The year is 1692; it is better to be anywhere else than here, particularly if you were not anything like them.
But how was she to know that?
She skipped down the beige streets of the town she has been taught to call home straight to the baker, the penny tucked deep inside her pockets.
To reach the baker you must walk down Beacon Street take the left at the statue of one of the Pilgrim Fathers and climb the cobblestone steps into Merchants Row which stank of all the fresh fish they brought in from the bay. However if you can pucker up your nose and hold your breath without actually clutching your nose with your fingers you are fine all the way down Merchant Row before you reached Ripley’s- the baker who served the softest muffins misted with pink powdery sugar. But if it must taste like soft clouds of honeyed rainbow, she must be sure of doing one thing-never look up. Yet she always does. Then the colourful clouds turned to the mulch, her mouths were always full of.
All down the alleys that twisted through the market which you reach via Ipswich Road, and afterwards as she waited on the walkway for the mud and snow spitting wagons to pass, they stared- some down their pointed noses, others down their upturned ones. Arched or hooked or stubby, one thing was certain: they stared. Otherwise they glared. Adjusting their steeple hats and their beavers, they made sure their eyes are not hidden in the dark shadows that fell on their faces, in case she missed the absolute despise in them.
She cannot understand all this glowering and grimacing even as she cannot understand why they wear so much black and blacker grey. She personally prefers crimson or the pink of her favourite muffin she is about to eat. She hopes Mr Ripley’s nigger stays where he is supposed to- in the backyard, because even if she manages to miss all those frowning eyes- blues, greens, and greys – “Tom” , the nigger( she has no idea what’s his real name) will ensure the rainbow joy turns to mulch when he screams,” the little witch is here !” . What is worse he would run, really and genuinely frightened, as if she is truly one. The important thing for Marie Carrie is she is not one and she has no idea why they call her that.
“What’s a witch, momma?”
“You mean, Marie Carrie, who is a witch?”
Marie Carrie said nothing, weren’t witches things? For sure that’s how the Reverend spoke about them all through the sermons. He had called them “it”; they must be things.
However she cannot be sure anymore; she had slept all through the Reverend’s sermons that, as is their wont, go on and on about the devil, his temptations and his evil rewards.
Tom, the nigger, is not here. But someone else is. And they all, Mr Ripley and his visitor, stop talking the moment she steps in. She is determined not to look at her visitor for she will not spend her precious earning to taste mulch. She keeps her eyes firmly on the pink misted muffins, “Mr Ripley, can I have one of those?” and points her finger at her treat. It requires all her strength to keep it from shaking because the air in the room has somehow turned colder than the nipping winter of Salem- this village she has been taught to call home.
“In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?[1]”
Yet there’s no place for her and momma in this place.
For now that’s not her concern because she is biting into clouds of joy six days of work have brought her. Marie Carrie does not really work, she tags along with Momma who works in the big house of the Reverend and gets paid a penny when she does a few odd jobs.
She dusts her pink hands in the apron. She always means to let the muffin last all the way back home, yet somehow it disappears before she crosses Mr Ripley’s threshold. Her heart sinks. The staring and glowering will commence. And with no muffin at the end of this journey she has no idea how she will endure it.
They stare at Momma too. But she doesn’t care a breeze for this town or its people whom she calls infidels.
Momma, unlike Marie Carrie, does not call this town home,
“Home is where the sun shines over beach sands that grizzle and scrunch under your feet sticky with sweat,”
Her mother bewilders her the most when she said things like that.
For Marie Carrie, who cannot keep the cold wind out despite the heavy black cloak and the heavier grey coat, balmy beaches are not possible even in her favourite dreams. What is more she likes this town with its tall steeples, the windy harbour, the grey houses and its people promenading the square dressed in their greys and blacks- people who stare.
Now that the muffin is out of her head she has the space to ponder and worry about a whole lot of other things. One thing always prioritises this list and this is when she will, like she has done in the past, remove her black gloves and stare at her hands till they turn blue in the cold the way mother’s never does. That’s because Momma’s is the colour of the ebony balustrade in the Reverend minister’s house which she polishes every other day, which, is where she, Marie Carrie, must rush if she does not want to be reprimanded for tarrying here and there, not minding her chores.
If she had turned around she would have seen the frosted door of Mr Ripley’s open, emptying out the visitor who was steadily glaring at her slow teetering figure. She would have recognised him as the one who had caused the temperature to drop the way it had in the bakery, reminding her of evenings when they ran out of timber. Marie Carrie, however, did nothing of that sort and purposefully walked on towards her life as the daughter of a slave woman who, she is sure , will pretty soon be found out for having truck with him she should not be having anything to do with: the devil.
The town is suspicious of mother. Marie Carrie has understood that.
Momma had given one of her mysterious smiles, “Don’t go around listening to the tittle-tattle of this town, Marie Carrie! You will soon have to be strong and brave knowing the right from the wrong. “
It all started with Ms Harris and Ms Williams- the Reverend’s daughter and niece-doing all those strange stunts with their necks and their limbs, twisting and contorting them as if they were attached to no spine or bones. Marie Carrie has been practicing their moves because since they commenced their jelly-like shakings they have got all the attention of Momma, who, these days is perpetually beside those two white children in her care.
Marie Carrie stops in her tracks. A wagon almost runs over her; it vaults over the walkway and the wagon driver screams, “Planning to die under my wheels before they send you to the gallows, you little witch?!”
She does not hear him at all. Her thoughts have gone back to what mother had told Sarah , the maid , last night when the latter had come to their quarters to share mother’s special joints- they warmed her up -Sarah said, on these cold winter nights.
“It is not sorcery “, Mother had whispered thinking Marie Carrie was fast asleep. She almost was. But the moment she heard the word “ sorcery” she was bright-eyed and perky like a lark on a spring morning .This was something she had to hear because in the past few weeks there had been so much hushed goings on about witchcraft , black magic, contracts with the devil, bewitching and so on.
“Of course it is Titibo”, Sarah had argued, “I wonder who is bewitching these little kids. And I hear it spreads across Salem village like a contagion.”
Mother had given her ironic laugh, “That it certainly is- a contagion!”
Sarah had received this intriguing statement in silence; she exhaled deeply, “A disease?”
“It comes from the bread.”
“Bread?” Sarah was incredulous.
Mother drew deeply at the joint, “When bread turns old or if it is made from stale Rye it causes the limbs to cramp up and pull as if one was going into convulsions. I have tried some myself and my limbs went writhing exactly like the children’s.”
“You be glad cook is not here to listen to you blaming her bread!” Sarah scoffed.
Mother gave a dry cough, “If it is witchcraft then there’s only one way of finding out.”
“You don’t believe in all that unholy methods, like the one about feeding the evil cakes to a black dog, do you?
Mother probably shrugged; her voice sounded exactly like that, “There’s no harm in testing!”
“The Reverend wouldn’t approve, Titibo”, Sarah was suddenly alarmed.
“Oh the Reverend! “, Mother jeered.
“Mercy Louis, the one who works with the Putnam’s, says it’s all the doings of the Wabanakis”, Sarah had gone on, not one to easily stifle any gossip she wished to share.
Marie Carrie does not like the Putnam’s’ servant – Mercy Louis. Nor does she like the Putnam’s. The former because of all the abominable things she says about herself and mother and the latter terrify her when they glare at her and mother.
Mercy Louis says she , Marie Carrie , is a Wabanaki ,born, as she is, to the black Barbadonian Titibo and the dark frightful Wabanaki husband of mother’s who comes to meet her in the stealth of the night. Marie Carrie does not think so because mother has told her otherwise. Yet Mercy Louis insisted she was a Wabanaki and hated Marie Carrie, not that she cared, because the tribe had come for Mercy Louis’ family in the stealth of the night like they had come for the whites up in Maine in the North.
“Mercy Louis and her family had it coming”, Mother mutters.
Mother continued with her whispered remonstrations, “And the Reverend and the Magistrate better look out too! Calling the Natives the children of Satan and forbidding them their rights does not launder them of the crime of taking away their land and denying them the rights to sell their goods in the market.”
This is another thing Marie Carrie cannot understand- Mother’s love for the Wabanakis; because the Reverend, the one who had baptised Marie Carrie and the one who gives her everyday lessons , called them savage . Deep inside her heart, though she never told mother, she agreed with him. That’s also why she does not want to be called the child of one of them –the savages; because then she can never be one of the people of this town whom she resembled– a creamy white and a pale yellow , the colour of the cheese cook whips up after she curdles the milk. People of Salem village love cheese but they cannot seem to love her- the mulatto child, what mother calls her, of a slave woman and her master.
Something is wrong. Marie Carrie knows it even before she reaches the end of the boulevard that leads to the Reverend’s home. There are scores of wagons. She is wrong; the Reverend has taught her that a score means a group of twenty. Twenty wagons outside the Reverend’s door would be an exaggeration. She must always be rational, as the Reverend had instructed her. There are, oh she can count, only ten. The relief is hardly long lasting; she has spotted Mr Richard Putnam and the sheriff. And the latter is dragging mother out on what seems like long ropes.
Afterwards, there would be the naming of the other unfortunates: Goody Osborne, Sarah Good, and Martha Cory. And Marie Carrie will, time and time again, hear the lines; “Thou shalt not suffer the witch to live”.
The strawberry fondue on the cruller mingles with her drool. She wakes up with a jolt , licking her lips .Her midnight snack is a smashed up mess of brown and pink, blending with the ink on the white sheet of paper, which , except for her name and her class is yet to be filled. She stares at her laptop screen that has paused. The blurred numbers in the corner tell her that the History Channel Documentary on the Salem Witch Trial will end in twenty three minutes. The alarm clock at her bedside reminds her she has the same twenty three minutes plus another six hours before she submits her essay on the 1692 Massachusetts Witch Trials.
She does not resume the video. Her head is still full of the dream about the little girl – Marie Carrie. The dream has given her an idea about her entry for the Bay Area short fiction contest the following winter. If only she could spin out academic papers as easily as she could weave stories.
She opens the minimised PDF of Edward Said’s Orientalism. The small print blurs, No! She must not sleep!
A black coffee should do the trick. However there’s no time for that necessity even as there’s no time to put down the story of little Marie Carrie. She cannot get rid of the image of the sad little girl lost in the cruel world of Seventeenth Century Salem. What would happen to Marie Carrie? Will the Reverend, who had been kind enough so far, save her from the gallows?
She sighs. The story of the fictional Marie Carrie must wait; her last essay on the coming of the founding fathers had been abysmal. It had received its deserved B plus. She had really gaffed that one. This one must get the A plus mother expects.
Her mouse opens Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World. This is the grand narrative of Seventeenth Century Salem that constructed the dissident as evil and monstrous. She had zeroed in on her title: “The Vilifying of the Other” ,after having almost decided to pander to the proclivities of Dr Matthews, her history teacher, when she must have dozed off
Dr Matthews, given her penchant for the postcolonial, is sure to be delighted with her hypothesis that those hunted down and hung as witches during the 1692 Salem witch hunt were the quintessential other of Salem Village- either ‘unruly’ other women or the Native American Wabanakis whose lands the whites had taken over. She is kicked with this argument. In the next three hours she writes her paper with her usual excitement and clarity: anticipating, and foreclosing counterarguments; “going easy on the methodology” ( as Dr Matthews always advised); and concluding the paper like a pro.
By two am Fathima Hassan is completely done with her paper and is, rather unusually, even content with her title.
After four hours of blissful sleep Fathima Hassan wakes up bright and beaming because for the first time she is proud of her essay. As she pins her green hijab she notices she has not written the date. How absolutely careless of her!
She writes in the style taught at her Lower Manhattan School; “9/11”
The year is 2001; in a few hours Fathima Hassan will find that it is better to be anywhere else than here, particularly if you are not anything like them.
But how is she to know that?
Fathima Hassan, her head covered with her hijab, skips down the beige streets of the town she has been taught to call home, with her essay tucked deep inside her backpack.
References:
The story has retained some of the historical figures involved in the horrific Salem Witch Trials of 1692: Titibo, the Barbadonian slave of Reverend Harris –the one who was first convicted of witchcraft; the Putnam family; Mercy Louis, whose entire family was killed by a native American tribe- the Wabanakis, a tribe who were feared by the Puritans of Salem because of the devastation they caused in York, Maine.
Marie Carrie is entirely a figment of mine and Fathima’s imagination.
https://youtu.be/jZM3RLdLMhY : video URL for the documentary on the Salem Witch Trials on which this story is based.
[1] John 14:2
