I hadn’t always lived in Salem. We relocated from Virginia when Mom had the bright idea to open a bed-and-breakfast on Essex Street. Conveniently, since 2010, we’d been direct descendants of Bridget Bishop, the first woman in Salem hanged for witchcraft. The lodgers always ate it up when Mom told them “our story” and “upgraded” them to the Bridget Bishop Suite.
Most of the gift shop owners farther down Essex did the same thing, especially the pedestrian street “psychics,” who charged two dollars a minute and sold rosemary-filled apothecary bottles for twelve dollars a pop. It was a twisted little thing about Salem, Massachusetts: more than three hundred years after the witch trials took place, most people still claimed some sort of connection to the hysteria.
I was eleven when Mom sat me down and made me watch The Crucible. “Taylor,” she’d said, “if you’re going to grow up in this town, you’re going to need to know what Salem is all about.” I think my mother actually believed that what went down in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was the honest-to-god true story— that seventeen-year-old Abigail Williams had an affair with thirty-year-old John Proctor and that when he dumped her, Abigail tried to send Proctor’s poor pregnant wife, Elizabeth,
to the gallows for dancing with the devil. Soon after, I found out that in real life Abigail had been eleven and John had been sixty—most likely, nothing had ever happened between them.
The truth was that the hysteria had been ignited by a bunch of bored eleven-year-old girls who’d decided to play a very dangerous game. At eleven, I could sympathize. I knew what it was like to be bored in Salem without electricity—we’d once had a power outage, and without screen time I’d had no option but to keep myself busy by shaving everything from the waist down until I looked like I’d fallen pants-less into a bramble bush.
Out of everyone involved in the witch trials, I always felt kind of bad for Abigail. From my place on our newly delivered leather couch—on my third rewatch of The Crucible—the whole thing just seemed like an unfortunate accident to me. I was sure Abigail didn’t mean to send half the town to the gallows (in hindsight, my judgment might have been clouded by Arthur Miller’s choice to cast Winona Ryder and her perfect face as Abigail Williams)…
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