Six Women of Salem (16 page)

She peers out the small window at the dusky street, wondering how long before Edward will return home with his muddy boots. Instead of seeing Edward, however, she sees the Shattuck woman with that strange boy of hers dragging behind, tugging on his mother’s hand as if the street were full of obstacles. Bridget is never sure if he acts that way on purpose or not. Goody Shattuck pulls the lad along, her shoulders slumped, looking utterly weary. Feeling sorry for that family would be easier if they did not blame
her
for the boy’s afflictions. She picks up her granddaughter and hugs her close. At least this child is well, but the threats that surround them are still out there—not least of which is the threat of neighborhood witch suspicions.

____________________

A
woman at the lower end of the social scale arrived around this time at Samuel Parris’s door, a pipe in her mouth, an infant in her arms, and a four-year-old girl in tow. She was Sarah Good, a married woman nevertheless reduced to begging for her children’s sake. Having to ask galled her, for she had begun life as the daughter of a much better off innkeeper and then slowly descended into greater and greater poverty as first one husband died in debt and then a second proved inept at supporting his family, as her pride soured to resentment.

Tituba may have answered the door, but it was her master’s place to decide on charity. He gave Sarah something for the child and watched the woman depart as she muttered in a tone more resentful than thankful. Betty and Abigail probably watched the encounter and heard the grumbling. Had the tattered woman uttered a curse? Did the girls frighten themselves all the more with speculations? Later the adults would recall that the malady the two suffered—whatever it was—grew worse around this time.

Sarah Good seldom attended meeting—”for want of cloase,” she would say—but she could well have agreed with one of Reverend Parris’s statements in his next sacrament sermon. “It is a woeful piece of corruption in an evil time, when the wicked prosper, & the godly party meet with vexations,” he proclaimed, perhaps thinking of the stubborn rates committee or of the more vicious frontier attacks. (Tituba, in the gallery, might wonder about the wickedness of slave catching, of families lost and separated.) Yet misfortune, Parris continued, “teacheth us to War a good warfare, to subdue all our Spiritual enemies.” It fell to him, then, as their minister to separate “the precious & the vile” within the congregation, “to encourage & comfort” those who followed God’s laws and “to refuse & reject” those who did not. Within this struggle, however, no one should think that God had forsaken them, that they were overwhelmed like a sinking ship. “The Church may meet with storms, but it will never sink. For Christ sits not idle in the Heavens, but takes the most faithful care of his little Ship . . . bound for the Port of Heaven.”

But why
did
the wicked prosper? After receiving communion that day Ann most likely joined many of the neighboring women at the home of her cousin-in-law Hannah Putnam, who was near her time of giving birth. Women would gather at such occasions to offer practical help and moral support, to share the tasks of easing the mother as well as the child during an event that displayed both the power and the utter vulnerability of women. It was Hannah’s travail, a time of pain and effort and danger. Any number of complications, from a breech birth to the mother’s convulsions, could end in the death of both mother and child—more reminders for Ann of her dead sisters and their dead children.

Hannah was no stranger to what she might expect, as this was her eleventh child (and there would be more in years to come). Her husband Jonathan’s task was to fetch the midwife and then get out from under foot—this was women’s work. Custom and modesty did not encourage the presence of men.

Whether Hannah’s children were sent away for further privacy is likely, but many customs are not clear, being that they were what everyone knew and few wrote down. In the weeks before the birth Hannah, besides preparing the childbed linen and baby clothes, would have brewed groaning beer and baked groaning cakes, traditional refreshments for her company. The birth was serious, but the women may as well enjoy what they could when they could.

If she were still well enough and if the weather not too severe, Rebecca Nurse may have attended as well, offering her years of experience in childbearing and childrearing. But Ann found no comfort in Rebecca’s presence. What chance remark, quirk of personality, or misunderstanding had caused the original misgiving is lost; perhaps Rebecca had once commented on the deaths of Ann’s children as being God’s will, an unfathomable sorrow that had to be endured. In any case, Ann did not trust Goodwife Nurse for all that the old woman was supposed to be saved.

Of the other children born in the Village that winter, Ann had likely helped when Mary Putnam, wife of Thomas’s brother Edward, gave birth to baby Prudence, but perhaps not a few days later, when Rebecca Nurse’s daughter Mary Tarbell gave birth to a son, much less when the beggar Sarah Good had produced a second daughter back in December.

Hannah survived her labor and delivered a daughter. So much could go wrong, if not at birth then in infancy or, if the child survived that, then in young childhood and beyond from accident or disease, from any number of material ailments, and also from ailments from the Invisible World—from evil magic.

The girls at the parsonage certainly were not well and did not improve. Local doctors came and went, offering nostrums, until one of them, assumed to be William Griggs, who lived on the east side of the Village toward Beverly, spoke of the possible cause that must already have whispered in the backs of people’s minds. The girls are “under an Evil Hand,” he observed—under the spell of someone who directed evil magic toward them.

This was by no means certain, even to the fearful parents who accepted the reality of such a possibility, as was true of nearly everyone of the era. That it
might
be so in any particular case was a matter for caution, even doubt, and prayer was the proper course to take. Although word of this doctor’s diagnosis spread through the neighborhood, both Mr. and Mrs. Parris felt they could leave the children at home in the care of Tituba and John on the lecture day of Thursday, February 25.

On that day their neighbor Goodwife Mary Sibley visited the parsonage, but not to see Reverend or Mrs. Parris; rather, as she explained to Tituba and John, she had come across the fields out of concern for the suffering children. There was a method that might relieve them, she said, something that Reverend Parris had probably not tried—a little folk magic (she would not have named it so plainly), an
antidote
to someone else’s harmful magic, a way to
repel
the hurt. Reverend Parris needn’t know about this.

Tituba knew that Goody Sibley was considered a Christian woman and was a full member of the Salem Village Church. A bit of benign magic, or whatever the people in New England called it, surely could do no harm and might at last relieve the girls’ symptoms by identifying their cause.

Under Goody Sibley’s direction John and Tituba proceeded to concoct a “witch-cake,” as the neighbor called it—an
anti
–witch-cake, more like it. Magic did not just happen—it was caused. So who caused
this
problem?

To make the witch-cake, one must take some of the victim’s urine (a part of the sufferer easily separated from her body, a part imbued with the baleful magic sent against her), mix it with rye meal (a cheaper flour), and form it into a small cake. Bake this in the hot ashes on the hearth, and when done, feed it to the dog. This they did while Betty and Abigail (though their whereabouts are not specified) probably looked on, wondering what would come of the piss-pot recipe, likely realizing then, if they had not before, that adults were convinced that someone was sending
maleficia
at them—some witch—for who else could do it? The dog—whether the Parris dog or the Sibley’s is not stated—ate the cooked dough. This biting and digesting of the cake that contained a part of the patient and, thereby, a part of the person who sent the magic against the patient ought to hurt the responsible witch. Ideally the guilty party would be drawn to the place where this was happening or at least would feel pain themselves.

The known result from Goody Sibley’s advice was that the girls felt worse, frightened that there really
was
a witch or witches coming after them. (The records are silent on what Thomas and Susanna Parris did, saw, or where they were.)

Now Tituba had even more to deal with, and when the master and mistress returned she did not dare tell them of Goody Sibley’s visit. The girls had seen her make the witch-cake after all and that magic had not helped a bit. Would they blame
her
for worsening the situation? For Betty and Abigail, in addition to feeling jabs and pinches, now said they saw shadowy forms and concluded that these were entities causing the pains. The sensations were not merely twinges to them but rather the result of someone actively pinching or striking them.

Perhaps when Betty and Abigail reported phantoms an adult asked if they recognized who it was and they blamed Tituba. They certainly reported that Tituba’s specter followed them and clawed at them when she was nowhere near them. When she was out of the room and out of their sight, Tituba learned, the girls knew where she was and what she was doing, leaving her to wonder if Goody Sibley’s charm
had
opened the girls’ eyes to the Invisible World. Something was loosed, for now the girls contorted with arms, legs, necks, and backs, as they twisted from side to side under some force more fearful than epilepsy, or they gagged and gasped as if something invisible to all but themselves were choking them. Tituba herself was now in an even more precarious position than slavery alone could impose.

Alarmingly, two other Village girls were similarly afflicted on the day of the witch-cake: Dr. Griggs’s niece Betty Hubbard as well as Ann Putnam Jr. How fast had word of the witch-cake charm spread, and by whom?

If Reverend Parris had not already consulted with other area ministers, he did so now, for soon after Goody Sibley’s visit several ministers and town leaders assembled at the parsonage. They saw the girls’ convulsions and saw how the choking stopped them from speaking, from answering their questions. The cause, they feared, was “preturnatural,” as Reverend John Hale of Beverly noted, for they “feared the hand of Satan was in them.” Satan’s human agent was another matter, however. The ministers advised Parris to pray for an answer and to “sit still and wait upon the Providence of God to see what time might discover.”

Then they questioned Tituba.

What about the witch-cake? they wanted to know. Tituba admitted that she had made such a thing, but she did not mention Goody Sibley. “Her Mistress in her own Country was a Witch,” she said, as Hale remembered it, for Mistress Pearhouse was safely distant. That woman had taught her ways to reveal real witches, to
prevent
their evil magic. Tituba herself was
not
a witch, she insisted.

Apparently the accuracy of the children’s accusations was not entirely believed just yet. Tituba remained in the same household, though the girls’ maladies did not cease.

Tituba was accused, and Tituba had helped make the witch-cake, but she was not alone in the process. Parris, writing a few weeks later, after he had questioned his slaves and after he discovered the neighbor’s involvement, referred to “the making of a cake by my Indian Man, who had his directions from this our Sister Mary Sibley.”

Robert Calef, writing a few years later, noted that “Mr. Parris’s Indian Man and Woman made a Cake of Rye Meal, with the Children’s Water, and Baked it in the Ashes, and, as is said, gave it to the Dog; this was done as a means to Discover Witchcraft.”

Reverend Hale of Beverly also noted the incident a few years later. Parris, he wrote, “had also an Indian Man servant, and his Wife who afterwards confessed, that without the knowledge of their Master or Mistress, they had taken some of the Afflicted persons Urine, and mixing it with meal had made a Cake, & baked it, to find out the Witch, as they said.” After that was when the girls accused Tituba of pinching them.

John was mentioned more often than Tituba, but the girls did not cry out against him. As an adult left in charge of the children, Tituba would have had to discipline them from time to time, order them about at least. Yet as a slave with the status of property, she had no authority of her own. Were one or both of the girls showing resentment or a genuine, if misplaced, fear? Had one called for the woman and Parris interpreted the spoken name as the answer to the question of who hurt her? Did the girls identify the specters they claimed they saw before or after an adult suggested names for them? And once the parents took the remarks as accusations and seconded them with their own belief, the girls might well think that adult approval proved the supposition and came to believe what, after all, had been a question rather than a certain statement.

Gossip flew across the Village, spreading the word that the ailing girls were bewitched. Rebecca Nurse heard of the malady in the minister’s family and remembered a time years beforehand when she too had suffered convulsive fits. Visiting the family would be the neighborly thing to do, but she feared that her own fits would reoccur if she saw the girls when one or both were in a seizure.

Beginning Thursday, the very day of the witch-cake, Dr. Grigg’s niece Elizabeth Hubbard began to act afflicted as well. She would have heard of his earlier diagnosis of the evil hand, and this seemed to prove it. Also on Thursday, Ann Putnam witnessed her daughter, her namesake, begin to flinch away from some invisible menace, some spirit that neither she nor Thomas could perceive. They could only guess where it was by their daughter’s reactions, guess what it was doing by their daughter’s words and motions. Something, someone, kept pushing a book at the child, a book to sign her name in—the Devil’s Book of his member witches, a base mockery of the church record book that listed Thomas and Ann’s own names when they had joined.