#283: SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS, OR, ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE.  “In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft.”

The Salem witch trials are part of every New Englander’s collective memory.  Even as the time recedes further into the past, the trials have become part of the local pop and tourist culture—Salem on Hallowe’en is scarcely less crowded than Times Square on New Year’s Eve.  The subject has interested me for years and I’ve puttered around in the literature and have been frustrated to find that most of the books—going back as far as Marion Starkey’s classic The Devil in Massachusetts, published in 1949—have struck me as labored and pedestrian, missing by miles what would seem to me the surefire drama and appeal of the topic.  So Stacy Schiff’s recent book The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal and Hysteria in 1692 Salem, was a really quite wonderful surprise.  The narrative has sweep and focus, the larger sense of period is excellent—one which “did not entirely differentiate sin from crime”—and the characterizations of both accusers and accused (who so often ended up changing places) are quick and vivid.  Schiff knows her story and she knows how to tell it.

       There are some tremendous difficulties built into tackling this subject, and we notice them in Schiff’s book largely by how deftly she approaches them.  A list of the cast of characters at the beginning helps you keep in mind who’s who.  One particular problem is that as the story progresses the arguments and frights and accusations begin to take on a family resemblance; this slows Schiff down only a bit, and she manages to keep the individuals well sorted.  Perhaps the largest difficulty—and this gets to the heart of the subject—is that no one interpretation, psychological, sociological or whatever, is going to encompass the full weird complexity of what went on.  Schiff deals with this—masterfully—by presenting much of what happens as the citizens of Salem themselves experienced it, mimicking nicely their beliefs and interpretations, without imposing her own.  It’s a prodigious balancing act, and it manages to include facts—at least as they’ve come down to us—that do not easily jibe with simple rationalism.  A young girl whose chair is being edged towards the hearth fire with a force four men have trouble deterring makes us wonder how many more things there were at Salem than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

       What Schiff conveys wonderfully well is the knowledge and thought of the period and much of its sociological detail.  At the time of the trials there was not a single university-trained medical man in any of the American colonies; newspapers did not arrive until well after the trials.  She details not only the darkness of the colonists’ beliefs—even the most educated people believed in witches and curses and suchlike—and the literal darkness of the time: no street lights, no electricity—in William Manchester’s phrase, a world lit only by fire.  And she captures nicely the appeal, in the face of the emotional pileup Salem was facing—“some stubborn, calcified knot of vexed, small-town relations”—of witchcraft as an explanation.  “Amid glaring accountability witchcraft broke up logical logjams.  It ratified grudges, neutralized slights, relieved anxiety.  It gave an airtight explanation when, literally, all hell broke loose.”

       Ghosties and beasties are creepy enough, but there’s something else at work here as well.  What Schiff nails frighteningly well is the moral claustrophobia of living in a Puritan village, with its maxim of “If your neighbor sins, you sin as well”—perhaps one of the most spiritually corrosive notions any faith has ever come up with.  The Witches conveys, as well as I’ve ever seen it, what results from living under a constant social and religious invigilation.

       This aspect is no doubt where the subject best benefits from a female perspective (some of the other books on the trials are by women, but not as many as you might expect).  Schiff never overplays this hand, but she does not approach the bench of Puritan elders on bended knee; indeed, late in the book, when she finally unloads on Cotton Mather, you can almost hear her (and many of us with her) exhaling.  Her prose has some of the silken, fanged irony we associate with Gibbon, and it well fits the topic.  Behind it all, of course, is the fascinated gaze of the true historian: she wants to know what happened, what it means.

       By the end, of course, she doesn’t know.  We none of us know, and we probably never will.  The Salem witch trials, for all that Schiff tells us so well of the events and the people involved, remains one of the black holes of American history, into which we may throw all of our ideas and theories and interpretations and still find many of the gaps unfilled.  The Witches is a terrific read, and gives us some sense of why there, why then:  “Sorcery adapted well to New England—a howling wilderness haunted by devilish Frenchmen and satanic Indians—as it did to Puritanism, an immersive, insecure-making creed that anticipated conflict if not outright cataclysm, having nearly been persecuted into existence.”  She evokes the terror of a village where suspicion crept in everywhere and any knock at the door might be the end of your life as you had lived it, in piety and safety.  All the facts are there, elegantly marshaled—and then that chair with the girl in it goes skittering across the floor towards the fire, and into your thoughts at night.  Schiff has the best words I’ve read on the topic—she just can’t have the last.

The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal and Hysteria in 1692 Salem, by Stacy Schiff.  Back Bay Books/ Little Brown, 2015.