Parsons Family Reunion 2015

One of the nicest things about the publication of The Witch's Trinity is that I gained a family out of it. Although I'm from the east coast, the Parsons family has a west coast reunion with people who warmly welcome me as one of their own. I first attended the annual reunion as a guest speaker about our shared ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons, accused of witchcraft in 1600s Massachusetts, but now I go as a "regular."

Pictured are Gary Parsons, our leader and historian, and Harriet Parsons, who sews a quilt to memorialize each reunion. We each decorate a square with fabric pens and she builds a beautiful quilt around them. It's a joy to go through each year's quilt and see the squares of years gone by.



. . . .

The crimes of my ancestor

This is NOT Mary Bliss Parsons, but a woman of the era

One thing I found fascinating when researching my ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons: learning what her “crimes” were.

In 1600s Springfield, Massachusetts, Mary began having spells while in church, at the same time that the minister’s children underwent the same fits. She was a grown woman with four children of her own at this point. Here’s what’s strange: another woman named Mary Lewis Parsons was accused of causing those fits. The two similarly-named women were not related.

Mary Bliss Parsons actually had to be carried out of Sabbath meeting along with those children. How dearly I would love to know what exactly was meant by “fits”—one description from later testimony was, “Shee would looke fearfully somtymes as if shee saw something & then bow downe her head, as others did on theire fits about that time.”

Mary cried out a warning that witches would creep under someone’s bed.  She struggled so hard in those church fits that it took two men to restrain her. It was said that Mary’s fits arose out of being locked in her own cellar by her husband, where she was tormented by spirits that would not leave her alone.

A neighbor testified that Mary told her she had gone to the river to wash clothes, and there spirits appeared to her in the shape of dolls. Whether this was hallucinated “truth” or a neighbor’s yarns, I feel anguish on her behalf if such terrifying visions presented themselves.

Three years later, Mary and her family moved to nearby Northampton, which her husband and others had purchased from the Native Americans for 200 yards of wampum (shells on strings), ten coats and a few trinkets. She had several more children.

In Northampton, Mary became viewed as not just a victim of witchcraft, but the source of it. When 11-year-old John Bridgman went into the woods to chase down the family cows, a force struck him on the back of the head. A while later, he stumbled and put his knee out of joint. The surgeon treated him once he had made his way home, but he was in agony for a month. In the early hours one morning, he cried out, waking his parents. He said Goody Parsons was trying to pull off his knee and was sitting, visible only to him, on the shelf.

(Goody is short for goodwife, a less prestigious version of “Mrs.”)

John was not the only one to point a finger at Mary. She was said to make spun yarn diminish in volume (clearly a bicker over reimbursement for cottage work); accused of making a cow die, an ox die and even a sow; and said to have the ability to go into water and come out dry. Another accusation that makes one worry for her domestic situation with her husband: she could always find the house key even when he hid it against her. Locked in the basement, locked out of (or in?) the house… Even without witchcraft, Mary’s life seemed full of trouble.

The most chilling accusation came from a woman besieged by bad luck. Sarah Bridgman, the mother of John whose knee had been so grieviously injured in the woods, had lost three newborns in succession. She blamed Mary for the death of baby James.

It’s one thing to make an ox die from rattlesnake bite on its tongue; quite another to cause a child to die. The stakes were suddenly much higher for Mary.

Talk was dangerous, and so to address the situation before it became worse, Mary’s husband filed a slander suit against Sarah Bridgman for calling his wife a witch. Dozens of people testified in this suit, and Mary’s husband won. Sarah was found guilty of slander and forced to either publicly apologize to Mary or pay a £10 fine (unknown which she chose).

Eighteen years later, Mary was again accused by the Bridgman family, this time of using witchcraft to murder Mary Bridgman Bartlett, Sarah’s grown and married daughter. Sarah was long dead by this time. Mary spent three months in a grim dirt-floored prison in Boston awaiting the trial where she was acquitted.

Mary lived a long life, dying in 1712 at the age of about 85. She had outlived her husband by 30 years. She escaped execution as a witch, but it is certain that gossip and suspicion must have followed her all her days.

My novel The Witch’s Trinity is set in medieval Germany where researchers say some villages burned a witch every three or four years over hundreds of years, as just a matter of course. There were even two villages where the women had been so systematically executed that only one remained. Can you imagine being that one woman left standing?

I chose to write about a character who was accused of witchcraft by her own daughter-in-law, and was not completely certain she wasn’t a witch. While in the course of writing the book, I first learned about Mary Bliss Parsons. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence that I only learned of my witchcraft lineage while writing a book on the topic.

I dedicated my book to her, because her story was so compelling and unfair and clearly illustrated how much she was a victim of her time.

My novel contains an Afterword about Mary, with more details about her life and neighbors’ testimony against her. If you are interested in googling Mary, please be sure to use her entire name (Mary Bliss Parsons) to avoid confusion with Mary Lewis Parsons.

- - - -

P.S. In looking for an image to accompany this post, I learned Mary Bliss Parsons has her own Facebook page. The web/world is so odd.....

P.P.S. I ended up using an image that is often identified as being a painting of Mary Bliss Parsons but is most definitely not her. I blogged about it in the past:

http://erikamailman.blogspot.com/2007/12/mary-bliss-parsons-is-that-you.html

P.P.P.S. I'm participating in a Twitterchat tonight under the hashtag #HistoricalFix with bestselling authors Katherine Howe and Cat Winter. It takes place 5:30-6:30 PST (8:30-9:30 ET) October 20, 2015. Lots of questions and giveaways: join us.

 . . . . 

Halloween op/ed

Witches burn town in 1610 Compendium Maleficarum

I've posted this before, but as Halloween is approaching, I'd like to take a break from the Donner Party and switch gears to witchcraft. Here is a link to my op/ed on our modern take on witches at Halloween time. It appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 2008 and several other newspapers nationally.

Ding, Dong, The Witch Isn't Dead

Last October, my neighbor stretched synthetic cobwebs among the branches of her tree. Against this creepy backdrop, she hung a broomstick and a badly made female figure, clearly a witch. The sight made me wince.
How did we evolve to find this display lightly amusing? Our forebears did hang women from trees. I imagine the devastation a time-traveler might feel as she realizes people crudely pantomime the appalling circumstances of her death each Halloween.

I may take this more personally than some. Townspeople accused my ancestor, Mary Bliss Parsons, of witchcraft in Massachusetts, three decades before the Salem hysteria. The court acquitted her, but neighbors pointed the finger at her again, 18 years later. I imagine she never relaxed in the interim. When the woman in the next cottage averts her eyes because she believes you know the devil, you can't exactly run over to borrow a cup of sugar.

Surprisingly, the courts freed her a second time. Our stereotype of witchcraft times presumes that once someone is accused, they are sure to hang (or burn, if in continental Europe -- England and New England were the only places that did not burn their witches). But magistrates acted fairly reasonably, releasing more than a quarter of the accused in 17th Century New England, according to author John Putnam Demos. Due to luck or power, my ancestor walked past the tree that might have hanged her.


Twice.

Scholars argue about how many executions occurred during Europe's 400-year holocaust (consider that the United States has not been a country for that long). In "The Da Vinci Code," author Dan Brown caused great controversy when he put the number at 5 million, describing it as a relentless effort by the Roman Catholic Church to subjugate women. Far fewer died, but this was at a time when minuscule Europe was repopulating from cyclical scourges of the Black Death. We do know that two German towns slaughtered their women until only one per town remained.

How much time must elapse before these tortures ripen enough to be entertaining? Several summers ago at a carnival, I watched kids gleefully glide down an inflatable slide in the shape of the Titanic ... isn't that funny, kids? Ooh, they struggled to swim in water so cold it produced icebergs! In his novel "The Last Witchfinder," James Morrow mocks Salem's annual Haunted Happenings. This monthlong "festival" capitalizes on the famous witch trials where 19 people hanged, one suffocated by rocks piled on his chest and five perished in prison. Currently, the Haunted Happenings Web site promises "a month of fun for the entire family."

Today, parts of Africa still persecute witches, with attempted lynchings in Congo as recently as April 2008.

Last month, police fired shots into the air at a soccer game in eastern Congo, attempting to break up a melee of rioters who believed one of the players was a witch: 15 fans died from trampling. The latest trend is penis theft, where witches either steal outright, or render smaller, a male's member. Deja vu. The Malleus Maleficarum, the famous witch-hunting bible from 1400s Germany, spends an inordinate amount of print on this issue, concluding that the best remedy is to ask the witch to restore the phallus. And then, of course, burn her.

In the western world, we stuggle to imagine thinking someone could work evil spells or creep out at night to meet Satan. Harder still to imagine testifying about that spell-casting, knowing the result could be death. Instead of a stuffed, painted pillowcase, my neighbor down the block could've wanted me in her tree swinging.

So while spirits run high at Halloween -- actually one of my favorite holidays -- please consider those who were not of green tint, with wart-ridden noses, cackling maniacally while riding a broomstick straight into a tree (another "funny" decoration where the witch breaks her skull in an accident that would not be survivable if real) ... but who suffered incredibly for the same word: witch.

*Note: these dates are from October 2008. There have been many more recent occurrences of witchcraft persecutions and executions since then (including in February 2013, when a woman in Papua New Guinea was burned alive in front of hundreds who watched and jeered. If you are interested, please see the Labels archive on the righthand side; if you click on "Modern Day Witchcraft Persecutions" you will see posts where I covered media reports as they happened.




. . . .

The serendipity behind The Witch's Trinity

At the Historical Novels Society, I met a wonderful fellow writer, Stephanie Renee Dos Santos. Recently, she approached me because she was writing a series of articles on serendipity in fiction. She had looked at my website and learned that I had not known about my witchcraft ancestor, Mary Bliss Parsons, until after I was already underway with my novel about witchcraft, The Witch's Trinity. That counts as an item of uncanny serendipity, and so she included me in her series--which I think is extraordinary. Although I'll link to my post in the series, I highly recommend all of them! They are available through the Historical Novels Society website, here.

Enough time has elapsed that I think it's okay to go ahead and re-post here. Thanks again to Stephanie for including me in the series.

Stories of Serendipity: Writing Historical Fiction Series Featuring author Erika Mailman

Stephanie Renee dos Santos

Welcome to the third week of our series where writers share stories of serendipity and synchronicity while writing, researching and publishing historical fiction, and the exploration of possible reasons for such occurrences.

This Sunday we are delving into the world of the female shaman: amulets, witches, magic.
Come read on…

 Muiraquita amulet

My final tale to impart for the series has to do with an Amazon talisman: a green frog amulet. The last third of my novel, Cut From the Earth (working title), takes place in the Brazilian Amazon in 1756, at a time when Catholic missions of multiple sects proselytized along the immense river and her tributaries. Writing my book’s first draft, I had given a fictional female shaman character a lichen-colored stone necklace in the shape of a frog and located the scene of her appearance in the Tapajos River region of the Amazon, at the historically documented Jesuit Mission of Tapajos– all things, but the mission, I thought I’d made up. But after completing my novel’s first draft, I flew to the great river mouth of the Amazon, to the town of Belém, to travel the river section of my book, to take in the surroundings and further investigate the places of my story. And while in Belém I came across a museum I hadn’t read about in any literature prior to my trip. While visiting the museum’s displays, I came across a story that explained that the indigenous women of the Tapajos River were known to possess jade-colored, frog-shaped stone pendants called a muiraquitã and that the gemstone it was made out of, nephrite, was found only in the Tapajos region of the Amazon. Bewildered, dumbfounded, I stared at the physical example of the amulet of my character in the showcase and read about her, gaining more insight into the powers associated with the real life revered stone and its holders.

It is my pleasure to hand you over to Erika Mailman, author of The Witch’s Trinity, and her uncanny and bewitching story of serendipity and coincidence…



“My novel The Witch’s Trinity was well underway when I got an odd email from my mother. “We’re related to a witch!” she reported. I was stunned. All my life I’d been fascinated by witchcraft, and had even pretended that a particular name on the family tree that hung in the stairwell was the dark mistress in question. My mother had learned about Mary Bliss Parsons, our ancestor, via a friend who sent a link to an extraordinary website UMass website  which contains testimony—both typed and scanned-in originals—from Mary’s neighbors, condemning and protecting her. Mary was accused of myriad crimes, such as going into the river and coming out dry, and causing a farmer’s sow to die when formerly she was a “lusty swine and well fleshed.” She dispatched a rattlesnake to bite an ox, made a young boy trip in the woods and hurt his knee, and made spun yarn diminish in volume after it had been sold. That’s just a minor catalogue of her doings.

Calling down the rain”: in the 1489 edition of De Lamiis, witches create
a brew to bring down the rain.

Two things were extraordinary to me. The first was that I had never heard of Mary Bliss Parsons before, and we were a family that was very proud of our heritage…including Mary’s husband Cornet Joseph Parsons, a founding father of Northampton, Massachusetts, where Smith College is today. We knew all about his life, but not one word about his wife’s witchcraft accusations—yes, plural, because 18 years after she was acquitted from her first trial, she was accused again. There’s even some evidence she may have faced a third accusation, but she died under the label “innocent” as an old woman, aged 85. Why was her story suppressed in the oral pass-down of our family history? And why would I learn about it while I was in the middle of writing a novel about witchcraft?

The other extraordinary thing to me was that I learned about my own ancestor through an educational website. I shiver to think of how our technology would appear to the people of 1656, the year of Mary’s first witchcraft trial. The testimony, handwritten by the court’s recorder, has now been scanned in and we can examine his every quillstroke. How is it possible that the deeds of a town consisting of only 47 households—Springfield, Massachusetts—are now freely available to a world of 7 billion people? As she died, she must’ve thought the rumors and tensions would die with her. Instead, they have been resuscitated and revived for a new audience. That is its own kind of witchery.

I’m at a loss how to explain such a coincidence. I kept using the word “uncanny” at the time (which Merriam-Webster asserts means “seeming to have a supernatural character or origin”). I wrote The Witch’s Trinity in nine months; how unusual that after decades of not knowing about my ancestor, I learned about her in this very narrow window of time when I was focused on the unfair and cruel situation she faced?
My editor asked me to write a brief essay about Mary Bliss Parsons, and it is included in my



 

novel’s Afterword. I appreciated the official request to learn more about my ancestor. It was sobering to learn that she was outspoken and freely dispensed advice, and that probably spelled her downfall. For instance, she scolded a neighbor for whipping borrowed oxen so hard—surely not a woman’s purview—and he accused her of causing his own ox to die. She was said to be “a proud and nervous woman, haughty in demeanor and inclined to carry things with a high hand”: in short, a woman who was confident and didn’t meekly bow her head as the culture then expected. I’d like to think my book is a form of apologia for Mary. She would doubtless fit into today’s world far better, and it’s sad that her era did not support her strength.”




. . . . 

Mary Bliss Parsons, is that you?

Yipes!

I was looking through my archives and realized I never corrected a major error. In this post, I attached an image that I identified as a painting of my ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons. It’s not! (and one of the commenters references another painting of her with a child, which also cannot be the case.) The image was posted at the UMass website with no caption. Because the site is about MBP and because (I must say it) the woman looks VERY MUCH like members of my family, I made the hopefully-understandable assumption that it depicts her.

I got in touch with the UMass webmistress to request permission to possibly use the image in The Witch’s Trinity, which has an extensive afterword about Mary Bliss Parsons. She informed me that there are no images of MBP. The UMass people had simply noticed the website was devoid of images and cast about to find some. The painting is of the same era, illustrating “Colonial America,” so they used it. They ran out of time and funding to properly caption the image.

(But I hasten to say the website is in all other regards completely amazing. Where else would I have been able to see—handwriting and all—the testimony in Mary Bliss Parsons’ witchcraft cases, without traveling all the way to Massachusetts? It also has a very in-depth analysis of my ancestor’s circumstances versus her accuser’s.)

The funny thing is, the woman in the image is basically a dead-ringer for my mom dressed as a Colonial woman. I’m blown away that this doesn’t depict our ancestor! (By the same token, it initially amazed me that after eleven generations, faces could still be so similar).

Interesting crinkle #1:

There was a second painting on the website (the one I think the commenter on my original post was referring to). I have to give my mother credit for questioning it. She said that she had seen it somewhere before (no, not in our attic!). With a strong interest in Colonial painting/furniture/antiques, she recalled that this portrait was unusual for that era in its use of yellow for the woman’s garment. I googled while she pulled out her books. And I was able to locate the painting, which identified the sitter as the wife of someone—not a Parsons. I just now tried to again locate the image; why didn’t I bookmark it? Can’t find it now.

Interesting crinkle #2:

I just went back to the Umass website and am unable to locate either painting. Looks like they took them down. And added some new content: nice work, guys!