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| ISBN-13: | 9781408810378 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/03/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 555,697 |
| Lexile: | 760L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 12 - 18 Years |
The following manuscript comes from a remarkable collection of documents termed "the Mary papers." Found hidden inside a newly discovered and extremely rare quilt from the colonial period, the papers seem to take the form of an irregularly kept journal or diary. All dates are guesswork, based on references within the text. The first entries are tentatively dated from March 1659. I have altered the original as little as possible, but punctuation, paragraphing, and spellings have been standardized for the modern reader.
Alison Ellman
Boston, MA
1. Early March 1659
I am a witch. Or so some would call me. "Spawn of the Devil," "Witch child," they hiss in the street, although I know neither father nor mother. I know only my grandmother, Eliza Nuttall; Mother Nuttall to her neighbors. She brought me up from a baby. If she knew who my parents are, she never told me.
"Daughter of the Erl King and the Elfen Queen, that's who you are."
We live in a small cottage on the very edge of the forest; Grandmother, me, and her cat and my rabbit. Lived. Live there no more.
Men came and dragged her away. Men in black coats and hats as tall as steeples. They skewered the cat on a pike; they smashed the rabbit's skull by hitting him against the wall. They said that these were not God's creatures but familiars, the Devil himself in disguise. They threw the mess of fur and flesh on to the midden and threatened to do the same to me, to her, if she did not confess her sins to them.
They took her away then.
She was locked in the keep for more than a week. First they "walked" her, marching her up and down, up and down between them for a day and a night until she could no longer hobble, her feet all bloody and swollen. She would not confess. So they set about to prove she was a witch. They called in a woman, a Witch Pricker, who stabbed my grandmother all over with long pins, probing for the spot that was numb, where no blood ran, the place where the familiars fed. The men watched as the woman did this, and my grandmother was forced to stand before their gloating eyes, a naked old lady, deprived of modesty and dignity, the blood streaming down her withered body, and still she would not confess.
They decided to "float" her. They had plenty of evidence against her, you see. Plenty. All week folk had been coming to them with accusations. How she had overlooked them, bringing sickness to their livestock and families; how she had used magic, sticking pins in wax figures to bring on affliction; how she had transformed herself and roamed the country for miles around as a great hare and how she did this by the use of ointment made from melted corpse fat. They questioned me, demanding, "Is this so?" She slept in the bed next to me every night, but how do I know where she went when sleep took her?
It was all lies. Nonsense and lies.
These people accusing her, they were our friends, our neighbors. They had gone to her, pleading with her for help with beasts and children, sick or injured, a wife nearing her time. Birth or death, my grandmother was asked to be there to assist in the passage from one world to the next, for she had the skill -- in herbs, potions, in her hands -- but the power came from inside her, not from the Devil. The people trusted her, or they had until now; they had wanted her presence.
They were all there for the swimming, standing both sides of the river, lining the bridge, staring down at the place, a wide pool where the water showed black and deep. The men in tall hats dragged my grandmother from the stinking hole where they had been keeping her. They cross-bound her, tying her right toe to her left thumb and vice versa, making sure the cords were thin and taut. Then they threw her in. The crowd watched in silence, the only sound the shuffle of many feet edging forward to see what she would do.
"She floats!"
The chant started with just one person remarking, in a quiet voice almost of wonder, then it spread from one to another until all were shouting, like some monstrous howling thing. To float was a sure proof of guilt. They hooked her, pulling her back to shore like a bundle of old washing. They did not want her drowning, because that would deprive them of a hanging.
Witch Child. Copyright © 2001 Celia Rees. Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA. Published by arrangement with Bloomsbury Publishing plc.
Celia Rees on Conjuring Up Witch Child
"What interests me is why people believe things," says Celia Rees, author of the acclaimed novel Witch Child. "Why do people believe that some people have powers? And what could those powers really be?"
Told in the form of a diary, Witch Child is the spellbinding story of Mary Newbury, a teenage girl who escapes England's witch hysteria in the 1600s only to face intolerance among the Puritans in the New World. While illuminating one of the darker times in history -- a time when simply being different could cost you your life -- Witch Child evokes powerful themes that continue to resonate.
Why would young readers today care about a girl who lived hundreds of years ago? One obvious reason is the current fascination with the occult (think Blair Witch Trials, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a blockbuster series about a certain wizard, which shares a U.K. publisher with Celia Rees). But readers will be drawn more by Witch Child's perennial themes of adolescence -- social isolation, prejudice against those who don't conform, and the struggle to stay true to yourself.
"In any institutionalized setting like the one in which Mary finds herself -- it could be a school, it could be a neighborhood, it could be anywhere -- there will always be some people who are against you," Celia Rees says. "And you've got to stick by what you believe and what you think." While Mary is not without her faults -- "She's headstrong and she can make mistakes," the author says -- she stands as a strong role model. "There comes a point where you can't compromise any more," says the author. "You have to decide whether you're prepared to change yourself entirely or whether you're going to keep your integrity."
A long time brewing
A meticulous researcher, Celia Rees has long been curious about the era in which Witch Child takes place. "Even when I was studying history in college, I remember thinking how isolated the first communities in America were," she says. She was also intrigued by the hysteria of the witch trials and wondered whether the sense of strangeness and fear felt by the early settlers may have helped to fuel these awful events.
It was in such musings that the idea for Witch Child had its beginnings. "But the complete story would be quite a long time brewing," Celia Rees says. The magical moment came when she was reading a book about Native American shamanism and realized that many of the beliefs this community embraced -- such as natural healing and the ability to change shapes -- were also attributed to women who were called witches. She found it amazing that at a single point in time, a person with such "powers" would be persecuted in one culture but revered in another.
Is it real?
Because of the story's striking immediacy, many readers of Witch Child have wondered whether it is a real girl's journal. The premise of the book is that the pages of Mary's private diary have recently been discovered within the layers of an antique quilt, a quilt Mary herself pieced together. There is even an afterword from a fictional scholar who found the document, inviting readers to e-mail her if they have any information about Mary.
"I wanted to write it as a diary and not like a historical novel because I didn't want there to be any distance between the reader and Mary," Celia Rees explains. "It's easy when you read a historical novel to think, 'Well, that's a shame, isn't it, but it happened a long time ago so it doesn't really matter to me.' But I wanted it to matter with the readers right away. I wanted them to feel her anger, her fear, and her hatred, really, of what was going on."
Judging from the tone of the e-mails Celia Rees has received, Witch Child has indeed sparked some fervent interest in Mary's fate. "They're very, very positive," she says of her many correspondents. "They feel empathy for Mary and identify with her and want to know what happened to her." (Readers will not be left hanging -- a sequel is in the works that will reveal a surprising new episode in Mary's life.)
And what about Celia Rees herself -- does she believe in the supernatural? "Well, that's a tough question," the author admits. "I like to say that I'm a little bit like Fox Mulder on The X-Files. I want to believe. After all, it would be a boring sort of world if there weren't things we couldn't explain, now, wouldn't it?"
Interview courtesy of Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA.
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