The Witches: Salem, 1692 (6 page)

SAMUEL PARRIS PREACHED
his first Salem sermon in November 1689. He came to the village with little pastoral experience. Born in 1653 in England, he spent his youth largely in Barbados, where his family flourished as merchant-planters. While the ministry may once have been Parris’s profession of choice—he attended Harvard for several years but left in 1673, on the death of his father—his background was in business. At twenty, having inherited a plantation and seventy slaves, he returned to Barbados. Parris fared only adequately, struggling to maintain both the 170-acre estate and a generous inheritance from an uncle. Within a few years he sold the property at a loss. By 1680 he had reappeared in Boston, where he set himself up as a West Indies merchant. He married. He thrived initially, but while Massachusetts offered a more favorable economic
climate than Barbados, his career remained one of misfires and false starts. Parris spent a year in and out of court over a disputed loan. He grew as accustomed to financial scrambling as to deal-making. Opportunities regularly came his way. Each got the better of him.

When the Salem delegation found him in 1688, Parris was a member of Boston’s First Church and the father of three. It is unclear how or why he made the decision to enter the ministry; clergymen more often left the pulpit for mercantile pursuits than the other way around. He had previously thought of himself as a merchant and a gentleman, enough so to have his portrait painted in miniature. Just this side of handsome, with crisp, angular features, wide-set eyes, dark hair to his shoulders, and a voluptuous mouth, he bore a distinguished air. He is the only villager to whom we can put a face. His older brother was a minister in England; an uncle had preached at Boston’s First Church. Parris had served briefly in a remote Massachusetts hamlet. He spoke at informal prayer groups. He was on intimate terms with several local clergymen, including his Milton cousin. The Salem overture made, Parris stalled. “The work was weighty,” he explained. The farmers would have his decision in due course. He had any number of reasons to hesitate even if he knew nothing of Salem history, which was unlikely. His immediate predecessor, Deodat Lawson, was a member of the same Boston congregation. The two had mutual friends. The long courtship of Parris, a reluctant candidate without a bachelor’s degree at a time when Harvard MAs could not find pulpits, says as much about Salem village as about its future minister. Neither qualified as anyone’s first choice.

When finally it began, the negotiation was long and arduous. While he demonstrated little aptitude for business, Parris relished negotiation. At thirty, he was more seasoned than the ministers Salem had worn out before him. He had seen more of the world; he had limited experience of life in a backwater, of what he would term “this poor little village.” A bustling town of about eight thousand, Puritan Boston—with its ruffles and ribbons, silver lace coats and scarlet petticoats—dazzled by comparison with rustic Salem, of a very different palette altogether, all muted
greens, muddy purples, and deep reddish browns. Both contrasted vividly with Barbados. The village presented its best offer, entirely in line with the going rate. A hard-bitten bargainer, Parris was unimpressed. Deeming the terms “rather discouraging than encouraging,” he countered with eight conditions. The most onerous concerned firewood. If a minister’s battle for respect translated into a salary discussion, the battle for wood served as the combustive flash point. Its delivery burdened the community; a message was conveyed when it failed to arrive or proved substandard. “Isn’t that pretty soft wood?” observed a later parson as a congregant unloaded his cart. “And don’t we sometimes have pretty soft preaching?” came the response.

Parris wanted his firewood delivered. Again the villagers preferred to contribute to a fund from which he might arrange for his own. They had no village commons; wood was difficult to come by. Already scarce by 1692, timber represented a persistent, pervasive New England concern. Its use and misuse, its felling and export, were tightly regulated. Village proposal and counterproposal followed, relations fraying. An obstinate man with a rickety ego, Parris objected to the preferred fund. The price of firewood might well rise. Discussion persisted through much of 1689, a year that saw the overthrow of the colony’s Crown-imposed Anglican governor followed by profound political unrest, the intensifying Indian skirmishes, and the publication of
Memorable Providences,
the Mather volume that included the account of the bewitched Goodwins. “After much urging,” Parris remembered later, “I replied I would try them for one year. And so debate upon this point was ended.”

Even as negotiations continued, Parris, Elizabeth, their three children, and slaves moved into the parsonage at the village crossroads. A comfortable two-story home on two acres of land, it was configured around a cavernous chimney with four fireplaces. Parris constructed a large lean-to behind the parsonage’s four whitewashed rooms; the children presumably lodged upstairs with the help. Eighteen months after their arrival, the family lost the young black slave who had moved with them. In a momentous step for both the village and its new minister, on a
windy mid-November Tuesday, Parris was ordained in the presence of several neighboring clergymen, John Hale and Salem town’s two reverends among them. Parris discoursed on Joshua and a new era. With his ordination, the village could now offer the all-important sacrament. Acknowledging the villagers’ travails, he reassured them. The years in the wilderness were over. God that day rolled away his reproach; the farmers could move forward compatibly and constructively. In that undertaking the new minister included himself. His work was great but he would be zealous in its exercise. In conventional terms, he acknowledged that he would administer cordials to some but corrosives to others. “You are to bear me a great deal of love,” Parris instructed his congregants. In a less orthodox vein, he leaned on the homage part. “You are indeed highly to love every minister of Christ Jesus but (if you can, notwithstanding the vast disproportion between myself and others) you are to love me best.”

Some did, and some did not. He did not make it easy. Plenty of towns made life miserable for plenty of ministers, but few of them dealt as severely with their congregants as did Parris. He could be tedious, mulish, sulky. In possession of standards, he liked for things to be done properly. He applied great energy to small matters; he had the proclivity for tidiness that creates a shambles. When the wife of tailor Ezekiel Cheever went into labor early in 1690, Cheever impulsively borrowed a horse from his neighbor’s stable without permission, presumably to summon a midwife. The neighbor protested. Resolving the matter fell to Parris, who required three meetings to do so. He demanded a public apology. Cheever readily submitted one. Parris deemed the effort “mincing”; he ordered the new father to repent again in the meetinghouse the following week. He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped. He could be petty, unlike the elderly Salem town minister who had ordained him, from whom it was said “consolations dropped like dew.”

Parris tried to cram a great deal into a sermon; he could belabor, and exhaust, a point. He knew he often fell short but did not like to concede.
The pewter tankards on the communion table were an eyesore. Could they not be replaced? (Wealthier congregations used silver communion pieces.) To the parsonage he brought a number of items rare in Salem village: his own silver tankard, a writing desk, and a mirror. He boasted a coat of arms, a rarity among Massachusetts ministers. Parris had come of age in Barbados, the richest colony in English America, at the height of its power. He knew splendid homes and sumptuous hospitality. Salem looked shabby and—given the size of the Barbados household staff—doubtless also lonely to him. He quickly began lobbying for ownership of the parsonage and its land. The request was not inappropriate but it was premature; towns made such grants to their ministers after longtime service. The Salem villagers demurred.

Less than a year after his ordination, Parris compiled a numbered list of complaints, which he attempted to read to his congregants. Tempers twice prevented him from finishing. He managed finally to air his grievances at a special meeting in his parlor. Neither the house nor the fence and pasture nor the salary nor the firewood supply met with his approval. Already the eight-year-old parsonage was in dire need of repairs. His fence was rotten and on the verge of collapse. Brush overran two-thirds of his pasture. He could not subsist on an unpaid salary. Firewood he left until last. After much trouble on his part, he had received two small loads in three weeks. It was now the end of October. Without wood, he warned his congregants, they would hear no further Scripture. “I cannot preach without study. I cannot study without fire. I cannot live quietly without study,” Parris explained. He demanded a speedy consideration of each matter and “a loving and Christian answer, in writing.” The air was icy with grievances, taut with apprehension and frustration, discomforts his family inevitably shared. They greeted the disgruntled parsonage visitors and heard the raised voices, the outraged stomp of boots. The minister found his congregants insulting in the extreme. To his petition Parris affixed a line in his signature brand of high-handed self-pity: “Let me add if you continue contentious, your contentions will remove me either to the grave, or some other place.” He understood that his parishioners had
been kinder to his predecessors. None had fared as poorly. Nor presumably were his predecessors as sensitive to the cold as was he, after nearly a decade in the tropics.

The villagers met repeatedly to discuss their minister’s predicament. Within months of his ordination, his salary was in arrears; as early as the fall of 1690, a movement was afoot to dismiss him. The committee to collect his salary voted late in 1691 not to do so. He was also out of wood. A bitterness seeped into the sermons. The parsonage meanwhile grew colder and colder, as he emphasized from the pulpit. Were it not for a visiting Salem town deacon who made a last-minute delivery, Parris informed his congregants on October 8, he would have frozen. He made no appeal for the relief of his family, acutely aware of the challenges to his authority and presumably shivering as well in the rabid weather; November brought heavy snows and howling winds. Parris informed the committee that came to see him early that month that they should be more mindful of him than of other people. Having dug out from banks of snow, he complained on November 18 that he “had scarce wood enough to burn ’til tomorrow.” It did not help that the winter of 1691–1692 was especially arctic. Bread froze in communion plates, ink in pens, sap in the fireplace. The chimney delivered icy blasts. Parris preached to a chorus of rattling coughs and sniffles, to the shuffling of cruelly frostbitten feet. For everyone’s comfort he curtailed his afternoon sermon of January 3, 1692. It was simply too cold to go on.

Village quarrels aside, Parris had ample reason to complain. His was grueling work for which he was little prepared. He had taken on several occupations at once. The minister in a “little village” read divinity one minute and trimmed his mare the next, left off repairing the garden fence to preside over a prayer meeting. Parris might well hang a map of the world in his parsonage, he might appear to be the village intellectual, having at Harvard translated the Old Testament into Hebrew and Greek, but he devoted himself equally to turnip-sowing, cider-making, and squirrel-killing. “So perplexing it is to have the affairs of the ministry and of a farm to manage together,” lamented one Massachusetts minister.
Parris—who speculated in real estate and came late in life to tending his own fields—could only have felt similarly. The pastoral work alone was arduous and endless. “Now of all the churches under heaven there are none that expect so much variety of service from their pastors as those of New England,” wailed Cotton Mather, who did not thrill to the pastoral visit. Parris called on parishioners to inquire after religious instruction at home. He served as scribe, judge, counselor, confidant. He kept fasts and performed baptisms, arranged lectures and conferred with neighboring congregations. He comforted the sick and the bereaved, which over the summer of 1689 included four families who had lost sons to Indian attacks. Marblehead’s minister calculated that he went eight years at one stretch without so much as a half a day off. There was cause to be bone-tired under the best of circumstances, which Parris’s were not. Already primed for affront, he came increasingly to harp on Christ’s wounds and bruises. Well before the pitiless winter of 1692, he sounded better suited to a calamity than a ministry.

In addition to all else came the family devotions that had landed Bayley in such trouble. Morning and evening, Parris prayed and read Scripture with his household, including his slaves, their souls his charge as well. He gathered the family before the hearth for the singing of psalms and in weekly catechism. Many ministers’ children heard a preview on Saturday evening of the next day’s sermon; the Sabbath ended with a digest of the day’s service. Parris reinforced basic principles, stressing covenant obligations. Man was born in sin and embarked on a pilgrimage toward grace. A spiritual war was afoot, separating the godly from the damned. Church sacraments were paramount. Puritan parenting constituted a full-time activity; Mather was forever devising exercises for his sons and daughters. While Parris was less creative, he paid close attention to his children’s education, indistinguishable from their spiritual welfare. Well before the girls began to tense and twitch, their souls were closely monitored, daily palpated; the state of New England’s young qualified as something of a preoccupation. Parris devoutly hoped that all of his parishioners were so vigilant. He feared they were not. He
took up the popular refrain that family order was disintegrating; what was the matter with kids today? At a Cambridge ministers’ meeting he led a charge to see what could be done.

Five years older than her husband, a member of Boston’s First Church before her marriage, surrounded by five Putnam wives in her Salem pew, Elizabeth Parris would have shared in those tasks. She was expected to be constant in her devotions and compassionate toward the neighbors. Her obligations increased after the distractions of 1692; under any circumstances, she would have read and discussed the Bible with the parsonage children, whose education fell to her and whom she taught to read. Basic literacy was a New England requirement, thanks to the 1647 statute establishing schools, to which Massachusetts owes its educational eminence. That law too amounted to a defensive measure. It was understood that the “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, [was] to keep men from knowledge of the Scriptures.” The point was to outwit him, to stave off demonic ambush; even in the midst of an arctic New England winter, his hot breath could be felt on the cheek. The Salem town father who had not taught his children to read found a notice posted on the meetinghouse door offering them as servants to someone who would. And while basic literacy was a requirement, it was hardly a sufficiency. One future minister made his way three times through the Bible before he turned six. It was not unusual to have done so a dozen times before adolescence or be able to recite long passages by heart.