Tituba of Salem Village (4 page)

He got up, imitated a woman’s walk, mincing along, swaying his hips. “‘Make the fire blaze, John,’” he said in a woman’s voice, “‘make a big fire so I’”—here he tittered—“‘so I won’t get a chill, John Indian.’ And the captain thinks this is funny and he laughs and then they both laugh.”

He sat down on the settle, close to the fire, staring into it, “It’s not a man’s work. Not a man’s work.”

One night when he came home he was very upset. Witch Glover had been hanged that morning. He went to the hanging. Everybody went. They even closed the tavern.

He sat with his head in his hands. Just the two of them were in the keeping room. The master and mistress and the children were asleep in the little room that served as their bedroom.

“It was horrible,” John said. “She wasn’t anything but an old crazy woman. And they hanged her. Horrible. Then afterwards they all came into the tavern, so many they couldn’t even sit down. And they drank rum and laughed and said, ‘A hanging is thirsty work.’”

“What had she done?” Tituba asked.

“They said she witched the Godwin children. Just before she died she said hanging her wouldn’t cure them. You should have seen the crowd of people gawking at her—an old woman, dirty, crazy. They said the black man stood by and whispered in her ear before she was hanged.”

“Why did you go?” she asked sharply, not liking to see him so upset and wondering what he meant by “the black man.” She hesitated to ask any more questions, and was angered with herself for not asking.

“I didn’t know what was going on. They said, ‘Let’s go watch the Witch Glover. Come on, everybody. We’ll have some sport. Come on, John Indian, come and have some sport.’ I didn’t know it was a hanging.”

It was weeks before he mentioned it again. Sometimes when he sat silent, staring into the fire, she wondered if he was remembering the hanging of the Witch Glover.

Meanwhile, they settled into the little house as best they could. When the weather was fine, she took the little girls down to the wharf with her to buy fish. It was an exciting place. The wharf reached out into the open sea, and the boats could pull right up to it to dock. There were warehouses and countinghouses and shops and places where auctions were held, all along one side. There were wharves and small docks, all along the edge of the city, and places where they dried fish on frames, and then alongside there might be a bakeshop and a tavern, so that as you walked along you smelled fish, and the smell of the sea, and the smell of bread baking, and the smell of rum.

The mistress didn’t like these trips. She had all the fears that an invalid has. They would get lost. They would fall in the water and drown. (“Don’t go near the Long Wharf.”) They would go into the woods and be attacked by fierce animals—wolves or bears or wildcats—that inhabited the untracked forest that stretched for miles outside of Boston. (“Don’t go near the woods.”) She warned them about the danger of fires, of being trampled by horses, teased and tormented by foreign sailors, chased by dogs.

At last Tituba said, “Mistress, if we waited until we thought it was safe, we would never go outside the house.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said. “I mean—I wish you wouldn’t go unless John is with you.”

“In that case, we would never go out,” Tituba said gently. “He is at the tavern all day, and a good part of the night.” She tucked the covers in around the mistress a little more tightly. “It’s perfectly safe,” she said. “Betsey is on one side of me, and Abigail is on the other. We hold each other’s hands.”

Betsey’s grip on her hand was always tight—it was a frightened little hand. Sometimes the grip tightened beyond belief, and Tituba was sure the child was thinking: bears, wolves, wildcats, foreign sailors, big fierce dogs, angry cows, maddened pigs, stampeding horses.

Abigail’s curiosity overcame any fear she had. She chatted as they walked along, head up in the air, asking questions.

“Why do all these boys wear leather breeches?”

“They’re apprentices. Leather is tough, and they won’t wear out their breeches as fast as though they were made of cloth.”

“What is that dreadful smell?”—pointed little nose indicating that it was a very bad smell.

“Someone is boiling fat for soap-making.”

“Is that man with the beautiful coat a lord?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps he’s the governor of the Colony.”

There was one place along the way where Betsey’s hand always tightened in hers, squeezing it until it hurt. This happened when they came to the dooryard where there was a bear kept on a chain. Someone had tried to train him to do tricks. All he ever learned to do was stand on his hind legs and go around in a circle. The sight never failed to alarm Betsey. At first she tried to get them to run past this spot, but Tituba said no, they’d just attract attention and dogs would run after them, and some of those impudent bound boys would probably join the chase and set other dogs on them. It was best to walk past the bear, going at their usual pace. Betsey could walk on the side away from the bear and close her eyes so she couldn’t see him. Once the child walked almost home with her eyes closed because Tituba forgot to tell her to open them.

Tituba kept hoping that the master would be called to a church. But the weeks slipped by and none of the churches in Boston asked him to be the minister. Then towards the end of November, five farmers from Salem Village came to see him and asked him to serve as pastor in their church.

After they left, Tituba heard the master tell the mistress that he had gone to Harvard College and therefore he wanted a church in Boston and nowhere else. When she told John about this, he said the talk in the tavern was that the Boston churches did not want the master because he had an invalid wife, that a parson’s wife had to do a great deal to help him, and that a parson with two slaves was unusual—his family would be a costly one to support.

They spent the winter in the little house in Boston while the master waited to be called to a church. It was so cold that Tituba thought she would die. Wind and snow and sleet. She and the little girls could no longer go for walks. Once they had ventured near the Long Wharf, and it was like being out in the middle of the ocean in a ship in a violent storm. The water was gray-black, furious. Shutters banged and clattered; boats at anchor bobbed up and down, and some of them pulled loose.

Samuel Conklin, the next-door neighbor, suggested that Tituba learn to spin. “Helps pass the time in winter, and there’s never enough good strong thread in Boston.”

He introduced Tituba to Goodwife Trumbull, one of his neighbors. Goody Trumbull taught Tituba how to spin a thread on the flax wheel and on the wool wheel.

Tituba learned quickly. At first she was clumsy, breaking the thread, making it too thick. After a few days of practice she could spiha thread on the flax wheel so fine, so strong that Goody Trumbull said it was like magic.

“Looks like magic,” she kept saying. “Looks like it hadn’t been made by human hands.” She looked at Tituba slantwise, out of the corner of her eyes, as she said it.

Tituba smiled and pretended she thought this was very high praise and said, “Thank you kindly.”

After that she spun a thread that broke easily, that was thick in some places and too thin in others, just like Goody Trumbull’s thread.

Chapter 3

That first winter in Boston, Tituba thought all the plants and trees were dead. She didn’t say this to anyone. She mourned for them in silence. She could not imagine what it would be like to live where there were no green plants, no trees.

Samuel Conklin, the weaver who lived next door, said that spring would come and there would be green leaves everywhere—on trees and shrubs and all the little plants. There would be flowers and fruit and vegetables. “You wait and see.”

She did not want to say that she did not believe him. She nodded and said nothing. He had come to ask the master if he could teach her to weave, and the master was out when he came, so he sat by the fire in the keeping room, waiting for him to return. It was Betsey who started talking about all the dead trees and plants.

When the master returned he brought cold air into the room with him. He stamped his feet, rubbed his hands together, and stood in front of the fire, warming himself before he took off his greatcoat and his woolen cap. He cut off the heat of the fire from the weaver and from the children.

The weaver stood up and talked to him, standing in front of the fire, too. He said, “I need a helper. I had one of those fiendish bound boys and he’s run off. I’d like to teach Tituba to weave. She’s got good hands for weaving and spinning.”

“What are you offering in return?” the master asked.

“Good woolen cloth?”

The master shook his head. “No,” he said. “We need money more than cloth. It will have to be coins. Come, we’ll discuss it in my study. Is there a fire in there, Tituba?”

“No, master. It is laid and I will light it.” She did not remind him that he had said it was a waste of wood to keep a fire going when he was not in the room.

She did not know how many coins the weaver paid for her services. But every afternoon she sat in his snug warm room, learning how to weave, how to thread the loom, how to work out a pattern. To her own surprise, she enjoyed it. He kept roaring fires going in his fireplace. After two hours of work he’d bring her a dish of boiling hot tea. Every day he said the same thing, “Helps keep out the chill. Come, sit by the fire and drink your tea.”

He laced his own tea with rum. He drank it slowly; and then, having wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he would add another log to the fire and go back to work.

At first her arms and shoulders ached from leaning forward and pushing the shuttle back and forth, back and forth. Once she became accustomed to this motion, she found she could work very fast.

She stayed at the weaver’s until the light began to fail. She left reluctantly. When she reached the street outside, she pulled her shawl tight around her head and neck and hurried to get inside the master’s dreary little house. It always seemed cold in the house, and so before she unwrapped her shawl, she poked the fire, added another log, drew the curtains, hoping to make this draughty keeping room feel like the weaver’s big warm room.

One afternoon the weaver had a big order to fill, and she was later than usual when she returned to the little house next door.

The voice of the mistress, faint, querulous, came from the front of the house. “Tituba, is that you? Bring me a drink of the herb tea. I am faint for the want of it.”

Abigail said petulantly, “I thought you weren’t ever coming back. Where were you?”

Betsey said, “Titibee, Titibee, I’m so glad to see thee,” and hugged her.

Tituba returned the hug and said to Abigail, “Why didn’t you fix some of the herb tea for your Aunt Parris?”

“I didn’t know how. Besides you should have done it.”

“I can not be in two places at once, miss.”

“You could if you were a witch,” she said angrily.

Tituba boxed her ears soundly, hands cupped, striking the child’s ears very hard. Abigail’s cap fell off, and she shrieked, making a hideous sound that filled the room. Tituba shook her and said, “You stop that.”

Betsey cried out, “Oh, don’t,” and clapped her hands tightly over her own ears.

There was a thud from the small front room where the mistress lay in bed. Tituba said, “She’s fallen out of bed,” and hurried into the room, Abigail and Betsey following close behind her. The mistress was lying on the floor.

“I tried to get out of bed. All that uproar—” she said. “I’m all right. It’s just that my legs wouldn’t hold me up. What happened?”

Tituba said, “I boxed Abigail’s ears for being saucy.”

Abigail helped Tituba get the mistress back in bed. Tituba shook her finger under Abigail’s nose, “You behave yourself, or I’ll box your ears even harder.” It was best to say this now in front of the mistress so that if the mistress thought it was wrong she could say so.

The mistress closed her eyes, whispered, “Be a good girl, Abigail.”

In the keeping room, Tituba took a small wooden box from the mantel and opened it. “The leaves are in here, Abigail. You get hot water and the small iron pot and put this much of the leaves”—she held a pinch between her fingers—“in the pot. Pour on the hot water. Let it steep and then strain it through this cloth. And take it to your Aunt Parris.”

She didn’t think the herb tea did the mistress much good. Mistress Parris had had a fever all winter; her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright and shiny, her strength almost completely gone. Perhaps when the weather got warmer, if it ever did in this frozen country, Tituba could find roots or herbs in the woods that might help the mistress get stronger.

In the meantime, she had made an enemy of the nine-year-old Abigail. She could tell by the sullen expression on the child’s face, by the way the bright blue eyes tried to stare her down. It was almost as though she could hear what went on in the child’s mind—you boxed my ears, some day I’ll box yours. You hurt me, some day I’ll hurt you.

She finally accepted the fact that Abigail was her enemy, and though young, a dangerous enemy. On the other hand, Samuel Conklin, the weaver, was her friend, and though a new friend, a very good friend.

Towards the end of the winter, he came to see the master. He spoke forthrightly and directly, right in front of Abigail and Betsey, and within hearing of the mistress. Her door was open, and the weaver stood up straight and tall in the middle of the keeping room.

He said, “Mr. Parris, your Tituba only needs a little more practice to be better at weaving than me. She’s got good hands. ’Tisn’t easy to get that kind of weaver in Boston. Ye want to sell her?”

“Oh, no,” the master said. “I got Tituba and John at a great bargain. I used almost the last of my money to buy them. Their owner had to sell them in a hurry to pay a gambling debt.”

“I’d pay ye more than ye paid for her. I’d expect to.”

“Oh, no,” he said again. “With an invalid wife and my little daughter and my orphaned niece to be looked after, why I need more servants than other men. I couldn’t sell Tituba. I would never sell her. She does everything in the house and nurses my sick wife, too—”