Salem

Salem is such a beautiful town. Its streets are lined with perfect clapboard houses.





The little burial grounds burst with deceased personages of sometime note.



Its cobbled streets, built from the ballast shipped into its 47 wharves, wend their way from the low-lying harbour where pirates from all over the world once waited along the coastline to plunder its returning riches.



The prosperity of Salem was such that other parts of the world considered it a Kingdom in itself. But of course the reason Salem teemed with tourists on the suitably bleak morning I visited, is not because of any these things. And sadly for them, the personages of note are now only footnotes to Salem's true moment in history, the so-called 'witch' trials. The unfortunate women (and some men) persecuted during this bout of mania are now far more notable than any of the worthy inhabitants of the graveyards (Ozymandias, anyone?). And the 'witches' were not even permitted graves, but rather lay in hollowed out places, barely covered.

Of course most of us now know so much about Salem and its infamous witch-trials because of Arthur Miller's wonderful play The Crucible. And I retain a further sense of connection with those events because of my sister's, also wonderful, performance as Elizabeth Proctor (correct me if I'm wrong J).

On Sunday, in a curiously well-placed reminder, I meandered past the amphitheatre near City Hall late in the afternoon, and stayed to listen at a rally against the current events of Darfur. There were six important guest speakers, each of whom told a story of survival. Each had been a child when caught up in the lunacy of a genocide. The speakers were a very old Armenian man, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi persecution, a man who had escaped death from the Khmer Rouge, a young woman whose family was slaughtered in Rwanda, a young man who had lost his father and brothers in Srebrenica, and a teenager who had escaped the ongoing violence in the Sudan. So Salem was yet another a sobering reminder, if anyone needed it, of just how crazy human beings get.



Of course the business end of Salem is now a little overwhelmed by melodramatic enactments of the trials and the events which lead to them, irrelevant 'dungeons' with spooky things in them, New Age shops selling crystals, places which can photograph your aura, mediums who will steer a séance for you, glass globes to trap a familiar should it enter your house, and all sorts of other money-making clap-trap. I particularly liked this theme on a garden gnome, and lamented my already bursting luggage. A cyber version will have to do:



I noticed a Goody or two disappearing down the rainy side streets like messengers into the past.




But a modern-day Goody went by without drawing much attention. She paused to adjust her cape and packages because of the rain.



The house of Sheriff Corwin, the Magistrate who helped send 19 people to the gallows, is still standing, the oldest house in Salem (and built in the post-Medieval style, for anyone interested).




One of the required tests, I was fascinated to learn, was that those accused of witchery, usually very young women, were made to remove their clothes so the Sheriff might examine them for signs. Mistress (or was that Goody?) Corwin bore her husband 11 or 12 children.




The House of the Seven Gables is still standing, right at the water's edge. I always imagined it set on a hill, I can't remember why.




One of the women I discussed Melville and Hawthorne with in New York did not care for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, she said, had been mean to the shy Melville, and made him feel that his great book Moby Dick wasn't much good. But which is now the better remembered?




After tramping up and down and round about I hopped onto a trolley-bus driven by a middle-aged history buff who knew everything anyone could want to know about Salem. We quizzed her so much that she announced she was bored with her normal route and took us on an extended tour right out to the edge of the sea, onto an island where people were executed until recent times, and where the ocean pounds right up to the base of the houses in winter, gales sometimes smashing in the windows. It was fabulously elemental, and easy to imagine because of the bleak wintry day. Yes, the New England winter has finally shown itself, just a little.