I have been a member of this congregation for eleven years. I know the names of every family in this village. I have sat in that meetinghouse and listened to sermons and prayed alongside these people through two winters of smallpox and a summer of drought and the grief of ordinary life. And now one of them has said she saw my shape tormenting her in the night, and the magistrates have written it down as evidence.
This is what I want you to understand: it is not possible to defend yourself against a dream.
February
It began with Betty Parris, who was nine, and her cousin Abigail Williams, who was eleven. They began to have fits in February — screaming, contorting, throwing themselves against walls, reporting visions of something tormenting them. The Reverend Parris called in physicians. The physicians found no natural cause. One of them suggested witchcraft.
I did not think much of it at first. Children have fits. I had seen it before — the strange paroxysms that pass through a household, the way fear can move from one person to another like a fever. I thought it would pass.
It did not pass. It spread.
By March, the fits had moved to other girls. Ann Putnam, twelve, began to have them. Mary Walcott. Elizabeth Hubbard. And with the fits came the accusations: Tituba, the Parris family's enslaved servant. Sarah Good, the village beggar. Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman who rarely attended meeting. These were the first three. They were the kind of women a frightened community might choose: marginal, already suspect, already slightly outside the circle of belonging.
The Logic of Accusation
I should have seen what the logic of the thing required earlier than I did. The accusation needed to be believed. For the accusation to be believed, the accuser needed to be believed. For the accuser to be believed, the fits needed to be real. And for the fits to be real — truly real, demonically real, not the hysteria of children or the cruelty of girls who had discovered their power — the accused needed to be guilty. The logic was circular and complete. There was no place in it for innocence.
In late March, Ann Putnam named Martha Corey — a respected church member, a woman with a complicated past but a present that was orderly and pious. This was a different kind of accusation. This was not a beggar or a servant. This was someone like the accusers' own families.
I listened to what happened to Martha Corey at her examination and felt something cold begin in my chest.
My Own Examination
When my name was spoken by one of the girls, I did not at first comprehend what it meant. I had no quarrel with anyone. I had committed no offense that I knew of. I was a woman of some standing — not wealthy, but established, not marginal but central. I thought: there has been a mistake. I will explain the mistake and it will be corrected.
The examination was nothing like what I had imagined. I stood before Magistrates Hathorne and Corwin in the meetinghouse and the girls — who were present, who were always present at examinations — began immediately to have fits. They screamed that my shape was tormenting them as I stood there. They writhed. They pointed. The magistrates looked at me with an expression that I cannot fully describe: not hatred, but a kind of certainty, the expression of men whose minds were already made up and who were now conducting a formality.
"Do you afflict these children?" Hathorne asked.
"I do not," I said. "I am innocent."
One of the girls screamed. Another said she saw my shape biting her.
How does one refute a scream? What evidence contradicts a bite mark on a girl's arm that was not there an hour ago and is there now? I stood and said I was innocent and the saying of it seemed only to confirm, in the room, that I was not.
Prison
The Salem jail in 1692 was a stone building that had not been designed for the number of people it now held. I was chained — they chained the accused in that place — and kept in a room with eleven other women, most of whom I had known for years, in the dark, on straw, with the sound of the other prisoners and the smell of the place which I will not describe.
What I thought about in prison was small things. The garden I had planted in April. Whether my husband would remember to — it is absurd, what the mind does when it is trying to survive itself. It will not look directly at what is happening. It picks up small details and examines them. It plans the garden. It worries about whether the butter has been properly salted.
Nineteen people were hanged on Gallows Hill between June and September. I knew most of them. Rebecca Nurse, eighty-one years old, deaf, a grandmother, hanged. John Proctor, a farmer, hanged. George Jacobs Sr., who walked with two staves because his legs could not support him otherwise, hanged. Each hanging was attended by a crowd. The Reverend Noyes called George Burroughs a witch at the foot of the gallows after Burroughs had recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly, and the crowd believed him. If the prayer could not save you, nothing could save you.
The Turning
In October, Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer. It came out later that his own wife had been named. The logic that had seemed so certain in March had reached someone it could not conveniently reach, and in reaching that person it had revealed itself for what it was.
I was released from prison in 1693. The release was not an apology. It was not a statement that I had been innocent — only that the court that had been holding me had been dissolved. I came back to a village that had done this and was beginning to have to live with having done it. The girls who had accused were not punished. The magistrates were not punished. Some of them became judges of standing in Massachusetts courts.
Ann Putnam Jr. — who had been twelve during the trials, who had accused more people than anyone — issued a public apology in 1706. She said she had been deluded by Satan. Perhaps she believed this. I have no way to know what was in her mind, at twelve, when she pointed at women she knew and said she saw their shapes tormenting her in the dark.
What I know is what I told the magistrates, and what I have told everyone who has asked since, and what remains as true in 1706 as it was in 1692: I was innocent. I did not afflict any child. I did not make any compact with the devil. I was a woman in a village who was afraid, and the fear of others became, for a time, a sentence.
Narrator's note: This narrator is a fictional composite figure. The procedural details — spectral evidence, the court's formation, the 19 hangings, Ann Putnam's apology, and the dissolution of the court — are drawn from Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed (1974) and court records reproduced in Bernard Rosenthal's Salem Story (1993).