Tallow and Bone
*Spoiler alert
What can I say about this book? This book was so devastatingly good.
This is historical fiction, a retelling of the Salem witch trials. It follows the story of Amity Mereweather and her family who are on the run from witch hunters. She grew up in the court of England with her parents and five siblings. Only her and her mother are witches.
They are forced to leave England and head to America. Amity meets a boy, and when they kiss her earth magic comes out to kill him. The family have to run again. Their mother is trying to get them to Salem. However, the youngest child is lost. Her mother goes back to look for the child. When neither return the remaining family head to Salem to wait.
They are greeted at the parsonage by Reverend Burgiss and are given a cottage and some land to live in. See there is a curse on Salem. The earth is cursed, very little grows and anything that doesn’t is not healthy. Even when Amity puts her hands into the ground to grow vegetables, she can’t. The curse is to well developed. Their father leaves to steal money and find belongings for them. Amity is the oldest at 23, the youngest Harriet and Jacob are 16. They steal to find food and things to get them through until their father returns.
In the meantime, they do everything they can to fit in. They go to church, and Amity tries to befriend the local women. But there are whispers of witches, the Burgiss girls are locked away in their home. It is from here that we meet the various players of the witch trails. The Proctors, Mather, Bridget Bishop, Tituba.
But Amity meets three other true witches in the town. And without her mother Amity tries to learn what she can from them and help break the curse on Salem. One of the witches is a male witch. A man who she only ever sees with a mask on. He refuses to allow her to see his face. Even when they are intimate, he still refuses to show his face. I partly predicted who this man was and felt pretty good when we discover his true identity. But he refuses to marry her and tells his best friend, George, to marry her. As a good and decent man who does care somewhat for Amity, asks her to marry him. She agrees.
Thankfully they get along very well and soon she discovers she is pregnant. Which she hates and knows she is now trapped in Salem, without the man she truly loves.
During this time the town to continues to try witches, we watch Tituba confess to being a witch. But as a servant in Burgiss house, she is not killed. She escapes with her daughters. Innocent women continue to be tried and hung for their ‘crimes.’ Some die in prison without a trial.
The town becomes darker and neighbour turns on neighbour.
Amity gives birth to her child and knows it isn’t her husbands. It is the man she loved, the male witch. A twice blessed witch. Amity gave birth in the backyard, and a difficult birth that required her husband to cut her to help the child be born. A difficult and traumatic birth.
We then delve into postpartum depression and the effect on Amity, her child and her husband. She stays in bed; she only holds the child to breast feed. George is unable to pull her from her darkness. He takes the child to work and leaves her be. It is so wonderful to see this treated with such respect. To truly see this woman and how she is feeling, the darkness she is in and unable to see her way through. It is fascinating to read when in the current times a woman is charged the murder of her three children during a postpartum psychosis. Everything we heard her talk about is what we see Amity go through. Thankfully for Amity her husband actually cares for her and does everything he can to help her.
It takes time, but she is able to come out of her depression and realise she misses her husband and wants to spend time with her child. It isn’t easy but she fights for everything.
As much as Amity’s family is wonderful, her sister Elizabeth is not. I don’t like her from the outset. When she marries Revered Burgiss, it is easy to see where the story will go.
Just as Amity is finally coming to a better place, her lover returns in the hopes of getting her back. She refuses. Then she is accused of being a witch. The one thing she was most afraid of. Her lover, Steadfast wants her to run with their child. George tries to convince her as well. But she can’t leave him to the town.
She comes back to be thrown in jail, suffer a trial and find her husband murdered, continuing express that his wife is innocent. It is the most heartbreaking moment of the book. When Amity hangs, along with her sister Harriet, and another woman. Steadfast returns to save her.
This is a very dark story. But that time was a very dark period in history. Innocent women killed for having a voice, being intelligent, standing up for their own rights and helping save lives. All seen as proof of witchcraft. That there is no way a woman should be like this, it must be the devil at work. The patriarchy forcing women to bend to their will, forcing them basically into slavery, forced marriages, unable to do anything on their own. And if they do, they are a witch.
Sometimes I think the world is changing, but then to discover seven men who traumatised a young woman, and 50 others who didn’t help her. The world hasn’t really changed much. A woman standing up for herself will still be put down and abused by the patriarchy, by the men who don’t care about right or wrong, only their way, their voice. They want the power and control. To know that over 300 years later, nothing has really changed much, except women are finally banding together to protect other women and speaking up. We proved it in the Lindsay Clancy Trial, and the Cornell 7. When women come together to protect and speak up, we can change the outcome.