Dear Reader,
We move now to my patrilineal ancestors, my father’s father’s ancestry, with great thanks to my Grampy for sharing with me the resources he has and knowledge he keeps.
Thomas Sleeper, my great-times-nine grandfather was born in England around 1616. He perhaps came from Norfolk, as he came to settle in Hampton, New Hampshire (which was then Massachusetts) alongside a group of Puritans from Norfolk. Hampton is on the coast, about halfway between Portland and Boston.
Thomas was granted land in 1640, less than two years after the settlement was established. Hampton, in its early days, had acres of marshland or salt meadows which in the summer were covered with salt grass. This area was attractive to the government of Massachusetts, leading to the settlement of Hampton. The land is run through with large ponds and rivers which all lead to the coast, which had two “noted headlands:” Great Boar’s Head and Little Boar’s Head (relation to the deli company unclear). Mostly, though, the coast is and was a sandy beach with some coves great for fishing. There was a large variety of soil for farming, but most of the land was forested (save for the marsh) with all manner of trees, including oak, which were cut down and fashioned into posts (called ‘staves’) which sold for a good amount. Fish and game fed the colonists, though their sheep and cattle were terrorized by wolves and bears that roamed the woods. The colony established a significant payment for anyone who killed a wolf and brought its head to the town commons, and there was lots of ado around hiring a local shepherd and creating a cow commons to keep the cattle safe.
In one history, written in the late 19th century, it has this to say of the previous inhabitants of the land: “Some Indians, but how many, we know not, dwelt here. … They had also places of burial where they deposited their dead. These they held as sacred spots. After the white men had formed a settlement, there was some friendly intercourse between the two races. The Indian pappooses, it is said, would, in times of peace, often go to the log-huts of the new settlers, to play with their children. But the ancient race soon began to dwindle away, and, in little more than one century, were all gone. Their very names have also perished.”
The passive voice here is doing a lot of heavy lifting; the ‘ancient race’ did not naturally ‘dwindle away,’ as ancient races typically do not do such a thing. Certainly the colonists were afraid of the Native people, as in the spring of 1653 it’s recorded that a rumor spread throughout the town that “some thousands of Indians” had gathered nearby. The colonists panicked and sent a group of men to check if the rumor was true. The records share no result of the panic, so likely nothing happened; however, it does serve as a useful indicator that there was panic, that the people of the town were afraid, regardless of whether the Native people did in fact come to their houses and play with their children. Fear of the unknown, perhaps, of the ‘other;’ fear, too, of the unrightful settler who worries that his home may be taken just as he has taken it from another.
Thomas Sleeper came to settle in an area further removed from town which was considered the ‘frontier.’ He married a woman named Joanna, whose maiden name is unknown as is the date of the marriage. They had 8 children and were good church-going folk, well-respected by the congregation.
Perhaps the Sleepers were less fearful than some of their neighbors, as they ventured further into the wilderness to live, not sticking to the area surrounding the town commons. However, even living in town, closely watched by one’s neighbors, was not necessarily comfortable nor safe for all. These were the days of superstition, and Joanna, who leapt into history seemingly from nowhere, played an active role.
Eunice Cole was not well-liked in town. She was said to be “ill-natured, ugly, malicious, revengeful,” and it was because of this that she was accused of being a witch. Being unattractive and rude aren’t crimes that typically lead to jail time, but in the 17th century and the time of the witch hunts, they were useful excuses to point a finger at those who didn’t belong, ridding the community of a stain. While there was clearly a religious and superstitious aspect to the witch hunts, they were also very useful for establishing both social norms and punishments for falling outside of them. The town records attest to the effort put into establishing Hampton (or rather, Massachusetts more generally) as a legitimate colony, one with economic and social order. Deals were struck, money was granted and exchanged, Thomas Sleeper himself was given the role of sitting with the “youth” during church services to ensure their behavior. Time and energy were invested in norms of behavior that would serve the town and colony according to the economic order being set up — and women played an important role in that. Women reproduced, thus populating the colony, and supported their husbands and the patriarchy more generally, which was at the center of these agreements and order.
What we know about Eunice is scant, but from the records and accusations, we can see that she was childless and that she, rather than her husband, owned their property. Perhaps she was indeed ill-natured and revengeful, but it seems she fell outside of her role in key ways that made her a threat to the hierarchy that needed to be established.
Among the testimonies against Goody Cole were: talking about witches; poisoning cows and sheep; something involving a cat; turning a child into an ape; repeating words spoken in private without her present; calling someone a whore; and other difficult to understand accusations. (You can dive into them in the first source linked below if you’d like to join the fun.)
Joanna’s testimonies were two: the first was that she had visited a man who had been sick but was now feeling better. While she was visiting him, a gray cat came to sit on his chest, and “he cried out Lord have mercy upon me the cat hath killed me, and broken my heart.” Later, his wife, apparently having heard what happened, showed Joanna a cat (presumably a known cat) that Joanna said “was like that cat for color” but that the cat she’d seen on the man’s chest was “bigger than the cat she showed me.” The nail in poor Goody Cole’s coffin? She had apparently also visited the sickly man the day before. The accusation here seems to be that Goody Cole had a familiar or perhaps shapeshifted into a cat herself to torment the poor man.
The second testimony was that Joanna and another woman (called only Thomas Moulton’s wife) were talking about Goody Cole when they heard a loud scraping sound against the window of the house. When they went outside, they saw nothing. It happened again and there were no marks on the boards, which they said would have been noticeable had the scraping been done by a dog or cat.
So essentially: there was a cat and a freaked out man and some weird noises. Joanna was far from the only one to testify, and ultimately, Eunice was publicly whipped and then imprisoned in Boston. A few years later, the jailer came to town with a “bill for her keep”; however, her husband couldn’t pay it because all of his possessions including his home were in Eunice’s name. The town took possession of and sold the house in order to pay for her living expenses in jail — and when the money ran out after fifteen years, she was released. In that time, her elderly husband had died, but she was given a small house and the people of Hampton took turns providing her with “the necessities of life” until in 1672 she was accused again of witchcraft. This time she was found not guilty, but “suspicious” and sent to prison nonetheless.
Eunice’s voice is absent from the records, except that in 1662 she “prayed the court for release, pleading pathetically her own age and weakness, and the infirmities of her husband.” In 1665, she made another petition to the court to be released, and they ordered that she could leave prison but could not return to the colony. She stayed in prison, likely unable to leave and re-establish herself elsewhere with no resources.
I’ve heard and read a fair amount about witch hunts, from mandatory reading of The Crucible in high school to, more recently, Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch about the use of witch hunts in relegating women to a certain position in capitalism (the position of reproduction). Now to add to these more general or even fictionalized accounts, there are named women, who lived in a known place, whose stories hold physicality and specificity — and connection to me. Of course I know that I have always been affected by history and that which came before me, but to know of names and individuals who have been actors in these far-away dramas shifts the experience.
Similarly now I think of how I am that actor for future generations. I try not to get too bogged down in ideas about my legacy just for my own sanity. But for as much as I’ve thought of time in ways strange and stretchy, or else condensed and simultaneous, I haven’t considered my own existence in the midst of a specific time. It’s hard to tell what will bear our fingerprints in the millennia to come. I suppose one thing to do is to try to be good to each other.
Joanna was not practicing female solidarity when she joined the voices of the town against Eunice Cole. She was in fact participating in something much larger than herself; a general fight against women, against people who may be strange or live outside the ‘normal’ parameters of life, against the undesirable. We still participate in these same fights today in all kinds of ways. The witch hunt has transformed but not disappeared. We (I) still fail at female solidarity every day, every hour, in ways both small and large. Basically: it’s really freaking hard to live in this world, to do good things within the confines of society. Maybe Joanna felt pressure to say what she said. Or maybe she was the one pressuring others! Maybe she was afraid that if she didn’t fall in line, she’d be the next to be pushed out of it. Maybe she wanted to solidify her bond and sisterhood with the other women, a bond formed against Eunice. Maybe she was just one of the ‘mean girls.’
Maybe she was a product of her time.
This particular phrase gets used a lot to offer forgiveness or at least excuses for people of the past, and it seems to me that there’s use in understanding context but that you have to be careful about the extent to which you take it. I want to wonder why Joanna wasn’t ahead of her time, a feminist before feminism was a thing, breaking Eunice out of jail under the cover of night because of her deep compassion for her fellow women — but then, I look at myself, within my own time, and I wonder in what ways (or if at all) I have broken out of it. How to be a product not of my time (a difficult and tangled and collapsing one) but of the future; some presumably better future. Thinking ahead of oneself, using tools not yet invented: an impossible task to assign and yet, perhaps the most important one?
I don’t think that what Joanna (and the others) did to Eunice is forgivable, and certainly it’s not up to me to decide whether forgiveness is merited or not. I don’t know how useful the project of forgiveness between myself and my ancestors is; the forgiveness isn’t mine to offer, as I am not the one harmed by them. I suppose what seems more useful to me is to shift the question onto myself: what do I do today that is forgivable, or not, that will call into question forgiveness at all in the generations to come? Whose forgiveness will my nebulous little soul be asking for in the year 3000?
With love and sincerity,
Helen
Sources
1: Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History 1638-1693, Second Edition by David D. Hall, published by Duke University Press, 2005
2: History of the Town of Hampton, New Hampshire. From Its Settlement in 1638, to the Autumn of 1892. By Joseph Dow. Volume 1. Published by the Salem Press Publishing and Printing Co, 1893.
3: The Sleeper Family of New Jersey and New York, Compiled by Ethel Sleeper Gross, published by Press of Mount Holly Herald, 1931.