“Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice, ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.”
Ken Burns, “Being American Means Reckoning With Our Violent History”, Washington Post
I’ve been thinking about this quote from Ken Burns a lot. Especially as I think about what happened in Salem, MA, and about the history of the colonists. I’ve been thinking about Thanksgiving in light of all I am learning about the Salem Witch Trials and how the witch hunt was closely tied to the King William’s War. And how the settlers’ beliefs about God and the devil shaped how they responded.
What struck me about Mary Beth Norton’s “In the Devil’s Snare” was her making the connection between the Salem Witch Trials and the King William’s War. What Norton points out is that the men who sat as magistrates for the Witch Trials had failed as leaders to maintain good relations with the Wabanakis. They had essentially enabled the relationship between the Wabanakis and the settlers to reach the point of war. Rather than admit responsibility or guilt, they turned instead to hunt so-called witches, many (not all) of whom were believed to have survived the King William’s War because they had special relations with the Wabanakis. And many of the young girls who were the accusers? They were refugees, whose families died at the hands of Wabanakis. The first woman these young girls accused of being a witch was Tituba, a slave of Samuel Parris, a clergyman in Salem Village. They called Tituba “an Indian”, even though it is believed she came from elsewhere (perhaps Caribbean?), connecting her to the Wabanakis.
It seems there was an air of great fear and hysteria among the settlers in Salem when the accusations of witchcraft began.
Since my last post, I returned to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. I had forgotten that Miller wrote this as an allegory for McCarthyism, another American era of fear and hysteria and accusations of innocent people. While he changed several facts, the emotional pitch of the play felt perfect to me. The tension between those upholding the rule of the court and those who knew themselves to be innocent was chilling.
[If you’re interested in the play, I listened to it for free here.]
We could draw parallels to today. This need we as humans have of rejecting responsibility, of pinning our fears and guilt and yes, shame, on someone else, usually people deemed to be outsiders, the other. We have a long history of doing this to our black brothers and sisters. We have a long history of doing this to our Asian immigrants - these stories have remained largely unknown to most Americans and are just starting to become better known in recent times because of the violence towards Asians since COVID began - and to all immigrant groups.
I remember when I was a young girl in Nairobi and the city had shut down because of a coup. The coup failed, and President Moi continued to reign for many decades after, but I remember the fear that hung in the air all around us for many days. We couldn’t leave our home because there were stories of violence. As mzungu, we would be easy targets, our skin color making us stand out. Outsiders. Not belonging.
As someone who has been an outsider for most of my life, I can’t help but identify with those accused of being witches.
I read an interesting article about how there were no witches in Salem at the time of the witch trials, but how there is a growing population of witches in Salem now. It seems witches have found a home and community in Salem.
Part of the exhibit The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming at the Peabody Essex Museum is devoted to portraits of modern day witches. These beautiful portraits were taken by Frances F. Denny, a photographer whose work I’m more familiar with now, thanks to Susan, a subscriber here like you!
Here are some of my favorite portraits and quotes from the exhibit:
Many of these witches actually remind me of Korean 아줌마들 ajummas (an older woman, usually in middle age) and 할머니들 grandmothers. Why? Because many I’ve met are knowledgeable about healing through plants you can forage easily. Many have gained a wealth of life knowledge through their experiences and try to pass them down to the next generation. If you’ve watched any K-dramas, there’s usually a Korean grandmother or grandfather character that plays such roles to provide balance to the story. I love them. :)
I’m thinking about the season of Advent now. Perhaps if you celebrate Advent and Christmas, you will resonate with my thoughts. I think about this time of hope and waiting, how we await a Messiah to save us and he is born a helpless baby and lives a life that doesn’t match up to what we have built the Messiah up to be. I think about the death of the Messiah, how cruelly we kill him, how the court system held so passionately to their own righteousness, they couldn’t see his innocence. And we were right there with the court. Our own vision of our future, our own vision of the Messiah, so blind us we can’t see the vision the Messiah was presenting to us the whole time.
Reckoning. That’s a word that keeps coming up, both in the Ken Burns’ quote above, and the title of the exhibit at PEM. It’s really hard to read about the past. It’s far easier to mythologize the past. Reckoning carries with it a process of taking responsibility, even though we aren’t the perpetrators. Reckoning means accepting that awful unjust things happened and we are inheritors of this horrific past.
Are we capable of reckoning with the present?