I am sitting in Salem, Massachusetts, enjoying a little
lunch with friends. It is overcast, gray
and ominous, but we take a chance anyway and sit outside on the restaurant
patio. Good gamble; the weather holds.
From my seat at the table, I have a perfect view of the
street, and a perfect view of the back of a woman who is sitting on a nearby
bench with a huge rolling suitcase. I
become fascinated with a large glass bottle she has sitting on her luggage. It is clear glass, so I can see the contents,
gray and brown water with rags of some kind floating in it. It actually looks like a jar of garbage
water, or the morning after a party when the beer bottles are ripe with
leftover cigarette butts floating in the liquid residue.
The longer I look, the sicker it makes me feel.
The woman is clutching something, a cane I think, but it
turns out to be a long crooked, forked stick, like a primitive diving rod. I try not to stare, but I am morbidly
fascinated and repulsed all at the same time.
Suddenly she reaches up and grabs something from under her
upturned collar. Her thin and bony
fingers clutch a nest of gray straggly long hair, and she shakes her head until
the mass tumbles into a frizzed ball of string around her shoulders. She starts to turn around, probably sensing
someone watching her, so I quickly return my attention to my friends, the menu,
the sky. Anything but this woman. Her horrid mess of silver dry locks reminds
me of my own hair before I cut it all off more than a year ago and again a few
months before this when I realized I was sporting the Mad English Professor look
on the top of my head. It is a look that
compliments no one, man nor woman, and this haggard bench-warmer is no
exception.
I notice that she is dressed in black, hunched over on the
bench in the middle of Salem like a spectacle.
A witch spectacle. Part of the
colorful landscape, no less. For a brief
moment, I wonder if she can sense my eyes on her, knows I am staring and
wondering and imagining about her character.
Perhaps she might put a hex on me.
But I know the truth.
I am the one with the witches in
the family tree (and hanging from it, to be honest). I am
the real deal. She is nothing but a
caricature, a model, an archetype of the myth that has become Salem, a showpiece,
a trophy, a hobbit, a troll.
Her showy glass jar with its ridiculous rags (possibly even
her laundry) soaking, her rolling dark zippered valise, her stereotypical black
clothing, her laughable gray hair -- she is a pawn in the game that was once a
vibrant and normal village. I realize
that she has crawled under my skin not because she frightens me but for a
different reason: she offends me.
Every October for an entire month, the city of Salem becomes
a tourist trap, a joke playing on and because of its history. To those of us who lost family members
because of the hysteria, to those of us with broken branches in the family
tree, it's not funny. It's not a
profitable opportunity. Knowing that
damnable whacko Judge John Hathorne is buried within spitting distance of our
dining table makes me mad with centuries-old rage. And here, cluttering up my view, assaulting a
perfectly fine afternoon out, sits an unstable woman who fancies herself a
witch.
I've read the accounts of the trial of one of my
great-great-etc.-grandmothers. She is
guilty, all right, guilty of being old, guilty of being cantankerous, guilty of
being opinionated, and guilty of standing her ground. As a matter of fact, it sounds like she's
guilty of being me.
So forgive me if I find the petty devil-worshipping of the
ignorant to be offensive to my Salem roots and my historical senses. You people have it wrong, all wrong, all
goddamn bloody wrong.
Salem isn't the joke; you are.
You may laugh at the tourists and the locals as you rake in
the money for your fakery. You may laugh
at those of us who've lived it, who have had the reality and the facts and the
legacy passed down to us. We with these
deep-cutting Salem ties are not laughing with
you; we are laughing at you.
Will you please go buy yourself some real clothes instead of
traipsing around Salem with a black shower curtain tied over your shoulders. Will you please go to the salon, for the love
of god, and do something about your hair.
Will you please learn the history and understand that being a Salem
Witch is to be a victim not a beggar in a Halloween costume. And will you
please put that glass jar out of sight from the restaurant patio lest I lose my
lunch and add my already-been-partially-chewed pulled pork to your park bench
menagerie.
