One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  The occasional exile or execution of troublemakers like Anne Hutchinson or Mary Dyer might suggest that they were exceptions proving the rule of Puritan uniformity. But the documents related to the Salem witch trials, with their catalogue of the ways in which those with the least authority in the community sought spiritual solace and sanction outside the bounds of authorized religious practice, suggest that spiritual diversity was the true rule. Tituba—the South American Indian, who lived among Africans in Barbados, who baked witchcakes with an English woman, who for years served a family that seems to have had its own dabblings in non-Christian practices—was a mirror held to differences that were already present before she arrived.

  In fictional depictions of Tituba’s life she is often shown as a dramatic Voodoo priestess, practitioner of a religion now called, in academic circles, Voudon. Scholars of her life maintain that she was no priestess, yet the practices in which she seems to be implicated do suggest something similar: Hoodoo or conjure. While Voudon is primarily a Caribbean phenomenon, Hoodoo grew out of a blending of African American and Native American cultures. As the historian Jeffrey Anderson notes, Native Americans “did much to preserve African ideas and practices” in America, “enrich[ing] conjure with their own distinctive contributions.”

  Hoodoo existed well into the twentieth century. As documented most notably by Zora Neale Hurston, it was a central part of African American culture from the days of slavery until the Great Migration of southern African Americans into the Northeast and Midwest. Hurston was not only a novelist; she also trained at Barnard with the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, and chose as the site of her fieldwork the black southern world from which she had come. Among the dozens of tales of legend and belief Hurston recounts in her classic collection of folklore Mules and Men, one in particular echoes Tituba’s testimony both in its cast of characters and in the subtle claim it makes about the power of a good story. With the same matter-of-fact familiarity with which Tituba recounted her own dealings with the witches of Salem, a storyteller recounts a yarn about a man named Jack who played cards with the Devil and ended up losing his soul. Afraid that he will die when the Devil comes to collect, Jack decides to stop waiting for the worst and take matters into his own hands.

  Hurston writes, in the voice of the storyteller, “Jack walked up to de Devil’s house and knocked on de do’.”

  “Who’s dat?” the Devil’s wife asks.

  “One of de Devil’s friends,” Jack says.

  Claiming closeness with the Devil when it might do him some good, Jack not only wins back his soul, he runs off with the Devil’s daughter on two horses stolen from the Devil’s barn, then gets the Devil’s bull to trample its master. As the storyteller wraps up the yarn, “So dat’s why dey say Jack beat de Devil.”

  Legends involving the everyman Jack, whom Hurston called “the great human culture hero of Negro folklore… like Daniel of Jewish folklore, the wish-fulfillment hero of the race,” are part of an American mythology that turned the religious tradition brought from Europe on its head. They included not only the devil but God, Jesus, and any other holy character that might be conscripted into retellings that would better serve the people against whom scripture was so often used as a cudgel justifying slavery or segregation. “Even the Bible was made over to suit our vivid imagination,” Hurston once said. “The devil always outsmarted God, and our over-noble Jack… outsmarted the Devil.” Such tales are part of a genealogy of American religion that has its origins in acts of religious nonconformity like Tituba’s “witchcake.” They were attempts by the powerless to exert control over their lives.

  And they continue to be. The Anglican minister and amateur folklorist Harry Middleton Hyatt found that witchcakes were used by African Americans in Illinois as late as the 1930s. “If you think you are hoodooed,” he recorded, “take one pint of salt, one pint of corn meal, one pint of your urine.” After mixing this together, to rid yourself of the magical affliction, you would then “[p]ut that in a can on the stove at twelve o’clock at night and cook until it burns.”

  Long after the memory of Boston’s great fires of divine retribution had dissipated, the smoke of Tituba’s spiritual rebellion lingers. As Jeffrey Anderson has observed, “Conjurelike practices occur in some churches even today.” Often these practices are masked by more orthodox beliefs, but they nonetheless remain the spiritual medium of choice for those grasping for a sense of control over their lives. And they are found not just in churches. The maintenance staffs of courthouses around the nation regularly find evidence of Hoodoo spells. In restrooms, in stairwells, before the doorways of judges’ chambers, defendants and their families have been known to leave behind eggs, feathers, hair, black pepper, and blood. Sometimes they bake these ingredients into cakes, just as Tituba did shortly before her own dramatic court appearance.

  In the 1990s, the physical manifestation of Hoodoo, Voodoo, and conjuration became such a problem at a Miami courthouse that officials enlisted a special cleaning squad to dispose of ritual materials. Dade County officials pointed to the city’s large number of immigrants from Haiti, Cuba, and elsewhere in the Caribbean—the islands, in other words, from which Tituba and so many others were sent north into servitude three centuries before. When tasked by a newspaper with explaining this phenomenon, a local sociology professor, Teresita Pedraza, asked, “Why do people go to Lourdes? Because they believe it works. It’s part of a religious belief and value system.”

  As the story of Salem reminds us, this is a system that has been part of the American narrative nearly from the beginning. For those who will never hold the keys to the kingdom, the idea that objects borrowed from the kitchen can be as powerful as any found in a grand temple provides a sense of hope and possibility. For Tituba, the belief that she could control the world around her nearly saw her hanged, but her ability to tell the story of that belief certainly saved her life.

  An account of the method and success of inoculating the small-pox, in Boston in New-England, by Cotton Mather. London: J. Peele, 1722.

  CHAPTER 6

  Call-and-Response

  1702–1721

  Late in the evening on the last day of October 1702, Cotton Mather was afraid. Puritans sanctioned no notice of Halloween, of course, and so despite the Boston minister’s occult preoccupations of the previous decades, it was neither witches nor the devil he feared that night. This particular terror was not born of something that could be preached against and then exorcized by ecclesiastic tribunal. Nor apparently could it be simply and silently prayed away. He had tried as hard as anyone might to do so, but what good were pious pleas for protection when the killer in his midst had been sent by none other than God?

  Mather’s fear was called smallpox. The disease had lately appeared again in Boston, as it had roughly every twenty years, by the reckoning of historians of the day. In its awful wake, the city’s preeminent minister had toiled for weeks, preaching from the pulpit to his ever dwindling congregation and visiting the afflicted in rooms he described as “venomous, contagious, loathsome Chambers.” During this season in which funerals were “daily celebrated and multiplied,” he noted, suspicion of witches and Indians had been replaced in the public consciousness with wariness of the “fevers and fluxes” that spread by the sad magic of human touch and breath.

  A plague is a busy time for a man of the cloth, especially one whose family had provided spiritual solace to the city from the beginning. Yet even a preacher’s faith could falter. “How often have there been Bills desiring Prayers for more than an Hundred Sick on one Day in one of our Assemblies?” Mather wondered. “In one Twelve-month, about one Thousand of our Neighbours have one way or other been carried unto their long Home.” In a population that had reached little more than 7,000 by then, the loss of 1,000 in a year made the epidemic seem like a surgeon’s handsaw cutting a body’s legs off at the shins.

  “Now the Small Pox,” he noted ominously, “is on every Side of us.”

&n
bsp; To Mather, the cause for this pestilence was clear enough. It was the same cause to blame for any death that surprised with its quickness or its magnitude. Years before, he had heard of an earthquake that destroyed the city of Port Royal in Jamaica. Shortly before the ground shook and the splinters of wharf houses washed into the sea, the people of the colony had fallen into the heathen excitement of visiting fortune-tellers. Mather found it odd that, even in a place whose impiety was well known, these supposed predictors of the future had failed to expect the inevitable outcome of their sin. The first commandment—“Thou shalt have no other god but me”—applied not only to worship but to practice. As the late events at Salem had shown, even dabbling in heathenish ways could have dire consequences. Mather had also heard of fortune-tellers much closer to home, in his own Boston, and often wished “the town could be made too Hot for these Dangerous Transgressors.” Lately attending a funeral every day, praying by the bedsides of neighbors whose sins he knew better than anyone, he might have wondered if he had finally gotten his wish.

  At a distance, this was perhaps a subject more for sermons than for tears. But now it seemed divine wrath had come home in the most intimate way. First his wife, Abigail, afflicted with symptoms Mather diagnosed as “sore throat, and such tremor, and such dolor, and such danger of choking, and such exhaustion of strength,” lay in bed calling to heaven as if pleading for death; then his children—his daughters Nibby and Nanny, and his son Increase, named for his imposing father but playfully called “Creasy”—suddenly showed signs of the sickness he had seen in so many other homes.

  How quickly life turns. In what was either a cruel twist of fate or Providence’s own lesson in humility, he had found cause for celebration just the day before. A gentleman had arrived by ship from New Castle, where he had purchased a copy of Mather’s latest book, The Ecclesiastical History of New England. It was the first time Mather had seen a printed copy of his magnum opus, so he had set aside a part of the day to offer Thanksgiving to God for seeing the work to its completion. How could he have imagined that the next evening, he would sit down in the candlelight to record his terror at the thought of losing his wife and children?

  “The dreadful Disease, which is raging in the Neighbourhood, is now gott into my poor Family,” he wrote. “God prepare me, God prepare me, for what is coming upon me!”

  Mather’s study was a large yet warm chamber that housed two to three thousand books (he had lost count himself). He might have turned to any number of those scholarly volumes at that moment for the preparation he sought, but, facing the greatest distress of his life, he turned only to scripture for solace.

  Naturally, he had done so many times before—but on this night, he did not search the text, or his own memory of it, for lines that might provide comfort. Instead, he decided to open his Bible at random and see if God might lead him to the appropriate words.

  This was not at all a practice he often indulged in, nor would he recommend that any who came to him for guidance similarly rifle through the holy book for “divinatory” purposes. To treat scripture like a game of dice or knuckle bones smacked of superstition, perhaps even a kind of sorcery. To presume that a verse chosen by the accidental placement of a fingertip on a given page would have special significance risked making a god of chance. Truly, it was not so different from the fortune-telling that had caused the very earth to tremble on a distant island. Yet in his desperation, he performed this small blasphemy despite the risks.

  “Unto my Amazement,” Mather later wrote, when he placed his finger in the sacred book, he stumbled onto “the History of our Lords curing the sick Son of the Nobleman,” the latter half of the fourth chapter of the Gospel according to John. The words stunned him with their relevance to his situation, as if they had been written for the sole purpose of his reading them that night:

  There was a certain nobleman, whose son was sick at Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus was come out of Judaea into Galilee, he went unto him, and besought him that he would come down, and heal his son: for he was at the point of death. Then said Jesus unto him, Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe. The nobleman saith unto him, Sir, come down ere my child die. Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way; thy son liveth. And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way. And as he was now going down, his servants met him, and told him, saying Thy son liveth. Then enquired he of them the hour when he began to amend. And they said unto him, Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him. So the father knew that it was at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth: and himself believed, and his whole house.

  Had ever the father of sick children read more hopeful a “sign and wonder”? Would not any spiritual father of an afflicted city—as Mather counted himself—dare to suppose God would speak so directly to him? “I saw, that the whole Bible afforded not a more agreeable or profitable Paragraph,” Mather reflected. To discover it at that moment, on that terrible night, seemed to him nothing short of miraculous. He immediately set about writing a series of sermons on the passage, hoping that his private trial might provide some public service.

  As he worked, it occurred to him that those stricken in the homes surrounding his own had become so numerous he would not have time to visit them all. Though it might give further ammunition to those who claimed he had never had an unpublished thought, Mather resolved to print up a small sheet of the encouraging words he might say were he able to pay a call to every darkened room. In these printed words, he would make no mention that it was his use of sacred scripture as a fortune-telling device that had led him to the appropriate Gospel story. But then the dying might have understood better than anyone that desperate times called for unorthodox methods.

  For Mather the miracles did not continue long past that one hopeful accident. Abigail—“my lovely consort… the desire of me eyes,” as he achingly described her—died a hard death over the following month. At her funeral in December of 1702, the widower gave to many of the hundred or more mourners a copy of a short book he had published years before entitled Death Made Happy and Easy. Into the front cover he pasted a page filled with couplets addressed to his wife of sixteen years:

  Go then, my Dove, but now no longer mine;

  Leave Earth, and now in heavenly Glory shine…

  Dear Friends, with whom thou didst so dearly live,

  Feel thy one Death to them a thousand give.

  Thy Prayers are done; thy Alms are spent; thy Pains

  Are ended now, in endless Joyes and Gains.

  Mather’s own pains, however, were far from ended. Never making peace with this time of particular loss (“Has not the Death of my Consort that most astonishing Sting in it?” he asked. “Truly, nothing has ever yett befallen me, that has come so near it…”), he came to feel a special antipathy toward the affliction that had troubled his community. This, he knew, put him perhaps for the first time outside the bounds of the covenantal doctrine that his father and his grandfathers had done so much to advance in New England. For as great an ill as a scourge like the pox was, as perfect a devastation as it had brought to Boston and beyond, was not sanguine acceptance of such hardships part of humanity’s agreement with the divine? Was not each coming of the epidemic an act of God? The disease itself was indisputably a part of the Lord’s creation, designed and employed to punish humanity for its failings or to instruct it in humility. Who then was man—even a grieving man—to question or wish to control the workings of life and death?

  And yet in the year after his wife’s death, Mather came to question everything. “Was ever man more tempted than the miserable Mather?” he wrote. “Should I tell, in how many Forms the Devil has assaulted me, and with what Subtilty and Energy, his Assaults have been carried on, it would strike my Friends with Horrour.” An inveterate scribbler even in mourning, he made a careful catalogue of the ways in which his former surety was coming undone. “Sometimes, Temptations to Impurities; and sometimes to Blasphemy, and At
heism, and the Abandonment of all Religion, as a meer Delusion; and sometimes, to self-Destruction itself.”

  When it came to smallpox especially, Mather could not help inching closer to even greater impiety. If it were in man’s power to counteract the sickness through the God-given gift of the intellect, would it not be wrong to squander grace by failing to do so?

  Such thoughts lingered and faded through the years of Mather’s grieving. And faded they might have remained were it not for another turn of fate—one that determined his internal turmoil over these matters would find an improbable resolution. It was nearly four years to the day after the funeral of “his lovely consort” that Mather sat once again at his desk and recorded the event that would change the course of his life, even as it revealed something of the early influence of religious differences in America.

  “This Day, a surprising Thing befel me,” Mather wrote in December 1706. “Some Gentlemen of our Church… purchased for me a very likely Slave.”

  When Mather received this dubious gift—a man whose life and labor he presumed to own despite not having paid a shilling for either—the practice of having an African servant living under an English colonist’s roof was well established, but was not yet the “peculiar institution” American slavery would become.

  It was by then eighty-seven years since the hot day in August when a Dutch ship loaded with human cargo arrived in the colony of Virginia, delivering the first African-born servants to the English colonies. Earlier that summer, in June 1619, another vessel, an English sloop called the Triall, had come to shore filled with corn and cattle, relieving the colonists of the always-lingering “feare of famine” and apparently allowing them to feel they had sufficient material wealth to consider an acquisition, should the right opportunity arise. Two months later, the Dutch ship brought just that. After inspection of the cargo, the Virginians settled terms of the trade—within a dozen years the going price per head would be 2,000 pounds of tobacco—and “twenty negars” came ashore to begin harvesting the crop that had been bartered for their flesh.