Best friends, we met secretly.
Listened in awe to Tituba’s tales.
Barbados voodoo, fortune telling.
So exotic to our young minds.
Betty’s father ranted,
not just pulpit preaching.
Everyday damnation,
spirit squelching abuse.
We craved attention, excitement.
Anything but embroidery
peeling potatoes, praying,
tending garden and the hearth.
Betty and Abigail started it.
Twitching, talking in tongues.
Rolling on the ground,
petticoats be damned.
STOP! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
I joined them and we ramped it up.
Rolled and spit and drooled,
hiked our skirts over our heads.
Center of attention were we.
Eyes on us, tongues wagging,
STOP! THE DEVIL BE GONE!
What? What was he talking about?
Too late. We’d gone too far.
He demanded, WHO?
WHO HAS COMMANDEERED YOUR SOULS?
CONFESS NOW. TELL US WHO!
Scapegoat. We didn’t know that word.
But forced by his shaking
we had to pick.
God forgive them. Betty and Abigail did.
Tituba!
They had the limelight as they screamed her name.
Jealous I was. I craved their fame.
Sarah Good! I screamed.
God forgive me my pride.
Now, two hundred people accused
Thirty found guilty. Nineteen hanged.
Oh my God, what have we done?
Young girls turned miscreants
in a Puritanical world.
Day 25: National Poetry Writing Month. Toads asks us to write a poem in which we “take on the persona of someone from history; and we write in the first person – as if we are that person.”
I’ve chosen to write in the voice of Ann Putnam who was 12 years old at the time of the Salem Witch Trials. She was good friends with Elizabeth Parris (Betty) and Abigail Williams, the first two girls (ages 9 and 12 respectively) who accused Tituba of witchcraft, thus lighting the spark of the Salem witch trials of 1692. Betty’s father was Reverend Samuel Parris, Putitan minister in Salem and central figure in the witch trials. Tituba was his slave from Barabados who, it is known, shared many stories of her culture and voodoo practices with Betty and her young friends. This is, obviously, a fictional narrative, told in the voice of Ann, as to the origins of the paranoia that filled Salem, Massachusetts in these Puritan times.
