Books: Ye Old Boy

THE DEVIL IN MASSACHUSETTS (310 pp.) —Marion L. Starkey—Knopf ($3.50).

When the Reverend Samuel Parris took the ministry of tiny Salem Village in 1689, he brought with him two dark-skinned slaves he had picked up while trading in Barbados. One of the slaves, an ageless woman named Tituba, became the darling of Salem’s teen-age girls. In a stern Puritan community that shunned amusement, Tituba’s stealthy demonstrations of West Indian voodoo could be wonderfully thrilling. But to children like Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail the shows also brought spasms of guilt, for they were convinced they were trafficking with the devil.

In mid-January 1692, Betty and Abigail fell sick. Betty would break into fits of weeping and sometimes make hoarse choking sounds, almost like the barking of a dog. Abigail would run about on all fours, rasping and babbling. The children could not bear to hear prayers, and when Betty came out of one seizure she sobbed that she was damned.

The malady spread; there was hardly a corner of Salem without its afflicted maiden. Long weighed down by Indian raids, smallpox and quarrels with London, Salem took to the outbreak of convulsions with something approaching relief, as if a holiday had been declared.

After the local doctor had tried his few remedies on the girls (“physics” made no difference), he weightily declared that “The evil hand is on them.” With these chilling words the witch-hunt began.

In her debonair, Freudianized study of the Salem witch trials, Marion L. Starkey analyzes the maidenly affliction as hysteria. She sees the girls as partly possessed and partly calculating, weighed down by the rigors of Calvinism, depressed by the lack of an outlet for their high spirits, and finding in their seizures a way both to draw attention to themselves and to wreak an incredibly malicious revenge on the adult world.

“Who Torments You?” Once the devil’s hand was suspected, a group of ministers-in-conclave queried the girls: “Who torments you?” At first, they did not know. Only after a dish of “witch cake” (a blend of rye meal and the sufferers’ urine baked in ashes) was fed to a dog, were their tongues loosened. Betty Parris named Tituba; the others also accused a village tramp and a matron who did not attend church regularly.

The two Massachusetts magistrates sent to Salem Village for preliminary examinations faced a difficult problem: what constituted evidence of witchcraft? The Bible mentioned it in the same breath with sodomy and idolatry, but neglected to define it. After due deliberation the magistrates declared that a devil’s “teat” or “devil’s mark” on the body of the accused was proof of guilt, that mischief following anger between neighbors was ground for suspicion, and, most important of all, that “the devil could not assume the shape of an innocent person.” This last meant that hallucinations would be accepted not as evidence of the wrought-up condition of the accuser but as proof of the guilt of the accused.

Suckle a Bird. Stimulated by a thrashing from her master, Tituba quickly confessed to witchcraft and spun a richly embroidered tale that held Salem spellbound. Red cats and red rats had come to her one by one and said, “Serve me.” Though as an earthly creature she could not read, she had in her spectral phase seen nine Salem names in the devil’s book.

Some sturdy old farmers belittled the whole affair—”bitch witches” sneered one; “get her a man and the wench’ll settle down,” laughed another. Oddly enough, those who had expressed their skepticism were among the next to be accused. Named among the new witches were John Procter, who had cured his maid’s fits by plumping her down at a spinning wheel and threatening a thrashing if she stirred from it, and Martha Cory, a hearty matron who had rashly asserted she didn’t believe in witches. (“Look!” screamed one of the girls at church service, “there sits Goody Cory on the beam, suckling a yellow bird betwixt her fingers!”)

The hysteria spread through Massachusetts. Young girls lived in dread of a spectral rape by the devil and of giving birth to a demon child, while young men (and older) were haunted by the “shapes” of comely matrons who at midnight dropped down from a beam and snuggled close. The devil worked overtime; he was described by one hysteric as “a short and black man—a Wretch no taller than an ordinary Walking Staff … he wore a high crowned hat with straight hair; and he had one Cloven Foot.” Another accuser casually referred to him as “ye old boy.”

Walk in the Clouds. With a kind of perverse logic, those who “confessed” were set free while those courageous enough to deny the accusations were almost all sent to the gallows. Scores of people were jailed, but a few hardy souls began to speak up against the hysteria; a Salem Quaker, a few clergymen, a Boston merchant. Those still in jail were quietly set free—on condition they pay the expense of their imprisonment.

Later, some of the accusers confessed that they had sinned. Wrote the Rev. John Hale, who had been a witness against one of the witches: “We walked in clouds and could not see our way. And we have most cause to be humble for error . . . which cannot be retrieved.” And indeed it could not be retrieved, for before the nine months’ hysteria spent itself 20 innocent men & women had been executed in Salem.