The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  He grilled middle-aged Sarah Osborne, his second suspect, with the same rigor. Like Good, Osborne had tenaciously pursued a substantial inheritance, in her case after the 1674 death of her husband. That claim proceeded slowly. In the meantime, she had taken up with and married her Irish farmhand. Rumors had circulated about her for years, the most recent of which she had spent bedridden. Hathorne met again with denials, if from a better-humored, less shabby defendant. Osborne refused to implicate Good, whom she had not seen in some time and knew only in passing. But Sarah Good implicated you, Hathorne needled her. Osborne neglected to rise to the bait. Again Hathorne asked the girls to stand. Would they approach the witness? Each identified her positively. When she had pinched and strangled them, they said, she had worn precisely the clothes she did that afternoon. In an acknowledgment of her looking-glass predicament, Osborne had been heard since her arrest to sigh that she was more likely bewitched than a witch. This too came to Hathorne’s attention. What, he asked, had she meant by the remark? Osborne related a familiar nightmare. In her sleep, she either saw or dreamed she saw—the distinction passed without comment—an Indian-like figure. He pinched her neck and dragged her by her hair to her front door. What to do under the circumstances was something most Massachusetts women had already contemplated. In her bestselling narrative, Mary Rowlandson noted that before her Indian abduction, she had regularly concluded that she would prefer death to being taken alive by savages.* All had heard of infant heads dashed against trees, of pregnant women disemboweled. Impatient though the villagers were with the destitute, they willingly contributed to a fund for the relief of former Indian captives. In February, the village collected thirty-two pounds, or half of Parris’s annual (unpaid) salary.

  Again someone in the packed meetinghouse volunteered a bit of stale history. Between the girls’ contortions and the salvos of unsolicited evidence, Hathorne’s courtroom, bathed in anemic, late-winter light, was far from orderly. Even on paper the hearings sound chaotic; there is a reason, notes a scholar of the seventeenth century, that we shout “Order in the court!” today. It seemed Osborne had once mentioned having heard a suspicious voice. Was that the devil speaking to you? Hathorne asked. “I do not know the devil,” Osborne replied evenly. She had thought she heard a voice proposing she skip meeting. She ignored it. Hathorne persevered. “Why did you yield thus far to the devil as never to go to meeting since?” he demanded. She had been ill, as anyone named Putnam knew full well; Osborne had been absent from worship for some time, embroiled in a lawsuit with the village’s first family for far longer. Her first husband’s will named as its executors Thomas and John Putnam, Osborne’s adversaries in her decades-long litigation. Her current husband helpfully specified that she had not attended meeting for fourteen months. That day or the next, the innkeeper’s wife inspected both Good and Osborne for witch marks.

  While arresting Osborne, Constable Herrick had performed a diligent search for any images, ointments, or apparatus associated with witchcraft. He appears to have added the fillip himself; his warrant included no such instructions. At one address, the rifling must have been especially awkward. The third name twelve-year-old Ann Putnam supplied was that of Tituba, her minister’s Indian slave. She had lived with the family for some time, since at least the Boston years. She may have worked for Parris earlier, in Barbados. It is notable that the parsonage girls—at whose side Tituba lived, prayed, took her meals, and likely slept at night—did not name her. Nor did Parris. He also twice stated that John, whom the villagers understood to be Tituba’s husband, had baked the witch cake, following Mary Sibley’s instructions. Deeply attached to Betty, well versed in Scripture, Tituba was by no means the usual suspect. All kinds of slaves and servants got into all kinds of trouble. She had not. She had never before landed in court. For years Tituba had sung psalms and recited her catechism before the Parris hearth; she was as integrated into every aspect of family life as the Goods had been shut out. She knew no pinch of hard luck that might discomfit the community. Both Good and Osborne lived on the outskirts of town and attended meeting irregularly. Traditionally witches were marginals: outliers and deviants, cantankerous scolds and choleric foot-stampers. They were not people of color. On all counts Tituba failed to fit the profile. She proved spellbinding, however.

  Again Hathorne began with a presumption of guilt. “Why do you hurt these children?” he demanded. In what was clearly not her first language (“I no hurt them at all”), Tituba denied having done so. Who was it then who tortured the girls? continued Hathorne. “The devil, for all I know,” she rejoined before—moments later, to a hushed room—she was describing him. She was as expansive as Sarah Good had been curt, less the scapegoat of myth than a sort of satanic Scheherazade. Lifting liberally from the Puritan playbook, in supersaturated 3-D, she introduced a full, malevolent cast, their animal accomplices, their various superpowers. She was masterful and gloriously persuasive.

  Only the day before, while she cleaned the parsonage lean-to, a tall, white-haired man in a dark serge coat had appeared. He ordered her to hurt the children. With him were four accomplices, including Good and Osborne. The others were Bostonians. The man threatened to kill Tituba if she did not torture the girls. Had the man appeared to her in any other guise? asked Hathorne. Here Tituba made clear that she must have been the life of the corn-pounding, pea-shelling Parris kitchen; her tale grew more intricate as she warmed to it.* What she reported was vivid and sensational, lurid and harebrained. While earlier the girls had violently twisted and screeched, none now flexed a muscle or emitted a sound, their relief attributed to Tituba’s confession.

  A yellow bird accompanied her visitor. He appeared as two red cats, an oversize black one, a black dog, a hog. If she served him, she could have the yellow bird. The cats had appeared at the Parris home as recently as the night before, just after prayer when they had scratched her, nearly driven her into the fireplace, and commanded her to torture the girls. Sarah Good had also appeared that evening while the family prayed. She had a yellow bird on her hand and a cat at her side. She had attempted to bargain with Tituba, stopping her ears so that she could not hear the Scripture. Tituba remained deaf for some time afterward. If she lived in fear of Parris—servants and slaves could expect to be beaten, by ministers as often as anyone else—she was more terrified still of her serge-coated caller. He visited four times, threatening to slice off her head if she mentioned him. In their spectral disguises, Good and Osborne had kept her extremely busy, sending her to the doctor’s to pinch sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard; to the Putnams’ to afflict twelve-year-old Ann. They commanded Tituba to kill Ann Putnam with a knife, testimony that was instantly corroborated; from the pews came reports that Ann had complained that her supernatural tormentors had tried to lop off her head! Tituba had traveled a great deal in and out of houses during a week of drenching rains, flying as far south as Boston. She was a brilliant raconteur, the more compelling for her simple, declarative sentences. The accent may have helped. She was as utterly clear-minded and cogent as one can be in describing translucent cats. And she was obliging; her examination is five times as long as Sarah Good’s. No one objected that the previous day, when Tituba held the conversation in the lean-to, or that morning, when she claimed to have pinched Elizabeth Hubbard, she had been in custody. Nor did anyone ask why the visitor directed Tituba’s attention to only two of the parsonage’s four children or point out that Tituba dated her newfound acquaintances to after the girls had experienced their first pains. But then no one seemed inclined to interrupt her either. Finally, they were getting somewhere.

  How had Tituba managed her travels? Hathorne wanted to know. “I ride upon a stick or pole, and Good and Osborne behind me,” she confessed, elaborating a little; the three traveled with their arms around each other. She could not say if they sailed through the trees or over them as they flew so swiftly. Time and distance held no meaning for them. Tituba may have been smallish; she several times asked her examiners t
o believe that Good and Osborne strong-armed her into those excursions. She cleared up a few other mysteries as well. That wolf that had stalked Elizabeth Hubbard? It was Sarah Good, transformed. The hairy creature with the wings and the long nose that warmed itself before the Parris fire? Sarah Osborne. She claimed not to know the words to describe the creature but fared admirably. She could not name the tall man’s accomplice but knew the woman from Boston; she recognized her white-lined hood. Tituba neither stinted on the visual details nor failed to deliver on any of Hathorne’s leading questions. If he mentioned a book, she could describe it. If he inquired after the devil’s disguises, she could provide them. She had had time that morning to talk to Good and Osborne. She had had weeks to wonder at, worry about, and care for Betty and Abigail. She adored the girls and deferred to her master, of whom she lived in some fear; a clergyman was meant to show more love than terror to his children and more terror than love to his servants. Tituba was as desperate for a resolution as anyone. Her life was upended. Here was a performance through which no one slept. Only at the end of her testimony did the girls again begin to convulse. “Do you see who it is that torments these children now?” demanded Hathorne. It was Sarah Good, Tituba assured him. The girls agreed. They continued to howl, but Tituba ran out of words. She could not manage another syllable. “I am blind now, I cannot see,” she protested before the March 1 hearing concluded with a prayer.

  BY THE END of the afternoon Tituba and Osborne were locked in the Salem jail. It had been a stimulating, destabilizing day for all involved. More prosaic business followed the justices’ departure. A town meeting had been called for one o’clock; it began late. The Salem villagers wrangled still with their obligations to Salem town. The differences, it was decided, remained irreconcilable. The farmers resolved to petition the court for full autonomy, appointing a constable to spearhead that effort. They voted as well to reject the town’s offer to trade highway maintenance for their support of the village poor. Charity was an unaffordable luxury.

  That evening after dark a persistent, unearthly noise startled a village cooper and a laborer. Drawing near, William Allen and John Hughes discovered a “strange and unusual” beast on the ground. As they approached it dissolved in the silvery moonlight; two or three women materialized in its place and flew swiftly away. More or less concurrently, Elizabeth Hubbard heaved at the Griggs homestead. “There stands Sarah Good upon the table by you!” she cried to Samuel Sibley, Mary’s husband, who was tending to her in her sickness. Shockingly, Good was barefoot, bare-legged, and bare-chested. “If I had something I would kill her!” roared Sibley, reaching for his walking stick. With it he struck the spectral beggar woman across the arm. Hubbard’s account was easily corroborated. Constable Joseph Herrick held Sarah Good that evening at his farm so as to deliver her the following day to the Ipswich jail. Somehow the irascible prisoner managed to elude her guards and slip out into the night, taking her infant but leaving her shoes and stockings behind. In the morning, Herrick’s wife noticed lacerations along Good’s arm, from elbow to wrist. There had been no sign of blood the evening before. Sibley’s blows had evidently struck home.

  Herrick’s deputy could only have been relieved to deliver the suspected witch to Ipswich, a trip of several hours that she made as difficult for him as possible. She rode pillion, on a cushion behind the saddle. It made for slow going; three times that afternoon she also leaped from the horse in attempts to escape. She was not a witch, she railed. Nor would she confess she was one. They had only Tituba’s word. It would be absurd to believe a smooth-talking slave, Good protested, simultaneously fretting that someone actually might. She cursed the magistrates. Addled, she tried to kill herself; it was difficult to say who was more terrified in the wake of Tituba’s hypnotic performance. On Wednesday, March 2, the authorities clapped Good into the Ipswich jail, an insalubrious address even by her standards. It was squalid and stinking. That evening found John Hughes at the Sibley home, where some account of Sarah Good’s antics and his encounter with the flying beast were doubtless discussed. Hughes left around eight o’clock, followed for some time by an unfamiliar white dog. When he was in bed at home, behind locked doors, a great gleam suddenly illuminated his room. He sat up to discover a fat gray cat at the foot of his bed. The twenty-two-year-old cooper, William Allen, also suffered a restless night. A fluorescent Sarah Good landed on his bed. She sat on his foot, though when he kicked, she vanished, taking her light with her. It was as if Tituba had handed out hallucinogens. The terrifying, psychedelic confession, rather than the voodoo of legend, was to be her contribution to the events of 1692.

  Who should Ann Putnam Jr. discover in her room the following day but Dorothy Good, the itinerant Sarah’s five-year-old daughter. The pint-size witch bit, pinched, and choked Ann, all the while urging her to sign a diabolical pact. Meanwhile Hathorne continued to interrogate the suspects in jail, where Tituba continued, over the course of four days, to deliver revelations. She had entered into an agreement with the devil. “He tell me he God and I must believe him and serve him six years and he would give me many fine things,” she related. What else had he said, asked Hathorne, nearly supplying the answers; the first mention of a satanic compact is his. He had suggested pacts with the devil to Good and Osborne as well, neither of whom picked up on them. “Did he say you must write anything? Did he offer you any paper?” he asked Tituba. He had. She had told him she could not accept him as God and tried to run upstairs to confer with Reverend Parris, but the visitor had prevented her. He traveled with his confederates. He forced her to torture the girls. He arranged things so that Parris could see neither himself nor Tituba, a well-known maneuver. Tituba knew her Bible and traded in all the right imagery; if she was not obedient, she understood how obedience sounded. On a subsequent visit—generally the devil called around prayer time—he produced a book from his pocket in which she was to inscribe her name. She was spared from doing so as Mrs. Parris called for her at that very moment from the next room. Tituba was meant to sign in blood, though she muddled her account of how this was arranged. How many marks were in the book? inquired Hathorne. Tituba could say exactly: there were nine, in red and yellow, Sarah Good’s and Sarah Osborne’s distinct among them. In custody Good confirmed the mark was hers. Osborne scoffed at the notion.

  Before Tituba’s initial testimony the tall man had reappeared, she revealed, to warn her not to breathe a word. Were she to do so, he would decapitate her. Pressed for other names she was hopeless. She began to veer into incoherence, or at least the account of her testimony does. Could Tituba at least say where the nine lived? “Yes, some in Boston and some here in town, but he would not tell me who they were,” she replied. This was unsettling news, as were the blood signatures and the hint of conspiracy. Tituba had seen something of which every villager had heard and in which all believed: an actual pact with the devil.

  John Hale, the thoughtful Beverly minister, lived four miles from the village. Having attended hangings as well as prison examinations, he knew his witches. He had observed the parsonage girls in their first fits; he was among those on hand when Hathorne deposed Tituba in jail. The magistrates interrogated her four times, more extensively than they would any other suspect. Three men took copious notes; they dared not miss a febrile word. Tituba insisted she was not a witch, though she had previously worked for one. Her mistress had taught her how to identify witches and how to avoid being bewitched, a lesson she had evidently forgotten. In prison she was reexamined for suspicious marks, which she turned out to have after all. Were further evidence necessary, as Hale and the justices looked on, she began to writhe and shriek. Her diabolical confederates tortured her for having betrayed them.

  A week after their arrest, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were carted off to await trial in Boston’s prison, Good’s infant along with them. Even assuming no one jumped from her horse, that journey constituted a full-day affair. It could only have been tense, given the mutual accusations. As for the
ir destination, with its fetid air, dirt floor, and armies of lice, the Boston jail constituted “a grave of the living.” John Arnold, the Boston jail keep, was notoriously cruel, said to be as obdurate as the shackles with which he fixed the suspects in place. The chains had no locks; a blacksmith alone could remove them. At the same time, Arnold opened accounts for the women’s charges, for which they would be billed. He was soon buying blankets for the prisoner-infant, settled in the dungeon. The chains were as much a testimony to the women’s preternatural force as the defects of the Massachusetts jails. It was understood that witches could control their victims with their every gesture; if they could not move, they could not enchant. Prison breaks however occurred with stunning regularity. An Ipswich prisoner blithely decamped by lifting the boards over his head. Salem inmates at one point dismantled not only the door but an entire wall of the facility. A year earlier, two had called for a pot of beer. They were in a canoe paddling to freedom by the time the jail keep’s wife delivered it.

  Assuming Tituba was convinced by her own testimony, she must have been petrified. Not even a sturdy prison could prevent the tall man from decapitating her. The justices found her entirely credible. She suffered for her confession. She repented. Her details were precise; they tallied unerringly with the reports of the bewitched. Tituba had moreover been consistent from beginning to end. “And it was thought that if she had feigned her confession, she could not have remembered her answers so exactly,” Hale later explained. A liar, it was understood, needed a better memory. Tituba had absorbed all of Parris’s teachings, even if her incandescent account was notably short on professions of piety; she mentioned God only once. Assured throughout, she held up remarkably well for someone caught between a merciless inquisitor and a ghastly decapitator. The irony was that all might have turned out very differently had she been less accommodating. Confessions to witchcraft were rare. Convincing, satisfying, and the most kaleidoscopically colorful of the century, Tituba’s changed everything. It assured the authorities they were on the right track. Doubling the number of suspects, hers stressed the urgency of the investigation. It introduced a dangerous recruiter into the proceedings. “And thus,” wrote Hale evenly of an affair that had seemed modest, local, and—Salem town’s senior minister implied—so ordinary as to be uninteresting, “was this matter driven on.”