Abigail Hobbs Quotes

The girls expressed in fits what they could not communicate in words, or what no one seemed to hear when they entrusted it to words.* Mather and Sewall were mistaken about lightning and its preference for parsonages.† But Parris was correct in noting that the devil targeted the most pious. Hysteria prefers decorous, sober households, where tensions puddle more deeply; it made sense that the Salem minister wound up with more witchcraft victims under his roof than anyone else. (The surprise was that he did not wind up with more. Two Parris children soldiered on, forgotten by history.) Instructed not to fidget, well-mannered, well-behaved Betty and Abigail writhed. They could not unburden themselves as did those loudmouthed, plot-propelling bad girls Abigail Hobbs and Mary Lacey Jr., who may actually have believed they had signed pacts with the devil and sound as if they would have if they could. It would have been easier at the parsonage to have a vision than an

More than half the women who were hanged in 1692 had previously been accused. Rebecca Nurse’s, Mary Esty’s, Elizabeth Procter’s, and Mary English’s mothers had been rumored to be witches. Samuel Wardwell had a Quaker uncle; the Nurses had raised a Quaker orphan; Alden had Quaker relations. Abigail Hobbs was happy to sell her parents down the river as only a fourteen-year-old will.

By the time the older girls began to contort, additional forces had come into play. The five who were to become the most vociferous accusers stepped in only after Tituba’s high-voltage testimony. Every one was a servant. They had reached the age when one ecstatically ambushes the grown-ups, when dependence grades into revolt. They may have had an agenda, which they pursued more subtly than did Abigail Hobbs. They knew stresses the younger girls did not, having ventured farther into the forest of sin and temptation that Elizabeth Knapp so brilliantly charted. They were more attuned to adult collisions, demands, confidences, advances, to wolves in sheep’s clothing. Was there a sexual element at play? One can make what one will of the piercing and pecking and pricking, of pitchforks thrown down, of backs arched suggestively upward and knees locked fiercely together.

justices. Many quarreled with the logic of the committee, which left open wounds and produced fresh indignities all around. Mather made a point of visiting Salem afterward “to endeavor an healing of all tendency to discord there.” Abigail Hobbs was rewarded for her inflammatory confession. William Good, who had denounced his own wife, made out especially well. Pleas for further redress continued. Still no one scurried off in disgrace. We know of only one witness who recanted, on his deathbed, admitting that his charges against Bridget Bishop had been groundless. It seemed pointless to attribute blame, just as it seemed impossible to make sense of the events of 1692. Few were innocent aside from those who had been hanged.