Second Examination, March 2, 1692.
“Q. What covenant did you make with that man that came to you? What did he tell you?”
The first of those two questions was the crucial one at a trial for witchcraft. Had she made a covenant with the devil, or any devotee of his? That was the main point to be determined. If she had, she was a witch, according to the prevalent creed; if she had not, she might be innocent of witchcraft. But seemingly the court could not wait for an answer, because, in the same breath, it asked, What did your visitant tell you?
“A. He tell me he God, and I must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give me many fine things. Q. How long ago was this? A. About six weeks and a little more; Friday night before Abigail was ill.”
That last answer is very instructive. It fixes the exact time when one of the children in Mr. Parris’s family was first attacked. For this second day’s examination was held on Wednesday, March 2. It will appear from the above and future answers that the specters first attacked the children on a Wednesday evening, just six weeks before this 2d of March. The man appeared to and talked with Tituba on the Friday evening before that Wednesday in January.
The testimony, therefore, takes us back to January 20th as the commencement of overt manifestation of spirit infliction of sufferings there. Five days further back, i. e., the evening of January 15, is apparently the date of “the man’s” first recognized appearance. Therefore, until better information is obtained, we shall regard that as the date of the primal advent of the genuine author of witchcraft at Salem Village, whom we deem to have been also its regulator through its heart-rending unfoldings.
“Q. What did he say you must do more? Did he say you must write anything? Did he offer you any paper? A. Yes, the next time he come to me; and showed me some fine things, something like creatures, a little bird something like green and white. Q. Did you promise him this when he first spake to you? Then what did you answer him? A. I then said this: I told him I could not believe him God. I told him I ask my master, and would have gone up, but he stopt me and would not let me. Q. What did you promise him? A. The first time I believe him God, and then he was glad. Q. What did he say to you then? What did he say you must do? A. Then he tell me they must meet together.”
There is some obscurity in this quotation, which raises the question whether the witness contradicts herself by stating that at her first interview she believed that her visitant was God himself (as John the Revelator did that a prophet returning from the spirit spheres and appearing to him was God), and her stating again that at the first interview she told him she could not believe that he was God, and proposed to go up and ask her master, Mr. Parris, what he thought about it, but was held back by her spirit-attendants from doing so. There is, we say, obscurity as to whether the account makes her apply both of these opposing statements to her conceptions of her visitor at the first interview with him, or whether it was not till a subsequent meeting that she doubted his Godship. As reported, her examiners are made quite as hard to understand and track as she is in her answers. But, upon a careful reading, we judge it fair and proper to conclude that her doubts concerning the character of her acquaintance were expressed as late as at the meeting on Wednesday, January 20, and not on the previous Friday.
“Q. When did he say you must meet together? A. He tell me Wednesday next, at my master’s house; and then we all [did] meet together, and that night I saw them all stand in the corner—all four of them—and the man stand behind me, and take hold of me, and make me stand still in the hall.”