Edward and Jonathan Putnam were probably among the onlookers, for on the same day they journeyed to town and entered complaints against not only Rebecca Nurse for tormenting Mrs. Ann Putnam, her daughter Annie, Abigail Williams, “and others” but also against little Dorothy Good as well.
So at some point before eight o’clock the next morning Rebecca heard a knock on the house door, and this time the family opened to find Marshall George Herrick with his official black staff of office confronting them. Rebecca had not yet recovered from whatever her illness was, but in spite of her angry relatives, Herrick produced and read the warrant for her arrest. Francis had to have been furious at that, protective and protesting. But nothing he or his sons could do prevented the marshall from bundling Rebecca off to Ingersoll’s. To judge from their later actions, Francis and much of her family followed, frustrated and fuming at the idea anyone could seriously suspect his wife, their mother.
The child Dorothy Good was also brought to the ordinary under arrest. Deodat Lawson saw her there, where she seemed “as hale and well as other children.” Who knows what she might have understood of the events. Perhaps the grandmotherly presence of Goody Nurse was some comfort.
Also about was Mary Warren, having escaped from Procter’s fiercely watchful eye. Besides clouting her back to attention, Procter may have beaten her more than that. But once being forced to focus on her spinning, Mary had calmed, and for a time she had no more hysterical episodes. Eventually, however, Procter needed to be away from home for a few days to attend to business elsewhere, and Mary, brooding on the apparent plague of witches, began letting her nervousness get the better of her. Without her master’s warning blows to jolt her, she started experiencing fits again. If Goodwife Elizabeth Procter tried to slap some sense into the girl, it didn’t work. Mary already resented her mistress, behind her back referring to her slightingly as Betty Procter. (That much she would say to the magistrates; how she may have referred to her mistress when sharing gossip with the other hired girls is another matter.)
The Thursday of the hearing was also lecture day and the Village’s turn to host the talk—a respectable excuse to slip away from work early enough to watch the questioning of suspects as well. Mercy’s name does not appear in the notes of this day’s hearings or on any of the surviving indictments. Mrs. Ann Putnam was definitely an afflicted witness named in the complaint. She had already convulsed that morning before court convened.
Once again Ingersoll’s ordinary was too small for the crowd of onlookers. So at ten o’clock Rebecca stood alone between guards in the packed Salem Village meeting house. She faced the Magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin along with the array of accusing afflicted witnesses. Besides Mrs. Ann Putnam, her daughter, and Abigail Williams (all named in the warrant), Ann’s maid Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Mrs. Bethshua Pope were also present. These witnesses were agitated from the start, nervous through Reverend John Hale’s opening prayer and the magistrates’ remarks. Some of them had only seen Goody Nurse’s specter, though it had not harmed them.
Hathorne gestured to some of the younger accusers, asking, “Goody Nurse, here are two An Putman the child & Abigail Williams complains of your hurting them What do you say to it[?]”
“I can say before my Eternal father I am innocent, & God will clear my innocency.”
“Here is never a one in the Assembly but desiers it,” said Hathorne, sounding almost sympathetic, “but,” he added, “if you be guilty Pray God discover you.”
Henry Kenny, Mercy Lewis’s kinsman, “entered his complaint,” then “said that since this Nurse came into the house we was seiz’d twise with an amaz’d condition.” But Parris’s notes do not explain just what had happened, and it is not clear if the incident happened at Kenny’s house or at the meeting house.
Building on this, Hathorne again indicated the afflicted. “Here are not only these but, here is the wife of Mr Tho[mas] Putman who accuseth you by credible information & that both of tempting her to iniquity, & of greatly hurting her.” (The “credible information” was presumably other people’s accounts of what Ann said and did during her fits, the iniquity being the specter’s attempts to recruit Ann’s soul to witchcraft. Other people had witnessed that one-sided conversation.) Not all of the afflicted witnesses were certain that Goody Nurse had hurt them, however, even though they reported seeing her specter at the witches’ meetings.
Rebecca did not associate herself with any specter. “I am innocent & clear & have not been able to get out of doors these 8 or 9 dayes.”
Edward Putnam related an account of Rebecca’s supposed acts of torture.
Hathorne asked Goody Nurse if it were true.
“I never afflicted no child never in my life.”
“You see these accuse you, is it true?”
“No.”
“Are you an innocent person relating to this Witchcraft[?]”
At this point Ann Putnam had had enough of what she saw as lies. Before Rebecca could deny this as well, Ann began shouting, “Did you not bring the Black man with you, did you not bid me tempt God & dye[?] How oft have you eat & drunk y[ou]r own damnation[?]” (How often, that is, had Rebecca taken communion under false pretenses, partaken of the Lord’s bread and wine when she was actually pledged to the Devil?)
“What do you say to them[?]” said Hathorne.
“Oh, Lord, help me.” Rebecca cried. She spread her hands imploringly—and the afflicted flinched away, groaning as if she had thrust some invisible force at them with the gesture.
“Do you not see what a Solemn condition these are in?” the magistrate demanded of her. “[W]hen your hands are loose the persons are afflicted.”
The guards grabbed Rebecca’s hands to hold them still. Across the room she saw the surging mass of the afflicted, and two of the young women were shouting. She may not have heard them clearly, but they accused her specter of attacking them as well. Mary Walcott and Elizabeth Hubbard had not accused Rebecca of actually hurting them before, but now Mary cried out that she had been bitten and raised her arm to display tooth marks on the wrist. Elizabeth Hubbard also accused Rebecca of hurting her now.
“Here are these 2 grown persons now accuse you,” said Hathorne (that is, not children like Abigail and Annie). “[What] say you? Do not you see these afflicted persons, & hear them accuse you[?]”
“The Lord knows I have not hurt them. I am an innocent person.”
But the afflicted cried that the Devil himself stood by Rebecca, whispering in her ear amid a swarm of imp familiars. Many of them convulsed, twitching and flailing in terror at such a sight, causing several people in the audience to burst into sympathetic tears.
“It is very awfull to all to see these agonies,” said Hathorne, and she a woman who had so long professed to be a Christian acting with the Devil right in front of them all by the look of it, “& yet to see you stand with dry eyes when these are so many what [i.e., wet].”
“You do not know my heart,” Rebecca answered.
“You would do well if you are guilty to confess & give Glory to God.”
“I am as clear as the child unborn.”
“What uncertainty there may be in apparitions I know not,” he continued. But what about the familiar spirits? The afflicted could see them right there in court, all flocking to her. “Now what do you say to that?”
“I have none Sir.”
“If you have,” he chided, “confes, & give glory to God. I pray God clear you if you be innocent, & if you are guilty discover you. And therefore give me an upright answer have you any familiarity with these spirits?”
“No, I have none but with God alone.”
“How came you sick?” Gossip had speculated that, rather than being ill, she may have been injured when people struck back at her specter.
“I am sick at my stomach.”
“Have you no wounds?”
“I have none but old age.”
The afflicted again said they sa
w the Devil and the imps and flocking spectral birds, and they shrieked at the sight. Rebecca leaned back against a support—a chair or a pew—and the afflicted arced backward as if their spines would break. She moved her hands, and they shied away as though they were being hit. To the magistrates and to much of the audience, the cause and effect of her movements and the afflicted’s reactions seemed painfully obvious.
“It is all false,” she insisted. “I am clear.”
“Possibly you may apprehend you are no witch, but have you not been led aside by temptations that way[?]”
“I have not.”
“What a sad thing is it that a Church member here & now another of Salem, should be thus accused and charged,” he observed, referring both to Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse.
“A sad thing sure enough!” Mrs. Bathshua Pope shouted, but evidently she did not throw anything this time. She and the others then fell into “grievous” and “lamentable fits.”
According to some of them Rebecca’s specter detached from her body and hit them on its way out of the meeting house. Outside, her spirit mounted a horse behind the Devil and galloped around the building in mockery. The afflicted screeched so much so that folk up the road heard them, while inside the meeting house people wondered who in the audience would convulse next. Instead of trembling, Ann Putnam froze, locked in paralysis. The magistrates gave Thomas permission to carry her outdoors, and once away from the commotion, she relaxed and began to recover.
The court, however, was not through with Rebecca Nurse. “Tell us have not you had visible appearances more than what is common in nature?”
“I have none nor never had in my life.”
“Do you not think these suffer voluntarily or involuntarily[?]”
“I cannot tell.”
“That is strange everyone can judge.”
“I must be silent.”
“They accuse you of hurting them, & if you think it is [not] unwillingly but by designe you must look upon them as murderers”—that is, did she think her accusers lied, doing so in a charge that could take her life?
“I cannot tell what to think of it.”
The magistrates insisted, so Rebecca admitted she had not understood all that was said. She was hard of hearing, after all.
“Well then give an answer now, do you think these suffer against their wills or not[?]”
“I do not think these suffer against their wills.”
“Why did you never visit these afflicted persons?”
“Because I was afraid I should have fits too.”
“Is it not an unaccountable case that when you are examined these persons are afflicted?” For the afflicted were reacting to her every movement.
“I have got no body to look to but God.” She moved her hands as she spoke, and as she did, the afflicted responded with “violent fits of torture.”
“Do you beleive these afflicted persons are bewitcht[?]”
“I do think they are.”
“When this Witchcraft came upon the stage there was no suspicion of Tituba,” Hathorne continued. “She profest much love to that Child Betty Parris, but it was her apparition did the mischief, & why should not you also be guilty, for your apparition doth hurt also.”
“Would you have me belie my self [?]” Rebecca cocked her head, and Elizabeth Hubbard’s neck bent sharply to the side.
“[S]et up Goody Nurses head,” Abigail Williams cried, “the maids neck will be broke.”
“What do you think of this?”
“I cannot help it. The Devil may appear in my shape.” The magistrates ignored her logic and instead directed Reverend Parris to read the shorthand notes he had taken of some of Mrs. Ann Putnam’s fits. (These have not survived but must have been close to Reverend Lawson’s account of the same or a similar episode.) Mrs. Putnam’s spectral dialogues with an invisible Rebecca along with the courtroom convulsions of the afflicted impressed the magistrates more than the real Rebecca’s Scriptural argument about the Devil’s deceptions. The magistrates then ordered that Goody Nurse be held for later trial.
If Mary Warren had had any doubts about her interpretation of her symptoms, the sight of two grown women convulsing—respected married women, not just unregarded hired girls—accusing their neighbors of bewitching them must have seemed to prove her worst fears. Mrs. Putnam looked half dead as her husband carried her from the meeting house—a fearful sight.
The examination of Sarah Good’s child Dorothy is lost, but as young as she was, she also was held for trial. What the child thought it was all about is anyone’s guess. The afflicted reacted as though Dorothy’s specter attacked them every time the girl looked their way. Some of them claimed her specter bit them, showing little teeth marks on their skin. This must have impressed Mary Warren.
(The little girl may have been placed in the house of prison keeper William Dounton rather than in the common jail, for it was there, on March 26, that Hathorne, Corwin, and Reverend Higginson would question Dorothy further. They must have asked her about familiars, for, according to Deodat Lawson, the child “told them . . . it had a little Snake.” Pointing to “a deep Red Spot, about the Bigness of a Flea-bite” on “the Lowest point of [her] Fore-Finger,” she said that was where the snake would suck nourishment. And no, “the great Black man” [i.e., the Devil] had not given her the snake—her mother had.)
After the midday meal on March 24, visiting minister Deodat Lawson delivered the afternoon lecture, which was intended as a warning against jumping to conclusions. Was Rebecca Nurse present under guard as an example, or was she confined to the watch-house prior to being taken to Salem jail? Ann Putnam may have recovered enough to listen (the afflicted tended to recover fairly quickly, especially if they had won their point). Mary Warren was almost certainly present.
The text, Zachariah 3:2, concerned a man who Satan himself had accused, only to have his sins forgiven. Lawson himself had to have had his dead wife and baby daughter in mind, supposedly, according to Tituba, killed by witchcraft. But he reminded his audience that the Devil had malice enough against humanity and could act against them both physically and mentally without the help of mortal witches. He warned against the Devil’s “Mists of Darkness, and ignorance, in the Understanding” and “false Representations to the Eyes” (as Rebecca Nurse had warned the court), advised them to look into their own hearts and consider what they were doing that would please the Devil, and reminded them that no one had yet been proven guilty. “Give no place to the Devil,” Lawson warned, “by Rash Censuring of others, without sufficient grounds, or false accusing any willingly.” He reminded the courts to consider the cases by lawful means—that is, no folk tests or torture—and reminded the people against trying to use supposedly protective folk charms, which is so close to harmful magic. If John Indian sat in the gallery listening, he likely worried about the witch-cake Goody Sibley had encouraged him and Tituba to make to help the girls. If Goody Sibley heard this part, she had reason to worry about her association with magic of any kind.
But Lawson’s listeners apparently paid most attention when he described the dangers of the times as well as his description of how actual witches allowed the Devil to “use their Bodies and Minds, Shapes and Representations to Affright and Afflict others, at his pleasure.” And in that time of very real frontier attacks leveled at the towns from Canada, they paid more mind to his military metaphor to “ARM! ARM! ARM!”—which he clarified as meaning, “PRAY! PRAY! PRAY!” “Let us admit no parley,” he said, “give no quarter, let none of Satan’s Forces or Furies, be more vigilant to hurt us than we are to resist & repress them.” Yes, audience members like the Putnams and Mary Warren thought, resist and repress. The danger seemed so obvious to them.
Rebecca Nurse was taken off to Salem jail, while Ann Putnam returned home with her family, probably feeling somewhat (but not entirely) safer.
Mary Warren, however, did not return to the Procter farm but instead stayed somewhere in the Village overnight. She and
the other afflicted girls still experienced fits and visions despite the capture of the latest suspects. Mary could not help noticing how differently the Putnam and Williams and Walcott girls were treated than she had been, how the adults offered sympathy and consolation, whereas Elizabeth Procter criticized and John Procter beat her. Even the maids, Lewis and Hubbard, were treated sympathetically by their masters. And in all cases the magistrates themselves took what the afflicted said seriously instead of dismissing their complaints as the foolishness of mere girls, paid attention to them who had, until then, been ignored.
Before she could return to the Procter farm the next morning, Mary’s infuriated master appeared. Not only had she disobeyed him, but he had also lost a day of her work, lost his own work time fetching her back, and would lose more time while she got over her latest spell of fits. He hauled her home, no doubt telling her, as he had already told Walter Phillips on his way to the Village, that he would rather have paid forty pence than let her go to the court. “[W]e should all be Devils & Witches quickly,” he had said to Phillips. Those supposedly afflicted accusers “should rather be had to the Whipping post,” he proclaimed—whipped like common liars, that is. Now he had to “fetch his jade home and thresh the Devil out of her.” He called her jade, as though she were a wanton woman, and he made it clear that her actions would only lead to more accusations. He doubtless repeated it all to Mary on the difficult trip home.
That John called Mary a jade, taken with Mary’s disjointed testimony about pulling a specter into her lap and finding it was her master’s spirit, suggests a sexual undercurrent to the problem. Had Mary done more than fantasize a romance with her master? Had she made any sort of advance toward him—the potential strong protector—or indicated that she would not rebuff such an advance from him if he offered one? Her statements never hint that he showed any desires toward her. His only stated reactions seem to be disgust and anger. Whatever he felt about the maid, the situation had to have caused an awkwardness between him and his wife. What did Elizabeth think, and did any of this refer to the couple’s quarrels that Mary would mention?
Six Women of Salem Page 16