In the Devil's Snare (8 page)
The afflicted people were active that Sunday, but the witches’ specters were not. Ann Carr Putnam later attested that she “had agrat deal of Respitt between my fitts” on March 20. And although the apparition of Rebecca Nurse made initial appearances to Betty Hubbard and Mary Walcott, both declared that Nurse’s specter did not hurt them. The witches, then, seemingly observed that Sabbath, awaiting Martha Corey’s examination the following day.
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Interpreting the Afflicted Girls’ Depositions
The chronology in the preceding section (and that which will follow in the rest of this book) was developed in part by assuming the accuracy of dates specified in depositions offered by the afflicted girls weeks or months after the events in question. For example, Betty Hubbard swore on August 4 that the specter of Martha Corey had afflicted her on March 15. An obvious question arises: how could Betty have recalled the date with such specificity? The inquiry becomes even more pressing if one contemplates four separate depositions submitted by Abigail Williams on May 31. On the “14.20.21.&23 dayes” of March and the “12.13.& 14 dayes” of April, she attested, Martha Corey’s specter afflicted her. On the “15.16.19.20.21.23.31 dayes” of March, April 13, and the “4th & 29” of May, she was attacked by Rebecca Nurse’s specter. And on the “14.21.& 29” days of March and the “2.&.13” days of April, she was tortured by the apparition of Elizabeth Proctor, whereas “divers times” in April but especially on the “4.6.11.13 dayes” John Proctor was her tormentor.
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Since it is extraordinarily unlikely that a child like Abigail could remember such details and differentiate them so precisely, one possibility is that she was making it all up on the spot. Yet sometimes other evidence confirms the dates she and others gave; for instance, Deodat Lawson’s narrative indicates that Abigail complained of Goody Corey on March 20, just as her May deposition asserted. Moreover, the afflicted girls’ adult relatives often submitted depositions supporting their statements and the details of timing therein.
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Therefore another explanation is needed. I have concluded that exact dates in retrospective depositions (not all of which contain such information) reflect the existence of now-lost notes taken by adult observers of the afflicted, and that accordingly such dates can be trusted for the purposes of creating a chronology of the crisis. In earlier instances of affliction, adults, especially clergymen, took careful notes on the behavior of tormented young people. Such records formed the basis of Samuel Willard’s detailed account of Elizabeth Knapp and Cotton Mather’s narrative of the Goodwin children. Samuel Parris (and the senior Putnams, along with perhaps a few others) must have similarly recorded the details of the behavior of the young people in their households. Indeed, one page of Parris’s notes survives; covering April 4 through April 12, it is included in the evidence against John Proctor. For April 12 in particular, the notes give a minute-by-minute account of events as Abigail Williams, Mary Walcott, and John Indian had fits in which they accused the Proctors’ specters of afflicting them.
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Not all of the afflicted girls’ statements can be trusted in the matter of timing, however. For example, at the examination of Dorcas Hoar on May 2, Abigail Williams exclaimed that “this is the woman that she saw first before Tituba Indian or any else,” a declaration unsupported by other evidence (and, tellingly, never included in a sworn deposition). Likewise, on June 30 Ann Jr. swore that she had been afflicted since early March by the specter of Sarah Wilds. Again, that allegation is not reflected in documents created in March. Still other statements, especially those made by afflicted teenagers from households without supportive adults (for example, servants who accused their masters), lack specificity altogether: “severall times sence the later end of June,” “Sometime in July,” and so forth. But the very vagueness of such declarations, made in the near-certain absence of any written record, helps to underscore the likely accuracy of precise dates found in other documents.
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THE EXAMINATION OF MARTHA COREY
At noon on Monday, March 21, everyone once again returned to the Salem Village meetinghouse. The building was “Thronged with Spectators,” Deodat Lawson remarked, “many hundred” in all. Among the crowd were “most” of the afflicted females. Proceedings began with “a very pertinent and pathetic Prayer” offered by the Reverend Nicholas Noyes, pastor of the Salem Town church. Martha Corey too asked to pray, “sundry times,” but John Hathorne told her, “We do not send for you to go to prayer.” The magistrates enlisted Samuel Parris to take notes, presumably because Ezekiel Cheever, the scribe at the first examinations, would participate in the hearing by reporting on his encounter with Goody Corey nine days earlier.
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“You are now in the hands of Authority,” Hathorne began portentously.
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“Tell me now why you hurt these persons.” Goodwife Corey responded with an assertion of innocence: “I never had to do with Witchcraft since I was born. I am a Gospell Woman.” Asked her reaction to the complaints of the afflicted, she replied obliquely, “The Lord open the eyes of the Magistrates & Ministers: the Lord show his power to discover the guilty.”
The examining magistrate quickly focused on her conversation with Edward Putnam and Ezekiel Cheever, who interjected a warning “not [to] begin with a lye.” Why had she asked “if the child told what cloths you wore”? Hathorne wanted to know. Goody Corey proved unable to supply a satisfactory answer. First she said that Cheever, not she, had introduced the subject, then that her husband had informed her that “the children told what cloaths the other wore.” But Cheever retorted that she spoke “falsly” and Giles denied having discussed the subject with her. Hathorne berated her: “You dare thus to lye in all this assembly You are now before Authority. I expect the truth . . . Speak now & tell who told you.” Finally, Martha admitted to having learned about gossip on the subject. “I had heard speech that the children said I troubled them & I thought that they might come to examine,” she ventured, but identified no one source of information. Hathorne, dissatisfied, continued to press for further details, until Abigail Williams altered the course of the examination by exclaiming, “There is a black man whispering in her ear,” an observation immediately joined by Mary Walcott.
Thus appeared for the first time at an examination a figure that would become nearly ubiquitous in subsequent Salem records, the spectral “black man,” who was either the devil or his emissary. Historians have tended to equate this “black man” with the man wearing black or serge clothing described by Tituba in her confession, but only one of the other thirty-five people who saw the “black man” mentioned his clothes.
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More likely than a reference to wearing apparel is that the adjective alluded to the specter’s dark or swarthy complexion—indeed, that the specter the witnesses envisioned resembled an Indian. On numerous occasions seventeenth-century colonists employed the word “black” to mean “Indian,” as when in fall 1689 a militia troop in Maine was described as comprising “Both White & Blacke” soldiers, or when a witness in the Hartford witchcraft cases of 1662 testified that he had seen an accused woman in the woods with “two black creatures like two Indians but taller.” Recall, too, Sarah Osborne’s earlier nightmarish encounter with “a thing like an indian all black” she described during her examination on March 1. Cotton Mather made the connection explicit. Recording in
Wonders of the Invisible World
that confessing witches called Satan “the
Black Man,
” he added, “they generally say he resembles an Indian.”
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The association among Indians, black men, and the devil would have been unremarkable to anyone in the Salem Village meetinghouse. English settlers everywhere on the continent had long regarded North America’s indigenous residents as devil worshippers and had viewed their shamans as witches. Puritan New Englanders, believing themselves a people chosen by God to bring his word to a previously heathen land, were particularly inclined to see themselves as antagonists of the “devilish” Indians. In March 1692, people beset by an actual Wabanaki menace immediately to the north and east would have regarded as shocking but unexceptional a concurrent spectral attack featuring an instigator of a local witch conspiracy who looked like a Wabanaki. As John McWilliams has observed, the male Indian’s “spectral presence in Salem village and to the north was a sure sign of the devil’s impending war against New England.” Abigail Williams’s words linked invisible and visible worlds, implying the existence of an alliance between Satan and the Wabanakis. Thus the frequent references to the “black man” by confessors and the afflicted establish a crucial connection between the witchcraft crisis and the Indian wars.
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Abigail’s observation of the “black man” led Hathorne to ask what the man had said.
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After Corey responded that she had heard nothing, all the afflicted suffered “Extream agony.” The magistrate began urging Corey to confess, while she insisted that “we must not beleive distracted persons.” A witness (whose written testimony has not survived) then reported that Corey had remarked that “the girl” and “the Devil could not stand before” her. Corey denied having said as much, but “3 or 4 Sober witnesses confirm’d it.” “What can I do many rise up against me?” Martha cried. Hathorne had only one answer: “Why confess.” Goody Corey replied that she would indeed confess if she was guilty, but she was not.
Hathorne then moved on to the details of the children’s testimony: with what instrument had she struck Mercy Lewis during the spectral roasting scene? what bird were they describing? and did she think the children bewitched? “They may [be] for ought I know,” Martha responded. “I have no hand in it.” She knew nothing of a bird or of how Mercy had been hurt. Why did she try to prevent her husband Giles from attending the examinations on March 1? Hathorne inquired. A member of the audience answered for her: “she would not have them help to find out witches.” The magistrate accused her of regarding the afflictions as “a laughing matter.” After she rejected his characterization, Parris recorded in the transcript, “Severall prove it.” Desperate, Martha wailed, “Ye are all against me & I cannot help it.”
The focus then shifted from question-and-answer to action-and-response as the torments of the afflicted began to take over the examination. “When she bit her lip severall of the afflicted were bitten,” Parris noted, and “when her hands were at liberty the afflicted persons were pincht.” The Reverend Mr. Noyes observed aloud, “she practiseth Witchcraft in the congregation there is no need of images.” According to Deodat Lawson, the afflicted “produced the Marks [of the bites and pinches] before the Magistrates, Ministers, and others.” When Martha Corey leaned against the minister’s seat, “being the Barr at which she stood,” the afflictions intensified. Bathshua Pope, complaining “of grievous torment in her Bowels as if they were torn out,” hit Goody Corey on the head with her shoe. If Martha Corey shuffled her feet, the afflicted “stamped fearfully,” and, Lawson noted, they “asked her why she did not go to the company of witches which were before the Meeting house mustering? Did she not hear the Drum beat?” The afflicted declared that “23 or 24” witches were “in Armes” outside the building.
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In the midst of what must have been utter chaos, Hathorne pressed even harder: “Did you not say you would open our eyes why do you not?” “Were you to serve the Devil ten years tell how many?” “What book is that you would have these children write in?” Martha’s primary response to such questions, recorded Parris, was laughter. Surely she was hysterical rather than scornful. The examination ended with Hathorne questioning Corey about the nature of the Trinity, and finally with a “triall” in which “her hands being eased by them that held them on purpose,” the afflicted “immediately” suffered fits “& the standers by said she was squeezing her fingers.” “Do not you see these children & women are rational & sober as their neighbours when your hands are fastened?” Hathorne thundered. When the marshal quickly observed, “she hath bit her lip,” the afflicted fell into “an uproar.” Hathorne again demanded that Goody Corey confess to having hurt them. When she would not, he halted the proceedings, ordering her jailed in Salem Town. “After she was in Custody,” Lawson reported, her specter no longer appeared to torture the afflicted.
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Justice Hathorne clearly found the examination of Martha Corey frustrating, for it was far less successful than his first set of interrogations. The accused resolutely refused to admit her guilt despite being confronted with the testimony of numerous witnesses and with what seemed to be incontrovertible evidence of her practice of witchcraft in front of everyone. Hathorne’s failure to elicit a confession led to events in the meetinghouse-courtroom being controlled by the antics of the afflicted. Although the session began as a legal examination he was orchestrating, it ended in turmoil when one of the afflicted hit Goody Corey on the head with a shoe and they all stamped their feet noisily in unison. Thus the magistrates’ failure to follow Richard Bernard’s advice about conducting examinations of accused and accuser separately and in private had significant consequences that left them struggling to maintain a proper decorum.
The report of two dozen armed witches “mustering” to a “Drum beat” outside the meetinghouse summoned up images of invisible malevolent militias rising to do battle against God’s people in concert with the spectral Indian seen advising Martha Corey. Salem Village, its residents would have concluded by late that afternoon, surely lay in the front lines of a battle to the death against the forces of evil in both the visible and invisible worlds.
“A WOMAN OF YOUR PROFESSION”
Early the next morning (March 22), the apparition of Rebecca Nurse— wearing, reasonably enough for that time of day, “hir shift” and perhaps her nightcap—came once again to Ann Carr Putnam, also bringing “a litle Red book” for Ann to sign and, Ann disclosed, threatening “to tare my soule out of my body” if Ann would not comply with her request for a signature. For nearly two hours Goody Putnam carried on a heated conversation with Goody Nurse’s specter, during which they argued over “severall places of scripture” Ann cited. Although the argument ended, the tortures continued most of the day.
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That same Tuesday, a small delegation called on Rebecca Nurse at her home.
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Daniel Andrew, his brother- and sister-in-law Israel and Elizabeth Hathorne Porter, and Peter Cloyce (a member of the Salem Village church and Rebecca’s brother-in-law) had been asked to speak to Goody Nurse, “to tell her that several of the Aflicted persons mentioned her.” They found her ill, but nevertheless she “blest god,” because she had “more of his presents in this sickens then sometime shee have had.” The group later reported that “of her owne Acord” Rebecca started to discuss the spectral afflictions, especially those in the Parris household, remarking how she “was greved for them though shee had not been to see them.” She was concerned for her own health, she explained, because she had occasionally had fits in the past, and “people said it was Awfull to: behold.” Even though she had not visited the afflicted, “she pittied them with: all her harte: and went to god for them.”
Goody Nurse then remarked that she thought that some of the accused “wear as Innocent as shee was”; after “much to this purpos” the visitors finally told her “we heard that shee was spoken of allsoe.” She “sate still awhille being as it wear Amazed,” they reported, and said “if it be soe the will of the Lord be done.” Asserting her innocence, she mused, “what sine hath god found out in me unrepented of that he should Lay such an Affliction upon me In my old Age.” The visitors concluded their account with the observation that—unlike Martha Corey in similar circumstances—“we could not decern that shee knewe what we came for before we tould her.”
The next day, Deodat Lawson called “on purpose” to see the “very sober and pious” Ann Carr Putnam. He found her lying in bed recovering from a fit, and at her and her husband’s request he prayed with her. But she soon had another fit, eventually starting “to Converse personally” with Goody Nurse. “Are you not ashamed, a Woman of your Profession, to afflict a poor Creature so?” Ann asked. Lawson recorded that she first “seemed to dispute with the Apparition about a particular Text of Scripture,” then appeared to be seeking a text that would force the specter to depart. Finally, she blurted out, “It is the third Chapter of the Revelations.” Reluctant to employ a Biblical text as a charm, Lawson at first hesitated to read the passage, but then he decided “I might do it this once for an Experiment.” Sure enough, before he had finished reading the first verse, the fit ended. Thomas and “the Spectators” then informed Lawson that “she had often been so relieved by reading Texts that she named.”
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Sometime that same March 23, Deacon Edward Putnam and his cousin Jonathan Putnam filed a formal complaint against Rebecca Nurse for having afflicted Ann Carr Putnam, her daughter, and Abigail Williams. They also complained separately against Dorcas Good, the four- or five-year-old daughter of the jailed Sarah Good. Ann Jr. had first named Dorcas as her afflicter nearly three weeks earlier, but no action was taken against the little girl at that time. Now, though, another complainant had recently been added: two days before, Mary Walcott declared that Dorcas had “com to me and bit me and pinch me.” The affliction of a teenager once more led adults to take legal steps that a child’s lone accusation did not elicit. Dorcas and Goody Nurse were both arrested and held at Ingersoll’s inn until their examinations.
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On Thursday, March 24, at 10 a.m. Villagers again gathered in large numbers at the meetinghouse to listen to the interrogation of accused witches, and their pastor again took notes.
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The Reverend John Hale began the proceedings with a prayer. Instead of starting with questions to the examinee, as he previously had, John Hathorne immediately turned to the younger Ann Putnam and to Abigail Williams to ask if Rebecca Nurse had tormented them. Before the multitude, Ann Jr. had “a grievous fit,” and both children confirmed their accusations of the old woman. Henry Kenney broke in with the unsolicited comment that since Nurse had entered the meetinghouse “he was seizd twise with an amaz’d condition.” Hathorne next confronted Goody Nurse with Ann Carr Putnam, “who accuseth you by credible information,” and with a formal statement by Edward Putnam about her spectral attacks on Ann Jr. Rebecca Nurse insisted, “I am innocent & clear,” adding that she had been ill and unable to leave her house for over a week.
But then Goody Putnam cried out, “Did you not bring the Black man with you, did you not bid me tempt God & dye?” Nurse, saying, “Oh Lord help me,” spread her hands, at which “the afflicted were greviously vexed,” recorded Samuel Parris in the official transcript. Hathorne called Goody Nurse’s attention to the seeming consequences of her movements, and Mary Walcott and Betty Hubbard “both openly accused her of hurting them.” The age of the afflicted again entered into Hathorne’s thinking: “here are these 2 grown persons now accuse you,” he told Goody Nurse. How do you respond? How can you “stand with dry eyes” while witnessing such torments? Under pressure, Rebecca continued to assert her innocence.
The afflicted, though, declared that Nurse was surrounded by spectral birds and that “the Black Man” was whispering to her during the examination, so “she could not hear what the Magistrates said unto her.” Hathorne ruminated, “What uncertainty there may be in apparitions I know not, yet this with me strikes hard upon you that you are at this very present charged with familiar spirits.” Calling for “an upright answer,” he inquired, “have you any familiarity with these spirits?” Goody Nurse replied, “none but with God alone,” and Hathorne changed the topic. Referring to “an odd discourse” about her illness “in the mouths of many,” he asked about wounds; she said she had none. Neither had she “been led aside by temptations” to witchcraft, nor had she had “visible appearances more than what is common in nature.” How “sad” it was, the magistrate then observed, that two church members like herself and Goody Corey had been accused of such an offense. At that Bathshua Pope cried, “a sad thing sure enough,” and (Parris noted) “many more fell into lamentable fits.”
Perhaps it was at that moment that Ann Carr Putnam endured “a grievous fit . . . to the very great Impairing of her strength, and wasting of her spirits, insomuch as she could hardly move hand, or foot.” Her husband asked permission to carry her out of the meetinghouse and, she later remembered, as soon as she emerged from the building “it pleased Allmighty God for his free grace and mircy sake to deliver me out of the paws of thos Roaring lions: and jaws of those tareing bears.” For the next two months she suffered no more fits. The meetinghouse itself had thus become Satan’s territory; only by leaving it could she obtain relief from her suffering.
Hathorne pressed on, asking Rebecca Nurse for an opinion of the sufferers ’ torments: were they “voluntary or involuntary”? The old woman tried to evade the question, and might not have even understood it clearly (or so Parris thought), though she finally admitted, “I do not think these suffer against their wills.” But she also added—perhaps contradictorily—that she did think them “bewicht.” Those answers would seem to have given the magistrate an opening to push her further on characterizing the afflictions, but Parris recorded no follow-up questions. (He did, however, note at the end of the transcript that he had omitted “many things” because of “g[r]eat noyses by the afflicted & many speakers.”) Instead, Hathorne asked Goody Nurse to explain why her movements were mimicked by the afflicted, who thereby seemingly endured “violent fits of torture.” Receiving no satisfactory answer, he directed Parris to read “what he had in characters taken from Mr. Tho: Putmans wife in her fitts,” inquiring, “What do you think of this?” “I cannot help it,” Rebecca Nurse replied, “the Devil may appear in my shape.” With that, the examination came to a close, and she was sent to jail in Salem Town.
There is no extant record of Dorcas Good’s examination, which followed Goody Nurse’s, but Deodat Lawson reported that the magistrates and clergymen present “Unanimously” informed him “that when this Child did but cast its eye upon the afflicted persons, they were tormented, and they held her Head, and yet so many as her eye could fix upon were afflicted.” Moreover, the tortured Villagers complained that she had bitten them, “and produced marks of a small set of teeth.” Later in the week, Hathorne and Corwin (accompanied by Lawson and the Reverend John Higginson of Salem Town) went to the jailer’s house to question Dorcas further in a calmer atmosphere. She told them that her mother had given her “a little Snake” that sucked on the lowest joint of her forefinger, and there “they Observed a deep Red Spot,” a sign of regular contact with her animal familiar. She too was ordered jailed.
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Villagers who attended the public examinations of Rebecca Nurse and Dorcas Good subsequently told Deodat Lawson that “the whole assembly was struck with consternation, and they were afraid, that those that sate next to them, were under the influence of Witchcraft.” So pervasive was the devil’s influence in Salem Village that its residents felt sure of no one. When church members like Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse and a little child like Dorcas Good could fall into the devil’s snare, who was safe from his wiles? Giles Corey surely cemented those fears when he came forward that same March 24 with new evidence against his wife. He deposed that the previous Saturday, after the formal complaint had been filed against Martha, he had strangely been prevented from praying in his usual manner. And he reported that “my wife hath ben wont to sitt up after I went to bed, & I have perceived her to kneel down to the harth, as if she were at prayer, but heard nothing.” Perhaps, he implied, she prayed not to God, but to Satan, and her diabolic influence had stopped his own attempt to communicate with the divinity. Information about his testimony must have spread quickly through the Village.
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The court records preserve only brief snatches of the many Village conversations during the next few days. On the morning after Goody Nurse’s examination, two yeomen encountered each other near a neighbor’s house. One “askt how the folks did at the village”; the other replied, “he heard they were very bad last night but he had heard nothing this morning.” Three days later at Nathaniel Ingersoll’s, two young men (and possibly more) were “discoursing concerning the examyning of sewerall persons suspected for wiches,” with Goody Ingersoll and “some of the afflicted persons.” One of the men remarked that “I hard that goody procter was to be examyned to morrow to which goody Ingarsoll replyed she did not beleve it for she heard nothing of it.” Joan Ingersoll’s gossip network was better informed than the young man’s; although both Ann Jr. and Abigail Williams had accused Elizabeth Proctor, no formal complaint had yet been issued against her.
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As residents talked, Satan’s reach was expanding beyond Village boundaries. In Salem Town on March 25, Betty Parris—sent by her father to the home of a friend, Stephen Sewall, in hopes that a change of scene might ease her torments—again saw “the great Black Man,” who promised her that if she would serve him, “she should have whatsoever she desired, and go to a Golden City.” Stephen’s wife assured the girl that “it was the Divel, and he was a Lyar from the Beginning, and bid her tell him so, if he came again.” Betty, dutiful once more, reported to her hostess that she did just that. And in nearby Ipswich members of the Fuller family became convinced on March 23 or 24 that Rachel Hatfield Clinton, an impoverished and embittered neighbor they had long thought was a witch, had instigated the sudden collapse of a servant girl. After Rachel walked past a Fuller household en route to confront various other family members about “what Lies . . . we raisd of hur,” the girl fell down as though “Ded,” remaining without “any Apperance of Life” for more than three hours. Convinced that Rachel’s malefice had caused the strange occurrence, on March 29 they complained formally against her “on grounded Suspision of witchcraft.” She too was ordered held for further legal proceedings.
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