Tituba

The sky is a palm spread open, sheltering
nobody. An egg-yolk yellow moon floats over
the cage of men
in the middle of Bridgetown’s market: a display
of runaway slaves. When I walk along the margin

of the beach, I don’t look at them.
I don’t look at Gift of God, the waiting ship,
its principal cargo salted fish, sugar, slaves.
Instead I watch the water stutter against rocks.

*

Like the colored race generally and especially of the tropics, Tituba was a believer in the occult. -- Sidney Perley, The History of Salem, 1924.

*

In Salem, the New World sticks to my tongue
like wool. I can’t breathe
in the Reverend’s house. I can’t sleep
in the bed beside his daughter,
her flushed skin limned with sweat
in the cold room.

Each morning, Family Prayer, a circle
of bowed heads as the Reverend explains
the fallen world, this land infected by black devils.

Afterward I walk to the marsh to watch
the water separating here from home.
The sky shuts its fist.

*

We can only speculate what was going on behind the kitchen door, but we know that Tituba had been brought to Massachusetts from Barbados and enjoyed a reputation in the neighborhood for her skills in the magic arts. -- Kai Erickson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance, 1966.

*

In the dark, feel along the edge
of history’s body
to find the place in which local legend
becomes the truest story.

Touch the small, painful ache
where myths originate.
Rub your fingers on it like a scab.

*

. . the Indian woman was familiar with all the ridiculous and monstrous fancies then prevalent. The details of her statement cover nearly the whole ground of them. While indicating, in most respects, a mind at the lowest level of general intelligence, they give evidence of cunning and wariness in the highest degree. -- Charles Upham, The History of Witchcraft of Salem Village, 1867.

*

The Examination of Titibe

(H) Titibe what evil spirit have you familiarity with
(T) none
(H) why do you hurt these children
(T) I do not hurt them
(H) who is it then
(T) the devil for ought I know

*

The Reverend’s hand spreads open over my back.
He could reach inside
my body, drag words from my lungs,
force my silence out.

His fingers circle my wrists. His ribs
lock over mine, press me against the pantry wall.
His voice, pure threat. Confess.

Upstairs, his daughter spins and twists
in bed, calls out my name.
Later I will hold her tightly
while she shudders in my lap.

*

(H) doe you see who it is that torments these children now
(T) yes it is goode good she hurts them in her own shape
(H) & who is it that hurts them now
(T) I am blind noe I cannot see

*

Find the gap,
the rip in the paper. Pull out the stitches.
Stretch open the loops of thread.

Wait in the pantry, the garden
where she once waited.
Follow the path’s wet slate to the harbor.

Stand on the rocks and let go of the story.
The body sinks to the soft ocean floor.

*

Although no one race or color consistently defines her, Tituba remains in our mythology as the dark woman, the alien, who enters the Puritan world and plunges it into chaos. The myth of the dark Tituba recapitulates with an American tint the myth of original sin, the archetypal tale of the woman as progenitor of evils to come. -- Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692, 1993.

*

Here is the fallen world. Here is the village
where children choke and cry out
in their sleep, as her voice breaks
in the shore’s throat, as fiction spins into fact.

The Waste Book

the page to another version of history.
In the meetinghouse a man corrects

church records, head bent to the paper
that will offer us this past, this

story while at the end of another century
a woman watches her study window

like a movie screen, her garden’s beds
turning to torn, yellowed paper. She is ready

to erase her own story, cross out
her voice, blur her words to nothing

but stiff ink. What relief, she thinks,
to step outside her body, to leave

herself, to transcribe the archive’s directions:

    one or two words missing.
    name illegible, possibly John.
    name completely missing.
    this whole last line has been struck out.

as if only the voices hold her own speech
together, as if the voices cancel out her own.

In the other century, pages stack and settle
as the man works alone all night, retracing

parish records like a repeated prayer:

We should know the woman
is all wrong when she calls the past an empty

plate she can rinse clean, snow-covered
road she watches from her window.

No -- each page marks a plot, a burial ground,
each word a seed needling the dirt.

For Bernard Rosenthal

Torn, 1710

Nicole Cooley's first book, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press. Her novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love, appeared with Harper Collins/Regan Books in 1998. She is currently completing a book of poetry about the Salem witch trials of 1692 titled The Afflicted Girls. She lives in New York City.
 
 
Contents

 Nicole

Cooley