The Witch of Eye

by Kathryn Nuernberger

H: Doe you goe through the trees or over them.

  T: We see nothing but are there presently.

  H: Why did you not tell your master.

  T: I was afraid they said they would cut of[f] my head if I told.

  It is unclear precisely how many members of Salem village owned human beings as slaves. The first comprehensive records appear in 1754 when Governor Shirley ordered a census of all slaves over sixteen. In that year there were at least eighty-three people of African or indigenous descent living as property in Salem village.

  It is with Certeau and Alexander in mind that I have concluded there is nothing new to learn about history. There is only what I might try once more to see clearly.

  H: Would you not have hurt others if you co[u]ld.

  T: They said they would hurt others but they could not

  When Breslaw tells the story, she emphasizes the resistance in Titiba’s description of the nameless and faceless members of a coven, dressed in the fine clothes of well-to-do people. She proposes a new history that explains how a group of people came to have the idea that there is no such thing as witches. Her story goes like this: When a person like Titiba, who is not supposed to know how, masters the system and turns it against those who would master her, the ruling class suddenly and conveniently realizes nothing they have believed makes sense anymore.

  H: What attendants hath Sarah Good.

  T: A yellow bird and shee would have given me one.

  H: What meate did she give it?

  T: It did suck her between her fingers.

  Of all the pretty things the devil was said to have promised the people of Salem, my favorite is this yellow bird flying through the ash and charcoal palette of a cold and miserable place.

  The yellow birds of Barbados include: yellow-throated vireo, bananaquit, American redstart, American yellow warbler, northern waterthrush, prothonotary warbler, prairie warbler.

  Yellow birds that can be found in New England: saffron finch, goldfinch, pine warbler, yellow-throated vireo, yellow-breasted chat, yellow-rumped warbler, yellow-headed blackbird. The recently extincted Bachman warbler would have been there when Titiba was.

  H: Did not you hurt Mr Currins child?

  T: Goode good and goode Osburn told that they did hurt Mr Currens child and would have had me hurt him too, but I did not

  H: What hath Sarah Osburn?

  T: Yellow dog, she had a thing with a head like a woman with 2 legges, and wings. Abigail Williams that lives with her Uncle Parris said that she did see the same creature, and it turned into the shape of Goode Osburn.

  H: What else have you seen with Osburn?

  T: Another thing, hairy it goes upright like a man it hath only 2 legges.

  What was known then and is known now, but almost never is included in the story is that Titiba had a child who was about two years old when the trials began, just over three years old when it was over. Her name was Violet.

  When the general pardon was issued, the accused only had to pay their prison costs to be released. Samuel Parris did not pay the seven pounds owed for Titiba. We know she lived with little food and little heat in that prison for at least six more months until someone whose name no one thought to record bought her for the price of this modest debt. We also know that Violet was never with her mother again, because in Samuel Parris’s will, which was executed forty-five years later, she was handed down to his heirs.

  H: Did you not see Sarah Good upon Elizabeth Hubbard, last Saturday?

  T: I did see her set a wolfe upon her to afflict her, the persons with this maid did say that she did complain of a wolfe.

  T: She further saith that shee saw a cat with good at another time.

  H: What cloathes doth the man go in?

  T: He goes in black clothes a tall man with white hair I thinke.

  H: How doth the woman go?

  T: In a white hood and a black hood with a top knot.

  H: Doe you see who it is that torments these children now.

  At the time of the writing of this essay, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency held an estimated 10,000 migrant children in its custody; at least seven had died. Which is a situation not unlike the one from 1879 to 1918 when the US government took 12,000 children from their parents and their nations or bands into the abusive Carlisle Indian School, an institution that approximately 150 other US-run or Canadian-run or Catholic-run boarding schools for Native children modeled themselves after. Half of the 120,000 people held in Japanese internment camps in the US were children. Of the 12.5 million people carried across the Atlantic during the five centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, 26 percent are estimated to have been children. The number of children born into slavery has not yet been calculated, but they have been there, the children, afflicted, since the beginning of the American story.

  T: Yes it is Goode Good, shee hurts them in her own shape

  H: And who is it that hurts them now.

  T: I am blind now. I cannot see

  The Devil’s Book

  The devil keeps a book of names where you sign in your own blood or some other potioned ink like a liquid iron gall. There is no erasing it, there is no smearing it.

  When I try to imagine the devil’s book, I see the piled-up files as the historian combs through every record, bill of sale, ship’s manifest, and diary, trying to find one enslaved woman’s name in that sea of ink. I try again to see his book, but called to mind instead is that scene out of the transcripts of Salem when a judge asked the enslaved woman Candy if she had signed the devil’s book. She answered that her mistress had once shown her that her name was written in a book and she felt the presence of a great evil, the kind of thing the Puritans called “the devil.” Candy said, “Candy no witch in her country. Candy’s mother no witch. Candy no witch, Barbados.”

  When you decide to discover everything known about the devil’s book of names, a great many of the forks in your reading will switchback to Herman, a Czech priest who transcribed and illustrated the Codex Gigas. Herman the Recluse, the story goes, not inclined to a life of ascetic restraint, broke his monastic vows and was sentenced to be walled up alive. Frightened and frantic, he promised to create a book in one single night that would glorify the monastery forever and include all human knowledge. At midnight the monk prayed to Lucifer for aid; the devil finished the book in exchange for his soul.

  In another version of the story he lived inside that wall for thirty years, atoning for his sins by copying and illustrating.

  Elsewhere it is said the abbot gave him a year to glorify the monastery from his tomb and after that he would be walled in and left to starve. At midnight on the last night of the year he made his pact.

  It is formally known as the Codex Gigas because it is gigantic, the largest book the Holy Roman Empire would know. Medievalists observe how unique it is for its constancy of script. Most illuminated manuscripts were collaborative endeavors among whole monasteries of scribes, but here it really does seem like one man did work that, by the math of the archivists, would have taken approximately thirty years of daylight hours to complete.

  It is informally known as the Devil’s Book because Folio 290 recto depicts a florid and gleaming devil painted with gilded inks made of liquefied precious gems. The devil hunches in a loincloth, his green face snarls behind a thin and twirling moustache, ruby eyes, and two bloody horns protruding from his temples. His three-toed feet and hands have talons shaped like licks of flame. Sharp dewclaws curve out from his ankles. A dragon, a bird of prey, a snake in one body glowing off the animal-skin page.

  A lot of medieval demons you’ll see in the marginalia of psalters, Bibles, and books of hours look like caricatures of African people. This one is inspired by the medieval European caricatures to dehumanize Asian people. Freud and other early psychoanalysts spent a lot of time studying cases of demon possession and asking what they tell us about neuroses. But it wasn’t until Frantz Fanon and other post-colonial psychoanalysts started to ask what i
n the history of ideas makes the madness of racism possible that the invention of demons really makes sense.

  If your name appears in the devil’s book, to hear the Puritans tell it, he is now your master. If they let themselves think very much about it, the Puritans must have been terrified that what they had done to other people might in turn be done to them.

  When Nathan Putnam, master of Mary Black, told her in no uncertain terms she was forbidden to confess to anything the court asked, no matter how they pressed, did she appreciate the encouragement to hold fast to truth or just fear his commands more than those of the magistrate?

  Unlike Mary Black, the enslaved woman Candy confessed and she also accused. “Candy no witch, Barbados.” She said, “In this country mistress give Candy witch.” When the magistrates asked how her mistress made her a witch, Candy answered, “Mistress bring book and pen and ink, make Candy write in it.” The historian Cassander L. Smith lingers over the forty words of hers in this fragmented slip of a trial record we have left from that moment. Smith sees in her testimony an “instance of verbal resistance” when Candy “circumscribed the transcriber’s (and court prosecutors’) own rhetorical strategies” and makes us think about who her mistress really is, of what she is capable, and what it means to see your name written on someone else’s pages. She makes those who would have dismissed her as nothing more than property consider what it makes you when you say you have the papers to prove you own someone’s soul. The records say that the afflicted Puritans in the room, upon hearing Candy’s words and then seeing her dunk some knotted rags in a bucket, “were greatly affrighted and fell into violent fits.”

  The truth is here and has been the whole time. Even, or perhaps especially, pathological liars get their tongues all tied up in it. Medieval Christians called this phenomenon the Anti-Christ—every good has its opposite, every Christ his Satan, every Bible its Devil’s Book, every congregation its coven. They preferred to imagine that opposite existed outside themselves. It was only when they looked back on his life that the brothers came to call Herman a recluse. Recluse, so they wouldn’t instead have to say how they sealed a man into a dark room with just a small slit of light through which food and waste and paper and ink passed in and out. What a relief it must have been, to imagine that it was the devil in there looking out at you, and not a glimpse of yourself looking in.

  Horseshoes

  After dumping the burned remains of the Paisley witches in their mass grave at a crossroads, authorities sealed it with a horseshoe that sits now in the center of a traffic circle, cars whizzing around. Unlike most of the recorded executions, where the women were compliant, apologetic, and pleading, Catherine Campbell struggled and screamed all the way to the gallows. She called down the wrath of God and the devil on her accusers. Then Agnes Naismith was dragged to the scaffold. Before she was hanged then burned, she laid what she called a dying woman’s curse on the town. Some residents of Paisley say, despite the iron meant to hold an evil thing down, they can still feel those women’s angry heat.

  Paisley, an old mill town of mostly shuttered factories, is not so different from where I sit now. Potosi, Missouri, named after the mythical city of precious minerals the conquistadors set forth to claim, is one of many villages born of metals colonizers came here to dig and mine and smelt. Down the road is Old Mines, over the valley from Steelville, in a watershed with Leadwood, across a dry river from the Iron County line.

  One wonders what possessed the people who made the accusations, and how they lived with themselves after. There are a few instances of regret and recantation—after what she helped make possible in Salem, Ann Putnam insisted her body be buried in an unmarked grave. She said, “I desire to lie in the dust, and to be humble for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity to them and their families; for which cause I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God.”

  Christian Shaw’s testimony led to the execution of Catherine Campbell, Agnes Naismith, and others—seven people in all, including John and James Lindsay, brothers aged eleven and fourteen, who died on the scaffold holding each other’s hands. And yet she has no such apology on record. She was eleven when she saw her servant Catherine steal a drink of milk. She told her mother what the maid had done, and Catherine, pissed off at the stinginess of the whole household, cursed the girl, saying she wished the devil would “haul her soul through Hell.” Not long after, Christian encountered old, trembling, much-whispered-about Agnes Naismith on the road. Soon the girl was having fits and seizures, feelings of flying through the air, and coughing up bits of hair, charcoal, chicken feathers, and straw. The usual symptoms.

  It is possible Christian Shaw was a murderous, conniving psychopath. Others have suggested we might attribute cases like hers to what the DSM-5 calls functional neurological symptom disorder. There are experts who say it is worth considering the possibility that witchcraft is real, especially to those who believe in it. So far as we know, the girl herself never wondered whether the story of her life was a delusion or a sin or a convenient occasion for landed gentry to demonstrate their power. She was after all the daughter of the Laird of Bargarran, and the daughters of lairds seldom have to contemplate, must less justify, the reasons for or the consequences of their actions.

  I read these accusations and convictions, recantations and curses beside a stream that flows through a water table the lead mines bought the underground rights to back in the Depression years, one desperate farmer at a time. Out here some of the water runs clear some of the time. Anymore you never know when the mines might sink a spring or let it run a kind of slurry through the mess of what they do underneath us. When there’s work, my kin cut steel, my kin weld iron, my kin go into the lead mines. When there is not work, my kin collect scrap metal, my kin sell, my kin cook, my kin become the cops who arrest them and the prison guards who hold them for it. Out here there is the highest incidence of lead poisoning per capita in children anywhere other than Flint.

  Centuries before Agnes Naismith was hung by a rope and then burned at the stake, Saint Dunstan, the tenth-century farrier and owner of a great iron forge, was asked by the devil to shoe his cloven hoof. Dunstan recognized his customer and agreed, but then caused him so much pain digging the nails into the most tender places he could reach, the devil begged him leave off. Dunstan stopped his work on the promise the devil would never again enter a place where a horseshoe was hung.

  Among other things, the Paisley witches were accused of discovering you can hang the horseshoe over your threshold upside down and your presser, your cold-shoe, your mare ride, your sphinx moth, your sweetest sin, your siren song would not be thwarted entry.

  This newborn creek is so clear we can watch trout, old and huge as river gods, graze past the green grasses ten feet deep before spilling downstream to discover the silt runoff and limestone bottoms of our careworn hills. The people my ancestors drove away, starved out, murdered in cold blood, or just never spared a single thought for at all, members of the Osage Nation called and call this place sacred. Because there is no place we can go where we do not carry our history and because there is no place where we will allow each other to speak of it either, we eat beside the ruins of the forges where iron ore was mined and then carted down the hill to be cast into bullets during the Civil War, for whichever side wanted to pay the highest price. Though I wish it were otherwise, I know I am surrounded by people who hope it was the Confederacy that made the best use of them.

  The horseshoe, because Mars, the God of War and Warhorses, was an enemy of Saturn, the Liege Lord of Witches.

  “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” we say out here with derision and cruelty when someone who has lost something tries to offer a reason why.

  There is an old admonition to put a horseshoe on your stable to keep the evil things from stealing milk from your cows or leaving your horses exhausted and covered with sweat. But the crumble-down barns are empty except for the rats and possums and
the dusty piles of feces they leave in the stalls of their wake.

  Out here white people forget what they know as a way to live with it. If you have a hilltop your great-great-granddaddy handed down, you’ll dig up a century’s worth of shotgun shells when you disc the wheat, and then arrowheads, a coin or two a conquistador would have held between his fingers. You’ll disc up bones and some of them will be human. And if all you have is a bank account left behind with your family’s name on it, it’s even easier to refuse to remember what horror it took and takes to be here.

  Christian Shaw grew up. She traveled widely across Europe with her mother, who was also her business partner. After finding such fine thread being spun in Holland, they smuggled pieces of that new invention, the spinning jenny, back home in their skirts. And then founded Bargarran Threads, which would become the industrial backbone of Paisley’s mill-town economy for the next four hundred years. Whether Christian felt like a survivor of something terrible or a murderer of the innocent or just never thought of anyone but herself at all is impossible to say for certain.

  Who remembers now that before there was the word nightmare, there were the stories of the mara, those dreadful harriers of horse flesh and dreams?

  The mara, those white-mothed souls of people who leave their bodies in the night.

  The mara, who sit astride your chest and ride you through your dreams so hard you wake each morning in a pant.

  In the old legends a Viking invader called Thorkel the Tall once had a dream about riding a red mare that barely touched ground. He thought it a positive omen, but his wife knew the red foretold blood and the mare was the self of himself he was about to lose.