More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey
In the mid-90s, my family went on a road trip in New England. My mother, eager to reinforce her children's only-nominal Americanness, started us off in Boston and plotted a course full of historical points of interest on our way to a Passover seder at my aunt's house in Rochester, NY. Most of the stops on this journey were new to me (or perhaps only vaguely familiar from books such as Johnny Tremaine and The Witch of Blackbird Pond —I told you that my mother tried to make Americans out of us). One stop, however, I may have insisted on making myself. Even from the other side of the planet, I had imbibed, from movies, TV, and general cultural miasma, the notion of Salem, Massachusetts as "Witch City". I was aware of the witch trials, but in no way interested in reconciling the paradox that even respectable Salem tourist attractions, such as the Salem Witch Museum , mostly avoid—the fact that there were no witches in Salem in 1692, and yet the town continues to capitali...