Today in Salem: The beggar Sarah Good is pleading with the pregnant Elizabeth Proctor for help. Sarah has always been an angry beggar, as likely to throw a stone as she is to say thank you. But today is different. She will be hanged in five days, leaving behind her four-year-old daughter Dorcas, who is also in jail. Will Elizabeth care for the little girl after Sarah is taken away? Make sure she eats? sleeps? says her prayers?
Sarah has chosen Elizabeth carefully. Being pregnant, Elizabeth is unlikely to be hanged soon. And, unlike most of the women there, she still has young children, and will know the needs of a four-year-old.
Still, Elizabeth hesitates. Dorcas hasn’t once left her mother’s side, hissing and scratching at anyone who draws near. A bite of bread, a wink, a scrap of string – nothing quiets or tempts her. What else can Elizabeth do, though? She gives a small nod. The girl will eat when she’s hungry and sleep when she’s tired. Prayers are unimaginable except on the little girl’s behalf, but Elizabeth can at least do that.
Meanwhile, a few doors down, the Governor is inhaling the aromas of roast fowl and boiled turnips, drumming his fingers on the table and bouncing his knee. He’s still giddy from yesterday’s military displays, impatient and eager to go north to fight the enemies on the frontier.
A feast extends from the head of the table, where he’s sitting, and ends at the other end, where the ponderous Chief Justice Stoughton sits, as still as the Governor is fidgety. Raucous men line each side, guffawing and drunk on rum. It’s a public thanksgiving, declared by the Governor, with gratitude to God for his recent safe return from London, recent victories over the war-mongering French and Indians, and so many other personal blessings in his life.
Today in Salem: A new, smallpox-infected specter is afflicting the girls in full force. Girls in the nearby town of Andover have been seeing and hearing the pariah Martha Carrier’s specter for a month now. No one is surprised that she’s a witch. She and her family recently brought the terrifying scourge of smallpox to their town, where 13 people died, including seven members of Martha’s own family. Her children are scarred, and the Carriers have been shunned ever since. Now the Devil himself has named her the Queen of Hell, and her furious presence is being felt in earnest.
In Boston, five new prisoners are waking to the smells of dung and wet dirt. One of them, the pious Mary Esty, has been here before and is wearing heavier irons than anyone else. Of the other new prisoners, four of them have surprised and dismayed the quarrelsome (and possibly pregnant) Elizabeth Proctor, who had no idea that her 15-year-old daughter, stepson, sister, and sister-in-law had been accused and arrested.
In the corner, as always, the beggar Sarah Good curls around her baby, who’s growing thinner by the day. The baby’s weak cry sounds more like a small cat than a baby, but there’s nothing to be done, as Sarah’s breasts are slack. Her four-year-old daughter, Dorcas, leans into her, sleeping against what softness is left in her shoulders.
In Cambridge, the shipmaster is begging the jail keeper to remove the eight pounds of irons that are shackled to his wife. Last night he’d managed to have her transferred from Boston to the jail in nearby Cambridge, close to home. But the jail keeper had immediately clapped and shackled eight pounds of irons onto her legs. She’d sobbed and convulsed so severely, all night long, that the shipmaster is afraid she’ll die if she spends just one more night there (never mind chained). But the jail keeper just goes about his business, looking away, as if the shipmaster is nothing more than a fly buzzing about.
WHO was Martha Carrier?
Martha, age 39, was from Andover, Massachusetts. Before her marriage, she moved to the nearby town of Billerica, where she lived with her sister and brother-in-law. There she met Thomas Carrier, a 7’4” Welshman who was twenty years her senior. They married when she was 21, and had their first child two months later.
Her husband was rumored to be one of the “headsmen” who executed King Charles I. Were people afraid of him, an extraordinarily tall executioner? Did their obvious premarital relations make them the subject of gossip? Was Martha’s obnoxious behavior toward her neighbors overly aggressive? It’s impossible to know why, but they were asked to leave Billerica, and soon moved back to Andover to live with Martha’s parents.
At that time, the highly contagious smallpox virus regularly swept through entire communities, leaving terror and death in its wake. Two years before the Trials, it broke out in Martha’s family, and seven of them died, including her father, both of her brothers, two nephews, one sister-in-law and one brother-in-law. Not just that, but six other people from Andover died, too. From that point on, the Carriers were outcasts, believed to be the cause of the epidemic.
Martha Carrier’s name was cleared of all charges nearly twenty years after her death. In 1999, Billerica’s Board of Selectmen unanimously voted to rescind the 1676 banishment of the Carrier family, 323 years earlier.
LEARN MORE: If people were so afraid of smallpox, why were they fighting about inoculation? What role did the media play?
A disease that’s highly contagious, with a 30% fatality rate, is terrifying in any context. Imagine: In a small family of only 3 people, it’s likely that one person will die. In the average Puritan family, two or three of the children would probably die (if not their parents). Across the community, they would lose up to a third of the ministers, the farmers, the midwives, adults in every occupation. Those who survived were almost always left with scarring, sometimes severe. Some became blind.
Wouldn’t people do anything they could to reach immunity? The answer: “Yes, but.”
In colonial days, there was no ”germ theory.“ People didn’t know exactly how smallpox spread, only that it did, sometimes through the air, and sometimes through things that had been touched by sick people. Aggressive quarantines weren’t always successful, since there was a lag between when a person was infected and when they showed symptoms. And there was no such thing as a vaccine.
There was, however, “inoculation,” where a small amount of pus or a scab from someone with smallpox would be rubbed into a small incision in a healthy person’s skin. That healthy person usually became ill with a much milder case, and then became immune. These days science tells us why that’s true, but at the time the belief was based on anecdote and experiences in other countries. And while some people fully believed in the practice, others thought it just spread smallpox even more.
Cotton Mather, one of the prominent ministers involved with the Salem Witchcraft Trials, is largely credited with introducing inoculation to the colonies, and vigorously campaigned for it during a 1721 smallpox epidemic. It engendered a fierce public debate; in fact, a small bomb was hurled through Mather’s window, with the message “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you! I’ll inoculate you with this; with a pox to you.’’ And the doctor who was administering inoculation received so many threats that he hid in his house for two weeks.
Emotions ran high on both sides of the debate, and was fueled by the media of the time. Newspaper and pamphlet articles from both sides condemned their opponents with name-calling, sarcasm, and verbal abuse. (One anti-inoculation newspaper was headed by its 16-year-old editor, Benjamin Franklin. His own son would die of smallpox 15 years later.) Both sides had merit, and both sides claimed support from God: In the short-term, inoculation did spread smallpox, since people who were inoculated came down with a mild-case of it. But in the long term it built immunity.
The proof was in the pudding, as they say. Once the outbreak was over, the death rate in the inoculated population was 2%, as compared to the 15% death rate of the non-inoculated in that specific epidemic. After that, the procedure was used for decades until the first vaccines became available.
The last major smallpox epidemic in the United States was in Boston between 1901-1903; the last outbreak was in 1949. In 1980, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated. No cases of naturally occurring smallpox have happened since.
Today in Salem: The elderly jail keeper brings 4-year-old girl Dorcas Good into his kitchen, where two ministers and two magistrates are waiting. She’d been questioned at the examination with Rebecca Nurse, but the crowd was noisy and the girl intimidated. Sending her to stay with the jail keeper was the right thing to do at the time. Perhaps they can get more information from her this way.
One of the ministers is elderly, soft-spoken but eagle-eyed, and it’s he who first speaks to the little girl.
“Come here, child,” he says, “and tell me if you see things that others cannot.” Dorcas bites her lip and looks over at the cruel magistrate Hathorne, who is already leaning in and frowning. The soft-spoken minister raps the table with his knuckles, and she jumps a little, looking first at his face and then his hand.
“A little snake,” she says, and holds her own hand up. “It sucks on my hand.”
Now all four men are leaning in. Where? they ask, pointing to freckles and spots. No, no, no she says and points to her own knuckle, where the men can see a dark red spot the size of a flea bite.
The cruel magistrate Hathorne takes over from the soft-spoken minister. Did the black man give her the snake? Was it the Devil?
No no no, Dorcas says again. Her mother did.
The two magistrates exchange glances. Familiar spirits like snakes often drink nourishment from a witch’s wounds. Perhaps Dorcas is a witch, and her mother, the beggar Sarah Good, may be responsible.
Today in Salem: How is it possible for a four-year-old girl to be a witch? The judges are intent on finding out, and will question little Dorcas Good as soon as they’re done with the elderly and beloved Rebecca Nurse.
Two days ago, Rebecca was sick in bed when kindly friends told her about the accusations. She could hardly speak, she was so astonished. Now she is standing in front of the normally cruel Judge Hathorne, who is speaking kindly to her. No one wants her to be guilty, he says, but if she is, then now is the time to confess. But Rebecca, in the soft voice of an elderly woman, says that she’s innocent before God. Over and over the judge questions her, but she doesn’t waver. “I am as clear as the child unborn,” she says.
The afflicted girls are shaking and suffering so badly, though, that some in the crowd start to cry. Soon the girls are shrieking so loudly that Rev Parris, appointed to take notes, gives up trying. Pandemonium breaks loose, and ends with the constable holding Rebecca’s head firmly between his hands, forcing her to look forward.
The judge sits back and narrows his eyes. It’s odd, he thinks, that Rebecca herself isn’t crying, even if it’s just from sympathy. He leans back in and asks Rebecca if the girls are genuinely suffering. But Rebecca is hard of hearing, and with the constable holding her head in place, she can’t lean in or cock her head. She can’t hear him, so she doesn’t answer. Her silence, with the girls’ torments, are enough. Beloved or not, Rebecca Nurse is sent to jail.
The constable holds little Dorcas Good’s hand and leads her to stand in front of the judges. Dorcas’s mother, the beggar Sarah Good, has been in jail for three weeks, but Dorcas is still hale and hearty.
The constable takes no chances and holds Dorcas’s head still, just as he’d held Rebecca’s. But the afflicted girls claim that Dorcas’s specter is biting them, and hold out their arms to show small bite marks. With almost no questioning, Dorcas is sent to stay with the Salem jail keeper.
Today in Salem: The three accused witches are finally behind bars, and 9-year-old little Betty, the tomboy Abigail Williams, and the 17-year-old servant Elizabeth Hubbard are feeling somewhat better.
Ann Putnam is still tormented, though, this time by the specters of a woman and a little girl. Ann doesn’t know who the woman is, but she recognizes the girl: It’s the beggar Sarah Good’s 4-year-old daughter, Dorcas. Sarah has her baby in jail with her, but has left Dorcas behind in the care of her hapless father.
Can it be? Is it possible for a small child to be a witch? If any child could be, it would be Dorcas. In the best of times Dorcas is a wild child, dirty, disheveled, and often hungry. Now, though, with her mother gone, the little girl is frightened and furious, and her specter bites, pinches, and chokes Ann in revenge.
Meanwhile the magistrates are interviewing the three imprisoned witches at the jail. It doesn’t matter that the two Sarahs have denied being in league with the Devil. The magistrates know they’re guilty, and they must confess.
The beggar Sarah Good has been brought back to Salem, and now she’s twisted at an awkward angle, nursing her baby in one arm. The other is bruised and swollen from leaping off the constable’s horse, and she holds it close, as if it’s in an imaginary sling. In another corner of the jail cell, the sickly Sarah Osborne is sleeping in dirty straw, breathing shallowly. The cruel magistrate John Hathorne prods her with his foot until she rolls over to look at him.
“What promise have you made to the Devil?” He looks back and forth to each of them. None, they both say at the same time. “Have you signed his book? Tell the truth!” The beggar just laughs and holds her baby closer. The sickly Sarah Osborne sighs. No, they say.
As for the slave Tituba, she’s been pacing in a small circle all day. She’s already confessed, but to prove her worth, she adds a new detail: when the previous minister’s wife and child died, it was because of witchcraft.
LEARN MORE: What was the jail in Salem like?
The Salem “Gaol” was only eight years old when the witchcraft trials began. The floor was dirt, and the windows had iron bars. But we don’t know much more about the building, except that it was described as “thirteen feet stud, and twenty feet square, accommodated with a yard.” It’s hard to translate that into today’s measurements. Was the facade of the building 20 square feet? Or did that refer to the length and width? Did it have two stories? What was the distance between studs? Was it built of stone or wood? We know it had a yard, but was it secured to the exterior of the building, or was it a central courtyard?
The most important thing we know is that the conditions were appalling. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and smelled of dung, vomit, dead vermin, and unwashed bodies year-round. It was miserably overcrowded, and prisoners were infested with fleas and lice thanks to vermin, which spread “jail fever” (typhus). An earlier prisoner said he was “almost poisoned with the stink of my own dung and the stink of the prison having never so much as a minute’s time to take the air since I came into this dolesome place.”
WHO was Dorcas Good? Dorcas was the 4-year-old daughter of the beggar Sarah Good. Dorcas was accused of witchcraft, like her mother, and confessed that her mother had given her a little snake that sucked on her finger. The magistrates took this to mean she had a “familiar” and was, therefore, guilty. Dorcas stayed in prison for eight months and was emotionally damaged for the rest of her life.
