Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [39]
Boyer and Nissenbaum’s close study of the town highlights the larger processes of transformation underway in New England as a whole, as many inhabitants of riverine and coastal communities (such as Springfield or Boston) benefited from commercial opportunities far from home.160 They broadcast their new prosperity in larger homes filled with imported household goods. Others, like the people of Salem Village, engaged in subsistence farming and were relatively removed from the market economy. These economic practices, historians suggest, accompanied different worldviews, with the farmers connected to past habits and values that prized the community and the market-oriented Salemites looking toward a different kind of future, one which tolerated and even accepted individual ambition. These ingredients, in and of themselves, would tell us little, because these features characterized transitions within New England as a whole, albeit especially pronounced in commercial centers. But Salem endured some particular challenges, most notably because of the town’s geographic location and legal status but also because of the incendiary mix of personalities who found their way to the region and who gave voice to the conflicts that had begun to constrain and shape daily interactions.
Certain people and temperaments come clearly into view in Salem. Samuel Parris was one such figure. As Salem Village’s minister, he was a critical component of the outbreak’s existence. His father, Thomas, had first made and then lost his fortune in Barbados. The family cycle repeated itself with Samuel. Thomas Parris managed to fund Samuel’s education at Harvard, the only college in the English colonies at the time and the only place to train for the ministry. In 1670 Samuel journeyed to Massachusetts, where he lasted three years in Cambridge, training for the ministry, before returning to Barbados in the wake of his father’s death, his education incomplete. Back in Barbados, Parris tried to establish himself as a merchant in Bridgetown. After a few years, however, he decided to move on, and gathering up his human property—the two slaves, Tituba and John Indian, whom he had probably purchased in Barbados in the 1670s—he sailed to Boston.161 Samuel’s career as a trader unfortunately replicated the trials of his father. He had to fend off suits for unpaid bills, but he managed to achieve some modest success. In the process he found a wife, Elizabeth, with whom he had first a son, John, and then two daughters, Elizabeth and Susannah. His commercial success, however, was neither reliable nor sufficient to support his family, and so Parris decided in the mid-1680s to pursue a new career in the ministry. Without a Harvard degree, Parris was out of the running for New England’s more prestigious positions, but he found a job, first at Stow, then in Salem Village.162 His frustration with the unfulfilled conditions of his employment at Salem Village—he wrangled over his salary and other benefits of his position—contributed to the animosities of the community, and his daughter and niece confirmed his fears and suspicions when they identified witches not only in the village, but even in their own house: the slave Tituba.
If Parris might help us understand how a fractured community gave voice to its anger through witch accusations, the pattern of the trials—why Salem became an outbreak—is harder to understand. For two historians, two individuals—and thus two different turning points, and indeed two different political, social, and racial contexts—offer crucial ways to understand the episode. One such figure was Parris’s slave, Tituba. She was probably an Indian from South America, a slave on Barbados, and Parris’s human property.163 When Parris transported her to New England, she joined a society where both Indians and Africans were enslaved. Tituba was one of the first three people accused of witchcraft, and unlike the other two, she confessed. Her confession, then, in contrast to the