Image via Wikipedia

THE JOURNAL OF ELLEN BLACK

September 21st, 1692.  Escaping Salem was the right thing to do.  Things were out of control there.  Even so, the surrounding hills bestow upon me both their own security and a different kind of threat.  There are wolves and bears out here in the woods and Father always said that the renegades carried off and raped settler girls who strayed too far from Salem’s safety.  Safety!  A scarce and precious commodity in Salem village now, but to explain my remarks to you, I must digress.

In December, 1691, eight girls in Salem came down with distempers, for which physicians could find no cause.  Their speech was strange.  They babbled incoherently.  They adopted strange postures and gestures and suffered fits and convulsions.  One of the girls was the minister’s daughter, the other was his niece.  A neighbour took it upon herself to have Tituba, the minister’s black slave woman, concoct a witch cake of rye meal and the urine of one of the afflicted, and to feed it to a dog to determine wether witchcraft was connected with it or not.  Everything went mad in Salem from that point on.

  Even now I ask myself where did all this madness start?  Abagail Williams and Ann Putnam, I think, were at the root of its beginnings.  Abagail is 11 and Ann is 12, both much younger than me.  Silly girls with wild imaginations.  They were first to suffer from these unusual distempers.  They fell into fits, acting like animals and before anyone knew it they were claiming they had been bewitched.  Yes, that was perhaps the real start of it, and a lot has happened since then. 

Back in February they gave the minister, Mr Samuel Parris, the three names of those whom they claimed to be their tormentors.  Two were crones whom nobody liked and the third was Tituba,  yet everyone blamed Tituba for it all.  At least at first, since they thought it were her heathen ways which invoked the evil which came to dwell amongst the Puritans of Salem.  When they were accused of witchcraft and arrested , it became known that Tituba had made the witch cake at the Minister’s neighbour’s request.  In his church records, Mr Parris denounced his neighbour’s action and stated that until a community member had gone “to the Devil for help against the Devil,” there had been no suspicion of witchcraft and no reports of torture by apparitions.  This was not strictly true.  The afflicted had been visibly tortured by apparitions for days before all this came to light.  Was that not why the witch cake had been concocted in the first place?  And Tituba had always had her Barbados ways, whether they be witchcraft or merely foolish nonsense.  Let no man deny this!