The examination of Sarah Good, which took place on March 1, 1692, in the meetinghouse of Salem Village, was not supposed to be a teaching moment. It was supposed to be a straightforward case of witchcraft accusation, trial, and execution. The girls were screaming. The cows were dying. The winter was long and the food was scarce and someone needed to be blamed.
But Sarah Good was not what they expected.
"Sarah Good," Judge Hathorne intoned, his voice carrying the weight of certainty that came from never having questioned anything in his life, "you are accused of witchcraft. What say you?"
Sarah looked at him. She was forty years old, looked sixty, and had the eyes of someone who had seen six thousand years of human cruelty. She was not, technically, a member of the coven—she was too young, too new, too recently reincarnated to have remembered her true nature yet. But she was a woman. She was poor. She was inconvenient. And that made her a target.
"I say that you are afraid," Sarah said. Her voice was rough from smoke and cold, but there was power in it. "I say that you look at me, at my poverty, at my independence, at my refusal to bow, and you see something that frightens you. You see a woman who does not need you. You see a woman who does not submit."
The crowd murmured. This was not how accused witches were supposed to behave. They were supposed to weep, to beg, to confess, to name others. They were not supposed to speak truth to power.
"You traffic with the devil," Hathorne said, less certain now.
"I traffic with no one," Sarah said. "I am a woman. I am poor. I am angry. And that is enough, isn't it? That is enough to make me a witch in your eyes. Not magic. Not pacts with demons. Just... refusal. Just the simple, terrible crime of being a woman who will not bend."
She looked around the room, at the faces of the villagers, at the girls who were screaming and writhing, at the men who had come to watch a burning. "You want to know what witchcraft is? I'll tell you. Witchcraft is knowledge. Witchcraft is power. Witchcraft is the thing that women have always had and men have always feared. It's not in the books. It's not in the spells. It's in the blood. It's in the bones. It's in the refusal to be less than we are."
"She's confessing!" someone shouted. "She admits to witchcraft!"
"I'm admitting to womanhood," Sarah said. "Which, in your world, is the same thing."
They hanged her on July 19, 1692, along with four others. She did not weep. She did not beg. She looked at the sky and she smiled, because she knew, in the moment of her death, what she was. She remembered. The coven welcomed her home, briefly, before sending her back out into the world again.
And in the records of the trial, in the transcript that would be preserved for centuries, someone—no one knew who—had written in the margin: "She taught them. They did not learn. But she taught them."