Today in Salem: The jail keeper drops eight pounds of chains at the feet of the beggar Sarah Good. Stand back, he says, and pushes her against the wall. Sarah is spitting mad, but she can’t kick, and she won’t drop the baby. All she can do is unleash a string of curses as the jail keeper yanks the shackles tight, then locks them to a hook in the wall.
Until last night the magistrates had assumed that a jail cell would contain the witches and their specters. But after last night’s torments they know that a jail cell isn’t enough. The women may be locked in a cell, but their specters are traveling freely and inflicting great harm. So they’ve told the jail keeper to physically attach the women to the jail cell wall. That should keep their specters at bay.
The jail keeper drops another eight pounds of chains in front of the sickly Sarah Osborne, but she’s too ill to put up a fight. She slides down to sit, then leans against the wall. As weak as she is, though, the jail keeper is still rough as he pulls and locks the shackles. He’s no fool. She may be sick, but her specter is not.
The slave Tituba stands to the side. She doesn’t need to be attached to the walls; her specter didn’t torment the girls last night. Why would she? Tituba has no cause to be vengeful or angry with them. They didn’t testify against her. She’s already confessed.
LEARN MORE: Why were there babies in jail?
History doesn’t tell us why Sarah Good had her baby with her. But we do know that her baby, 5 months old, was still nursing. Puritans were strict about mothers nursing their own babies rather than using a wet nurse; in fact, Cotton Mather, a prominent minister of the time, later wrote that women who refused to suckle their infants are “dead while they live.”
Still, wet nurses were used in Puritan society during the first few days of a child’s life, until the mother was no longer producing colostrum (which the Puritans believed was poisonous, or at least impure). A wet nurse would also be required in the case of maternal death, or other extreme circumstances. But prison probably wasn’t one of them, especially for a beggar.