Sticks and Stones and Devilish Neighbors

This week I finished reading the book about witches, The Devil of Great Island. Though it was short, only 207 pages, it was pretty slow going, probably due to the fact that the book seems to be truly scholarly, which means that it's well documented but not particularly compelling as a story.  But I did learn some interesting things.

One of the things I learned is that early colonial New England was a very complex and contentious place--lots of arguing and fighting among the inhabitants, whether English, French, or Indian. For the most part, the fighting seemed to be between religious factions, yet the causes stemmed more from property disputes and politics than religious practices or freedoms.  One interesting fact is that the squabbling among colonists got so bad at one point that the English government had to step in and tell the Massachusetts Bay folks that they had to be more tolerant of other religions!

But the Crown's meddling in colonial affairs did little to improve matters. In fact, their untidy method of granting land parcels was what caused some of the problems in the first place. Other problems arose from the diverse group of colonists, some of whom had widely divergent ideas about how to establish a village or a colony. Their conflicts with the natives who were displaced by their increasingly large settlements also factored into the tense atmosphere.

One result of all this fighting, the author Emerson Baker argues, was an increase in accusations of witchcraft.  According to the author, accusing neighbors of witchcraft was a way to get them out of the way and then grab their land or property.  But there was another side to the witchcraft controversy: the people who were accused probably were guilty of harming people, Baker believes, just not as witches.  The episodes of stone throwing, for instance, were probably secret attacks by very mortal neighbors who were unhappy with the victims' behavior and saw no other way of persuading them to stop.  Unfortunately, with one particularly exasperating fellow, George Walton, even repeated stonings failed to curb his bad behavior. His next door neighbor, Thomas Walford, was one of his victims. Since Mr. Walford was also my ninth great grandfather, I found the book's chapter on the Walfords very interesting, as you can imagine.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the period it covers, the late 17th century in New England, but be aware that it is a history book, not a narrative. 

For my next book, I'm going to stick with history and plunge into a book on the Underground Railroad that I've been meaning to read, Bound for Canaan.  I'll let you know how that goes next time!

17th Century New England Witches: Fact and Fiction

For the past two weeks, I haven't been reading much because I wasn't taking the bus every day, but I did manage to finish a novel by Alice Hoffman, The Probable Future.  As with all her novels, this one was about generations of women and their relationships with each other and the men in their life.  And there's always an element of magic with Hoffman's work; this story was no exception. In the case of the book's main characters, the Sparrow women, the magic goes all the way back to the 1600s in Massachusetts, with the appearance of a mysterious girl who walked out of the woods one day speaking gibberish, who attracted flocks of sparrows that perched on her as she worked in her garden, and who was later found to be unable to feel pain.  They took her for a witch, of course, and executed her for her supposed "crimes."

Her descendents all suffered in some way for their ancestor's deeds, and the story is in part about how they deal with that legacy.  It was a good story, compelling but with a nice, comfortable pace. There were mysteries to be unraveled for each generation of Sparrow women, and problems that found satisfying solutions by the end of the book. I recommend it highly.

In keeping with the theme of early Massachusetts, witchcraft and mysterious happenings, I'm now reading a history book, The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft & Conflict in Early New England, by Emerson W. Baker.  Mr. Baker is a history professor at Salem State College, and so he knows his witches.  The book tells about some strange doings in Maine and Massachusetts in the late 1600s (incidences of lithobolia, for instance) that many people of the time attributed to witchcraft; since then, they've been attributed to ghosts, poltergeists, and extraterrestrials.  It's pretty interesting so far, though I'm only about a quarter of the way through.

I started this book once before when I bought it to read about one of my ancestors, Jane Walford, who was one of the people featured in the stories.  I had put it aside because I was already involved in another book.  But now I'm committed to finishing it.

I'll let you know how things come out next time.