My Accused Witch Ancestor Was Also an Enslaver
It’s tempting when we uncover stories of an ancestor’s hardships to cling to those facts and want to believe they’re the whole story. And maybe they are. But sometimes an ancestor who was persecuted turns out to have persecuted someone else — and in more devastating ways. If we’re truly committed to understanding our family history and our legacies through our people who came before us, the practice of genealogy often involves acknowledging difficult truths.
I grew up in thinking of slavery as something that happened in the south, and knowing that my ancestors in Mississippi enslaved Black people. And until my late twenties, I believed all my ancestors in this country were southern. But in the year 2000, a couple years after my sibling moved to the Western Massachusetts town of Northampton and I’d come to love the place, I typed our Texan great-grandmother’s name into a precursor to Google, and a family tree tracing her lineage to 1600s Northampton came right up. I learned that we descend from two founding settlers of Northampton and Springfield: Joseph Parsons and Mary Bliss Parsons, my ninth great-grandparents. Anyone who lives in the area might know what I soon found out, that Mary was accused of witchcraft decades before the Salem trials. Her body was inspected for “witch marks.” She was tried by a jury of her Puritan peers in Boston. She beat the charges, and lived.
I was floored and excited to know that I came from this history, and to realize that my sibling, by complete coincidence, lived down the street from Northampton’s Bridge Street Cemetery, where several of our Parsons ancestors are buried, including Mary and Joseph’s son, also named Joseph. On a visit later that year, I walked among the graves and then visited the Parsons House, which stands on Mary and Joseph’s original home lot. It was the town’s main tourist attraction then because of Mary’s fortitude in the face of witchcraft charges, her infamy in the area, and the 1990s revival of interest in the Salem trials. The house is named for a grandson of Mary’s and Joseph’s who built it on the original Parsons lot, and the place is currently closed to the public for renovations.
In part I was delighted to learn of my connection to the Parsons family because I naively believed, like so many people have been taught to, that these New England ancestors surely inflicted less harm on other people than my white southern ancestors who enslaved Black people. But through research over the years, those hopes have fallen away, and my feelings about my Parsons ancestors have become far more complicated.
First I began to ponder and study Joseph more deeply. I found that he had a unique role in trading with and ultimately cheating, killing, and displacing many Agawam, Nonotuck, and other Indigenous people of the region. According to an 1800s account written by one of his descendants, Joseph could converse in one or more Native languages, unlike the vast majority of the colonizing Europeans, and for this reason he was particularly instrumental in negotiating (exploitative) agreements between Native people and higher-class settlers, and later himself. Joseph was a witness to the land deed William Pynchon signed with the Agawam people in 1636, and also involved in to later deeds and agreements with Native people in Hadley and Northampton. Although one scholar has argued that Pynchon’s agreements were unusual for the time in recognizing Native rights to land at the outset and sometimes in identifying individual Native people with whom they were made, and I have found that some of Joseph’s share these characteristics, ultimately the exploitative “mortgage deeds” resulted in land being forfeited to white colonists, my ancestor included. Joseph ultimately became known as Cornet because of his role in the Great Narragansett War (often called King Philip’s War), a genocide event. He died an extremely wealthy man, with immense landholdings.
As for Mary, after she prevailed in both a slander trial in Northampton and the later criminal trial in Boston, she and Joseph moved to Springfield to escape further witchcraft accusations. When rumors began to circulate again, Mary’s family attempted to shut them down by prosecuting a Black woman remembered to history only as “Betty Negro,” who allegedly told Mary’s grandson that “that his grandmother had killed two persons over the river, and had killed Mrs. Pynchon and half-killed the Colonel, and that his mother was half a witch,” implying that Mary was a full witch. Many sources online claim that Betty struck Mary’s grandson; in fact, the historical record of the complaint records the contention that the words struck her — the complaint was for “bad language striking his son Peletiah.” At one point, a blog dramatized the incident, using the term “spat” to mean “said” — “the slave spat at the boy” — and as a result some people are under the impression that Betty spit on the child, which is also incorrect. The only physical violence was inflicted by the Parsons family and their allies.
The trial was orchestrated by members of the family who sought to bolster Mary’s own standing by persecuting someone who had even less power. Mary’s son Joseph was the presiding Justice of the Peace, a “pseudo-judicial role” according to Christopher J. Carter, a judicial archivist of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives. John Pynchon, a Parsons ally, was also a Justice of the Peace in the proceeding. The outcome was swift, terrible, and predictable. “We find her very culpable for her base tongue and words as aforesaid,” the record reads. “We sentence said Betty to be well whipped on the naked body by the constable with ten lashes well laid on: which was performed accordingly by constable Thomas Bliss” — Bliss being Mary’s original surname.
I write about this history in my book, Ancestor Trouble. At the time of publication, I thought Betty was enslaved, based on the scholar John Demos’ Entertaining Satan. I later discovered (and clarified for the paperback) that it’s not entirely clear from the historical record whether Betty was enslaved, though it’s likely. And it’s certain that, as a Black woman, she was a useful foil for the Parsons family as they sought to quash rumors around their matriarch more broadly.
In the course of delving further into archives over the past year, I also learned that Mary herself probably enslaved a Black man named Tobee. He’s listed as the “Negro servant of the Widow Mary Parsons” in Springfield records at his death in 1711, the year before Mary herself died. Zoe Cheek, the archivist at the Springfield Museum, confirmed my sense that “servant” in this context in that particular era almost definitely denoted enslavement. (Last year the Historic Northampton project on slavery arrived at the same general conclusion around the use of the word in this era, in findings around enslavement in the town, but the connection to Mary was not understood at that time.) Cheek also said that my ancestor was the only “Widow Mary Parsons” in Springfield at the time. A contention was raised by a fellow descendant that because Mary was ruled incompetent at the end of her life, she may not have been a willing enslaver. Exonerating hypotheses were floated. I understand the urge to wish away painful histories, but to me the record speaks for itself. Mary was persecuted, and Mary also did harm — much more devastating harm. So I wanted to correct the record. (The paperback edition of my book, published by Random House last month, includes these facts and copious endnotes, if you’re interested.)
Rather than connecting me to the less fraught history I originally hoped I’d found all those decades ago — an ancestor who was persecuted and not a persecutor — my descent from the Parsons family turns out to be another deeply personal connection to participation in the systemic racism that continues in this country today. As a descendant of Mary Bliss Parsons and Joseph Parsons, I’m hopeful that if the Parsons House is eventually reopened to the public as a museum, these histories will be centered, and that the existing website entries about the house and my ancestors will be updated to include them, as well.
I made this argument in the Guardian in the context of my southern ancestors last year, but so many of us, all across this country, have family histories like mine that we need to be transparent about. New England is not exempt; on the contrary. Obfuscating these realities is a temptation we should resist, as individuals and as a culture. Instead, in addition to carrying forward the gifts our ancestors passed down, we can do our best to work against the harms they inflicted and the legacies of those harms. In a world where the history of slavery and Native genocide is increasingly being censored by law, one of the simplest things things to do as individuals is step forward with our own genealogies and tell the truth. It’s a first baby step toward the larger cultural repair we need, including reparations. I call this “acknowledgement genealogy” — and from the activist Briayna Cuffie I also learned the term “reparative genealogy.”
Although I know some of my fellow descendants of Mary Bliss Parsons will disagree, I believe that the best way for me — and for everyone — to honor our ancestors is to acknowledge the harmful things they did in addition to unfair treatment they endured or heroic actions they took. I’m not the first descendant of Mary’s to write about her or to feel a deep connection with her. But I believe sharing this history is a tribute to the best of who she was — to her passion, intelligence, and fighting spirit — and to the person she might have been outside the strictures of a patriarchal, colonizing Puritan society. And in any case, sharing these details of her life that have been glossed over, spun in the light most favorable to her, or lost to history until recently is the right thing to do. It’s not an end point, but it’s a beginning.
