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 capitalize on witches to this day. It was only when we arrived at the sombre, remorseful Salem Witch Trial Memorial that I began to sense the essential contradiction at the heart of this city, which owes its commercial existence to an appalling historical atrocity.
What I did not know at the time was that this memorial was brand new. Though Salem has been capitalizing on the witch trials since the mid-19th century, it was only in 1992, the three hundredth anniversary of the trials in which twenty-five people lost their lives to false accusations of witchcraft, that a memorial was erected to those victims. I remained ignorant of this fact—and its thought-provoking implications—until just a few days ago, when I read Ben Wickey's magnificent, heartrending More Weight: A Salem Story, a graphic nonfiction retelling of the events in Salem in 1692. Published last year to great acclaim, and drawing on historical documents, scholarly work, and other dramatizations of the events at Salem, the book focuses, as its title indicates, on Giles Corey, the eighty-year-old farmer who was pressed to death under heavy stones when he refused to enter a plea against the accusation of witchcraft, and whose last words—allegedly, and with sources that only date back to around a century after his death—were to call for more stones to hasten the end.
Corey has been a magnetic figure since the story of Salem began being told. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a play about him, Giles Corey of Salem Farms, in 1868. Another play, Giles Corey, Yeoman by Mary E. Wilkins, was published in 1893. Until Arthur Miller's The Crucible was first staged in 1953 and made a (fictionalized, inaccurate) version of John Proctor the face of the persecution of the innocent at Salem, Corey was perhaps the most famous of its victims. (Is it not interesting that an event whose victims were mostly women, part of a phenomenon that has ensnared overwhelmingly female victims, has produced so much fiction that focuses its attention on the few men who were also victimized?) Wickey draws on both Longfellow and Wilkins's dramatizations for his own interpretation, and intercuts the events in 1692 with two other storylines. In a framing story set in the present day, the town of Salem prepares for its Halloween extravaganza—an event which requires, according to the local police chief, the equivalent of an entire second police department to secure. And in the 1860s, Longfellow wanders the streets of Salem, guided by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose ambivalent relationship with his home town—and with his ancestor John Hathorne, the magistrate who conducted the initial interrogations of the victims—was fictionalized in his 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables.
(As an aside, is it just me, or has Hawthorne fallen out of the public consciousness in the last few decades? The movie version of The Scarlet Letter gave him a bit of a boost in the 90s, but compared to other famous American novelists of the late 19th century—Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Henry James—it feels as if nobody reads, or talks about him, that much anymore.)
Despite the drama of his death, Giles Corey is a questionable protagonist. He denounced and testified against his wife Martha before being named as a witch himself (she was executed not long after his death). And as Wickey discusses at length, in his life before the trials, he seems to have been a cantankerous, litigious man, quick to anger and quarrel—he and John Proctor appear to have veered wildly from deep friendship to deep enmity, including Proctor accusing Corey of setting fire to his house. At least one incident in his past, the death of a hired man on his farm, should probably have landed him in front of a hanging judge long before word of witchcraft was spoken in Salem. Wickey depicts Corey as a man who has reached old age riven by self-doubt, too stubborn to fully conform to the values of his puritan society (and also, too prone to pick a fight or pilfer his neighbors' goods) but also hungry for acceptance. He resents Martha for disagreeing with him on matters of little importance, but also loves her deeply. He's old, and maybe prone to complaining thoughtlessly to the wrong people; but he's still able to muster his strength of will—albeit, at a point where it achieves almost nothing.
 |
| The cantankerous Giles Corey (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
 |
| The defiant Giles Corey (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
Perhaps Corey's contradictions make him suitable to the question that inevitably arises when one talks about the Salem witch trials. Wickey's Corey believes in witches—unlike his wife, who insists, in what was a recognized and popular theological position throughout the three centuries of Christian witch mania, that it is sacrilegious to imagine that there are forces that exist outside of God's influence and beyond his power. But like many other residents of Salem in this retelling, he practices hedge magic and abides by superstitions that to him feel like something entirely different from the evil railed against at church. And he understands how his community and its systems function—understands well enough to refuse to go along with a trial that he knows will be nothing but a mockery of justice, to make a protest that he hopes will shame his neighbors. He is a combination of naiveté and savvy that ends up feeling entirely believable and human, and sheds a (possible) light on how the atrocities in Salem were allowed to happen.
The question of what the people in Salem believed, and when, is one that keeps troubling us as we look back at the witch trials. It's tempting, on the one hand, to dismiss them all as credulous, hysterical fools, and on the other hand, to assume cynically that they were lying from beginning to end, and that accusations against supposed witches—all made by the young children of some of the town's most prominent families—were designed purely to settle scores and grab hold of property. The truth appears to be more complicated. There's no question that many of the key figures in the trials believed genuinely in witchcraft, and what’s more, in the need to eradicate it in order to ensure a future for Puritanism in New England. Even some of the harshest critics of the trials hinged their criticism on the question of whether the devil could appear to someone in the guise of another person without that person’s consent.
At the same time, there were people in Salem who immediately recognized that the accusing girls were liars or fantasists who were being directed by their elders (some of these people were eventually denounced as witches themselves). There are recorded instances of the girls being bullied out of accusing an inconvenient targets, or into ramping up their accusations of a convenient one. The farce of the trials was commented on by people who attended them, including the fact that denial of guilt was seen as proof of guilt. Instances such as the conviction of Rebecca Nurse—who was acquitted, before the judge ordered the jury to deliberate again—aroused public outrage. The idea that nobody in 1692 understood the witch trials to be a sham is as ahistorical as the idea that everyone in 1692 understood it, though even the people who fell on the right side of history sometimes did so for reasons that to us seem foreign and rooted in superstition.
The question of what the people in Salem believed, and when, is one that keeps troubling us as we look back at the witch trials. It's tempting, on the one hand, to dismiss them all as credulous, hysterical fools, and on the other hand, to assume cynically that they were lying from beginning to end, and that accusations against supposed witches—all made by the young children of some of the town's most prominent families—were designed purely to settle scores and grab hold of property. The truth appears to be more complicated. There's no question that many of the key figures in the trials believed genuinely in witchcraft, and what’s more, in the need to eradicate it in order to ensure a future for Puritanism in New England. Even some of the harshest critics of the trials hinged their criticism on the question of whether the devil could appear to someone in the guise of another person without that person’s consent.
At the same time, there were people in Salem who immediately recognized that the accusing girls were liars or fantasists who were being directed by their elders (some of these people were eventually denounced as witches themselves). There are recorded instances of the girls being bullied out of accusing an inconvenient targets, or into ramping up their accusations of a convenient one. The farce of the trials was commented on by people who attended them, including the fact that denial of guilt was seen as proof of guilt. Instances such as the conviction of Rebecca Nurse—who was acquitted, before the judge ordered the jury to deliberate again—aroused public outrage. The idea that nobody in 1692 understood the witch trials to be a sham is as ahistorical as the idea that everyone in 1692 understood it, though even the people who fell on the right side of history sometimes did so for reasons that to us seem foreign and rooted in superstition.
 |
| Ann Putnam admits that accusing people of witchcraft is "sport" (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
 |
| Joseph Putnam harangues his brother Thomas for encouraging the accusation of alleged witches (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
It's perhaps in an attempt to bridge the conceptual gap between us and the people of Salem that Wickey makes his most interesting artistic choice in More Weight. Each of the three storylines and timelines in the book is drawn in a different style, on a sliding scale of photorealism and vibrancy. The present day scenes are in full color, and often taken directly from life—when I first saw Wickey's rendition of the witch trials memorial, I recognized it instantly as the place I’d visited so many years ago.
 |
| A ghost (?) visits the memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
The setting of the 1860s storyline is similarly drawn with exacting photorealism, the thin, straight pen lines stressing the forms of Salem’s houses and edifices. Hawthorne and Longfellow, too, are drawn with elegant pen strokes, their faces, clothing, and hairstyles full of detail as if cut out of a 19th century lithograph. But there's a faint phosphorescence to their figures that makes it look as if they are floating atop the backdrop—that makes them look, in other words, like ghosts. As they grapple with history, and with their role in the present moment (Longfellow was an ardent abolitionist; Hawthorne disdained any political affiliation), Wickey's artistic choice reminds us that they are momentary guests. That the past looms over them, but so does the distance of time between them and us.
 |
| Hawthorne and Longfellow wander around Salem (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
Most striking, however, are the scenes set in 1692. Here the backgrounds are drawn with softer, less architectural lines. The figures, meanwhile, look like something out of a cartoon, with large, moon-like faces, lumpy bodies, and hands that are out of proportion to their heads. Giles Corey, in particular, looks almost like a muppet, which creates a sense of dark humor in the scenes in which he, and other victims, are interrogated and accused. The associations of childishness play up to our prejudices about these people—they are simple, maybe even stupid.
 |
| John Hathorne and John Hale discuss the eradication of witches (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
 |
| Giles and Martha Corey discuss a bad dream (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
As the atrocity builds towards its climax, however, more and more details creep into the faces of the accused, representing their physical deterioration after months of imprisonment, but also our growing understanding that these are people just like us, full of the same doubts and possessed of the same intelligence.
 |
| Giles Corey refuses to plead (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
 |
| Martha Corey is sentenced (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
After the last of the Salem victims are killed, Wickey delivers a long concluding chapter that sums up three hundred-plus years of the trials' aftermath. The comedown was shockingly, almost depressingly swift—in September 1692, the judges presiding over the witch court were talking about writing a book about their triumph over evil; by January 1693, several of them had started distancing themselves from the proceedings. Restitution, however, came slowly if at all, with some victims or their survivors petitioning the courts for years, even decades for restoration of confiscated property, compensation for pain and suffering, or declaration of their innocence (though petitions to exonerate the dead began in the mid-20th century, the last Salem victim wasn’t exonerated until 2022). More time passes, the people who witnessed the Salem witch trials drop away, and Wickey's focus shifts to how the town processes—or does not process—its ignominious history. As the pace of history picks up, as Salem's fortunes rise and fall, as figures familiar from history visit or settle in it, Wickey's pages become clotted, almost overpowered with text, charting how the witch trials—and the very concept of "witch"—transition from a fact of history to an element of pop culture.
 |
| Changes in Salem in the 20th century (page from More Weight by Ben Wickey) |
There were no witches in Salem in 1692, and yet, as Wickey points out, the town of Salem has made witches its symbol and primary source of income, inevitably creating a slippage in which "the Salem witch trials" comes to mean "the trials of the Salem witches". This difference may seem silly or immaterial to us, but it absolutely would not have been so to the people murdered in Salem in 1692, who might have saved their own lives by making a false confession of witchcraft, but chose not to. Wickey tries very hard not to dismiss the modern practice of Wicca as a legitimate religion, but he's crystal clear on the point that claiming the witch trials as trials against Wicca, and even insisting, as some practitioners do, that the victims were practitioners themselves in secret, is deeply offensive to their memory, besides being obviously untrue. As a person who has grown up around Salem (and who discovered, over the course of researching More Weight, that he is descended from one of the victims, Mary Easty) he wonders whether Salem will ever be able to put down the witch pipe, and find some other justification for its existence than an annual bacchanalia that demeans the memory of one of America's darkest chapters.
It's both a compliment and a high bar to clear when I say that the book that I found myself thinking about very soon after beginning to read More Weight was Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1999). Like More Weight, From Hell is a dramatization of a historical atrocity—the Jack the Ripper murders—whose real interest is in the force—the weight—that history exerts on us. As Hawthorne and Longfellow tramp across 1860s Salem, visiting important sites in the drama of the witch trials, their conversation frequently turns to the presence of the past in their present moment, not only through the possibility of unquiet spirits lingering on after their deaths but in the landscape itself. "Does the earth speak to its children?", Hawthorne repeatedly asks Longfellow, quoting his friend, the transcendentalist preacher Jones Very. At the same time, the two writers also seem cognizant of us, looking back at them; of themselves as a part of history.
That awareness projects back into the 1692 storyline, in which moments of silence and absence seem to hint at the horror to come. Like the Ripper murders, the Salem witch trials are a historical horror that also exerts a fascination on everyone who learns about them. They seem to demand retelling, whether lurid and sensational or sober and grounded in fact. Wickey's subject, then, is as much how we retell this story as the story itself, whether we can find at the heart of it the real pain and injustice that so many treatments of it gloss over or hold at a remove, and whether we will be willing to acknowledge them when we do. Like Moore, Wicky seems to be saying: this has happened; but also, it is happening, and it will always happen, because we will keep telling the story.
It's both a compliment and a high bar to clear when I say that the book that I found myself thinking about very soon after beginning to read More Weight was Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1999). Like More Weight, From Hell is a dramatization of a historical atrocity—the Jack the Ripper murders—whose real interest is in the force—the weight—that history exerts on us. As Hawthorne and Longfellow tramp across 1860s Salem, visiting important sites in the drama of the witch trials, their conversation frequently turns to the presence of the past in their present moment, not only through the possibility of unquiet spirits lingering on after their deaths but in the landscape itself. "Does the earth speak to its children?", Hawthorne repeatedly asks Longfellow, quoting his friend, the transcendentalist preacher Jones Very. At the same time, the two writers also seem cognizant of us, looking back at them; of themselves as a part of history.
That awareness projects back into the 1692 storyline, in which moments of silence and absence seem to hint at the horror to come. Like the Ripper murders, the Salem witch trials are a historical horror that also exerts a fascination on everyone who learns about them. They seem to demand retelling, whether lurid and sensational or sober and grounded in fact. Wickey's subject, then, is as much how we retell this story as the story itself, whether we can find at the heart of it the real pain and injustice that so many treatments of it gloss over or hold at a remove, and whether we will be willing to acknowledge them when we do. Like Moore, Wicky seems to be saying: this has happened; but also, it is happening, and it will always happen, because we will keep telling the story.
Comments
Post a Comment