We’re well into Salem’s busiest season of Haunted Happenings now, and as usual I’m having lots of conversations with our visitors about the Puritans. Pause. Whenever I say that out loud or write something like that I never miss the oddness of it. I mean seriously, who outside of Salem thinks of the Puritans on Halloween?
Or, are the Puritans actually super relevant to think about during the season of Halloween? That’s what I want to reflect on in this post. Yesterday I had the great pleasure of having my cousins from Texas on my tour in addition to many lovely other guests to our city. It was a morning tour, so the Haunted Happenings chaos around us was still gentle – a busker here, a delivery truck there, a few other tour groups maneuvering for space. I gave some background on the Puritans and why they decided to come here in the seventeenth century, I explained what it might have been like to live here then, for them, for the Massachusett people, for the Dutch to the south, the French to the north.
By the time I got to the story of 1692 my guests (I hope!) understood that the hysteria didn’t come out of nowhere. People who love their neighbors, family, and friends don’t all of the sudden out of nowhere start condemning those people to death, convinced that they’re controlled by Satan. After the tour, one of my cousins said something to the effect of, “I like how you explained that anyone could have been the bad guy in that story. That depending on the time and circumstance any of us could be the bad guy.”
As anyone who talks for a living knows, often ones listeners can make a conclusion or take an idea away with them after you speak with them that wasn’t truly something you said. That’s one of the magic aspects of communication between fellow humans – we the speakers cannot control the conclusions or ideas that our listeners take away with them.
Did the context that I gave imply that anyone could have been the “bad guy” in that situation? Yes, I did. But I didn’t outright say it. Sometimes one of my guests says something to me after a tour that is much more succinct and impactful than what I said, and this case yesterday was no different. This used to happen when I was teaching too. I’d go around and around an idea or a concept, giving the background and the context, and then one of my students would conclude the whole thing beautifully. I love when this happens.
Here’s the thing: what happened in 1692 (and any other period in Salem’s history) happened to people, and at any given moment in any given circumstance, yes, people can decide to be led by their better angels, so to speak (this phrase always reminds me of West Wing), or to act like the bad guy. I thought my cousin summed it up perfectly, because the reality is most of us know the people involved in the witch hysteria by the worst moment of their lives.
The hysteria of 1692 was a moment when fear was so rampant that people had to decide whether to give in to the fear or to risk everything not to. Many of them had plenty of reason to give in to fear, as I’m sure I’ll write about in another post. The ones who chose not to, the ones who chose to maintain their innocence, to sign a petition in favor of Rebecca Nurse, to write a letter to the judges to urge caution, and after the tragedy to apologize for what they had done, those are the ones we in the twenty-first century want to relate to, to celebrate, to remember.
I don’t disagree with this tendency to celebrate the ones who listened to their better angels. I feel it myself. But I also think it’s important, and at this time of year downright fitting, to also acknowledge what my cousin said. Anyone of us could have acted the way those judges acted. Anyone of us could have pointed the finger of fear at someone we once loved, someone we once called friend. I know this because I’m old enough now to have experienced some dark and fearful moments of my own. I know this because I was lucky enough to be educated to examine myself honestly and critically, to acknowledge the dark and the light in me and in everyone else. I’m not saying I’m good at it and that I always make decisions based on compassion and connection. I’m just saying that in the years I’ve spent reading and speaking about the Puritans I acknowledge they are no different from me – only their context is.
So why do I say this time of year is a great time to remember the Puritans? In living through the phenomenon that is Haunted Happenings, the description of Halloween that resonates the most with me is Stacey Schiff’s, and it is twofold: 1) holidays are events and rituals that allow us to remember who we are, and 2) Halloween is a holiday that allows us to “inhabit our fears,” and therefore move through them.
On Halloween there is an invitation to become something different from what you are normally, maybe even to become something you normally fear. There are horror movies, and foods that look like entrails, jump scares and haunted houses, and of course, ghost stories. In it’s current commercialized form, Halloween is basically an opportunity to confront what frightens you, have fun while doing it, and come out the other side unscathed. A mini crucible, if you will, on a MUCH smaller scale than the crucible the Puritans found themselves passing through in 1692.
Haunted Happenings lasts the entire month of October in Salem, so this fright fest doesn’t have even to end after one night. That also means, of course, that the celebration overlaps with Indigenous Peoples Day, a day once known for European explorer Christopher Columbus. After my cousin made his comment yesterday, I have to admit I started to feel the irony but also the resonance of this overlap between Haunted Happenings and Indigenous People’s Day. Want to make the story of the Puritans and their failed utopia even more complicated? Acknowledge the people who lived here before they arrived and who very much still lived here during the witch hysteria. If you want dark, the history of European and Native interactions in New England is a good place to look.
According to Ned Blackhawk’s awesome book The Rediscovery of America, the coastal native peoples in what became Massachusetts bay Colony had been having encounters with European explorers for well over one hundred years before some of the English decided to stay in the place called Naumkeag in 1626. Just a few years before, between 1616-1619 the diseases carried by the Europeans had killed two-thirds of the coastal native peoples.
I can’t even imagine how people who didn’t understand germ theory could have processed death on that scale. Native or European, it would have felt like a kind of apocalypse. Then there was conflict and periodic peace, and as any student of American history knows, the story is still unfolding, but in a drastically different context. One of the reasons why Blackhawk’s book is needed is that the country has been missing widely-available stories about its Native peoples for centuries now.
The conclusion I come to time and again in my research and in my work is that human stories are complicated stories. There are good guys and bad guys and everything in between, and one person who makes a choice out of compassion in one context can make a choice out of fear in another. What I’m saying is that all the stories of Salem – the dark, the grotesque, the sublime, the triumphant, the mundane, the frustrating – are all part of what Salem is. Of who we are. And they are all relatable.
Does everyone who visits Salem in October dig deeply into their psyches to examine why they want to visit that haunted house, why they want to read Salem’s Lot or visit Gallows Hill? Of course not. But is the opportunity there? Oh yes. Salem is a unique place for many reasons, but one of them is that it flat out invites you to experience a one-day holiday for an entire month, and in a variety of different ways. So I invite you to consider my little reflection here and my cousin’s conclusion as an invitation to take advantage of the opportunity this city provides. If Halloween truly is a time to remember who we are by acknowledging our deepest fears and confronting them, that seems like a worthwhile endeavor to me. In a charitable mood, one might even consider it worth all the traffic.
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