Robert Walker: Children of Salem

The pamphlet’s message spread throughout Boston, and depending on the reader, this news was either a sensational revelation of truth or a terrible gossip’s lie that had been stretched out of all proportion. But this, of all the accusations, if a lie, then a lie touching on the highest family in the land, and condemning the First Lady of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. What must the people of Essex County think?

The pamphlet went on to say:

Each of these virtuous, Christian women, Mrs. Hale of Beverly, a minister’s wife, and our Mrs. Phipps of Boston, the governor’s wife, have habitually visited those unfortunate and wretched souls jailed on the charge of witchcraft and murder via the dark arts.

While we here in Boston are not so familiar with Minister John Hale and Mrs. Hale of Beverly, we are familiar with William and Mrs. Phipps. We have seen her kneel to extend prayers and bread, feeding the accused—and we know that mere accusation alone has nowadays become the coin of realm in the court system. Now to have Mrs. Phipps accused of these heinous crimes has placed her in the company of degenerates, murderers, thieves, and other lowly types. If some among us have questioned the extremes we see in Salem Farms, what now would authorities have us do with this extreme accusation?

Perhaps at last this insult to him will garner action from our governor, who may well on hearing this nonsense go from being a man of inaction and knowing nothing of witchcraft matters or how accusations have been handled since March to knowing the truth of these matters! For what Goodman in Essex County, indeed the entirety of the present colonies, who knows his wife intimately to be pure of heart can doubt now that many pure of hearts have been arrested, imprisoned, and perhaps executed among the twenty-one thus far hung in Salem? Are we now to imagine Mrs. Phipps at the end of a rope, summarily executed by the state? A state headed by her husband?

Is there any question or doubt in the mind of our governor as to what these recent accusations against his wife mean? We at this ledger do hope that Minister Hale might come to Boston, seek audience with Governor Phipps and compare his Goodwife with Phipps’ own. That the two men might begin with their ladies’ charitable, munificent, and pious natures, which nature precludes any curiosity or interest in the black arts. ”

The paper had been quietly speaking out since Jeremiah Wakely’s secret dispatches had begun showing up. The editor however stopped short of printing the libelous theory of how Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village not only instigated and fanned the flames of accusations in the witch hunt for personal gain, along with other ministers and magistrates—including Sir William Stoughton and the Court of Oyer & Terminer. The editor also refused to print the horrid theory that a man of the cloth, Parris, may or may not have killed his own half-breed infant in an abortion performed by a ship’s doctor named Caball docked at Barbados some three or four years before removing himself and his family to Salem.

News of Mrs. Hale’s having been accused had come along with testimonials as to her character. Oddly, the postmark on the news was that of Connecticut—a man named Silas Smithington, but the Sperlunkle knew it was an alias of the outlaw Jeremy Wakely.

Whatever the truth of the matter, all of Boston had this news of Mrs. Phipps’ being a witch now on the tongue. It took the place of concerns of weather, crops, fishing nets and catches, and of cargo coming and going in the harbor, and the normal life of trade in weights and measures and working one’s fields, and clearing woods, and building barns and homes. Concerns that, particularly in Salem, had been let go since the witchcraft panic had begun and snowballed downhill until people were seeing witches everywhere. Now the frenzy, like a disease, had spread to other villages and towns until now it gripped Boston in a most dramatic fashion.

In the Governor’s house, Mrs. Phipps sat her busy husband down, and she insisted he listen to a tale told by a so-called witch and now a reported fugitive and outlaw, a man named Jeremiah Wakely alias Silas Smithington.

“How ever does my lady come by these accounts from this rogue Wakely?” demanded William Phipps, pacing their bedroom.

Elizabeth Phipps sat at her mirror, brushing out her long, golden hair. “By a party who came to me while you were fighting Indians in the territories. A reliable source.”

“That Samuel Parris has played us all for fools, the entire General Court? The Salem judges, Corwin and Hathorne? That Parris’ true intent was land holdings and the court seized on the idea along with vote gathering?”

“You know something of the man I speak of,” she calmly replied and resumed brushing. “A man who has done work for you through Increase Mather, secretive work.”

“Jeremiah Wakely? Who has come under suspicion himself? Who has married into one of the witch families down there?”

She wheeled on him and angrily shouted, “Yes, the same as was sent by Increase Mather into Salem, just before all of this witch hunt business began, yes—orders stemming from you, Mister Phipps.”

“One and the same, yes.” He avoided her eyes.

“Increase, your trusted friend, he spoke highly of this Wakely as I recall.”

“He did indeed. Trusted his judgment.”

“As you did, and yet you take the reports of others against him as fact?”

“He is accused of breaking prisoners out of the Salem jailhouse!”

“And when they come to lock me away in the jailhouse here, William? Will you break me free? What I hear is that Mr. Wakely took back what was his, and it’s rather romantic, his facing a loss of everything—his reputation, his very future, his life for his love.”

Sir William Phipps did not miss the innuendo. “I’d do the same for you, Lizbeth! You know I’d give up everything here—” he swept a hand through the air—“to keep you safe.”

“Wakely told me a horror tale about a child aborted in Barbados by a Dr. Caball, a man I have heard my father speak of—a miscreant who has no education and is no doctor at all but a butcher whose services go to anyone with coin.”

“Tell me then the whole story and how Wakely came by it.”

Mrs. Phipps laid out everything she’d learned about Parris, including his connection to her father and this man, Caball, and the fact these two men conspired to hide Parris’ mistake .

“How do you know this information is correct, Elizabeth?”

“When I was a young girl, my father came home with an infant, a child of mixed race.”

“Really? To raise as his own mistake?”

“He made some peace with Mother about the child, and he and my mother raised the child. I asked mother about it once, and she simply said, “Your father saved this child from a certain death. He is a good man.”

“Then there was no murder in Barbados of this Tituba Indian’s child.”

“No, only what appears to be an attempt that my father learned of and stopped. He must have convinced Parris to allow him to take the child. The mother, in a drugged state and afterward assumed the worst.”

“What became of the child?”

“He was trained in the ways of a man servant, and he is still in my father’s service. His name is Reginald.

“How can you know this is—was—the same child?”

“How can you know that it isn’t?”

“And if this confessed witch, Tituba is telling the truth . . . Parris is not the man he pretends.”

“What will you do, William? What will your office make of my being accused a witch? They strip the witches to search for imperfections on their bodies, calling warts by another name—the teet where suckles a demon or familiar! Will you stand by as you have so long now when they strip—”