Part 19

Who was "my Indian man"? Yes; who that baker whose cake raised the devil, and caused apparitions to become exceeding plenty? Mr. Parris, prior to being a minister of the gospel, had been a merchant in Barbadoes, and at the commencement of the strange feats alluded to, had in his family some servants, whom he called Indians; but they probably were natives either of some one of the West India islands or of the neighboring coast of South America, whom he had brought thence, and who were, doubtless, by nature less firm and self-reliant than our northern Indians usually are. Two of these servants, or slaves, viz., John Indian, the cake-baker, and his wife, Tituba, were among the first, if they were not the very first, persons there to succumb, and yield subjection to the peculiar influences which developed the terrible events we are considering. Those two humble, ignorant, weak-minded slaves may have been, and we regard them as having been, though unintentionally and unconscious of it, very efficient aids in the outward manifestation of what their master properly termed "amazing feats."

John seems, so far as records depict him, to have been only about as much of a medium as King Saul was; that is, one that could be made to tumble down and roll about in unseemly ways. There may, and there may not, have been properties in his composition which were very helpful to spirits in gaining control over other persons. However that may have been, he was not perceptibly much of a medium, and had but little connection with the events which so harassed his master and neighbors, as far as can now be shown. But his wife, Tituba, deserves extended notice and careful study. Before the observable works were commenced, she was clairvoyant and clairaudient, and her aid in the amazing feats which transpired was solicited in advance by a nocturnal visitant needing no opened door for entrance. She entered behind the scene,--behind the vail of flesh,--and her spirit eyes saw the chief manager. She is the great eye-witness in the case. She was a medium easy of control, and, Agassiz-like, retained her consciousness and her memory of experiences while her form was subjected to control by another's will. Obviously, also, she was an uncommonly good developing medium, or, in other words, her constitutional properties were such as greatly aided spirits to develop the mediumistic susceptibilities of other persons.

This humble, illiterate slave, besides being apparently the chief focus or reservoir of supermundane forces that evolved the Salem wonders, was one among the first three persons who were arrested and brought before the civil tribunals under charges of practicing witchcraft. Her statements at her examination were recorded very fully by one of the two magistrates who conducted the proceedings. And the transmitted words of this simple-minded creature, whose intellect was incompetent to foresee the consequences of her answers and statements, throw more light upon the origin and growth, and upon the nature and true character, of Salem witchcraft, than does all that came from other lips, or any pens of her cotemporaries, or than has come from subsequent historians. Her mediumistic susceptibilities gave her admittance where she was an actual observer of the real author of and actors in that memorable drama. Her knowledge was derived directly through one set of her own senses, and therefore she was able to speak of, and apparently did speak simply and truthfully of, persons and scenes which her inner organs of sense had cognized. She _knew_ more than did all her prosecutors and judges combined concerning the matters under investigation at her trial; and could those who then presided have been nobly humble enough to learn from such a witness, and single-eyed enough to admit into their own minds the literal import of her simple statements, the horrors which were subsequently experienced would never have transpired. But the faith of those times forbade such elevation.

Tituba's general, if not uniform frankness, and the extreme simplicity of her answers, tend strongly to beget confidence in the intentional and substantial truthfulness of her statements. We deem it unjust to doubt her truthfulness. And the general accuracy of her testimony is now rendered credible by its harmony with a mass of facts pertaining to Spiritualism. If the truth and accuracy of her words be conceded,--and they ought to be,--we learn distinctly that during the "several weeks" through which Mr. Parris's afflicted daughter and niece were treated by their physician and cared for by the family and friends without suspicion of witchcraft, Tituba was positively _knowing_ that something like a man, invisible to outward sense, visited herself, and sought and sometimes forced her co-operation in pinching the two little girls and in producing their seeming sicknesses. Her experience proved to her that the sufferings of the children were purposely inflicted by an intelligent being something like a man. Her statements prove the same to us.

Such testimony as hers, by such a lowly person as she was, when given before a tribunal whose members were firm believers in such a devil and in such a creed as have been described in our Appendix, even if fairly comprehended by them, would cause her judges to believe that she was virtually confessing that she had made a covenant with the Evil One. From their premises they could not logically draw any other conclusion. Perhaps, unfortunately for her, but not for us at this day, her intellect was too feeble to perceive the inferences which would be drawn from her words. Fearing not consequences, she could frankly tell her experiences and observations; she let out the exact facts of the case, and furnished for us a sound historic basis for the assertion that the strange maladies which came upon the little girls in Mr. Parris's house were designedly and deliberately imposed by a disembodied spirit or a band of spirits.

The mouths of not only babes and sucklings, but of adults of feeble intellect, present facts, sometimes, better than those whose intellects are swayed by fears of dreaded consequences which might ensue from frank and full avowal of their knowledge. From Tituba came statements of facts to which we must give prolonged attention. A perusal of the fullest minutes of her testimony may be wearisome, but her account of what she saw, heard, and was made to do, is so instructive that we shall present it without abridgment, because it was first printed in full only a few years ago, was probably never seen or known to exist by Hutchinson, was not availed of by Upham, and not very carefully analyzed by Drake. Only a very limited portion of the reading public has ever had opportunity to learn more than a small fraction of the disclosures made by this important witness.

Upham, though he had perused the minutes of testimony to which we allude, elected to use a briefer report of Tituba's statements, which was made by Ezekiel Cheever. The more extended one he noticed thus: "Another report of Tituba's examination has been preserved in the second volume" (we find it in vol. iii., appendix, p. 185) "of the collection edited by Samuel G. Drake, entitled the 'Witchcraft Delusion in New England.' It is in the handwriting of Jonathan Corwin, very full and minute." It is "full, minute," and abounding in facts which the faithful historian should adduce and comment upon. It was written out by one of the magistrates before whom Tituba was examined, and therefore its authority is good. It surprises us that the historian who noticed it as above failed to use much important matter contained in it which was lacking in the report that he preferred to this.

Drake, under whose supervision this ampler report was first printed, says, in Woodward's "Historical Series," No. I. Vol. III. Appendix p. 186, that "it is valuable on several accounts, the chief of which is the light it throws on the commencement of the delusion.... This examination, more, perhaps, than any of the rest, exhibits the atrocious method employed by the examinant of causing the poor ignorant accused to own and acknowledge things put into their mouths by a manner of questioning as much to be condemned as perjury itself, inasmuch as it was sure to produce that crime. In this case the examined was taken from jail and placed upon the stand, and was soon so confused that she could scarcely know what to say. While it is evident that all her answers were at first true, because direct, straightforward, and reasonable. The strangeness of the questions and the long persistence of the questioners could lead to no other result but confounding what little understanding the accused was at best possessed of.... The examination was before Messrs. Hathorne and Corwin. The former took down the result, which is all in his peculiar chirography." Upham, it will be noticed, says the report was written by Corwin, while Drake here ascribes it to Hathorne. But since those two men were both present as joint holders of the examining court, the authority of either gives great value to the document; we regard the record as having been made by Corwin.

While Drake says this record of "the examination is valuable" for "the light it throws on the commencement of the delusion," he also calls it a "record of incoherent nonsense." The public very narrowly escaped loss of opportunity to get at the important and luminous facts contained in this document. Drake, in 1866, says, "The original (now for the first time printed) came into the editor's hands some five and twenty years since," at which time, "on a first and cursory perusal of the examination of the Indian woman belonging to Mr. Parris's family, it was concluded not to print it, and only refer to it; that is, only refer to the _extract_ from it contained in the HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF BOSTON. But when editorial labors upon these volumes were nearly completed, a re-perusal of that examination was made, and the result determined the editor to give it a place in this Appendix." We are constrained to doubt whether this editor attained to anything like either fair comprehension of the value of this document even upon its re-perusal, or that he perceived one half the import which facts fairly give to the following words from his pen: "The record of this examination _throws light on the commencement of the delusion_." Yes, light upon the time, place, source, and nature of that commencement, and which also discloses who was the originating, and probably the guiding agent of all that witchcraft's subsequent process up to its culmination--light which, to great extent, exculpates both the fathers and their children--light which reveals the true actors and exonerates their _unconscious_ instruments. That document, read, as it now can be, with help from modern revealments, proves that some spirit, or a band of spirits, was witchcraft's generator and enactor at Salem, and indicates that simple Tituba comprehended the genuine source of the disturbance more clearly than did any other known person of that generation. She furnished for transmission a key that now unlocks the door of the chamber of mystery, in which she and her associates were made to enact thrilling and bloody scenes one hundred and eighty years ago.

That such as desire to do so may be enabled to peruse the whole of her testimony, which probably can now be found printed only in Woodward's very valuable Series of original documents pertaining to witchcraft,--a work too voluminous and costly to obtain general circulation,--we shall do what we can to further public accessibility to Tituba's statement, ungarbled and unabridged. Still, to both relieve and enlighten the reader, we shall break up its continuity by interjecting comments upon many parts as we go on, but do this in such form, that, if the reader chooses to peruse the whole unbiased by comment, he can; for this will require only an observance of our quotation marks. By skipping our comments he can read in their original collocations all parts of what Drake calls "incoherent nonsense," but which to us, notwithstanding some perplexing incoherence of both questions and answers, is rich in instructive _facts_.

Prior to March 1, the malady seems to have spread out beyond the parsonage and seized upon other persons, for on that day several afflicted ones were convened as witnesses, or accusers, or both, at the place where the magistrates then appeared for attending to the cases of three women who had been accused of witchcraft, arrested, and held for examination. Here was the commencement of reputed folly and barbarity so exercised as soon to redden that region with the blood of the innocent, the manly, the virtuous, and the devout.

Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba were brought into the meeting-house as suspected witches and as producers of the sufferings of the several afflicted ones, to be examined in the presence of their accusers and the public. What course the magistrates either elected or were constrained to pursue in order to educe such facts as would sustain a charge for witchcraft, will reveal itself as we proceed, through the questions which they put to the accused, and the kinds of evidence which they admitted.

TITUBA.

"_Tituba, the Indian woman, examined March 1, 1692._

"_Q._ Why do you hurt these poor children? What harm have they done unto you?

"_A._ They do no harm to me. I no hurt them at all."

The first question by the magistrates implies the presence there of the afflicted children, and of their then seeming to be invisibly hurt. It also implies the magistrate's assumption that Tituba was hurting them. Her denial that either they had harmed her or that she was hurting them was distinct. But the magistrate seemingly doubted its truth or its sufficiency, for he next asked,--

"_Q._ Why have you done it?

"_A._ I have done nothing. I can't tell when the devil works.

"_Q._ What? Doth the devil tell you that he hurts them?

"_A._ No. He tells me nothing."

She conceded here that the _Devil_ might be, and probably was, at work upon the children; but _his_ doings were beyond the reach of her perceptive faculties. _He_ made no communication to her. Thus early her words indicate that her knowledge of spiritual matters caused her to draw and adhere to a distinction between _The Devil_ and either _a Spirit_, or bands of spirits, which distinction she and other mediumistic ones of her times adhered to, while the public lacked knowledge that facts required it, and ignorantly called all visitants from spirit realms _The Devil_.

When glancing at Cotton Mather's unpublished account of Mercy Short, we copied from it the following statement: "As the bewitched in other parts of the world have commonly had no other style for their tormentors but only THEY and THEM, so had Mercy Short." Clairvoyants and all who obtained knowledge of spirits through perceptions by their own interior organs seldom, if ever, have seriously spoken of either seeing, hearing, or feeling the _Devil_. Possibly, at times, some may have done so by way of accommodation to the unillumined world's modes of speech. But, as Mather says, they have, the world over, _generally_ called the personages perceived, "_They_" and "_Them_." Such a fact demands regard. The personal observers of spiritual beings have never been accustomed to designate them by bad names. Fair inference from this is, that such beings have not generally worn forbidding aspects. It has been the reporters, and not the utterers, of descriptive accounts of spiritual beings who have made use of the terms "devil," "satan," and the like. Mather perceived the common "style" of the bewitched, and yet the warping habit of Christendom made him preserve continuance of inaccurate reporting; for he, like most others in his day, persistently wrote "devil," where that name was not announced, and ought not to have been foisted in. Tituba saw no one whom she ever called _The Devil_, though history has taught that she did.

"_Q._ Do you never see something appear in some shape? _A._ No. Never see anything."

This answer is not true if construed literally in connection with its question. She did, as will soon appear, sometimes see many things clairvoyantly, but never _The Devil_, who had just before been mentioned.

"_Q._ What familiarity have you with the devil, or what is it that you converse withal? Tell the truth, who it is that hurts them. _A._ The devil, for aught I know."

She persistently admits that the devil _may_ be then and there at work, but asserts that she does not know anything about _him_.

"_Q._ What appearance, or how doth he appear when he hurts them?"

She makes no reply when asked how the _Devil_ hurts. She ignores _him_.

"_Q._ With what shape, or what is _he_ like that hurts them? _A._ Like a man, I think. Yesterday, I being in the lean-to chamber, I saw a thing _like a man_, that told me serve him. I told him no, I would not do such thing."

_Devil_ had now been dropped from the question, and _he_ substituted. What is _he_ like? Then she promptly mentioned an apparition not only visible, but audible, who, if carefully scanned, may prove to have been chief author and enactor of Salem witchcraft. She who saw and heard him says he was "like a man, I think,"--was "a thing like a man." According to her perceptions he was not the devil. She did not know the devil. Others at that time and ever since have called her visitant the devil. But Tituba, who saw, heard, and thus knew him, did not and would not.

Next comes in, parenthetically, a summary of her sayings and doings, as follows:--

("She charges Goody Osburn and Sarah Good, as those that hurt them children, and would have had her done it; she saith she hath seen four, two which she knew not; she saw them last night as she was washing the room. They told me hurt the children, and would have had me gone to Boston. There was five of them with the man. They told me if I would not go and hurt them, they would do so to me. At first I did agree with them, but afterward, I told them I would do so no more.")

According to this summary, apparitions multiplied; for, besides the man, she saw four women around herself: that company threatened to hurt her if she would not unite with them in hurting the children. Two of these were apparitions of her living neighbors, Good and Osburn, then under arrest; the other three were strangers. We shall soon see that she believed, what is probably true, that apparitions of particular persons can be not only presented by occult intelligences to the inner vision, but put into apparent vigorous action, while the genuine persons thus presented in counterfeit have no consciousness either of being present at the exhibition, or of performing, either then or at any other time, the acts which they seem to put forth.

The conceptions which this simple mind held concerning the nature, powers, and purposes of those who came to her in manner strange to most mortals, are pretty clearly indicated. By her likening them to men and women, and by her protests against their forcing her to act cruelly, she justifies the inference that she failed to see in or about them anything very forbidding, awful, or satanic. She admitted the possibility that the devil might have hurt the children, but also asserted that, if so, _his_ action was unbeknown to her. The "something like a man," together with these women and herself under compulsion, were the afflicting ones, so far as her vision or other senses could determine. _She_ nowhere applies the term "devil" to her male apparition. No hoofs, horns, or tail, no sable hues or frightful form, are brought to view by this clairvoyant's description of her occult companions. They wore, in her sight, the semblances of a man and of women--not of devils.

How different would have been results had her simple words and instructive facts been credited and made the basis of judicial decisions! Could she have been calmly and rationally listened to by minds freed from a blinding and irritating faith that Christendom's witchcraft devil was her companion and prompter, her plain and definite exposition of the actors who generated troubles which were profound mysteries to her superiors in external knowledge and penetration, would have brought all the marvels of that day within the domain of natural things, and warded off the horrors which ensued.

"_Q._ Would they have had you hurt the children last night? _A._ Yes, but I was sorry, and I said I would do so no more, but told I would fear God. _Q._ But why did not you do so before? _A._ Why, they tell me I had done so before, and therefore I must go on. (These were the four women and the man, but she knew none but Osburn and Good only; the others were of Boston.")

If we get at what Tituba meant by the words just quoted, it was substantially this: "They wanted me, and forced me against my will, to join with them in hurting the children last night. I was sorry that I was forced to act cruelly, and told them that I would not be forced to it again, but would serve God. I did not take that stand before, because they told me I had already worked with them, and therefore must go on.

"_Q._ At first beginning with them, what then appeared to you? What was it like that got you to do it? _A._ One like a man, just as I was going to sleep, came to me. This was when the children was first hurt. He said he would kill the children and she would never be well; and he said if I would not serve him he would do so to me."

The witness was here apparently brought to describe her _first_ interview with the author of Salem witchcraft. We see her now standing at the fountainhead of the devastating torrent which soon deluged the region far around with terror, anguish, and blood. Who first appeared to her? Who was the prime mover? And when was he first seen? Subsequent statements are soon to show that on Friday, January 15, 1692, six weeks and four days before the time when she gave in this testimony, _one like a man, just as she was going to sleep_, came to her and demanded her aid in hurting the children. The fact is clearly stated that five days before the Wednesday evening when the children were first hurt by spirit appliances, and supposed to be taken sick, "_one like a man_," when Tituba was about going to sleep, came to her and avowed his purpose, in advance, to torture and even kill the children. From that time forth she knew the source of the strange operations in her master's family.

"_Q._ Is that the same man that appeared before to you, that appeared last night and told you this? _A._ Yes."

Her visitor was the same person on these two different occasions, which were more than six weeks apart, and in her various clairvoyant excursions and feats he was frequently, if not always, her attendant.

"_Q._ What other likenesses besides a man hath appeared unto you? _A._ Sometimes like a hog--sometimes like a great black dog--four times."

"The man" probably assumed or presented those brutish forms. A frequent teaching of spirit visitants is, that they "can assume any _form_ which the occasion requires;" they also have often given the impression that they cannot assume _hues_ brighter than inherently pertain to their own intellectual and moral conditions, but of this we have yet no conclusive information.