Witch Week

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones, 1982.

This is the third book in the Chrestomanci series.  In this series, there are many different worlds, and in each of those different worlds, there is a copy of every person.  Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the worlds. However, there is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds.  This person is called the Chrestomanci.  All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives.  The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions and between worlds, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course.

This story takes place in a world where witches are being burned at the stake in the 1980s. At a boarding school for troubled children and orphans, everyone is aware of what an accusation of witchcraft can mean. One day, one of the teachers finds a note in a social studies book saying that one of the students in class 6B is a witch. It’s a serious accusation, but how seriously should anyone take it? This is, after all, a school for troubled children, and children in general play pranks. Mr. Crossly finds the note worrying. Some of the teachers are convinced that this is just a prank or someone playing up for attention. Miss Hodge says that there is a sick mind in class 6B. Mr. Wentworth, whose own son, Brian, is in that class, says that he’s sure that all of the kids in class 6B have sick minds, but that’s just typical. He thinks it’s best if the teachers take no notice of the note. But, the note is correct. There is a witch in class 6B.

Strange things start happening in class 6B and to the students in that class. A flock of assorted birds swarms into their music class. In gym class, Nan Pilgrim can’t manage to climb the rope, no matter how hard she tries. When she and two other students are called to have lunch with the headmistress, Nan finds herself making disgusting comments about the food without her even wanting to say anything, but for some reason, the headmistress can’t hear a thing she says, even though the other students can. Then, it is revealed that Nan’s real name is Dulcinea, which is the name of a famous witch. Could Nan secretly be the witch in class 6B?

Although she can’t openly admit it, Nan is descended from the famous witch Dulcinea, who tried to stop the persecution of witches, and she is also what is called a “witch orphan”, meaning that her parents were witches. However, Nan insists that she’s not a witch herself, and Nan isn’t the only suspicious student in the class. Everyone there is troubled in some way. Brian Wentworth is often picked on for being the son of a teacher. Simon Silverson, Dan Smith, and Theresa Mullet are bullies. They are all eager to point fingers at Nan for being a witch, but could that be to cover up for themselves?

Charles Morgan was sent to the boarding school because his parents think that he is troubled and disobedient and a bad influence on his younger brother. In a way, he is very troubled, but he can’t explain what is really troubling him. When he was younger, he witnessed a witch being burned, something that still traumatizes him. Then, he helped another witch who was being hunted to escape. He can’t admit to his parents that he helped this witch because it was illegal, but the witch promised him good luck for doing so. So far, he hasn’t noticed any good luck, and he feels terrible every time he hears about another witch being burned, thinking that it might be his witch. It all makes him angry and depressed, and he hates the boarding school and everyone there.

Miss Hodge tries to investigate the students by having them act out witchcraft inquisitions. Since most of the children don’t know what happens at an inquisition and aren’t very good actors, most of them are terrible at it. But, she comes to think maybe Charles is the witch because he gets angry at Nan over all the disgusting things she said at lunch and taunts her about them in a way that makes it sound like he’s saying some kind of spell.

When Miss Hodge tries to tell Mr. Wentworth about it, he shrugs it off because he also heard the things Nan said at lunch. Mr. Wentworth interviews Nan about why she said all those things at lunch, but she can’t explain herself. She doesn’t know what made her say those things. Sometimes, she just can’t seem to help herself, and she felt almost possessed. Mr. Wentworth knows about her family’s history and warns her to be careful.

Then, when Charles is trying to escape from some bullies, he somehow manages to turn himself invisible. He doesn’t understand it, but he tries to do something else magical as a test. Since Dan Smith hid his spiked shoes earlier, Charles tries making Dan’s spiked shoes disappear. To Charles’s horror and astonishment, he succeeds! Somehow, he has apparently been a witch the whole time without knowing it. Charles thinks maybe he did some of the other strange things without knowing it, too. He’s always heard that witches are evil, and he thinks maybe he has secretly been evil this whole time and had better confess. An accidental mix-up when he goes looking for the headmistress stops him from confessing immediately, but it leaves him unsure what to do.

Mr. Wentworth has a private conversation with Charles about Miss Hodge’s suspicions about him. He knows what Charles was really talking about when he was arguing with Nan, but he points out to Charles how bad it might sound to someone who didn’t know what he was talking about. Information about witches and the past witch uprisings is drastically censored. There is almost nothing about it in the school library, but Mr. Wentworth understands the situation and explains it to Charles in a no-nonsense way. Nan’s ancestress, Dulcinea Wilkes, had been an advocate for witch’s rights in the 18th century, particularly the right not to be murdered. She said that witches couldn’t help being witches because they were born that way, and it wasn’t fair for them to be murdered for something they just couldn’t help. She said that witches would only use their powers in good ways if people would stop hunting them and burning them, but the murders and burnings continued, and Dulcinea lost her temper. She retaliated with violent spells that frightened people so much that they also murdered Dulcinea by burning her. In remembrance of that, people still continue to burn effigies of her, like they do of Guy Fawkes. Mr. Wentworth says that he thinks what happened to Dulcinea was unfair, but he is worried about his students because there has never been so much stigma against witches at any earlier point in history. Although his students wouldn’t remember it, there was a major witch uprising around the time they were all born. The news of this uprising was largely hushed-up, but the witches attempted to take over the entire government. The revolutionaries were all civil servants, and they were all burned when the uprising was crushed, but the government has been paranoid about anyone with any sign of witchcraft since. When they learned that the leader of the uprisings started showing signs of witchcraft when he was about 11 years old, they even started allowing children to be arrested for witchcraft, even on slight suspicion. The inquisitors have powers that go largely unchecked. Mr. Wentworth knows that any of his students can be hauled away and executed with little recourse.

Even though Mr. Wentworth is concerned with protecting Charles, Charles gets angry with him for giving him a black mark as a reminder to control his behavior, and he glares at Mr. Wentworth. It’s a terrible mistake. It turns out that Charles has the evil eye, and it seems like he accidentally makes Mr. Wentworth disappear. Although Charles tries to pretend like everything is normal, he is desperate on the inside. Soon, someone will realize that Mr. Wentworth is missing and that Charles was the last person to see him. He even tries burning his own finger on a candle to remind himself that burning hurts, and he needs to control himself to avoid being burned to death. When he tries to fix what he’s done with magic, Mr. Wentworth does return, but everyone’s shoes mysteriously disappear.

To Charles’s surprise, the memories of the witch he saw burned and the witch he helped to escape stop bothering him so much after he knows and accepts that he is a witch himself. It’s like he’s always known, inside, that he would be a witch, and once he becomes reconciled to his true nature, he becomes calmer and more self-confident. He knows that he can’t stop being a witch. He can only try to avoid being caught. However, it turns out that he is not the only student who has witchcraft, and when the desperate students seek help or a method of escape from this prison-like school, they accidentally summon Chrestomanci to straighten everything out.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in different languages).

My Reaction and Spoilers

Alternate Worlds

Like all of the books in the Chrestomanci series, this book takes place in an alternate world or alternate reality. It explores not only the suspicion and paranoia that go with witch hunts but also the mechanism by which these alternate worlds or realities are created. When the students who have realized that they are witches try to escape, they are given a spell that calls Chrestomanci from his world to theirs. Chrestomanci is accustomed to being summoned to random places on short notice (it’s just one of the hassles that come with the job), but he finds this particular world puzzling. He knows from the similarities between this world and others in the series of worlds that contains his own that he must be in that particular series of worlds, but he recognizes immediately that there is something wrong with it. It has way too many similarities with the world that is “our” world in the series, but yet, there shouldn’t be any witch trials or burnings in the 1980s. He explains that alternate worlds are created when there is some major event that has only two outcomes with an equal chance of happening. Every time that happens, the world splits into two separate worlds where each of the possibilities happen. Because this world is so much like the world that is “ours”, he knows that whatever event caused the split happened fairly recently in history, but for some reason, the split wasn’t complete. There is no real magic in “our” world, but this odd, dysfunctional, split-off world is full of it.

By talking to the students about what they know about the history of their world, Chrestomanci is able to pinpoint the event that caused the problem. As with other Chrestomanci books, Chrestomanci doesn’t just magically solve the problem all by himself, but once he understands the situation, he shows the students at the school where the problem lies and what they need to do to fix it themselves, making use of their own powers, and even some of the mistakes they’ve made, to set their world right and re-integrate their world with “our” world. Once their world is repaired, it’s as if all the witch trials never happened. People who were burned are alive again, and people who were in prison are living perfectly normal lives. The children must sacrifice their magical abilities and all or most of their memories of their old lives to join with our world, which some of them are initially reluctant to do, but once they do it, all of their lives change for the better. Orphans have their parents back, the school is now a day school instead of a boarding school where the children were basically prisoners, and the children are all much friendlier toward each other now that they are no longer part of that toxic atmosphere, where suspicions always surrounded them and everyone is afraid of exposure.

Themes and Spoilers

Parts of the story were stressful because of the bullying among the students and the constant threat of imprisonment or death for any child who was proven to be a witch. Most of the adults are not that concerned with the welfare of the students because this entire society is engulfed with paranoia, and everyone is desperate to protect themselves at all cost. The adults are often so preoccupied with saving themselves that they would be willing to throw the children to the wolves rather than face imprisonment or death themselves. The major exception is Mr. Wentworth, who tries to warn children who show signs of witchcraft that they need to be careful. His efforts to protect the children are touching because he has more to lose than some of the other teachers who play along with the politics and paranoia of their society. (Spoiler!) Mr. Wentworth and his son Brian are both witches, and Mr. Wentworth is being blackmailed for most of his salary by the headmistress. Mr. Wentworth advocates self-control to the students as the best way to avoid being caught, but it soon becomes apparent that nobody with witchcraft abilities can fight using them forever. That’s why some of the children’s abilities come out unconsciously, without them even being fully aware of what they’re doing. That’s where the mystery of the story comes in.

Chrestomanci books always contain an element of mystery in some way or other, and from the beginning of the story, there are the questions of who wrote the note about there being a witch in class and who the witch is. We never learn who wrote the note (I don’t remember that being definitely revealed), and in the end, it doesn’t really matter. When Charles realizes that he is a witch, that seems like the answer. However, Charles is not the only witch in class. As one of the other students points out, all of the weird things that have been happening at the school are very different in character, so there is more than one person involved. By the end of the book, it is revealed that (spoiler) the vast majority of the students at the school are witches. Some have been doing magical things unconsciously as their powers have started asserting themselves, and some have done things on purpose because they know they can. Chrestomanci realizes that many more people in their society in general are witches than these paranoid people ever suspected, and witches are only regarded as a minority because of the atmosphere of fear they live in. Everyone has been trying so hard to conceal any sign of abnormality that they all have a warped view of who they all really are and what their society is actually like.

I couldn’t help but notice that, witch or not, absolutely nobody in this society can be called an innocent person. Everybody is doing something illegal, unethical, or simply deceptive. They all have secrets, and they all do things to cover up what they’re doing. Even non-witches are often doing horrible things that they have to cover up. The apparently sweet and proper headmistress is actually a cold-hearted blackmailer. Teachers are manipulative for personal and professional reasons. The so-called “normal” (or “real”, as Nan thinks of it) children are all either secret witches or just horrible bullies and rotten human beings. Like their elders, the “normal” children are sneakily manipulative and practice blackmail and brutality against the other students, knowing that’s the way to get to top of their social heap. As I said, the entire society is toxic, not just the school, and everything the children do is a reflection of their elders (and vice versa, when you think about it). Grown-up witch hunters are like overgrown child bullies, and people like the headmistress probably started their blackmail and manipulation at a young age, just like the students, as tools of survival and self-promotion in this cold, toxic, pitiless world.

The normalization of the toxic parts of this world is both stressful and worrying. People can adjust to many awful things if they are not given any alternative, and that’s what this dysfunctional world represents. There are moments of lightness, though, and some characters are more caring than others. The story is told from the point-of-view of different characters, and much of this book is a psychological study in the different ways people deal with bullying, suspicion, and paranoia. As I said, Mr. Wentworth risks himself sometimes to help students in danger and make them see the seriousness of their situation. Some of the students band together to try to help each other survive their mutual risk, while others are more self-centered, prepared to throw each other under the bus to save themselves. It’s a relief to see all of that end when the world is set right, but it occurs to me that the story has exposed all of the characters’ true characters, what each of them are capable of doing in extreme circumstances. The extreme circumstances brought out the worst in some characters, while others were more creative and caring in spite of everything.

Little Witch's Big Night

Little Witch’s Big Night by Deborah Hautzig, illustrated by Marc Brown, 1984.

On Halloween night, all the witches in Little Witch’s family are busy getting ready for their big broomstick ride. However, when Mother Witch sees that Little Witch has cleaned her room and made her bed, something too nice for a witch to do, she punishes her by telling her that she will have to stay home.

Because Little Witch is left at home, she is there to answer the door for three trick-or-treaters dressed as an astronaut, a devil, and a pirate. Since she doesn’t have any treats to offer them, she offers to give them rides on her broomstick.

The trick-or-treaters have a great time as Little Witch has her broom do tricks and she shows the pirate a real pirate ship.

The trick-or-treaters have so much fun that they promise to come back next year. Little Witch resolves to be good all year so that her mother will punish her again and make her stay home from the Halloween flight, so she will be there to meet her new friends when they come back.

However, when the other witches come back, Mother Witch says that she missed Little Witch on the flight and that she will get to come on the flight next year. Little Witch asks if she can bring some friends with her, and Mother Witch says that will be fine, as long as Little Witch isn’t too good.

This was one of my favorite Halloween books when I was a child, and so is one of the other books in the series, Happy Birthday, Little Witch. The first time I read these books, I read them out of order, but you really have to read the books in order to understand Happy Birthday, Little Witch because it turns out that Little Witch still doesn’t understand the idea of trick-or-treating or that human children wear costumes on Halloween. She really thinks that she met a small astronaut, pirate, and devil on Halloween, and that makes it difficult for her to find them when she wants to invite them to her birthday party. The Little Witch in this series isn’t the same as the Little Witch in the Little Witch Craft Books.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

The Midnight Folk

The Midnight Folk by John Masefield, 1927.

Kay Harker is an orphan, the ward of Sir Theopompus, usually in the care of his governess, Miss Sylvia Daisy. One day, Sir Theopompus asks Kay if he has any idea what he wants to do when he grows up. Kay says that he likes the idea of being a jockey, but Sir Theopompus says that he could be a sea captain, like his great-grandfather. According to the stories about him, Kay’s great-grandfather sailed around the world and stole a treasure from the priests of Santa Barbara worth about a million pounds (British money). The stories differ about what happened to the treasure, though. In some versions, his crew mutinied and took the treasure for themselves, but other stories say that he brought the treasure home with him and hid it somewhere in his family home, the home where Kay now lives.

Sir Theopompus asks Kay if he’s ever come across the treasure, but Kay says he hasn’t. Sir Theopompus suggests that if Kay finds the treasure, the two them could split it between them. Kay says that wouldn’t be fair, if he had to do all the work of finding it by himself, and also the treasure is stolen property, so it would rightly belong to the priests of Santa Barbara. Still, Sir Theopompus encourages Kay to search for the treasure. Kay doesn’t believe that the treasure is really in the house or that his great-grandfather would be a thief, and he doesn’t think it’s fair to tell such stories about him when he isn’t there to defend himself. His governess tells him that he has been impertinent and sends him to bed early.

Kay is later woken by someone calling to him to open the door, and he sees a door in his room that he has never noticed before. The voice he hears belongs to the black cat called Nibbins, who tells Kay to come with him and not make any noise. Most of the house is asleep, and Nibbins refers to the ones who are awake as the “midnight folk.” He leads Kay down a secret passage that was once used by smugglers.

There, Kay learns that his old toys were his “guards.” He doesn’t know where his old toys are because his governess packed them away when she came, saying that they would just remind him of the past. Nibbins says that his old toys had stumbled onto a clue about the hidden treasure and went in search of it. They didn’t think it would take them long to find it, but he hasn’t heard from them since. Kay sadly fears that his old toys may actually be dead. (A horrifying thought.)

Then, there’s an even more shocking revelation. Nibbins shows him that there are spy hole where Kay can see what’s happening in various rooms in the house, and in the dining room, he witnesses a meeting of witches! Nibbins shows Kay where the witches keep their brooms, and they take a couple of the brooms on a ride to the woods, where Nibbins introduces Kay to a poacher called Bitem. They witness the witches having a bonfire and a magical ritual at Wicked Hill. Nibbins says that he used to be a witches’ cat and helped with rituals like that. Sometimes, he still feels the call of magic.

The leader of the magical group is a wizard called Abner Brown, and they overhear him saying to the witches that they are going to hunt for the Harker Treasure. Abner has learned that the treasure is not actually in the Harker house, but it’s somewhere close by. Abner reveals previously-unknown details of the treasure’s history, including the fact that his own grandfather had once been in possession of it and hid it until someone called Benito Trigger found it. Abner has found evidence that his grandfather tracked down Trigger and confronted him in this very area and that Trigger may have killed him. Abner believes that the treasure is still hidden somewhere near to where his grandfather died. Nibbins leads Kay back to his bedroom through another secret passage before anyone discovers that he is gone.

Kay knows that what he witnessed the night before wasn’t a dream because, in the morning, he sees the remains of the leftover goose that the witches were eating the night before, picked to the bones. The servants think that the cats got at the goose and ate the leftovers, but Kay knows better.

Then, the portrait of Kay’s great-grandfather comes to life, and his great-grandfather invites Kay into the portrait, showing him the house as it was in the past. His great-grandfather denies having stolen the treasure years ago, but he says that it was entrusted to him and that he lost it. He was in Santa Barbara when the territory was breaking away from Spain, and the archbishop gave him the treasure to guard from the revolutionaries. However, his crew did mutiny and turn pirate. The crew took the treasure, and they abandoned Kay’s great-grandfather ashore, far from any European colony. For a time, he says that he was a slave of a tribe of Indians (Native Americans), but he eventually escaped and made it home to England. He heard that his old ship may have sunk, but he doesn’t know for sure. Even he doesn’t know where the treasure is now, thinking that it must have either sunk with the ship or been scattered by the crew. It’s always bothered him that he was unable to fulfill his promise to keep the treasure safe. He wants Kay to learn what happened to the treasure and, if possible, restore it to its rightful owners.

Through Kay’s midnight adventures and the ghosts of the past stirred up by the magic of the witches, Kay begins to learn the full sequence of events that led to the treasure being lost, and eventually, what happened to it. Along the way, Kay also makes the startling discovery that his governess is actually one of the witches!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

There were some parts of the story that I found difficult to follow because the story kind of jumps around, people start talking about things as if we should already know about them, and some things that Kay encounters are not fully explained. Many of them seem like dream sequences or imaginings, except they have lasting consequences. Then, there are times when people go into lengthy explanations that seem to meander, and there are people who go by multiple names. For awhile, Kay almost seems to forget about seeking his great-grandfather’s treasure and starts looking for the treasure of an old highwayman instead, and there is a strange interlude with King Arthur and his knights.

Still, this story is a children’s classic, and it’s almost like a collection of all the features that are found in classic children’s literature: an orphan, talking animals, witches, pirates, ghosts, mermaids, a highwayman, King Arthur and his knights, hidden treasure, etc.

For awhile, I thought that the story might end with the implication that much of it was in Kay’s imagination. Kay is a lonely boy who doesn’t see his guardian very often and lives with a strict governess and no other children for company. I thought maybe he was spinning dreams or imagined stories to explain other events happening around him. I spent part of the story working out how a child might interpret a strict governess who took away his old toys as a witch, and I thought maybe she was in a romantic relationships with Abner Brown, which would be why Kay would see him as a wizard. Then, maybe these young people had parties in the house with their friends after Kay was put to bed, so he imagined that they were having witches’ meetings. They could also be hunting for the legendary treasure, so all the parts related to treasure-hunting could be true. However, the book implies that the magical parts of the story are real. Even the magical things Kay experiences have real world consequences, which help both him and readers to realize that what he has seen has really happened.

I thought that the story became a little more cohesive after Kay makes the discovery that his governess is actually one of the witches. He eventually learns the full truth of what happened to the treasure years ago and meets up with his old toys/guards, who are still alive and have been seeking the treasure the entire time. Kay’s toys/guards bring the treasure from its hiding place to a secret hiding place in Kay’s room and help him to alert the proper authorities and restore the treasure to its rightful owner. Kay’s governess is arrested when she and her friends are caught trespassing in pursuit of the treasure and in possession of smuggled goods. The governess is released when Abner Brown pays the fines for their activities, but she leaves the area instead of returning to Kay. Kay’s home life changes for the better because a friend of his mother comes to live with him and look after him.

Hester Bidgood

Hester Bidgood, Investigatrix of Evill Deedes by E.W. Hildick, 1994.

Hester Bidgood was a character in one of the McGurk fantasy mysteries, which involved time travel, and in this book, she investigates a mystery of her own in her own time, the late 1600s, Colonial America.

Goody Willson’s cat has been found, badly injured, with the shape of a cross burned into it. Some people are spreading the rumor that this is a sign that Goody Willson is a witch and that the injuries to the cat were a sign of God’s disapproval for Goody Willson’s “witchy ways.” Of course, Hester and her friend, Rob, don’t believe that. Old Mistress Brown worries that if the witch rumors go too far, everyone will soon be a potential witch suspect, like in Salem. Rob takes care of nursing the cat back to health, while he and Hester try to determine how the cat came to be injured in such a strange manner.

Rob knows what it’s like to be an outcast. Although he’s a white boy, he lived for a time among the Native Americans as a young captive and adopted many of their habits. He doesn’t know how to read, and Hester has been helping him. However, there are people in the community who don’t trust Rob because of his connections to the American Indians, and they call him derogatory names.

Hester and Rob consider that the mark on the cat could have been made by a branding iron. They go to the blacksmith and ask him if he has an x-shaped branding iron or if anyone has asked him to make one, but he says no. But, then Hester begins to consider that maybe the cross isn’t really a cross. A cross sign could also be made by putting two capital ‘T’s together at an angle.

Their investigations also take them to the old Morton homestead, where the entire Morton family was killed by American Indians some years before. Someone has been staying there in secret, and there are signs of blood, possibly from the injured cat. Gradually, Hester and Rob begin to put the pieces together, realizing who the person responsible must be and how this evil deed is actually connected to an earlier crime.

I didn’t really like this book because of the cruelty to animals. It wasn’t just what was done to the cat but also when Hester remembers Rob finding a dragonfly and considering taking off its wings. Hester stops him from doing it, but it’s still a disgusting thought. I thought that the villain was pretty obvious from the beginning, too, although I didn’t know the motive. When there’s a witch hunt, the person who is the most guilty is the first one to bring up the subject of witches.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, 1958.

This is a book that is often used in American schools or recommended to students, but because of the complexity of the story and dark subject matter, I wouldn’t recommend it to young children. It’s more appropriate for middle school level children and older.

The year is 1687, and a sixteen-year-old girl named Kit (short for Katherine) Tyler is traveling by ship from Barbados to the Connecticut Colony. Kit was born in Barbados, where her grandfather owned a plantation, which he received in a grant from the king. However, Kit was orphaned at a very young age, and now, her grandfather has died, so Kit is on her way to live with her Aunt Rachel, her mother’s sister, who is married to a Puritan and is living in Connecticut.

In Barbados, Kit was part of a prominent, slave-owning family, but in Connecticut, she’s just another girl. The people in Connecticut are Puritans, which puts Kit on the opposite site of a political conflict. Her father’s side of her family in Barbados was on the side of the Cavaliers, who supported the king against the Puritans, or “Roundheads” in the English Civil War (1642-1651). Because her Aunt Rachel has married a Puritan, Kit’s Connecticut relatives are on the side of the Roundheads. When Kit first sets off on her journey, she has very little idea of the difference between the two and what it’s going to mean for her future life.

People in Connecticut do things differently, and from the very beginning, Kit strikes them as strange and unpredictable. She is impulsive, and even her grandfather used to warn her about thinking before she acts. Kit is accustomed to living in luxury, giving orders to slaves, and generally being allowed to do as she pleases. It comes as a shock to her that not only can she no longer do these things, but others may heap harsh judgement on her for behaving oddly, even when she does it in the name of a good cause.

Kit gets her first impressions of what life in Connecticut will be like when she talks to the ship captain’s son, Nat Eaton, and an aspiring clergyman named John Holbrook. John Holbrook is the son of a tanner who has had to work by day and study by night since he was young, and he struggles to complete his education because his family doesn’t have enough money to send him to college. Because Kit’s grandfather was wealthy, Kit has never really had to think much about money before. She never had to work or even do chores when she was young, and when she tries to talk to John Holbrook about the books that she’s read, he disapproves of her choice of reading material because he thinks that reading should be reserved for the serious study of religion.

Kit’s naivety and views of slavery are challenged when Nat Eaton talks her about the horrible conditions slaves endure when they are transported from Africa to the Americas and how many of them don’t survive the experience. Kit is accustomed to owning slaves and having them work for her, but just as she has never had to think about the cost of the fancy clothes and other luxuries that her grandfather gave her, she realizes that she’s never given a thought to where slaves come from and how. Kit learns that, while there are people in the North American colonies who own slaves, there are others who vehemently disapprove of the practice, including Nat Eaton. He says that if his family had dealt in slaves, they could have a lot more money, but they’re doing fine carrying more humane cargo and passengers.

Note: Racial issues are more of a side issue than the main part of the story, and this is the part of the story that addresses the issue the most. I can’t say that Kit ever comes to reverse her early view of slaves completely, but this is the beginning of a revelation to her, one of the first indications to her that the life she previously lived is actually the exception instead of the norm, and not everyone looks favorably on people who live the way she used to live. None of the main characters in the story are black.

Kit is dismayed that there seem to be few topics from her old life (politics, money, slaves, the luxuries she owned, the relative freedom she had, not having to work, having plenty of time to read whatever books she liked whether they were useful or instructive or religious or not, etc.) that don’t cause some awkwardness, discomfort, or disapproval from the people who live in the community she is about to join and who will now be playing significant roles in her life. People don’t seem eager to be friends with her, and they look at her suspiciously as a stranger.

As her ship nears its destination, a little girl on board loses her doll overboard and Kit jumps into the water to get it back, alarming everyone. Most of the other women and girls don’t know how to swim, and they think it’s strange when Kit says that her grandfather taught her how to swim when she was little. The sea around Connecticut is too cold for swimming, so they’re not used to the idea of recreational swimming. (This time period was part of the Little Ice Age, so the area was even colder then than it is today.) Some people also consider that one of the tests for witchcraft involves seeing if a woman could float in water, and they begin whispering that Kit might be a witch.

When Kit finally arrives at the town where her Aunt Rachel and Uncle Matthew Woods live, Wethersfield, she is disappointed to see that it’s much more rural than the community where she used to live. The streets are not paved. Kit is dressed in an overly-elegant way for the community and even for her own family. When she finally meets her aunt, she thinks that she must be a servant at first because she is dressed so plainly. Aunt Rachel is happy to see her, and Kit meets her cousins, Judith and Mercy. Judith is very pretty, and Mercy walks with crutches. Kit is surprised at the very simple way they live, and they are taken aback at her fine clothes and all of the possessions she brought with her in her trunks from Barbados.

Her relatives are stunned when they find out that Kit plans to stay with them. They had not even expected her to come for a visit, and they had not heard about her grandfather’s death. Uncle Matthew asks why she didn’t write to tell them that she was coming, and Kit admits that she was afraid to write to them because she didn’t want them to tell her not to come and she didn’t have any other choice but to come to them. After her grandfather’s death, the overseer of the plantation sold off the entire crop and kept the money for himself, and all of the other plantation owners in the area presented Kit with debts her grandfather had with them that needed to be repaid, so she was forced to sell off the slaves and almost everything else to pay them. (From Kit’s description about the sudden influx of supposed debts after her grandfather’s death, I wondered whether at least some of these supposed debts were fraudulent and if Kit was simply too young and naive to challenge them, being accustomed to her grandfather handling all of the family’s money and business arrangements, but I can’t really be sure. She doesn’t go into detail about what proof the creditors offered of the debts or if she simply took them at their word, and its only real importance is in helping to provide her with a reason for going to live with her relatives.) Aunt Rachel says that Kit did the right thing by repaying the debts and coming to them, but Uncle Matthew seems less sure. He disapproves of Kit’s grandfather for being a royalist and seems reluctant to take on a now impoverished relative accustomed to a luxurious life.

Kit tries to share some of her fancy clothes with her cousins when they admire them, and Judith and Mercy love the new clothes, but Uncle Matthew puts a stop to it. He disapproves of Kit’s clothes because they are just too fancy and he thinks they encourage vanity. Uncle Matthew is very direct with Kit, explaining to her that people in this family and in this community live a very different life from the one she is used to, and she is going to have to adjust to their ways if she wants to live with them. Adjusting to this new life, which is so different from everything she knew before, is a major struggle for Kit throughout the story.

Privately, Kit confides in Mercy that she had another reason for wanting to leave Barbados. There was a man there who was a friend of her grandfather’s. Her grandfather also owed money to him, but he would have forgiven the debt and paid the other debts if Kit had agreed to marry him. Other people in Barbados said that it was a smart match and that she should marry him, but he was fifty years old, and Kit couldn’t bring herself to marry someone so much older than herself. That’s why she wanted to leave Barbados in such a hurry and didn’t want to wait even long enough to write to her relatives. (The issue of the girls’ marriage options and what they mean for their family and future lives is a major focus of the story. It is taken for granted throughout the story that all of the girls will get married at some point and that their primary future occupation will be being someone’s wife. However, what being a wife means for them depends on who they marry, what their husband’s occupation and position in society are, and the type of lifestyle they can support.) Mercy says that Kit did the right thing by leaving Barbados and that her Uncle Matthew will get used to her being there if she can demonstrate that she can be useful (an important factor in the occupation of being a wife or daughter of a Puritan family).

Being useful is a problem for Kit, who is unaccustomed to doing work of any kind. She doesn’t know how to do even basic chores. People need to explain to her how to do everything, and even then, Kit is extremely clumsy and lacks the patience to follow their instructions properly. Judith loses her patience trying to teach her and isn’t happy to learn that they’re now going to have to share a bed. Kit appreciates Mercy for her understanding and her quiet strength. Even though some people disregard Mercy because of her disability, Kit knows that Mercy has valuable skills and that she can work as hard as anyone. Life with the Woods family is a monotonous series of chores that previously Kit would have thought of only as labor for slaves that she would never have to do.

Then, there are religious differences between her and her relatives. When Kit lived with her grandfather, they never attended regular church services, but Uncle Matthew’s Puritan household is strictly religious, so Kit is expected to go to church with the family. At the church services, she sees that other people in the community are wearing clothes that are about as fashionable as her own, so not everyone in the community is as strict in their dress as the Woods family is. However, Kit is bored by the services (which last all day), the other parishioners don’t seem very friendly, and it seems like word has spread that Kit is a charity case that her aunt and uncle have taken in. However, she does attract the attention of a young man named William Ashby, and Judith meets John Holbrook for the first time.

As Kit spends more time with her relatives, she discovers that Uncle Matthew is a local selectman but that he has political disagreements with some of the other men in town, and some of them think that he is less loyal to the king than he should be. Kit also becomes involved in the romantic interests of her cousins and confronted with some choices she needs to make about her own future. William Ashby is from a wealthy and socially prominent family, but Uncle Matthew dislikes the Ashby family for being Royalists. Kit learns that Judith was interested in William Ashby before she came, and she worries that Judith will be angry with her for attracting his attention, but Judith tells her not to worry about it because she is now in love with John Holbrook. Kit still feels uncomfortable at William’s sudden interest in her because she has only just come to live in the area, she knows very little about William, and the two of them don’t seem to have much to talk about during his visits with her. However, Aunt Rachel and her cousins encourage her to pursue the relationship because William Ashby’s family is prosperous and he can provide a good living for her. Kit is flattered by William’s attention because he admires her whether she is “useful” or not. With his family’s money and position, William Ashby could give Kit a life similar to the one she had before with her grandfather with nice clothes and relative freedom from routine household chores.

However, Kit’s views and ambitions in life begin to change when she starts helping her cousin Mercy to teach young children in the community’s dame school. Basically, a dame school was when a woman of the community would teach children basic lessons, such as reading and writing, informally in her own home for a fee. (For more information, see Going to School in 1776.) Mercy explains that after children learn to read in the dame school, they can go on to the more advanced lessons in the community’s formal grammar school. Kit always enjoyed reading and discovers that she likes working with the children. As a dame school teacher, Kit earns fees from the students and performs a useful service that she enjoys much more than weeding gardens, scrubbing floors, and other household chores. Kit was not raised to have a profession, but there is more than one kind of work in the world and even in this small community, and this particular kind of work suits her. It pleases Kit that the students appreciate her and enjoy her lessons and stories.

The girls’ romantic dreams and life decisions as they come of age and begin making lives for themselves in the community could make for an interesting historical novel by themselves, but there is more to this story. This is a witch trial story. Kit has already had people making witch comments about her because of her odd behavior, but through her work at the dame school, she demonstrates other odd habits that cause her to get on the wrong side of community members. When she gets the idea of having students act out the story of the Good Samaritan instead of simply listening to it, the situation gets out of hand. She is criticized for using the Bible for play-acting, and the dame school is temporarily closed. Then, Kit befriends Hannah Tupper, a somewhat eccentric widow who lives in an undesirable area near Blackbird Pond that often floods. Nobody understands why she wants to live out there, all alone with her cats, and people in the area say that she’s probably a witch. The truth is that she is known to be a Quaker, and the Puritan community doesn’t like to associate with her because of her religion. Kit likes Hannah because she is kind and understanding to her and calms her when she is upset, but her family doesn’t like her to associate with Hannah, saying that evil can seem innocent at first. Kit also realizes that, while William Ashby admires her, he is also scandalized by her behavior. Hannah, on the other hand, is supportive of Kit and helps her continue to secretly teach a young girl whose mother doesn’t want her to have reading lessons.

Kit’s friendship with Hannah gets her into trouble with community and even puts her life in danger. People in Wethersfield start to die from a disease that has struck the community, and Hannah is blamed. Kit risks her life to save her from an angry mob. Although she successfully gets Hannah to safety, Kit is also accused of witchcraft and put on trial.

I often find stories of people falsely accused frustrating, but this one has a good ending. There is a note in the back of the book that explains the historical background behind the story. Kit Tyler is a fictional character, but there are some real historical characters in the book, and the political situation involving the colony’s charter is real.

The book is a Newbery Award Winner. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

The time period of the story is a time of witchcraft suspicions, like those that sparked the infamous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts (1692-1693). Historically, suspicions of witchcraft and actual witch trials were more likely to occur in communities suffering from internal divisions and instability, especially when the community suffered some further calamity with no apparent explanation, such as a sudden epidemic of illness (possibly ergotism in Salem), heaping panic on top of existing community tension and anger. Then, the community would take out its feelings on someone who was generally disliked by a majority of community members, usually targeting someone who lacked resources to fight back against the allegations of witchcraft, like a poor woman or a widow. Basically, the community wanted someone who could serve as a convenient scapegoat (as described by the Salem Witch Museum) or whipping boy for the commu,nity’s roiling emotions and real problems that they either didn’t want to address or lacked the means to address. Even when it became obvious in hindsight that they had killed innocent people, most of those involved wouldn’t even suffer feeling guilty or bad about themselves for murder because there was always Satan and his trickery to blame for their own actions and decisions. No one could prove that they hadn’t been honestly deceived by the devil, so they would not be held responsible by their friends, who liked them personally and had been actively involved in the entire episode themselves. The community would already be accomplished at mental blame-shifting, so their minds would be relatively untroubled by personal responsibility. Knowing that they didn’t experience regret or remorse for their actions, that they felt right and good about their personal choices, doesn’t help the people they killed, the families of their victims, or people vicariously experiencing the injustice through history or historical novels. Miscarriages of justice are deeply frustrating, which is why I don’t normally like this type of story, although in the past, I’ve been fascinated by the historical background of this incidents, which is why I wrote a couple of papers on witchcraft trials, both American and European, in college, back when I majored in history. (Don’t make the mistake of saying anyone was burned at the stake for witchcraft in America. It’s not true, not even at Salem. The accused were hanged, and some were pressed to death with heavy rocks, but nobody was burned at the stake for witchcraft in the American colonies. That happened in Europe but not America, and it always annoys me when people get that wrong.)

In the book, the community in Wethersfield has all of the historical elements necessary for producing a witch hysteria. From the beginning, Kit notes the the political divisions in the community. Particularly, her uncle is at odds with other prominent community members about specific local issues and the amount of loyalty owed to the king, and there is also a conflict over the colony’s charter. Even though Kit would be the side of those favoring the king, more so than her uncle, the feelings that community members have about her uncle’s political position would give them a natural prejudice and suspicion toward what they would view as the strangest and most problematic member of her uncle’s family. Then, there is a sudden sickness that causes community members to die. The community also has an outcast who would make a convenient scapegoat, Hannah Tupper. When Kit first hears about her, her cousin Judith tells her that some people already think that she may be a witch. As both a widow and a Quaker outcast, she would have been unable to save herself from the townspeople without Kit’s help. When Kit provided that help, and the community lost their first choice of scapegoat, they picked Kit as their second choice, an acceptable substitute.

On the one hand, my own anger at the injustices of the past leads me to return the witch hunters’ judgement with some harsh judgement of my own. Some of the world’s most judgemental people are so unaware of any other emotions besides their own that they are shocked to discover that other people actually have minds and feelings and an equal ability to look back at them and assess what they see. I suppose that these people wouldn’t have guessed what future people would think when they looked back at them because their views of themselves wouldn’t match what independent observers, seeing their actions and the consequences across time, would see. Human beings often have internal fantasies about themselves where they are more brave, clever, attractive, and on the side of moral right than they actually are, and I think the witch hunters are a definite example of that. I don’t like people who wriggle out of personal responsibility, no matter why they do it, and if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, I only consider people as “good” as their own personal behavior and the way they affect other people around them. Nobody’s “good” simply because they say they are or like to think of themselves that way, especially if their real actions say otherwise. Actions speak louder than words. There are many things about the people in the community in this story (as well as in real historical communities) that don’t live up to my high personal standards. Offending me isn’t a criminal offense, and there aren’t many consequences for doing it, but it does provoke a lot of griping.

I think that there’s little point in having standards if you don’t actively live them, and although I think some of that sentiment would have been in the witch hunters’ thoughts, I further believe that everyone has an equal responsibility for both the standards they have and how they choose to demonstrate them. If people would give more thought to the “hows” of their actions and the consequences of what they do, I think there would be fewer problems in the world in general. I also think letting people get away with harmful behavior and not at least clearly criticizing it sets a terrible precedent that is likely to lead to further harm. In the book, once Kit’s name is cleared, she is inclined to forgive her accusers, although she is offered the opportunity to charge them with slander. I understand the reasons why Kit would decide not to pursue these charges, but at the same time, there is clearly one person in the story who was more responsible than the others for the charges brought against Kit and who has also been shown to be hostile toward her own innocent young daughter, and this person does not receive punishment for her actions in this story. I did feel better that the father of the child, realizing that his wife has been wrong about their daughter, falsely labeling her as a half-wit and keeping her from the education that she should have, stands up for the child and her continued education in the end, but I still kind of wanted to see the rest of the community give the mother more of a direct, official warning or censure to bring it home to her that there would be consequences for further misbehavior on her part because of the serious consequences, even possible death, that she almost imposed on others. Sometimes, I feel like this sort of conflict comes to an end too quickly and easily in stories with kind of an air of “We’re all good here now” without some of the underlying problems really being confronted or resolved. It happens sometimes like this in real life, but it’s not very satisfying, and just because some people say “We’re all good here now” doesn’t mean that everything is really fine and everybody involved is really fine. I’m never comfortable with pretending that things are okay that are clearly not. The mother of the child seems to have some mental issues of her own and some kind of emotional conflict over her own child that gives her a warped view of reality. That isn’t fully explained or resolved in the story, probably because the other characters don’t fully understand it, either.

Perceptions are important, but a person’s perceptions don’t stop reality from being, well, real. I know that, in real life, all or many of the supposed witch threats probably seemed real to the individual accusers in the middle of their personal panic, but the reality of the situation is that they did a great deal of harm to innocent people who were unable to stop them. In fact, they specifically targeted people they knew couldn’t stop them, which sounds pretty calculating. They did it because of their own personal problems and the demons that lived in their own minds, whether or not those mental demons had any supernatural help. It’s frustrating because you can’t communicate completely rationally with determinedly irrational people any more than you communicate can with dead people or fictional people and convince them to change their minds. There are times when there’s just nothing you can do when there is no way for the other person to receive new information or they’re just determined not to and no way to help someone who not only doesn’t want help but doesn’t think they need it and would be deeply offended and suspicious at the mere offer. On the other hand, the psychology of such incidents is kind of interesting.

Years ago, I attended a talk given by a team of professional ghost hunters where they said that people who call them to investigate hauntings in their homes tend to be people who are already troubled about something else in their life, such as money problems, marital problems, health problems (mental and/or physical), problems with their kids, or some combination of these. Then, when something happens that seems strange and inexplicable, they get startled by it because they’re already on edge. People who are more secure in their lives and are generally happy might brush off one or two odd things that happen as just rare oddities and forget about them, but people who are already upset about something else tend to seize on them. They become hyper-vigilant. They start noticing more and more odd things that they might otherwise have overlooked and draw connections between these things in their minds, actively looking for more. Soon, they have themselves convinced that they’ve got a full-blown haunting in their house, when at least some of what they’ve experienced is just the ghosts in their own minds. In one case, they said that a man was troubled by a mask he bought at a garage sale. He thought it was cursed because, soon after he got it, a bunch of bad things happened to him. (As I recall, his wife divorced him, he lost his job, and he had health problems.) The ghost hunters said, “To be fair, we don’t think that this mask was cursed when the man bought it. We think it became cursed because he bought it, and he continually blamed it for every bad thing that happened to him around that time, even though these things were probably going to happen anyway.” This is basically the same process that leads to witchcraft trials, except that in witchcraft trials, it happens on a larger scale. Witchcraft trials involve whole troubled communities instead of just a single troubled household.

This still happens in modern communities, but in places where people don’t believe in witches, it’s more likely to take the form of a kind of moral panic, where people get upset about a possible infiltration or excess of people seen as some kind of disruptive moral deviants, rather than a witch hysteria. In both cases, the community experiences extreme fear or paranoia about some perceived threat, but in moral panics, the perceived threat comes from some part of human society, like Communists during the Red Scare or some variety of criminal, not a supernatural force. Actually, I believe that we’ve been living in a state of moral panic in the US for at least the last few years, probably longer, on more than one front. I can’t help but notice that much of what’s been happening in modern times fits all the criteria and follows the typical stages of a moral panic, particularly the parts about the “hidden dangers of modern technology“, a belief in “a ‘hidden world’ of anonymous evil people“, and fear of an “evil stranger manipulating the innocent” (which, weirdly, is what I think is behind the willingness of some people to believe conspiracy theories in the first place as they accept stories that come from apparent “friends”, or at least people who look like people they might want to get a beer with or something – some people use them as their primary source of media, thus checking another box in the requirements for a moral panic and leading up to the final point). In my experience, the fear is particularly about evil people who want to “control” others and tell them what to do, the ultimate community boogeymen where I live. I’ve heard a lot about it for years from real people who habitually like to tell me what to do and how I should feel about things themselves.

This is kind of a digression from the story, but I put it here to illustrate that we might not have to question how people can get themselves into community hysteria over perceived threats, most of which prove to be not that threatening in the long term. Most people might not believe in witches anymore, but they’ve found plenty of creative substitutes for the same basic process over the years. A complete list would take too long to compile, but if you spend any amount of time on social media, you can come up with several “evil” or “deviant” groups or ideological concepts that people hate and fear in the space of a few minutes. Thanks to modern technology, you don’t have to wonder what’s going on in people’s heads. You can Google it. Many people will just tell you right up front what boogeymen are lurking in their minds, and they’ll gladly share that information with untold numbers of total strangers through Twitter, Facebook, and Quora, feeling validated and supported if faceless usernames agree and spread their stories, no matter why they do, and often raging against sinister forces trying to spy on them at the same time. It’s not rational, but it is recognizable. I put it to you that a few moments of honest self-reflection, considering not how you feel but what you’re actually going to do and what it’s going to mean in real terms, can be the stitch in time that saves nine. There are dangers to modern technology, but I don’t think they’re really that hidden. They’re the same dangers human society has caused itself in the past, just much faster, and they come mostly from the demons in the minds of the people involved. There is nothing online that wasn’t designed, written, promoted, spread around, and ultimately accepted by individual humans. It’s when people lose touch with the realities of the situation and the consequences that their actions have for real people around them in the real world that I really worry. It seems to me that blaming the Internet or the media for the things people have decided to do themselves has become the 21st century version of “The devil made me do it.”

My Sister the Witch

My Sister the Witch by Ellen Conford, 1995.

Norman Newman is convinced that his sister, Elaine, is a witch. When he goes to her room one evening to call her to dinner, he catches her all dressed in black and chanting strange words.

Norman likes to read horror and mystery books, and he uses some of the techniques that he has learned from reading his favorite mystery stories to investigate his sister. Some of these techniques don’t work as well for Norman as they do for the characters in his books, partly because he doesn’t really know how they work (like which end of a glass you’re supposed to put against a door when you’re trying to listen in on someone) and partly because the characters and situations in books are fictional and some of the things they do don’t work that well in real life.

Early in the story, Norman uses one of his scary stories for a book report for school, and his teacher tells him that she wants him to start to read other types of books. She makes him write an extra book report, telling him that he has a week to read something outside of his usual genre and report on it. That incident and some other pieces of bad luck cause Norman to think that maybe Elaine really is a witch and that she put a curse on him, just like a witch in the book he just read.

Norman’s friend, Milo, thinks that Norman’s imagination is just running away with him. It’s happened before because of the scary stories he reads. Once, he thought that their teacher might be an alien.

When Norman has a brief streak of good luck, he starts to think that whatever curse Elaine put on him may be over, but then, he gets sick to his stomach. He goes to the library to get a book for his new book report, and he also gets a non-fiction book about witches. Then, he overhears Elaine talking to her friend, Deirdre, about something being powerful and scaring Deirdre’s sister. The two of them begin chanting together. Norman decides that he was right about Elaine being a witch and that Deirdre must be a witch, too.

After some research, Norman and Milo learn that, to get rid of the effects of a magic spell, they need to learn the words to the spell and say it backwards. Norman doesn’t remember the whole spell from when he heard Elaine say it, so Milo says that he’ll just have to look for a copy of the spell in her room. The book they consult also says that a spell can be neutralized if the person it was cast on duplicates it, which means gathering all the materials used in the spell, but Norman doesn’t know where he would find things like newts’ eyes and frogs’ toes. Either way, it looks like Norman’s going to need a copy of Elaine’s spell. However, even when he gets it and tries to break the curse, things still go wrong. What can Norman do to get rid of this bad luck spell?

I particularly liked the character of Milo in the story. Milo uses a wheelchair because he was hit by a car when he was young and can’t walk. Norman notes that, although Milo can’t use his legs, he gets around very well in his wheelchair and that he has very strong arms. Milo is also more level-headed than Norman, pointing out to him how he has allowed his imagination to run away with him in the past.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Spoilers and Other Thoughts

I thought that the secret behind Elaine’s spell was pretty obvious from the beginning because the book repeatedly says that Elaine wants to be an actress. It reminded me of other stories I’ve seen where someone’s playacting was mistaken for some real life danger. Overall, I enjoyed the book, even though I figured out what was going on pretty quickly. Kids might be in suspense for longer.

By the end, Norman still hasn’t learned his lesson because the next scary story he reads leaves him looking at his dog suspiciously. There is at least one sequel to this story called Norman Newman and the Werewolf of Walnut Street.

The Witches of Hopper Street

The Witches of Hopper Street by Linda Gondosch, 1986.

Kelly McCoy and her friend, Jennifer, are offended that another girl from school, Rae Jean, is having a Halloween party and didn’t invite them. Jennifer says that they could just throw their own party on Halloween, but Kelly says that’s no good because everyone else they know is going to Rae Jean’s. It isn’t so much that Kelly really likes Rae Jean; it’s more that she hates being excluded.

The girls talk about what they want to dress as for Halloween, and Kelly suggests that they be witches because she’s fascinated by the witches she saw in a play of MacBeth. Kelly also has a book called “Magic and Witchcraft”, and she says that they could study the book and become real witches. Jennifer doesn’t see the attraction of becoming a witch, but Kelly promises that they’ll only perform white magic, where you use magic to perform good deeds, instead of black magic, which involves cursing people. Although, she might make an exception for just a few little black magic spells against Rae Jean. Jennifer says that Kelly can’t be serious, but Kelly says that she is because it’s awful being the only ones in the sixth grade not invited to Rae Jean’s party. Jennifer points out that Adelaide also wasn’t invited. The girls know that Adelaide isn’t popular because she’s overly tall and awkward and much smarter than the other kids. Then, Kelly gets an idea – there were three witches in MacBeth, so maybe they should invite Adelaide to become a witch with them.

When the girls see Adelaide on her way to Rae Jean’s house to help her with her math homework, they stop her and suggest to her that she join them as witches. Kelly tells her that Rae Jean is dangerous and that dangerous things will happen at her party. Adelaide says that she’s not going to the party anyway. Then, Kelly pretends to tell the future with a deck of cards, predicting that there will be a mysterious death in 24 hours. Her prediction comes shockingly true when Rae Jean’s cat kills her pet parakeet.

Kelly knows that the parakeet’s death was partly her fault for taking him out of his cage when Rae Jean brought her cat around, showing off her prize-winning pet, but she also blames Rae Jean for bringing her cat to her house in the first place, and the reason why they took the bird out of his cage was that Rae Jean was goading them about how dumb the bird was. (I think that the kids’ mother shouldn’t even have let Rae Jean bring her cat into the house. The other kids said that they didn’t want to talk to her, but the mother insisted that they let her in because she’s a “nice” girl. That was an irresponsible thing for the mother to do, and she’s not a good example to her children. When you have a pet in the house, you have to make the pet’s safety a priority, especially over being polite to someone who is rude and insulting anyway. Rae Jean shouldn’t have been allowed to bring a predatory pet into their house, uninvited, simply because she wanted to and the mother didn’t have the guts to say no and enforce some house rules. Of course, this is one of those annoying incidents in books that’s used to move the plot forward. If the parents acted anything like mine, it wouldn’t have happened, and this would be a different story.) Adelaide is impressed that Kelly’s prediction came true, and she agrees to be a witch with Kelly and Jennifer.

Kelly walks the others through rituals for being a witch, like signing their names in a Black Book (really, it’s an old brown science notebook), preparing their broomsticks (they’re supposed to be rubbed with the fat of a newborn piglet and belladonna, but the best they can do is strips of bacon and dieffenbachia), and preparing magical rings to protect themselves from evil creatures (Kelly got hers at an estate sale so she’d have one that belonged to a dead person, but the others just got their rings from the quarter machines at the supermarket). The girls pledge to keep their “coven” secret, but then someone leaves a message for them that says, “Midnight is the witching hour. Then you shall be in my power.” All of the girls deny having written it. So, who did? Who else knows about their witchy activities?

Kelly still hasn’t given up her plans to use this witch business to ruin Rae Jeans’ party. She soon acquires a new pet, a skunk, from her brother Ben’s friend Buster, whose father is a veterinarian. She calls the skunk Cinnamon and declares that he is her familiar. To keep the boys quiet about their activities, they have to let Ben and Buster join the coven as warlocks. As an initiation, all of the witches and warlocks have to drink salt water and eat beef liver. Kelly’s mother is perplexed by some of the odd things that they do, but she doesn’t question them too much, and none of the adults ever discover that the kids sometimes sneak out at night to perform rituals. (I could never have gotten away with this sort of stuff as a kid because my mother was always the type to ask a lot of questions about everything and get specific answers.)

Kelly gets the idea of making a voodoo doll of Rae Jean, using an old sweater of hers that Rae Jean’s mother gave her because she helped to get a box of old clothes down from the attic for a sale and because Rae Jean told her that the sweater was scratchy. To get Rae Jean’s hair and nails, the witches open a “spa” business at Kelly’s house. They succeed in getting hair and nail clippings, but Rae Jean gets scared away when their “spa” treatment involves mud that they just dug up in the backyard and has a worm in it. After they make the doll, they decide it looks really awful and sticking toothpicks in it is creepy, so they take the toothpicks out and get rid of it. Instead, they decide to focus on giving Rae Jean the “evil eye” – basically staring at her to make her feel uncomfortable. (That one works whether you’re a witch or not.) When Rae Jean and some others in class get sick, some of the other kids start to believe rumors that the girls have spread about a “poison plague.”

Eventually, Halloween comes, and Kelly gets the idea for her, Jennifer, and Adelaide to use their witch act while passing out candy to the trick-or-treaters. They put the candy in their “cauldron” (an old camping pot), give themselves fantastical names, and perform chants while handing out candy. They have fun with that, but they still feel left out of the party, so they decide to try one last witchy trick on Rae Jean. They decide to brew up a love potion (just apricot juice with honey, and they even think it tastes good themselves), sneak into the party as fortune tellers, and slip the potion into the party punch. Rae Jean’s mother is amused by their fortune telling act and lets them into the party, although Rae Jean isn’t happy to see them.

When Kelly’s new pet skunk gets loose in the party, there is some momentary chaos before Kelly manages to explain that the skunk is deodorized and can’t spray. During their time at the party, the girls learn the true identity of their mystery message writer and have an honest talk with Rae Jean about their feelings and apologize for the witchy things they’ve been doing. Rae Jean also tells them the reason why she didn’t invite them and how left out she felt when she didn’t get invited to a big party that Kelly had soon after she moved to the neighborhood. Rae Jean comes to realize how much she has provoked the other girls into hating her with some of her behavior, and she apologizes bringing cat to Kelly’s house and killing her parakeet. However, Kelly is also forced to acknowledge that she’s also provoked Rae Jean with her quick temper and attempts at revenge. All of the girls owe each other some apologies, and they make up. Kelly and her friends promise to give up all the witch stuff.

However, before they cut it out entirely, they have one last thing to do. Adelaide read about an old superstition that explains how to see a real witch at midnight on Halloween night, and before Halloween is over, the whole “coven” decides that they have to try it. What they see is a bit startling, and although it has an apparently logical explanation, gives the kids an appropriately witchy scare. Could there possibly be a real witch in their neighborhood?

I didn’t like the parts of this story about dead animals. I hated the part where the parakeet was killed, and later, I felt sorry for a cat that died (of natural causes, and it was a sickly stray, not Rae Jean’s cat). I never like stories where animals die, especially through human cruelty or carelessness. Yet, I have to admit that I have a particular attachment to this book, which I remember reading when I was ten years old. Some of their rituals are a little gross, but as I a kid, I think I was attracted to the idea of having a secret, mysterious club and intrigued by the identity of the mysterious message-writer. At the end of the story, they think they know who wrote the note, but their last midnight ritual causes them to have second thoughts.

This book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

My Halloween Story About My History With This Book:

This particular book and I have a history. This book was important to me as a kid because it sparked something formative, but to tell you what that something was, I have a confession to make: When I was a kid, I wanted to be a witch. I was in high school before the first Harry Potter books appeared, so it wasn’t about that. No, my introduction to witches was The Wizard of Oz, my favorite movie when I was five years old. I liked Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Dorothy was my favorite character, but I liked Glinda, too. Later, when I saw the movie of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, my interest in witches increased. I also read The Blue-Nosed Witch when I was young, and I was hooked. For a portion of my early childhood, my favorite Halloween costume was a traditional witch costume.

I didn’t want to curse people or be an evil witch, like the Wicked Witch of the West, in spite of my traditional witch costume with the pointy hat. No, I wanted to be a Good Witch and maybe ride a broom and bring suits of armor to life and maybe defeat Nazis in a way that is far less gross than melting them, like in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. I had discernment. I had standards. I also had a fear of heights after falling off the monkey bars when I was four, so that probably should have been a clue that broomstick-riding was out for me, but when you’ve got magic, I guess these things aren’t much of a problem. I can’t say that I was really ambitious about wanting magical powers because I didn’t really do anything to acquire them, it was just that I kind of liked the idea … except for that one time, and that’s what this little side story is leading up to.

When I was about ten years old, I read this book with a friend, and we were both enchanted with the idea of making up our own rituals and becoming “witches” and maybe trying some spells on Halloween, just to see if magic works. I only had sort of a vague notion of what kind of spells that we could do. I guess I was picturing something like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, where you recite a rhyme and something is supposed to happen, but I didn’t know any real spells, just movie stuff, and I was clever enough to realize that the stuff in movies probably wasn’t real. Naturally, being a bookish person, I decided that the best way to learn more was at the library. PSAs on tv always told you to “Read more about it“, whatever “it” was. (This was the early 1990s, and I didn’t have access to the Internet yet. That wasn’t even an option.) If anybody had some real spells books, especially ones placed at a convenient height on shelves that a not-very-tall ten-year-old could reach, it would be my local public library, right? I was actually surprised myself when I found one in the library catalog. I really didn’t think it was going to be that easy. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was when I actually picked up the book and opened it.

Now, I have to admit here that I didn’t read the whole book, and years later, I can’t remember the title or even what the cover looked like. I kind of wish I did because there are people I would like to show this book to just to prove that it actually exists. When I told my mother about it later, she thought that I dreamed the whole thing, but I swear I didn’t.

This book did have “spells” of various kinds. I picked one from the table of contents (I forget what, but something that sounded like something two ten-year-old girls might want to do on Halloween) and looked at the instructions. It was disgusting. It involved things like animal entrails, which I wouldn’t have known where to get and wouldn’t have wanted to touch even if someone handed me a free bag full. There were other things about animal parts on different pages that disgusted me, too. Under no circumstances was I going to kill cute animals just to do some dumb trick on Halloween, and I wouldn’t have wanted these animals parts even if someone else had done the dirty work of getting them. I wasn’t a vegetarian, but these were definitely not things I could just buy at the grocery store, or better yet, cooked and yummy with a side of fries and a plastic toy.

As I was staring at this book, I suddenly realized that I had no desire to do anything it described and that I was never going to do anything it said. Then, I had a worse thought: someone else must have thought this was a good idea, or they wouldn’t have written it down. Maybe I didn’t want to mess with animal entrails and body parts to gain magical powers, but someone else obviously would. What kind of person would do such a thing? Whatever kind it was, it wasn’t me, and I knew it. The image of the type of person I would have to be in order to do any of this, in order to take any of this seriously, disturbed and repulsed me more than just what was written in the book itself. I slammed the book shut, shoved it back on the shelf, and ran away. I never saw it again, although I did try to find it again once to show it to my mother so that I could prove that I wasn’t dreaming. It wasn’t even in the catalog anymore then.

My guess is that, whatever this book was, either someone stole it from the library (it is the sort of thing an aspiring evil witch might do) or lost or damaged it or some parent or librarian realized that this might not be the best book for children and had it removed from the shelves. Since then, I’ve wondered who put that in the kids’ section in the first place. I’m not fond of censorship, but I have to admit that this book was pretty dang gross and creepy. Was that spell book really serious, or did I miss some introductory part that would have explained that it was all part of some larger ghost story or something? What was the point of the book? I’ve often wondered. All I really remember now is that it was in the first row of children’s non-fiction books at the library, probably the 100 or 200 section of the Dewey Decimal System.

I’m actually glad I did look at it, though, because it made me realize a few things about myself. I realized that there were limits to the things that I was willing to do and that I had the power to say no when something was beyond my limits. My friend was disappointed and thought I was a bit of a wimp for chickening out on our witch experiment so soon and not even showing her the book, but I didn’t care that much. I was firm. I also came to realize that sometimes, it’s the things we don’t do or won’t do that define who we really are. In the end, it may not matter what that book actually was so much as that it left me with a stronger sense of who I was. I should have paid more attention to the part in the Bedknobs and Broomsticks movie where Miss Price said that she realized a long time ago that she could never really be a witch because nobody who felt the way she did about “Poisoned Dragon’s Liver” could be a real witch. I came to appreciate the sentiment.

This experience didn’t completely scare me away from stories with witches in them, as evidenced by the Halloween stories I cover here. I was born close to Halloween, and I like the holiday because I enjoy the imaginative costumes and playing pretend. (Not to mention chocolate. I also enjoy chocolate.) I enjoyed the Harry Potter books, too. But, I know where the dividing line is between pretend and real. It doesn’t trouble me now because I already put the book back on the shelf and said no when it was asking too much, and some decisions stick for life. I don’t worry too much about giving fantasy books to kids, either. Everyone has decisions to make in life about who and what they want to be, and I figure that the younger generations might as well learn where the dividing line between fantasy and reality lies early in life. A bit of a scare now and then might even help them to think more deeply about life’s consequences and make better choices.

If that spell book had been less scary and disgusting, like something that Wiccans use that involves pretty things like crystals and herbs instead of entrails, I actually might have tried a few spells as a child, probably raiding the spice drawer in the kitchen or dismantling my rock collection for spell ingredients. However, Jenny Nicholson did a YouTube video, demonstrating how that typically goes for the aspiring witch. I thought it was hilarious, especially after my childhood escapade. I doubt that I would have had quite the range of objects that Jenny describes, and my parents would have been mad at me if I tried to throw eggs at trees, but I probably would have achieved similar levels of results if my friend and I had actually gone through with our experiment that Halloween. As an adult, I mostly think that things like that are more psychological tricks than anything else, and I find descriptions of them amusing now.

Anyway, that’s my creepy experience with “real” magic. If anyone thinks that they know what that creepy spell book was, feel free to tell me. I don’t feel like I have anything to prove magic-wise, but I still have people I’d like to convince that I didn’t just imagine that the book exists.

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E. L. Konigsburg, 1967.

Elizabeth tells the story about how she first met her friend Jennifer one Halloween. Elizabeth is new in town, and doesn’t know many people yet. She doesn’t have any friends to walk with to or from school, and she encounters Jennifer in the woods she passes through on her way to school. When they meet, Elizabeth is dressed as a Pilgrim for the school’s Halloween parade. Jennifer also happens to be wearing a Pilgrim costume, and she’s sitting in a tree. Elizabeth sees that Jennifer is about to lose a shoe because it’s too big for her, so she impulsively pushes the shoe back onto Jennifer’s foot. Jennifer says that witches don’t lose things, and Elizabeth tells her that she’s not dressed like a witch because she’s wearing a Pilgrim costume. Jennifer says that this is what real witches dress like, not like the silly pointed hat costumes. (It becomes more clear later that Jennifer is referring to the accused witches at Salem, Massachusetts.) Elizabeth admires Jennifer’s costume because it looks more authentically old-fashioned than hers does, like a real antique. Elizabeth points out that they’ll have to hurry or be late to school, and Jennifer says that she’ll walk with her in exchange for the cookies Elizabeth is carrying. Elizabeth gives her the cookies because she isn’t hungry and badly needs some company. Jennifer makes it barely on time to her class, but Elizabeth is slightly late because she’s in a different class that’s further down the hall.

Elizabeth describes the Halloween parade at school, and you can tell that this book was written decades ago because there are kids wearing cardboard boxes because their costume is a pack of cigarettes, which would never happen at a 21st century school. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a kid, nobody would have dressed as a pack of cigarettes. There were a lot of anti-smoking campaigns when I was young, our teachers and most of our parents wouldn’t have allowed it, and with more exciting things to be, like super heroes and Ninja Turtles as well as the traditional witches, ballerinas, robots, vampires, and monsters, why the heck would somebody want to be a pack of cigarettes anyway? Lung cancer may be scary, but dressing as a pack of cancer sticks isn’t exactly fun Halloween scary. If you want to be a box of something, at least pick crayons so you can tell people you’re the sharpest crayon in the box. But, I digress.

At the parade, Elizabeth sees Jennifer unsnap the tutu of school mean girl Cynthia, who is dressed as a ballerina, so it falls down. It’s not a serious embarrassment because Cynthia’s still wearing her leotard underneath. Still, Cynthia is one of those two-faced kids who are good-looking and act like perfect angels when adults are watching but turn into nasty little monsters when the adults look away, so this minor embarrassment pleases Elizabeth and many of the other kids. Jennifer also passes a note to Elizabeth to meet her for trick-or-treating that evening, telling her to bring two bags. As the students parade across the stage for the costume contest, Jennifer amazes everyone by wearing a paper bag over her head that doesn’t have any eye holes cut into it, yet she doesn’t have any trouble walking, somehow seeing where she’s going or knowing where to go anyway. This is one of the odd things that Jennifer does that makes Elizabeth wonder if she really does have powers of some kind.

When the girls meet for trick-or-treating, Jennifer tells Elizabeth to give her the bigger bag of the two bags she brought. It’s a bit rude, but Elizabeth is fascinated by Jennifer and lets it go. Also, Jennifer has brought a small wagon with her. Jennifer has invented and mastered an act to get extra candy. At each house, she acts weak and breathless and asks for a drink of water. When the home owners give her a drink of water, she drops her empty bag, so the home owners will feel sorry for her and give her more candy. Then, out of sight of the home owner, Jennifer empties her bag of candy into the little wagon and does the same performance at the next house. Elizabeth wonders how Jennifer is able to drink so much water, but they collect an amazing amount candy from Jennifer’s act.

After Halloween, Jennifer tells Elizabeth to meet her at the library on Saturday, and she invites Elizabeth to become her apprentice witch. Elizabeth thinks it over and decides to accept. Jennifer begins leading Elizabeth through a series of rituals to make her into a witch. The first ritual involves both of them putting a drop of their blood on an old key that Jennifer was wearing around her neck. Afterward, Jennifer gives the old key to Elizabeth to wear. This ritual is kind of like a friendship pact.

Jennifer gives Elizabeth books to read from the library about witches and tells her to eat a raw egg every day for a week (she does it by mixing it into a milkshake), insisting that she also bring her a hard-boiled egg. From there, they progress through a list of other strange foods. When their grade starts rehearsing for their Christmas play, the food of the week is raw onions, which Elizabeth happens to love, in spite of being a notoriously picky eater. People notice the onions because Elizabeth is supposed to be a puppy in their school play that the princess played by nasty Cynthia gets for Christmas, and Cynthia can’t bear to get close to her.

Being Jennifer’s apprentice also means putting up with her rudeness and bossiness. When the girls decide to try making an ointment to change themselves into animals, they argue about what animals they’re going to be. Sometimes, Elizabeth finds Jennifer difficult to deal with because she isn’t considerate of her feelings, but she’s also fascinating because Jennifer is a serious reader and likes to talk about a wide range of interesting things, from witchcraft trials to Vincent Van Gogh to shipwrecks to the guillotines used in the French Revolution to secret codes. Their rituals continue through Christmas and the New Year and into the spring, with Jennifer promoting Elizabeth to Journeymen Witch and assigning her various “taboos”, things that she isn’t supposed to do.

For most of the book, Elizabeth doesn’t tell her mother about being friends with Jennifer. Jennifer, as a witch, is rather odd, and Elizabeth’s mother wants her to be friends with nice, normal children. In particular, she wants her to be friends with Cynthia because, like other adults, Elizabeth’s mother has been taken in by Cynthia’s two-faced act and thinks that Cynthia is a sweet, well-behaved little girl. When Cynthia invites her to her birthday party, Elizabeth knows that the invitation was really from Cynthia’s mother because she and Cynthia aren’t friends. However, Elizabeth’s mother makes her accept the invitation. The party is a trial because, thanks to Jennifer’s taboos, there are many party activities that Elizabeth can’t do (no eating cake, no pin-the-tail-on-the donkey because she can’t touch pins, etc.), but Elizabeth decides to make the most of it and enjoy being an oddball. Elizabeth has some fun when she realizes that she can act mysterious and witchy about knowing certain things and winning at the games she plays. She knows where the treasure is in the treasure hunt because it was just behind a pillow on the couch and she accidentally sat on it earlier, she wins at the clothespin drop game because she’s shorter than the other girls and finds the game easier, and she knows who brought which gift to the party without looking at the tags because she was the first to arrive and remembered what everyone else brought when they came. Of course, she doesn’t explain this to anyone, she just acts mysterious and witchy, like Jennifer. When she talks to Jennifer about the party, Jennifer acts like Elizabeth has actually used her witch powers to do those things, but Elizabeth insists that they were just ordinary incidents and her good memory for remembering the presents. Jennifer seems a little disappointed that Elizabeth doesn’t seem to see what she’s getting at with the witch business, and Elizabeth is disappointed that Jennifer doesn’t seem interested in the gossip she’s collected about the “normal”, non-witchy girls at the party.

The girls get a toad, which they name Hilary Ezra, their first compromise with each other by combining the two names that they wanted. Jennifer says that the toad will help them with their flying spell. They treat the toad like a pet, giving it insects that they’ve caught and measuring how far he can jump. They both love Hilary Ezra, but when Jennifer plans to add Hilary Ezra to their flying potion, Elizabeth refuses to allow it. She makes Jennifer set Hilary Ezra free. Jennifer tells Elizabeth that she’ll never be a witch because she’s too sentimental and dismisses her as her student witch.

Elizabeth is angry at Jennifer and thinks that their friendship is over as well as the witch business. However, after thinking it over, Elizabeth realizes something: Jennifer actually wanted Elizabeth to stop her from putting the toad in the pot with the other ingredients because she changed the order in which the ingredients were added from the order that was given in MacBeth, saving the toad for last and making a big show of dangling him over the pot, waiting for Elizabeth to stop her. Still, it makes Elizabeth mad that Jennifer made her stop her when she could have stopped herself and probably would have if Elizabeth hadn’t intervened.

Elizabeth has a right to be angry, but she also goes back to being lonely, and she doesn’t like that. While she’s alone at her family’s apartment one day, she spends some time looking at the greenhouses on a nearby farm called the Samellson Estate, and some of Jennifer’s cryptic comments about Hilary Ezra’s origins and her father being a “plant wizard” fall into place. The more Elizabeth thinks about it, the more the things Jennifer acquired for their “spells” make sense and the more Jennifer herself begins to make sense. Then, Jennifer makes the first move in repairing their friendship.

The book is a Newbery Honor book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

One of the important points about this story that helps make Jennifer more understandable as a character is that she’s African American and this book was written in the 1960s. The book doesn’t refer to Jennifer’s race or describe her physical appearance apart from her clothes until about halfway through the story, although she does appear in pictures before that. The 1960s was the time of the Civil Rights Movement, and in 1967, when this book was first published, Martin Luther King, Jr. was still live. School desegregations were a recent issue. The only time in the book that Elizabeth mentions race is when she notices Jennifer’s mother at the performance of the school play for the PTA, and she says that she knew that the woman must be Jennifer’s mother because “she was the only Negro mother there.” This one line says, without really saying it, that Jennifer is the only African American kid in her class because, if there was even one other, the black woman in the audience could have been somebody else’s mother.

When the story begins, each of the girls has a reason to feel like an outcast – Elizabeth because she’s new at school and doesn’t know anybody and Jennifer because she’s the only black kid. Both of them are lonely, and they’re actually a good fit for each other in terms of their interests, but in order to become real friends, they have to learn to relate to each other without the cover of their made-up witchcraft rituals. After Elizabeth realizes where Jennifer actually lives and what her life is really like, and Jennifer shows that she cares about Elizabeth’s feelings, the two of them are able to bond as friends instead of witches.

Elizabeth never explains why Jennifer came up with the witch idea in the first place, and the book ends soon after their friendship is repaired, so it’s left up to the readers’ imaginations. It might have something to do with feeling like an outcast because of her race and because her father is a blue-collar worker when the kids who live in the nearby apartment building are the children of white-collar workers. Because Jennifer feels different from other kids and often spends time alone, reading books and playing games of pretend, she might have felt uncomfortable explaining herself to Elizabeth, fearing that she might not accept her. Training Elizabeth to be a witch gave the two girls a reason to see each other, adventures to share, and something interesting to talk about. As long as Elizabeth needed Jennifer to teach her witch things, Jennifer would feel confident that she’d stick around as a friend. The girls gave that up when Jennifer realized that Elizabeth would be her friend anyway and might actually like her better just as Jennifer instead of a witch.

Mystery of the Witches Bridge

Mystery of the Witches’ Bridge by Barbee Oliver Carleton, 1967.

Thirteen-year-old Dan Pride is an orphan. His father was an international correspondent, and during his early years, Dan lived in different European countries, as his parents traveled around to his father’s assignments. However, three years ago, his parents died in a plane crash. Since then, Dan has been living in a British boarding school. Now, he has returned to the United States to live with his father’s brother, Uncle Julian. Dan doesn’t know what to think about his new town because it’s very different from everything that he’s known before, but he likes the idea of belonging to a family once again because he has been lonely since his parents died.

The Pride family lives in a New England seacoast town. They were one of the founding families of the town in Puritan times, but Dan discovers that the local people aren’t particularly friendly with the Pride family. Billy Ben Corey, a man who works for his Uncle Julian, explains that the Pride family has been rather stand-offish with the townspeople, and there are also rumors and stories about witches that go back to Puritan times. Billy Ben says that most of the modern locals don’t really know all the details of the witch incidents, but the vague rumors that have circulated about the Pride family have caused the townspeople to treat them with suspicion.

This sounds like a somewhat sinister beginning to Dan’s life in York, Massachusetts as he comes to understand how much of life there is governed by the past relationships between the oldest families of the area. Billy Ben tells him that the Coreys have worked for the Prides for generations, but relations between the Prides and the Bishop family haven’t been good and that Dan should avoid them.

Dan presses Billy Ben for more information, and Billy Ben tells him the story of how one of his ancestors, Samuel Pride, was accused of witchcraft back in Puritan times. Some unfortunate happenings at the time, which were probably just the result of bad luck and bad weather, were blamed on him because he was kind of an odd, temperamental person. He was known for playing the fiddle extremely well, and people said that he used it to summon up the devil in the form of a black dog out of the marsh. The person who made the accusation and who led the group that came to arrest Samuel Pride was an ancestor of the Bishop family. Samuel came out to meet the group that came to apprehend them on the old stone bridge that leads to the island in the marsh where the Pride family has their house and farm, Pride’s Point. The story goes that when Samuel met the mob on the bridge, he placed a curse on them, that doom would come for them out of the night, out of the fog, and out of the marsh. Samuel and his wife were executed for witchcraft, and not only after, there was a terrible fog and a sickness that killed many people in town. People said that it was the result of Samuel’s curse. That’s why the Prides and the Bishops have a bad relationship even though they’re neighbors, why the townspeople are still a little suspicious of the Prides, why the Prides are somewhat standoffish of the townspeople (When you think about it, who really wants to be outgoing and friendly with people whose ancestors not only killed yours but who are not welcoming or friendly themselves because they have continually looked at you and your family with suspicion for generations, like you’re the weird ones? The townspeople basically created this situation and have been perpetuating it ever since, yet they act like the problem is with the Pride family instead of themselves. Gaslighting is a relatively new term from the 20th century, but the concept has been around forever, used even by people who don’t know what it is and that it’s what they’re really doing.), and why people in the area are afraid of the stone bridge that they call the Witches’ Bridge, the place where the curse was supposedly delivered. Even into modern times, people in the area see strange lights in the marsh and hear mysterious fiddle music or dog howls that they think might be Samuel’s ghost.

There is still more to come because the mysterious misfortunes of the Pride family have continued even into modern times. Dan is named for his grandfather, Daniel Pride, who died suddenly under very mysterious circumstances, something that still haunts his Uncle Julian. Young Dan learns the story from Mrs. Corey, a relative of Billy Ben’s, who is Uncle Julian’s housekeeper. Daniel Pride had been working to change the family’s image in the eyes of the local people, debunk all the old ghost and witch stories, and lay past quarrels to rest. To try to make peace with the Bishop family and restore the Pride family’s former fortunes, Daniel had been trying to arrange to buy the shipyards that the Bishop family owned, which had formerly been owned by the Pride family. The Bishop family initially agreed to the sale, and one foggy night, Daniel went to see the Bishops to finalize the sale. What happened after that is still a mystery. Daniel was found dead the next day near the old chapel with a look of terror on his face. It’s known that he had a heart condition, so he apparently had a heart attack, but from the marks on the ground, it also appears that he had been running before he collapsed, possibly deliberately frightened to death. Also, there were marks on the ground nearby where his briefcase fell, but the briefcase containing the sale papers was never found. The superstitious people in the area think that Daniel’s death was another symptom of the family’s curse, but it might also have been deliberate murder and theft. The Bishop family insist that they never finalized the sale of the shipyard with Daniel before his death, but Uncle Julian believes that the sale was finalized and that the Bishops are lying to take advantage of his father’s sudden death, just like their ancestors arranged the execution of Samuel for their own advantage. Uncle Julian remains suspicious and bitter about what has happened, just as the townspeople continue to look at the Prides suspiciously.

All of this makes York seem like it’s not the best place to raise a sensitive young orphan, and that’s basically what Uncle Julian says to Dan when Dan arrives at Pride’s Point. Uncle Julian seems elderly and physically frail, and Dan senses that he is a deeply troubled man. Uncle Julian tells Dan that the family and the old family home have a troubled history. That’s why Dan’s father decided to go away and live his life traveling to different places, and that’s why Uncle Julian delayed sending for Dan for so long after his parents’ deaths. Uncle Julian doesn’t seem to think that Pride’s Point is a very healthy place, and he hints at buried secrets. However, he does say that, now that Dan is there, there are going to have to be some changes.

Dan doesn’t think this sounds too hopeful, and he’s lonely and disappointed that he hasn’t found the happy family and home he was hoping for and that he doesn’t even seem particularly welcome there. He can’t even really enjoy playing his violin because of the connection people there seem to have between “fiddle” music, witchcraft, and his supposedly sinister ancestor. As Dan is looking around his new bedroom that night, he suddenly spots a mysterious flashing light from his window, outside in the marsh. It’s creepy because it not only supports all the ghost and witch stories that Dan has just heard but because he recognizes the patterns in the flashes of light as Morse Code … and the message being sent is his own name: D-A-N P-R-I-D-E.

Dan doesn’t believe that any supernatural force was using Morse Code to flash his name at night. It was obviously some human person, but who would do that and why? What is the truth about his grandfather’s death? Is Uncle Julian right that the Bishops caused Daniel Pride to die and then lied about the sale of the shipyard to cheat the Pride family? Or is someone else responsible?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I stand by my earlier statement that there is basically inter-generational gaslighting of the Pride family going on. It’s gone on for so long that the townspeople have trouble recognizing what they’re doing or stopping themselves from doing it, even though some of them seem to have the feeling that it isn’t right. At one point, some of the townspeople who come out to Pride’s Point to help fight a fire make jokes about the Pride curse. I could sense tension in them, and I think it was an attempt to lighten the mood, but under the circumstances, it wasn’t really appropriate for them to joke around, especially not about something that’s been a sensitive topic for the Prides, something that has literally caused members of their family to die and others to be persecuted for generations. Keep your audience in mind, and learn how to read a room, people of York!

Uncle Julian hates the stories and rumors that have circulated about his family since before he was born, but he doesn’t know what to do to stop it, and he sometimes wonders if it wouldn’t be better for the family to simply leave their old family home and start up again somewhere else. Mrs. Corey tells Dan that every single time anything bad happens in the area, people either look at the Prides suspiciously or find a way to blame them, even though they didn’t have anything to do with whatever it was. Dan can tell that Uncle Julian is so accustomed to having people blame him and his family for things and repeat scary stories about them that he halfway believes the stories in spite of himself, and he’s overly sensitive anytime it looks like the townspeople might be trying to blame the Prides for something yet again. That’s what makes this situation gaslighting, because the community’s constant untrue stories have warped even the Prides’ sense of reality and views of themselves. The community of York as a whole has created a situation that makes it difficult for the Prides to make friends with other people and get reality checks, and the most dangerous part of it is that among the few people that the Prides are in the habit of trusting is someone who turns out to be the person they should fear the most.

I couldn’t help but notice that there was someone in the story that Dan trusted too much in the beginning. It’s partly because Dan is young and in a situation where he is just getting to know the circumstances and people involved, but even when this person says things that are untrue, contradictory, or just plain mean, he doesn’t call him on it or seem to question within himself why this person is talking like that, at least not until about the middle of the book. Gaslighters will do this to a person, playing mind games, lying, alternately being friendly and praising their victim and then putting down their victim and/or trying to blacken their name to other people, discouraging them from getting close to people who care about them and might actually help them, acting like normal things that the victim does or feels are somehow weird or abnormal, trying to keep their victims in a constant state of confusion, unsure of what the reality of the situation really is. Although I found myself angry with the people of York in a general way for perpetuating something awful that their ancestors did for generations and for being apparently oblivious to what they’re doing in modern times, there is a definite villain in the story who is both deliberately and concretely evil.

There is a parallel drawn in the story between Uncle Julian’s big, black dog, Caliban, who is disfigured from an old injury and the Pride family themselves. Dan is afraid of the big dog, and Billy Ben tells him that it attacked him once, but Uncle Julian says that Caliban is just distrustful because he was badly abused and injured in his earlier life. People are like that, too. I understand that because I used to volunteer at an animal shelter, and that’s where I got my dog, Betty. (If you look at my About page, you’ll see a picture of Betty.)

I’ll never know Betty’s complete history because she was found wandering alone without a collar before she was brought to the shelter. However, I’m pretty good at reading between the lines, and I can read at least part of the story from her behavior. Betty is afraid of anyone, even me, walking behind her, and I’ve noticed since her shelter days that sometimes, her back end looks a little off-center when she runs. Her tail has an odd, permanent bend at the very tip that we didn’t discover until we had the hair on it trimmed. I think she’s been kicked hard from behind before, hard enough to leave permanent injury. She’s not as scared of things as she used to be after having lived with my family for a few years, but she used to be terrified of newspapers or anybody standing over her with anything in their hands, so I think she’s been hit with things before. Betty also gets scared when people laugh. She’s not as scared as she used to be because she’s gotten used to us laughing at something funny on tv, but there are times when she’s cringed and slunk away with her tail between her legs from people when they laugh and she can’t figure out why they’re laughing. Betty’s fear of laughter actually disturbs me because I think I know why it scares her. Based on her reaction, I’ve think that it’s likely that whoever hurt Betty before laughed when they did it. I think Betty has an association between laughter and pain, and that’s why she takes laughter as a bad sign, reacting fearfully to it when she thinks it might be directed at her. Laughing while inflicting pain is a sick thing to do, the product of a sick mind. There are stories in Betty’s reactions, and I’m disturbed by the mental picture I have of the person who had Betty before.

I have to admit that my own history has also both colored/given me insight into Betty’s behavior. If it isn’t obvious from comments in my previous reviews, I don’t see teasing as a positive thing. I’ve reacted to it in the past much like Betty does to sudden, unexplained laughter, which is why I understand the feeling behind it. Some people say that they like to tease their friends and people they like, but I just don’t like it, and I’ve learned to be more open and honest about how I never will like it. I do not have good feelings about people who tease others for fun, and I deeply resent being told that I have to like it because the people doing it are “just having fun.” It’s not a bonding activity, not with me, no matter who says it is. I absolutely refuse to “bond” with anyone who does it. Anyone telling me that I have to change myself to like people who tease is 100% guaranteed to get on my bad side. I have a bad history with teasing and bullying, I have a bad history with the people who do it, and I just don’t want to be around it. Teasing involves getting a laugh at someone else’s expense, benefiting from their discomfort, and getting a good feeling from making someone else feel bad. I don’t think any of that is right, and it doesn’t take much for it to get way out of hand, especially when people have the impulse press harder to get the reaction they want to their “jokes”, like the other person just didn’t get it, instead of cutting it out when their “jokes” just aren’t funny. It’s always awkward when it comes from people who don’t know the sore spots that they shouldn’t poke at and try to act like they’re special friends who should be cut some slack when the reality is that we don’t really know each other that well, we’re not really close friends, and no such special relationship actually exists between us. Real friends understand and demonstrate respect for each others’ feelings, and they don’t intentionally poke at a friend’s sore spots, like the people of York did to Uncle Julian with their jokes in this story.

What ties all of this together is that Betty’s reaction to laughter is like Uncle Julian’s reaction to the townspeople and their jokes and comments; it’s a conditioned response from long-term negative association. The townspeople are uneasy because Uncle Julian doesn’t laugh with them, but Uncle Julian doesn’t laugh with the townspeople because none of it was actually funny. By perpetuating these witch stories, even in the form of “jokes”, they’re constantly feeding the myths and ghost stories and making the situation worse, and they don’t seem to care about how he or his family feels or how it affects their lives. You can tell who respects you and who doesn’t by seeing who tries to treat you the way you want to be treated. The people of York were making jokes to soothe their own feelings, sharing in-jokes that they’ve had with each other at the Prides’ expense, and they got really uncomfortable when suddenly confronted with Uncle Julian’s, feelings that they helped to provoke and didn’t want to deal with.

Don’t worry about Betty. It’s sad that she’s been afraid of things and it’s kept her from being more outgoing and friendly, but we’re working through it. In non-pandemic times, I take her to places where I know she’s welcome, and she has acquired a fan club of people who like to see her and say hi whenever we visit. Anytime she seems uneasy because we’re laughing about something, I sit next to her, pet her, and praise her for being a Good Girl so she knows that nobody is trying to be mean to her and that we value her. When someone has been programmed through negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement is needed for balance. I’m trying to build more positive associations for her. It’s working, and she’s improving. She behaves very well and is very happy little dog when she’s treated well. Don’t worry about me, either. I’ve had some bad experiences, but I’m not the only one who’s had to deal with this stuff. There are lots of different kinds of people in the world, and I’ve learned some things about finding the kind of people I want to be around and making it clear how I want to be treated. I just gripe and vent now and then because I don’t like mean behavior or seeing others in these situations, and I’m all out of patience for it. I’ve learned what to do to help remedy such problems, but that doesn’t stop me from resenting the people who create problems that need to be solved.

The way both people and animals behave offers clues about what’s been happening with them. Sometimes, they offer warning signs of people to avoid, and sometimes, they are signs that the person or animal is in distress and needs some outside help and support. Caliban’s behavior in the story is more defensive than aggressive. That is, Caliban is reacting, not instigating … and if I saw what Dan saw in the story, I would know immediately to be very suspicious of the person Caliban hates the most because it explains where the source of harm in his life is. In a similar way, the Pride family is mostly reacting, not instigating. They have been harmed, both physically and psychologically, for an extended period of time, and while they seem to have the sense that’s the case, they’ve been too close to the problem for too long to see what the source of the greatest harm really is. But, about halfway through the book, Dan does learn to correctly read the people around him and comes to realize who is really his friend and how isn’t, based not on how others talk about them but by how they each actually treat him. When you pay attention and think about people’s actions in context, you can see who really has your best interests at heart and who doesn’t.

Dan spends much of the story, particularly at the beginning, feeling like he is unwanted, both in York and at Pride’s Point. At first, he thinks that his Uncle Julian doesn’t want him, but he gradually realizes that’s not it. There is someone else who doesn’t want Dan there, for reasons of their own. As I was reading, I noted times when this person said and did things that manipulated Dan’s feelings, even actively trying to make Dan feel bad while carefully seeming “honest” or “helpful” so Dan would continue to listen. I felt so much better when Dan finally realized the truth about this person. I have to say that I was really angry with Uncle Julian when I discovered that he was fully aware of who hurt his dog and that he still trusted this person. For me, the first hint of that would have caused me to permanently sever the relationship because it’s sick behavior and a sign of a disturbed mind, but I can only suppose that he felt unable to because he had been dependent on this person for too long, largely shunned by the wider community, who could have given him a reality check if they’d had a firmer grasp on reality themselves.

Dan, who had never heard of the Bishops before arriving in York, finds himself becoming angry and resentful of them, hating them for what they’ve done to his family for generations. His uncle even warns him not to get involved with the family, but that’s exactly what the real villain wants. When Dan makes friends with a boy named Pip Cole and his twin sister, Gilly, he confides his anger at the Bishops and how he blames them for this whole mess and for perpetuating it for generations, but Pip knows more about the situation than Dan suspects, and he has seen a different side of the problem. Pip tells Dan his family would have less problems if they would just forgive the Bishops, but Dan doesn’t believe it at first because, the way he sees it, the Bishops are the villains, who have actively profited from their villainy all along. I appreciate Dan’s situation. Pip doesn’t fully appreciate that, for Dan and his uncle, it’s not just about the past because they’re still actively suffering from the townspeople’s stories, rumors, and suspicions about them. It’s hard and maybe impossible to forgive something that’s ongoing from people who see no problem with the situation and aren’t particularly sorry. On the other hand, the resolution of this situation requires at least one of the parties involved to make the first move. Dan’s grandfather was trying, but his mysterious death prevented his mission from being completed. Even Uncle Julian reveals that he had been prepared to forgive the Bishops and marry their daughter, but some of the circumstances of his father’s death led him to believe that his fiance actually had a hand in it, and that apparent betrayal is what has left him such a haunted man all of these years.

The stories that Dan has heard about his family are not the complete story. Dan eventually comes to realize that the Prides and the Bishops each have only half of the real story, and because of their reluctance to associate with each other, the Bishops partly out of continued superstition and guilt, not knowing how to deal with the Prides’ anger, and the Prides, because they are both justifiably angry and accustomed to unfair treatment and being shunned by the community. However, it’s important that they do talk to each other because it’s the only way for each of them to get the complete picture of what’s really been happening and learn the real villain’s true motives.

The key to establishing the truth is in the missing briefcase, and both Dan and his enemy are searching for it. Dan needs to make peace with his family’s past, and he finds some help from a mysterious hermit called Lamie, who lives alone in the marsh. Lamie is another outcast of the York community. People avoid him because he has a reputation for being weird. People in this community in general may be “normal” in the sense that their behavior is fairly uniform, but uniformity by itself isn’t a virtue. When you’ve got an entire community doing something they shouldn’t, being the odd one out can be a good thing. Lamie helps Dan when he needs it, and Dan discovers that Lamie is actually a very kind and understanding person. Lamie’s solitary lifestyle is rather unorthodox, but he’s actually happy in his solitude because he knows who he is, he takes care of himself, he’s comfortable with himself, and he’s living the kind of life he likes, in touch with the natural world. When Dan talks to Lamie, he realizes that Lamie is comfortable with his own identity and at peace in his own mind in a way that his uncle isn’t. Even more importantly, Lamie sees things from a different perspective because he isn’t part of the groupthink of this community.

Lamie was friends with Dan’s grandfather, and he tells Dan about a hidden chamber built by the Prides’ ancestors, where Dan’s grandfather kept important family papers. However, Lamie tells Dan that he isn’t sure that he should look for it if his only motive is revenge. Dan does have a desire for revenge after all of the stories of injustice toward his family that he’s heard and what he’s suffered himself since he arrived in this area. Lamie helps to calm Dan’s desire for revenge by quoting from St. Francis of Assisi, emphasizing the importance of forgiveness instead of revenge. The part about truth speaks to Dan, and he comes to realize that what he really wants, more than revenge, is to know the truth about what happened to his grandfather. Lamie tells him that he saw some of what happened the night his grandfather died, from a distance. Because of the fog, he couldn’t see everything, but he knows that the Bishops were telling the truth that Dan’s grandfather didn’t make it to their place that night to complete their deal, defusing Dan’s anger at them for their supposed lies. Lamie’s memories also give him clues about the true identity of his grandfather’s attacker and the location of the secret hiding place. However, to find it and to evade his enemy, Dan will need the help of the very people his uncle has forbidden him to associate with.

I found the parts about the gaslighting of the Pride family and the poisonous duality of their true enemy frustrating and anger-inducing, but once Dan speaks to Lamie (really, my favorite charcter in the story) and begins to sort out who he can trust and who he can’t, I felt a lot better. The story is very atmospheric, with a grand old house and property, surrounded by a foggy marsh, and even when the characters know who their enemy really is, they are kind of trapped with him in a dangerous cat-and-mouse situation as they both race to find what they’re really looking for. By the end of the book, all of the old mysteries are wrapped up, including the source of the the mysterious “fiddler” music.

A Woggle of Witches

A Woggle of Witches by Adrienne Adams, 1971.

Witches live in a dark forest, sleeping in hammocks in the trees.  When they wake up on Halloween night, they have a feast.

Then, they take to the skies and fly in fancy formations.  They fly in rings around the moon, even stopping on the moon to take a rest.

After they return to the ground, they are startled by some trick-or-treaters and hide from them, thinking that they’re monsters.

Finally, they return to their forest and go to sleep in their hammocks once again.

The story is minimal, but the pictures really make the book!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.