LT. PHILIP SMITH AND MARY WEBSTER, A WITCH

 

This is a great little story. It captures some of the real craziness of the colonial witchcraft hysteria in the 1600s, and ties it to Betsy’s 7th Great-grandfather Philip Smith and to Mary Webster, who was the inspiration for “The Handmaid’s Tale.” 

 

Philip Smith was born in Hadleigh, England in 1632 and came to Massachusetts with his parents in 1634. By the 1680s he was a leading citizen of Hadley, Mass, as a Lieutenant of the troop of militia, justice of the peace, selectman and deacon of the church. 

 

Mary Webster and her husband John were impoverished and sometimes needed help from the town of Hadley to survive. A later historian wrote that Mary was, “despised and sometimes ill-treated” and thus, “she was soured with the world, and rendered spiteful towards some of her neighbors; they began to call her a witch, and to abuse her.” At the time her worst troubles began, she lived alone in her own house. By 1683, the allegations of witchcraft became serious and Mary was taken to Boston to be tried for witchcraft. After waiting in jail for two months, Mary was tried by a court of eleven judges, found not guilty, and allowed to return to Hadley in June 1683. 

 

Rev. Cotton Mather picks up the story from there, in his 1702 opus Magnalia Christi Americana.

Talking about Philip Smith, Mather says “He was, by his office concerned about relieving the indigences of a wretched woman in the town [Mary Webster]; who being dissatisfied at some of his just cares about her, expressed herself unto him in such a manner, that he declared himself thenceforth apprehensive of receiving mischief at her hands.” 

 

Within a year and a half, in early January 1685, Mather writes that Smith began to be “valetudinarious” [which, I discovered, means a hypochondriac, someone abnormally anxious about their health] and told his brother that he had seen the “wretched woman” in his room.

 

“Some of the young men in the town being out of their wits at the strange calamities thus upon one of their most beloved neighbors, went three or four times to give disturbance unto the woman thus complained of [Puritans believed that “disturbing” witches, beating or restraining them, prevented them from casting spells]; and all the while they were disturbing her, he was at ease, and slept as a weary man; yea, these were the only times they perceived him to take any sleep in all his illness.”

 

While Smith continued to lay sick in bed, the young men of Hadley decided to “disturb” Mary further. According to Mather’s account, “They dragged her out of the house, hung her up until she was near dead, let her down, rolled her some time in the snow, and at last buried her in it, and there left her. But she survived.” According to one telling of the event, Mary was left hanging from the tree overnight at the coldest time of the year, and not cut down and buried in the snow until the next morning. Mary thus earned the nickname “Half-hanged Mary” and lived another 11 years before her death in 1696.

 

As for Philip Smith, the young men reported hearing and seeing things in Smith’s room that couldn’t be explained and he died shortly thereafter. Mather says that the jury that viewed Smith’s body [an inquest into the cause of death by a group of local citizens that was common in colonial times] found “several holes that seemed made with awls” and “a countenance continued as lively as if he had been alive.” When he was removed from his bed more than a day later, those who removed him “found him still warm, tho’ the season was as cold as had almost been known in any age.”  

 

Canadian author Margaret Atwood believes Mary was an ancestor of hers and made her the subject of a poem, “Half-Hanged Mary.” The 2017-18 television series “Lore” featured an episode about Mary Webster. And Atwood dedicated her book “The Handmaid’s Tale” to Mary, noting later in comments about Mary that, “Because of the law of double jeopardy, under which you could not be executed twice for the same offence, Mary Webster went free. I expect that if everyone thought she had occult powers before the hanging, they were even more convinced of it afterwards. She is my favourite ancestor…” Atwood’s poem is below.

 

 The details of the witchcraft allegations in this tale come from 1702 and the Rev. Cotton Mather, a New England Puritan minister and author. He was the son of Rev. Increase Mather, probably the most famous Puritan minister in the early days of New England settlement, an author and President of Harvard University. Cotton Mather, and to a slightly lesser extent his father, are blamed for supporting the witch hysteria that came to a head in the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, in which more than 150 people were accused of witchcraft, at least one died in jail awaiting trial and 19 were hanged before the hysteria died down at the end of 1692. His most famous publication was Magnalia Christi Americana published in 1702, a work which includes a description of the death of Lt. Philip Smith.

 

 

HALF-HANGED MARY by Margaret Atwood

 

7pm

 

Rumour was loose in the air 

hunting for some neck to land on. 

I was milking the cow,

the barn door open to the sunset.

 

I didn't feel the aimed word hit 

and go in like a soft bullet.

I didn't feel the smashed flesh 

closing over it like water

over a thrown stone.

I was hanged for living alone

for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin, 

tattered skirts, few buttons,

a weedy farm in my own name,

and a surefire cure for warts;

 

Oh yes, and breasts,

and a sweet pear hidden in my body. 

Whenever there's talk of demons 

these come in handy.

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8pm

 

The rope was an improvisation.

With time they'd have thought of axes.

 

Up I go like a windfall in reverse,

a blackend apple stuck back onto the tree.

 

Trussed hands, rag in my mouth, 

a flag raised to salute the moon,

 

old bone-faced goddess, old original, 

who once took blood in return for food.

 

The men of the town stalk homeward, 

excited by their show of hate,

 

their own evil turned inside out like a glove, 

and me wearing it.

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9pm

 

The bonnets come to stare,

the dark skirts also,

the upturned faces in between, 

mouths closed so tight they're lipless. 

I can see down into their eyeholes 

and nostrils. I can see their fear.

 

You were my friend, you too. 

I cured your baby, Mrs.,

and flushed yours out of you, 

Non-wife, to save your life.

 

Help me down? You don't dare.

I might rub off on you,

like soot or gossip. Birds

of a feather burn together,

though as a rule ravens are singular.

 

In a gathering like this one

the safe place is the background, 

pretending you can't dance,

the safe stance pointing a finger.

 

I understand. You can't spare

anything, a hand, a piece of bread, a shawl

against the cold,

a good word. Lord

knows there isn't much

to go around. You need it all.

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10pm

 

Well God, now that I'm up here 

with maybe some time to kill 

away from the daily 

fingerwork, legwork, work

at the hen level,

we can continue our quarrel, 

the one about free will.

 

Is it my choice that I'm dangling 

like a turkey's wattles from his 

more than indifferent tree?

If Nature is Your alphabet, 

what letter is this rope?

 

Does my twisting body spell out Grace? 

I hurt, therefore I am.

Faith, Charity, and Hope

are three dead angels

falling like meteors or

burning owls across

the profound blank sky of Your face.

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12 midnight

 

My throat is taut against the rope 

choking off words and air;

I'm reduced to knotted muscle. 

Blood bulges in my skull,

my clenched teeth hold it in; 

I bite down on despair

 

Death sits on my shoulder like a crow 

waiting for my squeezed beet

of a heart to burst

so he can eat my eyes

 

or like a judge

muttering about sluts and punishment 

and licking his lips

 

or like a dark angel

insidious in his glossy feathers 

whispering to me to be easy

on myself. To breathe out finally. 

Trust me, he says, caressing

me. Why suffer?

 

A temptation, to sink down 

into these definitions.

To become a martyr in reverse, 

or food, or trash.

 

To give up my own words for myself,

 

my own refusals.

 

To give up knowing. 

To give up pain.

To let go.

——————————————————————————

 

2 a.m.

 

Out of my mouths is coming, at some

distance from me, a thin gnawing sound

which you could confuse with prayer except that 

praying is not constrained.

 

Or is it, Lord?

Maybe it’s more like being strangled 

than I once thought. Maybe it’s

a gasp for air, prayer.

Did those men at Pentecost

want flames to shoot out of their heads? 

Did they ask to be tossed

on the ground, gabbling like holy poultry, 

eyeballs bulging?

 

As mine are, as mine are.

There is only one prayer; it is not 

the knees in the clean nightgown 

on the hooked rug.

I want this, I want that.

Oh far beyond.

Call it Please. Call it Mercy.

Call it Not yet, not yet,

as Heaven threatens to explode

inwards in fire and shredded flesh, and the angels caw.

—————————————————————————

 

3 a.m.

 

wind seethes in the leaves around 

me the trees exude night

birds night birds yell inside

my ears like stabbed hearts my heart 

stutters in my fluttering cloth

body I dangle with strength 

going out of the wind seethes 

in my body tattering

the words I clench

my fists hold No

talisman or silver disc my lungs 

flail as if drowning I call

on you as witness I did

no crime I was born I have borne I 

bear I will be born this is

a crime I will not

acknowledge leaves and wind 

hold on to me

I will not give in

————————————————————————-

 

6 a.m.

 

Sun comes up, huge and blaring, 

no longer a simile for God.

Wrong address. I’ve been out there.

 

Time is relative, let me tell you 

I have lived a millennium.

 

I would like to say my hair turned white 

overnight, but it didn’t.

Instead it was my heart;

bleached out like meat in water.

 

Also, I’m about three inches taller.

This is what happens when you drift in space 

listening to the gospel

of the red hot stars.

Pinpoints of infinity riddle my brain,

a revelation of deafness.

 

At the end of my rope I testify to silence.

Don’t say I’m not grateful.

 

Most will only have one death. 

I will have two.

——————————————————————————

 

8 a.m.

 

When they came to harvest my corpse 

(open your mouth, close your eyes) 

cut my body from the rope,

surprise, surprise,

I was still alive.

 

Tough luck, folks,

I know the law:

you can’t execute me twice 

for the same thing. How nice.

 

I fell to the clover, breathed it in,

and bared my teeth at them

in a filthy grin.

You can imagine how that went over.

 

Now I only need to look

out at them through my sky-blue eyes. 

They see their own ill will

staring them in the forehead

and turn tail.

 

Before, I was not a witch. 

But now I am one.

 

Later

 

My body of skin waxes and wanes 

around my true body,

a tender nimbus.

I skitter over the paths and fields, 

mumbling to myself like crazy, 

mouth full of juicy adjectives

and purple berries.

The townsfolk dive headfirst into the bushes 

to get out of my way.

 

My first death orbits my head, 

an ambiguous nimbus, 

medallion of my ordeal.

No one crosses that circle.

Having been hanged for something 

I never said,

I can now say anything I can say.

 

Holiness gleams on my dirty fingers,

I eat flowers and dung,,

two forms of the same thing, I eat mice 

and give thanks, blasphemies

gleam and burst in my wake 

like lovely bubbles.

I speak in tongues,

my audience is owls.

 

My audience is God,

because who the hell else could understand me?

 

The words boil out of me,

coil after coil of sinuous possibility. 

The cosmos unravels from my mouth, 

all fullness, all vacancy.