by Tanya Chris
My cell was just wide enough that I could have laid down full-length without touching either side wall—not that I had any desire to lie down in that filthy place—and not quite as deep as that. It was furnished with a chamber pot, which came pre-used, and a layer of straw meant to be both carpet and bedding. I threw some straw down over the contents of the chamber pot in an effort to hide the smell, or at least the sight, and then I used my feet to brush the rest of the straw back into a corner. I had no desire to catch whatever lived in it.
Beneath the straw, there was nothing but stone—hard and cold, but less likely to harbor bugs. The side walls were also stone, but the wall facing the corridor was open between the bars that ran floor to ceiling, so widely spaced Tom might have fit through them.
I could hear a woman crying and another woman yelling at her to be quiet. Giving me a cell to myself meant all the white women were now crammed together into one—ten women in a six by four stone box. No wonder someone was crying. They could thank the racist asshole who’d refused to share a cell with me for that. I hoped they did hang him for a witch.
Once I’d finished being angry at the racist asshole and feeling sorry for the women who were suffering a little bit more thanks to his prejudice, once I’d paced off my cell and rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic, there wasn’t much left to do. There was no telling how long I’d be there, but I understood the trajectory. I’d be tried and convicted. Then I’d be hanged. Whether it took a week or two weeks or two months didn’t matter.
Ezekiel was undoubtedly out there trying to stop that inevitable chain of events. I wished I had a way to tell him not to risk his own arrest, but he’d wouldn’t listen if I could any more than I’d listened when he’d begged me to go through the mirror. If they arrested him, maybe we could arrange to be cellmates. We might as well be hanged for being sodomites as for being witches.
“You see what happens when you stick your neck out,” Tituba said from her cell.
“You see what happens when you save your neck at the expense of others,” I retorted. “Maybe you’ll live and I’ll die, but at least I know where I’ll be going when I do.”
That shut her up. I didn’t know if I exactly believed in heaven, but my grandmother had always told me there was a heaven and that my mother would be there waiting for me. She never made it contingent on my behavior though. She said God loved all his children and welcomed them home with open arms.
I asked her once, when I was still small and believed what she believed, “The sinners too?” and she’d said, “Especially the sinners, because it’s been so long since he’s seen them.”
I regretted now that I ever stopped going to church with her. I regretted a lot of things—wasting energy chasing the white man’s version of success, trying to make myself homogenous for them, not caring enough about those who were worse off than I was, sharing my body with men who didn’t mean anything to me—but I didn’t regret staying on this side of the mirror.
Till death do us part might not be very long, but I’d be the man Ezekiel married, the one who was worthy of him.
I didn’t want any part of my body to touch any part of that jail cell, but hour drifted into hour and eventually I found myself sitting on the floor with my back to the wall I shared with Tituba. I had my head down in my hands because there wasn’t a thing to look at except a stone wall and a reeking chamber pot, so I didn’t notice my visitors until I heard Ezekiel’s voice say my name.
I looked up to find Reverend Hale outside my cell, Ezekiel at his elbow. Hale was all done up for church, collar and everything, carrying that leather satchel stuffed with court records as though a witch might crop up at any moment.
“I’m sorry to see you here, Mr. Johnson. Your name were raised yesterday, but I did not think it credible you were a witch, as you’d been there with the afflicted many times during questioning without they took any notice of you.”
“I’m not a witch.” I looked him dead in the eye when I said it, hoping to make an impression. “I’m a threat—a threat to Corwin and the politically-motivated pogrom he’s trying to pull off. He caught me trying to see you privately a few days ago and knew he had to discredit me before I could discredit him.”
“And so Mr. Cheever has said and so I have come, as he has asked, that I should hear your testimony.”
“Well, good. Thank you. Um.” Nothing like being put on the spot. Where was I supposed to start? “I’ve overheard Mr. Corwin say things to Mr. Hathorne about why certain people have been targeted. Apparently there’s a tax situation going on—” I looked to Ezekiel.
“Salem has petitioned for recognition as a sovereign entity, thus not subject to certain county taxes,” he explained, “but that do mean as we must be responsible for the maintenance of our own sick and poor.”
“Which Corwin doesn’t like,” I concluded. “Hence this idea of accusing all the undesirables of being witches. They get hanged, Salem gains its independence, and he and the other wealthy landowners are all the richer for it.”
“But it is not Mr. Corwin who accuses them, Mr. Johnson.”
“Well, it is, in a roundabout way. I’ll show you what I mean. Let me see the testimony where Martha Corey’s name first came up.”
Hale dug my handiwork out of his satchel and I scanned through it for Martha’s name.
“Here, see.” I traced the lines with my finger for him.
“I were in the room myself,” Hale reminded me.
“It’s subtle,” I told him, “but there’s a pattern. Here, look where Rebecca Nurse’s name was first raised.”
Hale read the accusation against Rebecca Nurse and then started scanning forward himself, flipping one page after another until he stopped reading and bundled all the papers together and stuffed them back into his bag with jerky movements.
“I do see what you intend me to see,” he said, “but perhaps ’tis God as gives Mr. Corwin the inspiration to suggest those He knows to be guilty, for whosoever it may be who do first raise the name, ’tis the afflicted who call them witch, not Mr. Corwin. Why else should these tormented souls call out a witch were it not because they name their tormentor?”
“My master beat me.”
Hale turned with surprise in the direction of Tituba’s voice.
“My master, Mr. Parris, when first it is said that Betty be tormented by demons, he ask me do I torment her and I tell him I do not and then he beat me until I do confess it, that I were a witch. Then were I brought to this jail and told as I would hang did I not say as who my witch-sisters be. So I did say them.”
“But why, if it were not true?” Hale’s back was to me now, but I could hear the astonishment in his voice.
“Come Friday, witches shall hang, but I be not one of them. So long as I do say who is a witch, I’ll be not one of them.”
God bless Tituba, because she’d just made herself one of them. If we didn’t succeed in convincing Hale that these witch trials were a sham, she and I were both going to swing so fast we’d die dizzy.
“Well, this is astonishing,” Hale said. “If Tituba does recant her testimony, we must need try those what have been found guilty again, but she is not the only one who accuses. Though she may have been lying, I’ll not believe that all of them have lied.”
We were losing him. It was too easy to dismiss a dark-skinned woman from another country and a darker-skinned man who talked funny. Unless we could get one of Salem’s own to admit that they’d found it safer to be accuser than accused, that they’d been enjoying the fun or working out their own aggressions, we’d never convince Hale that this witch hunt had been born of hysteria and furthered by malice.
I looked around for Ezekiel, hoping for guidance or assurance, but he was no longer anywhere in sight. A fine time for him to disappear now.
“I’ll discuss this with Mr. Corwin and Mr. Hathorne,” Hale said. “Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I’ll not discount it entirely.”
But he would discount
it. I was fucked. Tituba was fucked. Ezekiel might even be fucked. I slumped back against the wall, the last dregs of optimism drained from me
“We must send a firm message that you are either with us or against us.” Corwin’s voice was not loud, but it was clear. It filtered in through the narrow, barred window at the top of my cell. “And those who are against us shall pay, I do promise them that.”
Hale looked up. “There is Mr. Corwin now.”
“Shh,” I told him. “Listen.” I knew what we were hearing—not Corwin live, but Corwin recorded.
“A word in the right ear and it will be done,” Corwin’s voice continued. “Tituba is most agreeable.”
“But Tituba is a witch herself,” Hathorne’s voice answered. “I do worry that we put too much reliance in the word of a witch.”
“Oh, pshaw. Don’t tell me that you believe in witches, Hathorne.”
“If there be no witches, then why do we pursue them?”
“They’re parasites. Blood-sucking leeches. Call them witches if you must, for that’s our game as you say, but they are surely not of the Elite whatever label you choose, or they’d not be dependent upon us for their very sustenance. Don’t worry so, Hathorne. You pursue your witches and I’ll add a name here and there and it won’t hurt anyone who’s a friend to us.”
There was a moment of silence as the recording ended, then Hale’s voice bellowed “Corwin!” and he charged from the jail in a fluster of arms and legs and swinging satchel. He was back a few minutes later, towing Hathorne by the arm, Ezekiel trailing behind them.
“Where’s Corwin?” Hale demanded of Hathorne.
“I, I don’t know,” Hathorne stuttered.
“Do not say as you weren’t speaking to him, for we all heard it. Did he not say to you as there was no such thing as witches and that he used these trials for his own aims.”
“I have heard him say something like,” Hathorne admitted.
“And you do not tell it to me? You allow this … this travesty of justice to continue when you know it to be on false terms?”
“I don’t know as it was all false,” Hathorne hedged. “For any name he put forth were corroborated.”
“By Tituba!” Hale exploded. Hathorne winced. Those who supported tyrants were always so sorry once the tyrants were deposed.
I flashed a big smile in Ezekiel’s direction. He winked back at me. I was still in a jail cell with an overflowing chamber pot and louse-infested hay, but my day was looking up.
Chapter 21
Ezekiel refused to leave my side while Hale and Hathorne ran off to arrange an emergency hearing. He sat on the floor outside my cell and fed me food he’d brought from home. The iron bars were spaced wide enough that he could have passed the whole sack through, but he handed biscuits and ham to me in bite-sized pieces like a momma bird, his expression more gloomy than relieved.
“My father would not speak out on your behalf,” he said. “I did ask that he come with me to help free you but he would not, not even though you’re my—”
“Shh,” I warned. We were hardly in a private place. “I hope you didn’t say that to him. It wouldn’t make him any more likely to want to speak on my behalf.”
“Even though you are like family to us,” Ezekiel finished. “For you have been living with us all this while and taught Tom his letters and Abigail knitted her first pair of stockings for you. It is the same as if Corwin did come for one of us.”
“I’m sorry your father let you down.” I wished I could reach through the bars and take Ezekiel’s hand. I took the apple he held out for me instead and let our fingers brush as slowly as I dared. “He can’t see me the way you do, and he’s …. oh, scared, I think. Scared for himself and for you.”
“I cannot live beneath his roof and call him Father.”
Mr. Cheever had never treated me like family, but he’d let me live in his home. In fact, he’d let me sleep in his son’s bed, a defiance of social norms I hadn’t fully appreciated until a racist dude caused the whole jail to be rearranged out of fear of catching Black cooties. Mr. Cheever wasn’t the enemy. He was stodgy and formal and a bit of a coward, but he’d raised a fine set of children and he’d harbored a stranger in need, just as the Bible commanded him to do.
“Don’t cut him off, Zeke.” There was no influencing people you didn’t speak to. “Think of your brothers and sisters. You don’t want to lose contact with them. I don’t want to lose contact with them. Go to seminary. It’ll give you some distance from each other and he’ll approve of your being a preacher.”
“He won’t approve of what I shall preach, I reckon.”
“Maybe he’ll come around to it. You can’t preach only to people who already agree with you, not if you expect to change anything.”
Ezekiel nodded and handed me another bit of ham through the bars as an excuse to touch me. We continued passing food back and forth, lingering with each exchange, until the jailer came and collected me and Tituba and brought us across the street to the meeting house.
Hale had managed to assemble most of the church membership, including Mr. Cheever who avoided looking at either me or his son. He gave a concise overview of what he’d heard that morning, then called on us one at a time to amplify.
I testified first, describing the conversations I’d overhead and reading from my notes to demonstrate the pattern of manipulation I’d observed. Then Tituba got up and recanted everything she’d said before.
Most of the town didn’t know me as anything other than the Black guy with the quill, and Tituba had been more sympathetic as a witch whisperer than as someone who’d taken advantage of their gullibility to keep herself alive, but when she finished testifying, Mr. Parris rose to admit his role in starting the madness, and the tide started to turn.
“I did beat Tituba, as she claim, and which I do now regret, for though I did think as it would prompt her to be honest, it only did prompt her to spin a tale. My Betty were not bewitched, only ill,” he concluded with a nervous glance around the room.
He sat back down, his hat clutched tightly over his heart, and Hale called on Hathorne. By the time Hathorne had finished corroborating the conversations I’d already reported on, the expressions in the gallery had grown stern and the whispers were more angry than disbelieving.
Hale offered Corwin an opportunity for rebuttal. He rose to his feet and stalked, cane banging loudly against the plank floor, to the front of the room where he tried harder to justify his actions than to deny them.
From my spot up front, I had a good view of the crowd. I could see heads nodding in agreement as he spoke. They belonged to the men who’d helped Corwin police the town, the ones who’d voted against our attempts to strengthen the rights of the accused.
“Was not this for the betterment of our community and a service to God?” Corwin appealed to his neighbors. “Shall we allow foreign agitators to say what is good and what is evil?”
“What is good needs not lies and collusion to support it,” John Miller called out. Hale hushed him, because he didn’t have the floor, but there’d been more heads nodding at him than at Corwin.
Bigotry never did look good when a light was shone on it, and bullies were always cowards. Only Corwin had the audacity to even try to defend what had happened. His supporters contented themselves with nodding and when it became clear that the majority was against them, they stopped even doing that.
Corwin, seeing that he’d lost this round, predicted that Salem would soon be destroyed by idleness and foreign evil, then sat his butt down. Parris proposed that all convictions be vacated and all accused released, and the motion carried easily.
Before adjourning the meeting, Hale addressed the accusers. They sat side by side in the front pews, quiet and still. There were no sudden screams of pain or fits of rolling around on the floor today. They knew the jig was up.
“I do not say as you lied,” Hale told them, “but I think you may have been misled by your eagerness to be of service to
God and your community. Pray you this night and ask that you be shown the truth of your visions. Be not swayed by wealth, by ableness of body or color of skin, by suggestion from others. If after you do so pray, still you be tormented, then come Sunday and make your accusation in front of the congregation that all may hear.”
Yeah, no one was going to do that.
The hearing ended. The witch trials were over. The jailer looked at me and Tituba and shrugged, then simply walked away. I shook Tituba’s hand and asked her where she’d go and she said her master would expect her back, which reminded me that the witch trials were only one small part of what was wrong with this world.
Ezekiel had managed to fight his way through the crowd to the front of the room by then. He reached me just as Mr. Cheever did.
“I do apologize for your troubles in Salem, Mr. Johnson,” the elder Cheever said. “You be welcome in my home for so long as you care to stay.”
I thanked him for the invitation, then drifted away to give father and son privacy for the conversation they needed to have.
There were others who shook my hand and plenty who ignored me. Hathorne promised to engage my services whenever they needed a court stenographer. I’d take the work, but it didn’t escape me that the men of privilege who’d started this witch hunt—Corwin, Hathorne, Parris—weren’t paying any price for it, nor was any compensation being offered to those who’d been beaten, imprisoned, starved, and accused, as though to stop doing those things were reparation enough.
“Work it out with your father?” I asked Ezekiel from my spot behind him on Daffy’s back as we headed away from Salem.
He nodded. “I shall go to seminary in the fall. And I shall remain in his home until then.” Ezekiel sighed. “He knows now that Corwin and Hathorne were wrong, but do not yet see that he were wrong himself. But for me, I see how I were wrong.”
“You? When were you ever wrong?”
“How have I not been wrong? I thought as the world did spin as God determined and that He had no need of me to set it right, but I do see now as I am His hands and His voice. No more shall I look away, nor allow that others should. What you have said shall happen, Luther, that the Bible be a weapon meant to harm—I shall not allow that to happen.”