Six Women of Salem (18 page)

Yes, says Tituba, but she refused to comply with the witches even though they threatened to slit her own throat; instead, they flew her back to the parsonage. This was her spirit, of course. Family prayers were still in progress on her return, interrupted by a swarm of the witches’ familiars: a bird with a woman’s head, the yellow bird, a three-foot-tall creature on two legs and hairy all over, Osborn’s yellow dog, Good’s cat.

Abigail Williams interrupts to say that was the very bird-woman she saw last evening in her uncle’s house.

“Why did you not tell your master?” the magistrate asks. Reverend Parris looks as if he wonders as well.

“I was afraid. They said they would cut off my head if I told.”

Magistrate Corwin’s own son had been hurt recently, but she denies any involvement.

“Did you never practice witchcraft in your own country?”

“No. Never before now.” Somehow she has gotten around to confessing, to being not just the witches’ victim but also a collaborator. Yes, she had seen Good and Osborn work evil magic earlier this morning but not now in court. Yes, Sarah Good sent the wolf to chase Elizabeth Hubbard. The questions go on and on. Yes, yes, to whatever they ask. She hardly hears what they say anymore.

“What clothes doth the man appear unto you in?”

“Black clothes sometimes”—not unlike a minister’s garb—“sometimes a serge coat of another color. A tall man with white hair, I think.”

“What apparel does the woman wear?” Who were the specters from Boston?

“I don’t know what color.” Would these questions never stop?

“What kind of clothes hath she?”

Tituba has to tell them something. “A black silk hood with a white silk hood under it, with top knots. Which woman I know not, but have seen her in Boston when I lived there.”

“What clothes the little woman?”

“A serge coat,” she says, meaning a petticoat, “with a white cap, as I think.”

Despite her cooperation, the afflicted girls begin to writhe again.

“Do you see who it is that torments these children now?”

“Yes, it is Goody Good. She hurts them in her own shape.”

The girls agree, and Elizabeth Hubbard contorts again.

“And who is it that hurts them now?”

“I am blind now. I cannot see.” And she is mute as well to their endless questions. She too convulses in imitation or in fear, unable to go on, as afflicted as the girls. When she calms she tells them that Good and Osborn had attacked her, punishing her for her story.

The magistrates order Tituba and the other two prisoners held for future trial. Osborn and Tituba are to be taken to the jail in Salem town and Good to the other county jail in Ipswich on the morrow.

From her seat on a bench in the crowded meeting house Mrs. Ann Putnam has had an entirely different view of the proceedings from Tituba.

For days she has had to watch while her daughter fought off invisible spirits, as she cried in pain and terror at what her parents could not protect her from. Annie had been attacked again this morning before the hearing and then again in court when those three dreadful women came in. It breaks her heart to think her child has to endure this, yet she feels proud that Annie stands up to the witches even so. Stands up and speaks her mind—she is so like her father in that, like Thomas, who works tirelessly to bring the culprits to justice.

Those women—the first two with the brass to deny what was so obvious to all the onlookers, what was evident before their very eyes. Only the heathen slave had the decency to confess, which was a mercy, as it gave the victims some relief and verified Annie’s tale of the knife. But the two unnamed women and the man from Boston—who are
they
? The thought that more of the Devil’s helpers are out there, somewhere, makes her shiver. Today’s ordeal did not end the problem—what more must they face?

As the meeting house empties, Anne pulls her daughter to her, wishing she could protect her from the unseen terrors, as they watch the prisoners be taken away. A deputy struggles to balance Sarah Good on the back of his horse while she yells insults and resists, hampered by the infant in her arms. Will Good, looking sheepish, holds their older girl’s hand. The child tries to break free, calling for her mother, then stamps her foot—her mother in miniature—demanding to be let go. As the deputy carries Sarah away, the little girl bursts into desperate tears, calling and calling. Watching the scene would break a heart of stone—if you didn’t know what those Goods are.

____________________

A
t least four people took notes during the hearings of March 1: farmer Ezekiel Cheever, Thomas Putnam’s young half-brother Joseph Putnam, and magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. The written records would be used in the women’s eventual trials, whenever those could take place. Massachusetts would have to wait for its government to reform before it would be legal, or at least wise, to do more than a preliminary legal investigation while the original Charter of Massachusetts Bay was still in suspension and England deemed the province as lacking a recognized government. Some prisoners, found guilty of capital crimes back when Andros was in charge, still waited in the Boston jail for sentencing.

Rebecca Nurse’s children brought the news home to her, who was likely still as concerned as the rest of the Villagers at the unusual prospect of multiple witches. Details of Tituba’s confession describing the Devil as a black dog must have sounded alarmingly familiar. Four times the Devil had appeared to Tituba as the dog, they told their mother. The beast demanded that she serve him, but the slave had been afraid and resisted. “He said,” Tituba had explained at the hearing, that “if I did not, he would do worse to me.” It sounded all too plausible, so like the tales of Black Shuck back in Yarmouth.

Sarah Good was kept overnight at Constable Joseph Herrick’s place before being transferred to the Ipswich jail, but Tituba and Goody Osborn were carted off to Salem.

Once the prisoners reached the harbor, word of their arrival would spread as swiftly as gossip, drawing idlers and concerned citizens alike to watch them pass through the gate into the jail’s yard and leaving the town wondering at the presence of evil in their midst. Those who missed the hearing could quiz those who had been there for the particulars. If Bridget Bishop saw the cart pass, she would be right to wonder what comparisons her neighbors might draw between those prisoners and herself, considering her past problems with the law. Mary English, living further along the peninsula than the cart’s path, would hear the news soon enough, but did she think of the insults long since flung at her own mother and worry about her own reputation, or did she worry only about the spiritual safety of her own small children?

Salem’s jail was a square wooden building 20 feet to a side with 13-foot studs (so it may have accommodated two stories) set inside a yard measuring 70 feet along the lane and extending 280 feet back, with a fence surrounding it all. A brick chimney with one fireplace heated the building in winter. Iron bars on the windows and a lock on the door kept the prisoners in—although one man had dug himself free under the building’s sill a few years earlier, suggesting the lack of a basement level. The dungeon mentioned in some records probably meant the common room on the ground floor. Judging from various testimony, the jail certainly had more than one room. The jailer, William Dounton, and his family lived nearby in the house of correction, where minor wrong-doers were taught the value of hard work and where the jailer rented a chamber or two to prisoners who could afford to pay for better lodgings. Less dangerous prisoners could exercise within the yard. Ordinarily prisoners remained incarcerated only until the next Quarterly Court sitting if they were not released on bail. The whole complex was only nine years old and in relatively good repair.

After a night in jail Tituba and Osborn again faced the magistrates, or at least Jonathan Corwin, who made extensive notes, joined by Reverend John Hale of Beverly as an observer. Each prisoner kept to her original story, with the older woman insisting on her innocence and Tituba obediently spinning further details of the Devil’s demands. The specter had claimed to be God, but she did not believe him, saying, “I tould him I ask my maister & would have gone up but he stopt mee & would nott lett me.” She told them that the Devil and his witches had met again the following Wednesday just before prayer time, and that was when they took her unwilling spirit and
forced
her to hurt the girls. “I would nott hurt Betty, I loved Betty, but [they] hall me & make me pinch Betty & the next Abigall.”

The Devil brought his book in his pocket, she said, but Tituba’s answers as to when and how she signed it were not clear. “I made a marke in the Book & made itt wth red like Bloud,” she said, but she would not say what the red liquid was. The Devil “give me a pin Tyed in a stick to doe itt wth, butt he noe Lett me bloud wth itt as yett butt Intended another Time when he Come againe.”

“Did you See any other marks in his book?” asked the magistrate.

“Yes,” said Tituba, “yes a great many some marks red, Some yellow, he opened his book a great many marks in itt.”

“Did he tell you the Names of [them]?” They knew she could not read.

“[Y]es of Two noe more Good & Osburne & he Say thay make the marks in that book & he showed them mee.”

“[H]ow many marks doe you think there was?”

“Nine,” said Tituba.

“[D]id thay Write there Names?”

“[T]hay Made marks, Goody Good Sayd she made hir mark, butt Goody Osburne Would nott Tell she was Cross to mee.”

So now the magistrates had nine witches to worry about, not just the four mentioned earlier.

Then Tituba convulsed, being afflicted, the magistrates assumed, by some invisible spirit. When she came to she said that Good and Osborn had attacked her in retaliation for revealing their guilt. The magistrates took this at face value, and perhaps Tituba assumed it as well. Certainly the other two suspects resented her accusations. Good had made very public remarks about the worthlessness of testimony from a mere Indian; as low as Good was in the public esteem, Tituba was lower.

Now, however, the court valued Tituba’s voice, as the magistrates believed her and considered the other two to be liars. Hathorne and Corwin were impressed that the stories Tituba told were consistent from day to day. The other two women seemed to be making excuses, with their statements contradictory.

According to Reverend Hale it was on this occasion that Tituba, “being searched by a Woman, she was found to have upon her body the marks of the Devils wounding of her.” A few years after this, Robert Calef would write of Tituba: “The account she since gives of it is, that her Master did beat her and other ways abuse her, to make her confess and accuse (such as he call’d) her Sister-Witches, and that whatsoever she said by way of confessing or accusing others, was the effect of such usage.”

Goody Ingersoll examined Tituba for witch-marks on March 1, the day of her arrest and hearing, when she began by first insisting on her innocence and then confessing only after incessant questions. If Hale’s account belongs on March 2 and refers to a second search (he was quite possibly present when the magistrates quizzed her again), the scars of beating would have to have been made between the hearing and the next day’s questioning. The magistrates’ record of the hearing does not note the result of Goody Ingersoll’s search, and their record of the second interview makes no mention of a search.

In any case the laws of the time did allow masters to “correct” their servants, slave or free, just not with
excessive
force. “Correct” was understood to include hitting. Some men ended up in court for undue severity against free white employees. A slave, though not to be severely maltreated, in fact could be. Parris, indignant at this betrayal (in his eyes) by a servant in his own household, protective of his daughter’s and niece’s well-being, and all too aware of the scandal of a minister harboring a witch, especially during the current precarious state of Village tensions, may have taken it all out on Tituba in some way.

The magistrates questioned Osborn and Tituba again on March 3 in the Salem jail. Both kept to their original stories, though Tituba now added that witchcraft had killed Reverend Lawson’s wife and child some years before, leaving the magistrates to wonder how long the enemy had been among them.

With the three suspects in custody, the four afflicted girls felt some relief. However, convinced that more witches were still at large, as Tituba had stated, they were not yet free of spectral threat. Also on March 3 Ann Putnam had to deal with her daughter’s desperate attempt to resist attacks from both an unknown woman’s specter as well as the spirit of Good’s daughter Dorothy. The little girl could not have been more than six, yet according to Annie, the child had the Devil’s book with her and kept shoving it at Annie to make her sign it, to sign away her soul. When she resisted, the child’s specter pinched and even bit her.

On March 5 the law transferred Sarah Good from Ipswich to Salem with the other suspects—no easy task if she behaved as she had on the trip up, when she repeatedly flung herself from the horse and, in her guard’s view, tried to kill herself. There the magistrates questioned both Good and Tituba. Both kept to their original claims, but Tituba, they felt, was again more consistent, especially in contrast to Good’s evasions. Good seemed to be making up her account as she went, altering the story to put herself in a better light.

The three remained in Salem over the Sabbath. On Monday Tituba and the others were led out to a waiting cart and taken south to Boston. Witchcraft was a capital crime, and capital crimes were tried in Boston by the Governor’s Assistants in their aspect of a higher court. The road led back toward the Village and then diverged from that route to circle the rocky terrain south of Salem town and pass through Lynn to skirt the wide extent of Rumney Marsh, with its salty tidal creeks and wide tussocky bog land that was dotted with the wooden staddles where farmers would stack salt hay to dry after summer harvest. They continued south to the mouths of the Mystic and the Charles Rivers and onto a ferry that would take them, wagon and all, across the water to the town of Boston on its peninsula between the open harbor and the tidal flats of the Back Bay. The jail here was stone and stood not far from the town house in a fenced yard where some prisoners could get air and exercise. The interior held a common room, which the majority of the prisoners used by day, and, opening off this space, smaller rooms with small, barred windows where some of the prisoners spent nights.