In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton

are come to talke with me about being a witch but I am none I cannot helpe peoples talking of me.” Edward replied that they had come not because of gossip but because Ann had specifically named her. “But does shee tell you what cloathes I have on?” Martha asked, “with very great eagernes” repeating the inquiry when the men—undoubtedly stunned into silence— did not answer immediately. Finally they revealed to Goody Corey what Edward’s niece had said about having been blinded by her apparition. “Shee made but litle answer to this,” the men recalled, “but seemed to smile at it as if shee had showed us a pretty trick.”
    Discussions of identifying specters through their clothing must have arisen from Village gossip following Tituba’s confession eleven days earlier. Responding to John Hathorne’s queries, she had described the clothes worn by the specters she saw: the man (perhaps the devil) who had appeared to ask her to serve him was tall and white-haired, wearing either “black” or “Searge” clothing, and one of the two Boston women was dressed in “a black Silk hood with a White Silk hood under itt, with top knotts,” while the other had “a Searge Coat with a White Cap.” 2 No one recorded the ensuing gossip, but it surely focused on how descriptions of clothing could help to reveal the identities of otherwise unknown specters. Martha Corey appeared well aware that people were speculating she might be a witch and that clothes could form a part of the identification. She seemingly hoped to use that potential weapon to her advantage instead of falling victim to it.
    The three conversed at some length about the little girl’s complaints and witchcraft in general. 3 Putnam and Cheever expressed their concern about “how greatly the name of God and religion and thee church was dishonured” by Martha’s being accused, but Corey appeared more interested in stopping the pervasive gossip. Her visitors surely could not think her guilty of witchcraft, she insisted, because “shee had made a profession of christ and rejoyced to go and hear the word of god and the like.” Putnam and Cheever responded that “witches had crept into the churches” and that “an out ward profession” was insufficient proof of innocence, but Goody Corey, they reported, “made her profession a cloake to cover all.” When Martha indicated that “shee did not thinke that there were any witches,” they pronounced themselves “fully satisfied” that Tituba, Good, and Osborne were guilty as charged. Martha then derided the three as “idle sloathfull persons,” so that “if they were [witches] wee could not blame the devill of making witches of them.” Despite her skepticism about the three suspects, she exclaimed that “the devill was come down amongst us in great rage and that God had forsaken the earth.” Perhaps she referred to the Indian war, or perhaps she was contending that Satan had afflicted Ann directly, without the intervention of witches.
    Martha Corey probably ended the encounter with her fellow church members believing that she had made at least some progress in refuting the charge that she was a witch. She had forcefully reminded her visitors of her standing as a professed Christian and a member of the Salem Village church, had differentiated herself from the “idle sloathfull” folk already accused, and had exposed what she undoubtedly did think was a “pretty trick”—Ann’s explanation for her inability to describe Corey’s clothing accurately. But if Martha interpreted the results of the conversation in that way, Edward Putnam and Ezekiel Cheever came away from it feeling very differently. Upon returning to Thomas Putnam’s they learned that, as the specter had earlier predicted, it had not afflicted Ann in their absence. To them, the “pretty trick” was obvious: the blinding of Ann had prevented the girl from definitively identifying Martha Corey as her tormentor. That the