In the winter of 1692 two little girls, cousins from Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts, were seized by a strange affliction — the girls screamed, babbled, twisted themselves in odd positions, threw objects across the room. When a doctor found no scientific explanation for their illness, the rumors spread. The girls had been bewitched. Fair enough, these things happened back in those superstitious days, but who was the bewitcher? In no time more girls in the village fell prey to the same affliction. And in no time, the perpetrators had been named. The sick cousins themselves identified their tormentors — three local women who, or so the girls claimed, had summoned Satan to lock them down in a demonic spell. The women were put on trial and promptly two of them were hanged. By the end of the year a hundred and fifty residents of Salem Village had been accused of witchcraft; a great many of them had been excommunicated, executed, and buried in shallow common graves.
“Sound familiar?” Grandpa asked, and fixed me with his teary eyes.
“Well, sure. I mean, not really. Care to explain?”
He searched across the desk and flipped open another book.
Three years before the Salem witch trials an Irish washerwoman was executed in Boston, accused of bewitching the children of the wealthy family she worked for. The case, not surprisingly, gathered serious publicity, and one Cotton Mather, a very influential New England Puritan minister, even included it in his book on witchcraft and possession.
Grandpa traced a line in the book, right under the drawing of the poor woman hanging from a tree. “Cotton Mather,” he said. “I’ve always wondered what kind of human name this is. Ivan, I can understand. Or Boris. Or Stoyan. But Cotton Mather?”
“Forget the name,” I cried. “Finish the story.”
“One cold January night of 1692,” Grandpa said, opening another book from the pile, thinner than all the others, “the two little cousins, Betty and Abigail — now these names I can almost tolerate — were playing fortune-tellers in the kitchen.”
They’d asked a slave in the house to teach them magic and were summoning ghosts in mirrors, trying to see what kind of men they’d marry when they grew up, that kind of girly nonsense. The slave — her name was Tituba and she was Indian or African or Caribbean maybe — had cooked the girls some “witch’s stew” to eat. What was in the stew only God knew, but one can imagine how it agreed with the little darlings. Before the evening was over they were seeing pretty colors and dashing men and coffins in the mirror.
So, as these things often went, the two girls told their little friends about the game of magic; they most likely shared Tituba’s witch’s stew as well. Before long, little Betty had begun to neglect her errands, could not concentrate one bit in church, was restless at the dinner table, and when her father tried to say the Paternoster she screamed and barked like a bloodhound. Once she even hurled a Bible across the room right at his face.
“Guess,” Grandpa told me, “what her poor father’s occupation was in Salem Village?”
It didn’t take great flights of the imagination to guess it right. He was the village minister.
“And so he thought he’d cure his sickly girl with prayer. Until the demon swallowed her whole, that is.” He leaned over the booklet and read. “From the writings of John Hale, a witness to the affliction. The girls looked like they were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves … Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move a heart of stone to sympathize with them.”
A doctor visited the girls. And, unable to find a scientific explanation, he labeled little Betty gripped by the Evil Hand.
“Gripped,” Grandpa said, and looked me in the eye.
“Gripped,” I repeated, and heard my voice dipping, my throat getting dry.
But who had bewitched the girls? Because back in those days of Puritan New England life, witchcraft was a crime of grave proportions, and every crime must have a culprit.
“So what do the precious girls do, you think?” Grandpa asked. “The darling centers of absolute attention — in the house of a despotic father, in a village where the king of England has forbidden merriment, music, and dancing, where going to church is mandatory for three hours twice a week and only the Bible can be read, again, again, again? The girls cry out, Tituba did it! And at the fall of a dagger Tituba is seized. Ay, masters, I did it, ay!” Grandpa attempted his best seventeenth-century American slave impersonation. “The Devil made me. The Devil is among us, here in Salem.”
To prove that the girls were bewitched, Tituba baked a witch’s cake — rye meal and urine from the sick girls — and fed it to a dog. If the dog got ill, which naturally it did, then the girls had been put under an evil spell. “Rye meal,” Grandpa said, and let that hang in the air with great severity.
And after this Tituba, herself given attention for the first time, spoke of demons who took the form of rats, dogs, wolves, and yellow birds. Of flying about the village on brooms. No doubt she too had been snacking on the witch’s stew. And if Tituba was going down, why not drag the entire world with her? “I’m not alone!” she said in her confession, and pointed at one Sarah Osborne. That woman, Tituba said, was holding in her possession a devilish creature. Its head that of a girl, two long legs and wings, like a stork’s.
“Yes, yes,” the two little girls cried. “There are others who are guilty!” And so the naming farce began. And all across the village more little girls, and even women — lustful for attention and for power — began to fall down in demonic fits and sing the names of their guilty tormentors. Only yesterday they had been faceless and without a voice. Today they held the lives of others between their teeth. Vengeance was theirs.
For the people of Salem Village did not get along one bit. They argued about land, and property lines, and grazing rights. And the Reverend, poor Betty’s father, had taken land and money he shouldn’t have and he was favoring some families at the expense of others.
So they used bewitchment as an excuse to incriminate their enemies. And the mysterious witch’s stew had poisoned only some of the girls (or maybe it was the spoiled rye?), while others had only acted sick, desperate for power and attention. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place with an eerie accuracy. In the same way now, hundreds of years later, thousands of kilometers away, the poor, tortured girls of Klisura were rebelling against their fathers.
“And the girls from the upper hamlet?” I said. “What was the stew that got them sick?”
“Two years ago,” Grandpa said, and searched through the folder of clippings, “I found this in the paper.” He laid the article before me gently, with fear, as if he were laying down a newly hatched chick.
It had grown very cold around us and I realized the sun had almost set behind the hills. Something rustled in the corner; the beams above us creaked. Shivering, I strained my eyes to read the headline.
“‘Five Dead in Greece from West Nile Fever.’”
“Fifty kilometers from here,” Grandpa said. For him what had happened three years ago was tragically simple. The girls had gone to the river to see the baby storks and gotten bitten by mosquitoes. The disease came with the storks, from Africa. One mosquito bit a sick stork, then it bit a healthy girl. The sisters must have gotten sick with fever. But Aysha and the others didn’t. And yet the rumors spread and was there ever a little girl who didn’t crave attention? In a village like Klisura? With parents like these? So they started acting. And then Baba Mina came and fed kerosene to the fire.