Cracking Foxy

by Robert Buckley

Hang Around for a Spell

What's Samantha Smiling About? - Just over 300 years ago twenty people were sent to their deaths in one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in American history. This statue is located just a block away from where those victims were convicted.

From the top of Gallows Hill in Salem you can see the Atlantic Ocean and the tops of the masts of the Friendship, a replica of the first ship to ply the East India trade, the same trade that would make Salem one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cites in a young America, light years ahead of the curve in commerce and new ideas, an incubator of colossal intellects: Hawthorne, the Peabody Sisters, the mad poet Jones Very.

I’m walking my dog in the park atop the hill as a group of women approach, almost timidly, a few of their number holding back, inspecting the tall flagpole, futilely seeking some kind of monument.

“Excuse me,” one says. “Is this where they hanged the witches?”

At least she didn’t ask if it’s where they burned the witches.

“No, ma’am. Most likely at the bottom of the hill.”

I point to a towering apartment building set upon a high crag and then a little more to the left.

“At the foot of the hill,” I say. “Right behind the Walgreens.”

I’d be happy to explain that back in 1692 the hill was densely forested and getting a cart up the top would have been a major feat, and that the sheriff only needed to take the condemned beyond the town limits, and how the scant descriptions of the topography matched with that one spot – someone’s backyard.

But she’s already waved her thank you and darted back to her friends. They’re off to make their pilgrimage to the rear of a chain drugstore. They’ll find no monument there either.

I suppose I could have corrected her too. They weren’t witches, except perhaps for one, and she was most likely a dilettante.

No matter, they had gotten what they’d come for, a tangible, albeit tenuous, brush with a brief and terrible bout of viciousness that overtook a lonely outpost of Europe in the New World, and it’s stressed-out inhabitants who lived on the cusp of superstition and enlightenment.

The present city of Salem is a major tourist draw, entertaining visitors from around the nation and the world. The Witch City, whose police cars are emblazoned not with the city seal, but with a cartoonish witch on a broomstick.

The city for much of its history tried to downplay it’s nefarious past, taking pains to point out that it had been given a bad rap. The witch hysteria did not originate in Salem, the coastal community that even then was a bit more rational for having a stronger contact with the rest of the known world. The trouble started in Salem Village, present-day Danvers, about five miles inland. Salem was merely the county seat where the courts convened and where the gaol was located.

It was only in the last decade of the 20th century that entrepreneurs tallied the visitors who came to Salem despite the city’s best efforts to ignore the witchcraft hysteria and decided to make money off them.

In other words, they could profit from a 300-year-old atrocity. As a character in one of a few stories I’ve set in Salem points out rather ruefully, it’s rather like a little town in Poland perhaps three hundred years from now, celebrating Olde Aushwitz Days. As revelers in Salem dress like witches and goblins, maybe then folks will don dirty striped pajamas.

Now, lest you take me for a grouchy old killjoy, let me say that I have no problem with having fun and getting silly; there ought to be more Carnivals and Mardi Gras. The world needs to blow off steam.

For the entire month of October, my adopted hometown indulges in Haunted Happenings. And the only difference between it and the celebrations in Rio and New Orleans is the temperature. No young woman is likely to bare her software on a New England evening in October. In fact, even with the t-shirt on, you’ll easily deduce it’s a tad chilly. But, I digress.

There is something utterly schizoid about Salem. The dichotomy between celebration and tragedy worms its way into every endeavor. The city is a magnet for modern-day Wiccans, witches and various new-agers. They see the city as hallowed ground where martyrs suffered in the name of religious freedom, and claim the hysteria victims as their own. The problem with that is all those poor victims would be appalled and horrified to have been posthumously embraced and inducted into the ranks of modern witches. Think about it, they went to their deaths denying it.

The Wiccan community here is comfortably within the mainstream. That became hilariously clear when a bunch of out-of-town vampires announced they would hold their annual ball in Salem.

Witches wrote to the local newspaper complaining that letting the vampires have their way would give Salem a bad name. Hoo boy!

There have been competing psychic fairs that have devolved into legal squabbles. Who could have predicted that!

Things can and have gotten ... well ... nuts. From the what-were-they-thinking category, we offer TV Land’s donation to the city of a statue of Samantha Stevens from the “Bewitched” sitcom. Not only was it accepted, but it sits across the street from the site of the church that excommunicated members convicted of witchcraft. No matter, the effigy of the late Elizabeth Montgomery grins maniacally at tourists exiting a restaurant that now occupies the site.

There have been suggestions and some efforts to promote the city’s literary, maritime and philosophical legacy. This is the city where Hawthorne (barely) toiled in a political patronage job while penning “The Scarlet Letter,” and where he wooed his wife Sofia Peabody, one of the trio of sisters, including Mary and Elizabeth, who made their mark on the philosophical and educational history of the nation.

It was the city where merchant mariners brought back not only rare goods and art, but also a cosmopolitan world view that spawned a healthy liberalism in the young country.

But, folks still come because of the witches. What witches? Well, okay, just one, the first one accused. Her name was Bridget Bishop, and she went through husbands like pantyhose, flaunted her sex, wore a scarlet bodice, and went out of her way to vex her uptight neighbors. She also ran a roadhouse where the kids came to drink hard cider and blow off steam ... just like today. If she used little effigies to effect minor spells, what was the harm? I expect, if there is another life, Bridget is getting quite the hoot out of Salem’s kitschy celebrations.

If you decide to visit, feel free to have your fortune told by a lissome young witch, her bodice (maybe scarlet) near bursting. Try to pay attention to the cards, or the crystal ball.

Salem ... now, its okay to hang out.

Robert Buckley
October 2009

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Read more of Robert Buckley's Cracking Foxy in 2009 ERWA Archive.

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"Cracking Foxy" © 2009 Robert Buckley. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written

About the Author: Robert Buckley is senior fiction editor at ERWA. His stories have been published in various anthologies, including editions of Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica and the Coming Togther series of altruistic erotica.

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