already in arrears. Tituba’s master attended meeting after meeting with increasing irritation and suspicion. His ordination bound him to the Village Church, but a significant part of the congregation was acting against him.

If the master’s future was uncertain, what could the slaves expect? Home was not secure, and the wilderness was full of unseen enemies.

Only the increasing cold was certain.

Mary spits on the brass dial and gives it a final rub to make it gleam. . . .
There.

She admires the nesting circles cut into the flat square plate, the arc of numbers, and the circling stars—wheels within wheels, beautiful and mysterious.

The sundial stands on a fence post set in the yard in front of the house on the farm that a large productive family works, and
none
of it is hers. Although she admires the beauty of the dial, she thinks also how extravagant it is. The thing won’t show the time unless the sun shines, and if the sun shines, you can look at the sun itself to tell the time—or close enough.