Katherine Howe: Salem's lottery

Published on Thursday 16 July 2009 16:44

ONE AFTERNOON I ASKED MY undergraduates to define the various qualities that make one a witch. "Pointy hat!" one cried as I began a list on the chalkboard. "Ugly and warty!" called another, and I added to the list. We also agreed she would have green skin, a black cat, and be toothless and broom-carrying. This Platonic ideal of "witch" is familiar to all of us, as she shows up in fairy tales, on television, and in films with such regularity that we barely even notice her

In Salem, Massachusetts, the town next door to mine, this abstract witch also appears on T-shirts, tote bags, police cars, and taxis, as it realised decades ago that our collective interest in the horrible and macabre outweighs our interest in history. I live on the outskirts of "Witch City," and every Halloween our little corner of Essex County becomes awash in throngs of costumed revellers with magic and mayhem on the brain. Even in the summertime, tourists wander through town wearing witch hats.

As a historian, I observe Salem's reinvention of itself with bemusement. This fairytale witch, cackling with a toad in her fist, bears next to no resemblance to the 17th century's idea of what (or who) a witch was. Of course, we think that we have a solid understanding of the witch panic that swept Salem in 1692. Most of us learned about the event at school studying The Crucible, Arthur Miller's 1953 play, which brought accused witches Rebecca Nurse, John Proctor and Elizabeth Proctor into our broader cultural awareness. Miller was writing when anxiety about Communism was at an all-time high in American US culture, high enough that it could only be discussed in allegory, if at all. As such The Crucible, while beautifully researched, is less a play about early American witchcraft and more about its own time, when we did not have a strong sense of who among us could be trusted.

What moves me when thinking about Salem, and what really happened that January in 1692, is the chilling reminder that 19 people were hanged as witches because witchcraft was against the law. It's a simple, but profound, point. For witchcraft to be against the law, it must be threatening. And real.

The Puritans who settled Essex County lived in a world that contemporary Cotton Mather described as "these, that were once the Devil's territories". They felt themselves to be locked in a struggle with Satan, who could make mischief by tempting everyday people into sin. And further, they lived in a world of scant resources and high uncertainty, with deep winters, a swelling ocean, surrounded by woods filled with shadowy people who did not want them there. Their lives were hard. Salem was not the only time when responsibility and blame for their hardship was placed at the feet of someone – almost always a woman, and usually one on the fringes of her society – who could then be made to pay.

As it happens, the Proctors occupy a distant twig on my family tree, as does Elizabeth Howe, one of the first women hanged as a witch in the summer of 1692. As I moved through my own New England summers, I found myself thinking about the strange disjunction between the storybook and the historic when it comes to witches.

The Lost Book of Salem is my attempt to grapple with that question. It tells the story of Connie Goodwin, a Harvard graduate in history, who discovers that one of the Salem witches might not have been so innocent after all. Twin narratives follow Deliverance Dane in the 1690s, accused unjustly, if not inaccurately, of practising witchcraft, and Connie Goodwin in the 1990s, as she discovers that the past has more implications for the present than she could ever have imagined. In short, the novel wonders what would have happened if magic and witchcraft were real. Not real in the storybook witch sense but real the way the colonists actually believed magic to be.

The Lost Book of Salem attempts to restore a bit of the truth, fictional though it may be, to a time so shrouded in myth and misinterpretation that we almost can't see it, even as we pass over the very ground where real witches once stood.

&#149 Katherine Howe's The Lost Book of Salem is published by Penguin, priced 6.99