The Poetry of Strangers by Brian Sonia-Wallace

Author:Brian Sonia-Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Self-Proclaimed Witches and Deviants

I.

It’s an oppressively humid midsummer in New England, and I’m sitting in a darkened theater with a cross section of Massachusetts tourists in too-low cargo shorts and literal red socks. Around the walls are mannequins, frozen forever in the drama of the 1600s witch trials. I stare up into the face of the devil. He is bolted high up on the wall, with his eyes glowing red.

“There never were witches in Salem,” a voice crackles from the speakers.

Satan looks like he’s from a B-horror movie, a long-fingered diorama in red light. I was expecting animatronics, but the show we’ve paid to see is just mannequins and spotlights as a recording plays. The narration muses on whether the supernatural exists or if it’s only human superstition. The lights go down on the devil and up on a procession of puritan women in frocks and bonnets gathered around beds, then silhouetted as an angry mob. The mannequins are dusty with the occasional cobweb stretching from a finger catching the light. Nothing looks like it’s been touched since the 1980s.

The recorded voice sounds suspiciously gleeful in describing the grisly torture and execution of innocent person after innocent person. This is the exciting part of the story. The assembled congregation of tourists shifts in their seats to see the dioramas of the jail, the man on the gallows, and the man being crushed to confession under the rocks, confessing nothing, only challenging his captors to add more weight. “More weight!” the recorded narration intones, in the spooky tones of a ghost story.

Then, as the diorama light show ends, the narrator sweeps all the spooky suspense away with a few lines. Of course, the voice tells us, there never were witches in Salem. The trials were the result of rampant paranoia on the part of “hysterical girls.” Nothing supernatural to see here, just a bit of 1980s museum sexism. The next room hammers home the New England message of rationality and pluralism, sweeping the rug out from under the feet of the gleeful ghosts. Yet another set of dioramas draws a historical narrative of witchcraft from pre-Christian midwives to a pair of Wiccans, male and female, who assure us with tinny audio that they are a legitimate religious group with no claims to magical power. Because, of course, the museum makes it very clear, magic isn’t real.

As we exit through the expansive gift shop, the woman who brought me here grins under her pointed hat. “There never were witches in Salem?” she repeats and raises an eyebrow. “You can’t walk down the street here without tripping on one!”

It’s Holy Crow, the palm reader from Electric Forest a year and a half ago.

And she says she can control the weather.

Holy Crow’s given name is Eowyn, and I visit her and her partner, Meff, in Salem. They are gearing up for October, or as they call it, “spooky season.” This is their Black Friday and Christmas all rolled into one. The witches pick me

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