Hester(54)

She puts a pinky in the jar of syrup and puts a bit on her tongue.

“They hang her?” she asks plainly.

“She escaped.”

Mercy nods as if I’ve finally said something that makes sense to her, and so I go on—I tell her about Isobel Gowdie, raising my voice and pointing my hand high when I repeat her incantation.

“‘And if you kill me hell will reign on earth’?” In Mercy’s mouth, the words sound different. Like something in a theater. “She truly say that—‘lain with the Devil’s forked prick’?”

Her whole face lights up and she’s almost laughing.

“Now, that is a smart lady,” she says. “Man thinks you are powerful, you got to find and use that power.”

Mercy seems to be saying the same thing my mother told me before she died.

I lean in to listen more closely.

“That’s something we all have to know,” Mercy goes on. “Black woman, poor white woman—and especially a woman with your red hair and the way you talk.”

“My red hair and how I talk?”

She crosses her arms and looks me up and down.

“You don’t know it?”

I look at her face for a hint, but see nothing.

“Know what?”

“Isobel, I’ll say it straight. With your red hair and foreign tongue, they don’t think you’re much better than us.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“I’m talking ’bout them”—she waves a hand toward the door, toward the yard, toward the sky—“all of them. Mrs. Silas and her family, men in Salem and Boston—anybody who calls himself a true American thinks they’re better than everybody else. That’s why I don’t like to see that Silas lady use you like she does.”

“I’m Scottish.” I draw myself up, as if I have forgotten how the ladies in the shop cringe when they hear how I speak.

“That’s right—and they think the Scots are about as low-down as us Black folk. Maybe better than Indians but not by much.”

“Scots are British subjects—” I have longed to say it to Mrs. Adams’s customers. Mercy cuts me off, and the color of her words changes from plum to slate gray.

“Americans hate the king and the crown. Right here is where their war started. You know that, right?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Anyway, why do you keep on about it? You curtsy and go to dances at the royal court?”

Now she glares. Nat’s rose scents the cottage with a sweet fragrance as it begins to brown on the edges like silt at the tip of a summer lake.

“No, but—”

She folds her arms across her chest.

“You had a meeting with King George?”

“No.”

“Well then. And you’re sure not American,” she says. “Out there, to them whose families have been in Salem for two hundred years, you ain’t much better than Ivy or Zeke.”

I want to protest. Mercy seems to be saying that only children born to women who were born here can be truly American.

Maybe this is what I’ve missed all along.

“But there’s another kind of strength we’ve got,” Mercy goes on. “I’m talking about me, my folks. It comes from knowing the difference between who you are and who they think you are.”

I feel the rightness in what she is saying. I’m shaken, but I listen. She seems to draw herself up the way Isobel Gowdie has always stood straight and tall in my mind.

“You learn how to move through places so folks don’t see you, then you can do things folks don’t want you to do. You can do it right in front of them and they don’t realize. And you know why? Because if you’re nobody and you got nothing, then they don’t feel your threat, and they hardly see you at all.”

“I’m not nobody,” I say.

She’s nodding, but in a different way.

“That’s right,” she says. “You know that, but they don’t. You’ve got to work the space in between the two. When you’re near invisible and quiet and polite and a nice sort of pretty like you are, folks don’t notice all you can do. Problem is, with that red hair of yours, you’re still seen everywhere. Everybody recognizes you. But that’s easy to fix.”

She takes one of my bonnets off a peg.

“You just put up your hair. You put on a brown cape and plain bonnet when you don’t want to be seen or noticed. That’s when you use your power. Sometimes you got to act like you are nothing—so long as you remember that it’s a lie. So long as you remember you’re as strong as you believe you are.”





Salem, 1693


Tituba, little Dorcas Good, Sarah Carrier, and ninety-three other falsely accused women, men, and children stumble out of Salem and Boston jails when the court of Oyer and Terminer is suspended by the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Judge Hathorne watches them limp back into Salem—the orphaned children, the widows, the daughter who testified against her mother. He rages at the magistrates who recant their verdicts and at the accusers—Betty Parris and Ann Putnam first among them—who apologize for the terror they wrought.

“The victims believed Satan was here and I still believe it,” Hathorne tells his wife. “You stay clear of them, for changelings are always among us and I would not trust the lot of them, certainly not with my soul.”