The Heretics Daughter, by Kathleen Kent

I've always had a fascination/revulsion with the Salem witch trials. It may have begun when I was a teenager with one of my favorite books, Elizabeth Speare's Witch of Blackbird Pond. It probably started even earlier, as soon as I was old enough to hear my maternal grandfather talk about his painstaking research into my Massachusetts ancestors. Among them were a convicted witch (Rebecca Nurse, hanged in Salem in 1692), a witch accuser, a woman whose brother died "of a hideous witchcraft", and the sister of a convicted witch who is featured in Kathleen Kent's novel The Heretic's Daughter. My mother-in-law passed the book to me some months ago, but I put it on a shelf unopened. I wanted to read it, and I didn't want to read it. My mother read it and raved about it. Still it sat. Then, I saw Sarah Jessica Parker on a new TV series "discovering" her long-lost ancestor who had been accused of witchcraft in Salem, and I felt I could no longer ignore the signs to dive in.

I confess I dragged my feet through this book. After all, I knew how it was going to turn out, and it wasn't going to be good. I was right, of course, and then some. Kent reportedly did five years of research in order to capture in words this period of history in the area of Salem, Billerica, and Andover, MA, and boy, does it show. From the speech patterns right down to the minute details of everyday life, she paints it brutally and honestly. Those were tough times for people, to put it mildly. Under constant threat from Native American attacks and smallpox and hunger and harsh weather and damnation to hell, these early Americans scraped out a life filled with despair and fear and, yes, hatred. The story is told from the perspective of Martha Carrier's 9-year old daughter and succeeds in helping the reader to understand--never to justify, or excuse--but to understand how such a thing could happen in such a place at such a time, that the word of a handful of young girls could triumph over the reputations and integrity and word of the 30 adults who were put to death, and the hundreds who were arrested, tortured and imprisoned under horrific conditions.

Kent's character Martha Allen Carrier (one of a few real names used in the book) was the author's grandmother (x10) and the sister of my ancestor Hannah Allen Holt. I have to admit that, although I knew it was a fictional account, I scrutinized the character of Martha's sister Mary Toothaker for parallels to the scant biographical details I had about my ancestor. I didn't find any, but the experience of living in her world for a few days was enough. I loved reading about how the spirit of this ancestor has been kept alive in subsequent generations of Kent's family. My daughter Hannah was named for any number of Hannahs in my husband's and my family trees, and because we both liked the name, but I would like to bring the story of this long-ago Hannah and her brave, fiery sister into our family lore. To this end, I did email Kathleen Kent to see if her years of research had turned up any details about my ancestor or one generation back to her parents. I'll be interested to see if she responds. In any case, Martha Carrier was by all accounts a remarkable woman. She stood by herself, believing to the end that the truth would triumph. It did, just many years too late.

If you like beautifully-written historical fiction and can stomach descriptions of life at its worst, you'll want to read this book. It's no sweeping saga, but rather a very detailed account of a short period of time with a small cast of characters in a tiny corner of the world, but its lessons about human life, love, hate, religion--all the biggies--are universal.