It was grey and cold for summer but that wasn’t unusual. We had been fearing Indian raids all winter and spring but there hadn’t been any in a while. We just got on with the atmosphere of not knowing when trouble was coming but knowing it would. There had been harsh storms and lots of building and re-building with the unusual weather, but that was just the way it was. Food was always scarce, bears were always just a few miles away, snakes were usually under foot. It was all unremarkable.
We were always hungry. Wells always needed digging or sometimes closing up if a body fell into it. Crops were always failing to feed us all. You trade meat for greens and cheese for eggs. A day’s hard labour by a man for a week’s household labour by someone such as myself.
That July the men were doing men’s business, and the women were doing women’s business. Little children played tig across the common and did their chores and their letters. The young men were restless but could go hunting and race through the forests like wild ponies. They could be gone for days catching deer and possum and fish. But what of the maids, the older girls. The worse the crops, the more they were tethered to the house. The rumours of Indians hiding in the woods pinned the women to dark sheds where they tended to rotting wheat, or nursing them that’s sick and pus filled with herbs and cool cloths on the forehead. We all got on with building fires and banking them, skilled enough so the last embers did not wink out overnight. Men and women got married and had children regardless. The dead were buried in faith in everlasting life.
When the young women and girls started fainting and fitting we thought long and hard about what we had missed. Maybe something or someone had done something remarkable. Who and what was unusual? Who brought the fainting and fits to sit with the girls on the edge of adult hood and marriage?
There were 3 of us slave women in Salem in 1692. We were in separate households. And we had different kinds of owners. Some owners kept you close like a favourite toy
Everybody knows about Tituba. She had so much to say, didn’t she? Her people were native to this place, even though the colonists saw her as foreign. But she knew exactly how her masters head worked and that of her mistress. She was so much up under them she could describe their devil and knew about pacts and contracts. Tituba’s mouth ran like the Shawsheen river giving the men what they wanted.
And there was Candy, new to this place and to the English language and the people. I remember hearing her talk to herself in her own language more than once. And I asked her, why you still speaking that African language? And she’d ignore my question just cut her eye and continue to scythe the rough brown grass surrounding her mistress and master’s property. But one day when she was toting a pail of milk from one side of Salem to the other, the bucket perched on her head, her neck held high- I laughed and teased her again, expecting the same cross look and irritation. but this time she answered me. She stopped and put her hands on her hips and said she didn’t want to end up like me and Tituba. How do you mean, I asked. Not knowing who you are, who you really belong to. Without your language you can never find your way home.
And with that she took off her apron and shook it so – then wrapped it tightly around her body again and walked on.
I thought about that moment the day I was brought before the judges. I was identified as Mary Black. And for the first time I could see that that was not my name. It was simply what I was called, even after 3 generations in this place. My family name is simply the colour of my skin. Not the name of my owner, nor my mother’s owner. Certainly not the name of my father. And my Christian name Mary – well which of the 6 biblical Marys did the one who named me have in mind?
If I am Mary, the mother then my child must be the 4 year old they shackled for keeping a tiny grass snake in her pocket. In the dark and damp of the cellar where we were kept, she mewled like a kitten for her mother for half a year. I wonder where she is now and if she ever got over the lynching of her mother.
If I am the Magdalene, then I should be redeemed of all the sins that have been projected upon me. All of those who have born false witness upon me should be frightened lest I cast them into everlasting darkness. If I had such powers, I’d never been in Salem.
But today I think on these things that started in 1692 and I embrace that part of myself that is Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. I am a witness. I sit at the feet of events I cannot fathom. I have seen what has happened to them all, including Tituba and Candy.
When the dust cleared in 1694 Over 160 people had been accused of witchcraft in Salem. They lost legal rights and were deprived of their property. Twenty five people died, 19 by hanging, 1 by torture, 5 by the squalid conditions of imprisonment.
Tituba was sold and ended up in Boston not long after the end. Then a few months later I saw Candy sat on the back of a wagon, surrounded by a mountain of linens and foodstuff, nursing a babe in arms. Her face was transfixed by the bundled infant. Was that child hers or that of a new mistress? No one would say. Whatever the case the milk flowed from Candy’s breast into the child’s desperate mouth.
Ash leaves whispered between us. Black women slaves. She in a cart and me on a porch. The moment stretched.
I should have called to her, but I didn’t.
instead, I went inside the house. Scrubbed clothes, made supper, butchered and salted meat I’d never eat, sewed garments I’d never wear, soothed children’s brows in ways I’d never be allowed to do with my own.
Tonight, I put my pallet by the door and blow out my night candle. I listen to the spirit of the wind as it rustles the trees, I hear the babbling of the brooks and the shushing of the creeks. I think again about the river and the rain, the stars at night, the ground hackeys and marshes, the pine berries and walnuts and wild things that surround us. I take off my apron as Candy had once done, shake it just so. Then I wrapped it tightly around my body again. I hold my head up to meet the gaze of the last quarter of the dying moon. My owners are headed south to Virginia, and I have packed up their household goods and stayed quiet as a dormouse, docile as a lamb for a month of Sundays. My face has been a study in obedient stupidity. I’ve planned my escape. The Indians would accept me or kill me. I don’t care either way. I am Mary Black, and I will be free at the dark of the moon.
© Anita Franklin