Personal Narrative: A Witch's Last Tale

A Witch’s Last Tale One of my most vivid memories as a child was when I was six, a seemingly world away now. Holding me over her knee, letting me straddle it, she braided my hair in a straight, straw rope down my back. Gentle, yet quick as her fingers always were, she knew how to avoid tugging my knots in order to spare me more bedevilment. I remember that she had always removed it just as she finished, for fear of my father walking in on us. ‘It will be our little secret,’ she would say to me, before hiding my hair back under a cloth bonnet, and returned to her stitching. It wasn’t until many summers later that I learned why I was to keep the secret hair braiding quiet, and why she never did it while my father was home. In the eyes of the

Sitting in her own cell, I can only envisage what she must suppose of me. A lone candle is all that is allowed in here, besides a chunk of lead and some parchment which I am using to write this (Clifford L. Aldeman). Elijah, my now estranged father, wasted no time in abandoning me, just as he had my mother. He called me a witch, his exact words being “She’s foul spawn brewed in her mother’s womb! The devil in Hell himself is her father, not me.” That had been my undoing, along with Mary Walcott’s naming, and the fact that my mother was a ‘member of the coven.’ They supposed I was a witch too from my emotional outpouring (Stuart A. Kallen), and so I will be tested as my mother had. The tests are a cruel joke, that will prove not for in the end. They will swim me, and if I float I am a wiccan. If I drown, my name will be cleared (Stuart A Kallen); but that doesn’t do me a whole lot of good if I’m dead. I’m not the only one in here though, as a rough one hundred and sixty people are in this jail with me as well, Dorcas being one of them (famous-trials.com). Poor girl, still a toddler yet she watched her mother hang on Gallow Hill (famous-trials.com). They have yet to let her go or execute her, despite her being a member of the ‘coven.’ They must have some morales I suppose, despite their disregard for Giles Cory, the man that had been crushed to death, in retribution for not stating a plea to the witch accusations (Clifford

I must write this quickly and give it to Clementine, so she can keep it safe. She will add her own stories to the parchment, and when her time is up, she will pass it to another trusted individual. That way, in a small way, we can leave the truth here on Earth before we are taken. That my record is here, and isn’t erased like how I know my father will do. This is the proof that I am innocent and that I have lived! I, Ellen Margaret Graham, am innocent of black magic and witchcraft. There is not a witch coven in Salem, nor are there any witches. I was tried as wiccan because of my mother’s naming, who was named by her sister, whom I know had named her out of petty rivalry (Stuart A.