In the Devil's Snare

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Book: Read In the Devil's Snare for Free Online
Authors: Mary Beth Norton
Tags: nonfiction
38 Hathorne began with the same sequence of questions concerning familiarity with an evil spirit, contracting with the devil, and hurting the children, receiving similar denials. Then he explored her relationship to Sarah Good. Osborne indicated that she rarely saw her fellow defendant and hardly knew her. Undoubtedly hoping to spring a trap, Hathorne informed Osborne that Good had accused her of tormenting the children. “I doe not know [but] that the deveil goes about in my likeness to do any hurt,” Osborne retorted, offering what would eventually turn out to be an important line of defense for accused witches. After Hathorne asked the afflicted to look at her, they readily identified her as one of their tormentors.
    Then the interrogation took a different turn, based on remarks by Villagers in the audience. Someone reported that “shee said this morning that shee was more like to be bewitched than that she was a witch,” a statement Hathorne asked her to explain. Osborne responded that once she was frightened in her sleep, “and either saw or dreamed that shee saw a thing like an indian all black which did pinch her in her neck and pulled her by the back part of her head to the dore of the house.” That nightmare would have been hardly unusual for a woman in northern New England familiar with reports of scalping and the recent raid on York, and Hathorne did not explore it further. Instead, he pursued a point raised “by some in the meeting house”: that “shee had said that shee would never be teid to that lying spirit any more.” Wasn’t that the devil to whom you referred? he pressed her. Osborne reluctantly admitted that “a voice” had told her not to attend meeting, but insisted she had resisted its message. Yet “her housband and others” declared that she had not been to church for over a year. Although she claimed she had been ill, Hathorne accused her of “yeild[ing] thus far to the devil as never to goe to meeting.”
    The transcripts of the examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne reveal dynamics that would continue inside various makeshift courtrooms for the duration of the crisis. Four distinct elements combined to create an unstable, often explosive mixture: the magistrates, assuming guilt; the accused, struggling to respond to the charges; the afflicted, demonstrating their torments; and the audience, actively involving themselves in the exchanges by offering information and commentaries. These early records disclose another aspect of the crisis as well: even the closest relatives of the accused sometimes questioned their innocence. William Good and Alexander Osborne were but the first of many to express doubts publicly about their spouses or other relations.
    After the magistrates finished with Goody Osborne, they turned to Tituba. Undoubtedly Hathorne and Corwin had been among the “Worthy Gentlemen of Salem” who questioned Tituba previously at Parris’s request, and to whom she had acknowledged some acquaintance with witchcraft but denied being a witch. Perhaps they anticipated similar responses. If so, they were to be surprised, because Tituba confessed to committing malefice— because, she later informed a critic of the trials, Parris beat her until she agreed to admit guilt. 39
    After starting by again denying that she was a witch, Tituba gradually made a series of shocking disclosures in response to Hathorne’s persistent questioning. 40 The devil had appeared to her “and bid me serve him.” Good and Osborne had hurt the children; she had seen them do so, along with the specters of two women and a man from Boston whom she could not identify. Sarah Good’s familiar spirit was a yellow bird that “suck[ed] her between her fingers.” Sarah Osborne had two familiars: “a thing with a head like a woman with 2 leggs and wings,” and “a thing all over hairy” that “goeth upright like a man” and was two or three feet tall. Tituba herself had seen strange creatures. A

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