Weekly Reader: Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials by Marilynne K. Roach; Definitive Account of the Salem Witch Trials Individualizes The People Involved

Weekly Reader: Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials by Marilynne K. Roach; Definitive Account of the Salem Witch Trials Individualizes The People Involved

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Of the hundreds of accounts of the Salem Witch Trials, two books stand as the definitive account: The Witches, Salem 1692 by Stacy Schiff is one. It is a comprehensive account of the Trials, covering the people and the events and analyzes the potential reasoning behind it by offering social, psychological, physical, and religious motivations.




Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials by Marilynne K. Roach is the other. Instead of being a comprehensive account of the entire event, Roach personalizes it. She focuses on six individuals to show how the Trials affected specific people. While she offers some theories, they narrow in comparison to the immediacy of how lives were destroyed by accusing others and being victims of the accusations.




Roach wisely selected six different women from various social statuses, families, and that stood on different sides in the Trial. They were:




Rebecca Nurse-An elderly woman with a large supportive family. She often helped many people in the Village through troubled child births and illnesses. Despite her good reputation, her family was involved in various lawsuits against another family: The Putnams who became their sworn enemies. Despite the petitions from her family to have her exonerated, she was arrested, tried, and executed by hanging.




Bridget Bishop-A tough poor woman who had a bad temper and three marriages. One of her marriages was abusive and she was forced to stand in the pillory after she defended herself. She was also known to be somewhat bawdy and wore a red petticoat to the dismay of many of her fellow Puritans. Like Nurse, she was arrested, tried, and executed by hanging.




Mary English-A well-to-do woman, she married a man from Jersey who Anglicised his name from Philippe L’Anglais to Phillip English. She was one of the wealthiest families in Salem, but was distrusted because of her wealth and immigrant status. She was arrested and tried along with her husband, but thanks to some influential friends and money, they managed to escape.




Ann Putnam Sr.-The wife of Thomas Putnam and mother of Annie Putnam Jr., one of the afflicted girls. Putnam suffered many stillbirths and infant deaths, becoming afflicted herself and blamed her troubles on her family's enemies, the Nurse family, specifically Rebecca. Her daughter, Annie, became one of the star witnesses identifying people from nearby towns such as Andover and Lynn. After the Trials, Putnam’s daughter Annie was the only one of the accusers to make a public apology after her parents’ deaths.




Tituba-A slave in the home of Rev. Samuel Parris, the first afflicted family. Despite the theories of many, Roach’s book shows that she did not practice fortune telling to frighten the girls and only resorted to folk magic once at the behest of a white neighbor to make a “witch’s cake” to identify the tormentor of the afflictions. Despite this, she was fingered by the girls as the perpetrator and she in turn named two other outcasts: Sarah Goode, a beggar and Sarah Osborne, a woman who had a common law arrangement with a lover. Despite implicating others, Tituba remained in prison throughout the Trials and was eventually sold by Parris to pay off the prison debt that accrued during her confinement.




Mary Warren-A servant girl in the home of John and Elizabeth Proctor. She may have been one of the girls who engaged in fortune telling (by putting a shattered egg in a glass and seeing an image of the man she was to marry. One of the girls believed to be either Rev. Parris’ daughter, Betty or niece, Abigail saw a coffin.). She became one of the accusers who claimed to be haunted by the Devil and named her employers as well as various other people. Though she was eventually tried for witchcraft herself, she continued to accuse others while still in prison. After the Trials, she was released and disappeared from history.




In limiting the accounts to just these six women, Roach makes the accounts of the Trial more personal and intimate. She writes about the women's backgrounds and their various behaviors throughout the Trials. They also show that the accusations could fall on anyone. A woman who was considered a pillar of the community like Nurse, could be tried as a witch just as easily as a woman who previously had a rough reputation like Bishop. Roach showed the innocent lives that were ruined by religious paranoia and fear mongering that led to false accusations and executions or acquired reputations as accused witches.




Roach also engages in some literary techniques. At the beginning and ending of each chapter, Roach writes italicized sections that go into the character’s minds. She admits that these sections are just wishful thinking, but she is able to fill in the blanks with possibilities regarding their motivations and thoughts during their imprisonments.




Tituba in particular benefited from this approach. Because so little is known about her historically, Roach only had a few records and her imagination to go on. Many historians don't know where she came from originally (though Parris purchased her in Barbados), the proper spelling of her name, or what manner of name Tituba is since there are variations in various South American and West African countries. They are even uncertain whether Tituba was black or fully black. Since many of the court documents describe her as “Tituba Indian” or “Tituba, an Indian woman” rather than the usual epithets to describe a black person, it's possible that she may have hailed from South America originally and may have been a First Nation Native American woman or at least mixed race.




Roach’s writings portray Tituba as a woman caught up in a “damned if you do, damned if you don't” situation. She was at the mercy of her white owners and was bound by their laws and morals, having little say in the matter. In the sections depicting Titus's thoughts, she is given the option of either saying she isn't a witch and being beaten severely before her execution or confessing and never being trusted by her master and being sold anyway. While some may have criticized Tituba’s confession as the spark that lit the fire, Roach clearly understood that she was considered the lowest rung in a society that cared very little about her and considered her property. It makes her actions understandable that she would implicate people who had little opinion for her. Also in her presumed confessions, she would insist that “Satan wanted her to hurt the girls,” which she refused, Tituba painted herself as someone who loved the young girls in her care and wanted to protect them even though they named her.




The book also takes us into the eyes of both accusers and accused, the ones who claimed to be afflicted and the ones that were tried as witches, particularly Mary Warren and Anne Putnam Sr. Like reading books about the Holocaust or other terrible periods in history, it is important to understand why people act the way they do. Why did people feel it was their right to consider other people property? Why did they acquire such a low opinion of Jewish people that they were able to send them to death camps without a thought then insisting they were only following orders? And why did people believe so badly they were cursed by the Devil that they had to find someone to blame and that included their friends, family, and neighbors?




While many debate whether the afflicted were affected by mass hysteria, ergotism, or were simply faking it, Roach portrays Warren and Putnam as sincere in their beliefs that the Devil was cursing them. Putnam believed that the deaths of her infant children were the results of God’s punishment for sin in the village. A fear of God's wrath and punishment can cause people to see the Devil everywhere even in those they know.

For Mary Warren, she believed that something was affecting her. While that something more than likely was religious anxiety as well as untreated or unverified at the time mental illness, Warren more than likely stuck to the party line that she was cursed by witches out of fear and confusion. By the time the Trials continued, she and Putnam, as well as the others, were so far gone that to stop would be an admission of guilt. To fully understand history, you have to understand why people did horrible things so they can never be repeated.




Six Women of Salem is an excellent book that brings human faces to this long ago troubling time in history and shows who they were and how they acted and showed they really weren't that different from who we are today.