Imagine this.

 

You’re sixteen. Your parents are dead. They were killed in front of you. Brutally. You try not to think about it, but it’s hard to sleep when the pillow still smells of your mother’s blood when her skull cracked open next to your head. 

 

You live with an uncle. He could be worse, you suppose. At least he keeps you safe. But he’s strict. Always finding fault. He’s an important man, and wants people to bow and scrape for him. You don’t like bowing or scraping. What sixteen-year-old does? You roll your eyes behind his back. Your cousin lives in awe of him. Tacitly, tactfully, you try to wake her up. When he’s a hypocrite, you whisper it in her ear. When he finds fault in something she didn’t do wrong, you tell her that she was in the right. She’s slowly learning.

 

You don’t go to school. You have a job keeping house for a sad old lady. She never leaves her house. She takes good care of her children, and she seems nice enough, but when you look at her, you see yourself in ten, twenty, fifty, eighty years. Not like there are any other options. She doesn’t seem to mind.

 

Her husband, though: he understands. He rolls his eyes behind your uncle’s back. He twists his mouth up at hypocrisy. He craves something real, something just, just like you. 

 

He’s twice your age. That doesn’t seem to bother him.

 

Until his wife finds out. She doesn’t tell anyone, but you’re out of a job, and people talk. That’s all they do, actually. Talk. About you. And worse, you’ve lost the only person who ever stood with you against the overwhelming tide of disapproval. He doesn’t look at you anymore. It’s like he never touched you – no, worse, like he hated everything about it. Like he hated you.

 

You never meant to steal him. You would have been happy enough to let him keep living with his sad wife, if that’s what he liked – all you wanted was to have someone in your life who saw you as a human. But apparently there’s some provision in the Bible about seeing other women as human once you’re married. 

 

You’re angry. Hurt. Jealous. It’s unfair. His wife doesn’t even appreciate him. You lash out with the only crude tool that you have in this whole godforsaken world: a powerful uncle.

 

***

​

I was sixteen. Lonely in a sense so profound that it didn’t even register as a problem, or something I missed – wouldn’t have known what to do with more friends, or friends who knew me better, if I had them. Halfway out of the closet, and denied (by virtue of my few compatriots being very understanding people) the vindication of feeling persecuted. Very much in love with a tragically heterosexual best friend. So it goes.

 

My grade 11 English class was a total bust. I was already a seasoned reader and writer, having been consuming Shakespeare since age 10 and with an oeuvre of more than ten novels (admittedly, only about four of them cracked 50,000 words, but still, a novella of 20K is no mean feat in high school). I was bored by proving for the seventh year in a row that I knew the difference between a metaphor and a simile. I felt condescended to by watching films in class. The slough of desperately bad and exhaustingly dull CanLit short stories left me with a permanent allergy to all literature termed “semi-autobiographical” (either your life is interesting enough to write a memoir about or it’s not! In the case of these poor Canadian authors, I guarantee, the answer was always that it was not).

 

I sank down in the back row of class, slouched at my desk, and opened the next-to-last reading assignment of the semester, The Crucible. I’d never read it, but I liked witches and Puritans and the Salem Witch Trials, and for all my cynical posturing about the class, I’d always been an optimist at heart. 

​

***

 

Abigail: (Barring his way at the door.) Give me a word, John. A soft word.

 

Proctor: I come to see what mischief your uncle’s brewin’ now. Put it out of mind, Abby.

 

Abigail: John – I am waitin’ for you every night.

 

Proctor: Abby, you’ll put it out of mind. I’ll not be comin’ for you more. You know me better.

 

Abigail: I know how you clutched my back behind your house and sweated like a stallion whenever I come near! I saw your face when she put me out and you loved me then and you do now!

 

Proctor: (Taking her hands.) Child…

 

Abigail: (With a flash of anger. Throwing his hands off.) How do you call me child!

 

***

 

A teenage girl dismissed and disempowered by everyone until the only way she can control any single element of her life is through murder. What a story! Unfairly dismissed by half a century of critics who insist on thinking John Proctor is the hero. I loved The Crucible instantly.

 

The reality of the Salem Witch Trials is less glamorous, if equally gothic. Abigail Williams was 12 and probably didn’t have a torrid love affair with any of the accused witches (although I guess you never know). John Proctor owned a pub and seems decidedly less sexy than Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal. Although Miller totally missed out on the ripe-for-adaptation character of Abigail Hobbs, who spent nights in the woods and responded to the judge’s question “What would the Devil have you do” by saying, in disbelief, “Why, he would have me be a witch.” He probably smashed her together with young Miss Williams, honestly.

 

I read the books: classics like Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed and bestsellers like Schiff’s The Witches: Salem 1692. Even primary sources – Cotton Mather’s manic paranoia couldn’t be made up by any fiction writer. I got a thrill every time they came up in a class or in an unrelated book. 

 

I love the historical grit of the fantastical, the structures and petty rivalries of the town, the theories about ergot in the rye. I imagined what I would do if I was put on trial (as I inevitably would be. Incidentally, the correct answer is to quickly confess and accuse someone else; confessed witches were spared, it was only the ones who insisted they weren’t witches who went to the gallows). I have a deep and abiding love for the reality of the history––

 

But my favourite part is still the way that later writers looked back on it, the gothic chapter of American history as Schiff called it; they planted in it the seeds of later anxieties, failings of modernity and the American Puritan project.

 

There’s no shortage of prospective readings – hot takes – and mine is forever informed by my fictional favourite. To me, the Salem Witch Trials (always capitalized) are stories of mostly girls, mostly young, forced into a corner, deprived of every opportunity for freedom or success or even personhood, and lashing out with the only tools they have at their disposal. Because winning even the most unfair game is better than never winning at anything at all.