Learning To Leave the Past Behind

As I’m weaving my way through the sixth part of the Loving Husband Series, I realized that the Salem Witch Trials are never far behind for the Wentworths. The infamous witch hunts of 1692 once again play a role in James and Sarah’s story. Both James and Sarah have to learn how to leave this disturbing time behind them.

Why Set a Story in Salem During the Witch Trials?

As I’m delving back into Colonial American history, I’m reminded of how I came up with the idea of writing about the Salem Witch Trials to begin with.

While I was writing the first draft of Her Dear & Loving Husband (in 2010)I looked over a map of the U.S. deciding where to set the story. Nowhere popped out at me. 

I deliberately stayed away from the Pacific Northwest and Louisiana since other literary vampires live there. Transylvania–a no-go. I thought of my hometown Los Angeles, and then I thought of where I live now in Las Vegas, but neither of those felt right. Too bright, I think.

I decided that if I wasn’t going to set the story in the Northwestern U.S., how about the Northeast? I pulled my map a little closer, looked at the Northeastern seaboard states, saw Massachusetts, and I thought hmmm… I love American history, and there is plenty of that in Massachusetts. Could there be some history in this story?

While I was looking at the map I saw that there, in a little dot near Boston, was Salem. My history-loving brain immediately thought of the Salem Witch Trials, and I was sold on both the setting and the historical background.

The Salem Witch Trials were not a joke. When I decided to use the witch hunts as the historical background for Her Dear & Loving Husband, I felt as though I had a duty to share the witch trials as they were, with all of the ugliness–the terror, the accusations, the madness–along with the real people with real families with real lives who died as a result. 

Since I wanted the historical period of the witch trials to echo what was happening to James and Sarah in the present day, I needed to make sure that the historical background coincided with the present-day story. To a degree, you could say the history informed the story; in other words, once I decided on the historical period it was easier for me to shape the plot.

Visiting Salem, Massachusetts

Leave it to me to write a novel set in a New England town I had never been to. I was born in New York, but we moved to the West Coast when I was seven and I consider Los Angeles my hometown. I never visited Salem when I wrote Her Dear & Loving Husband. Thank goodness for the Internet, websites about Salem, and Google Earth.

I did finally visit Salem while writing Book Two in the Loving Husband Series, Her Loving Husband’s Curse, and I loved the town. In fact, I wanted to move there. Luckily, everything in Salem was where I thought it should be.

It was a surreal feeling when I first arrived, and it had to sink in that I was actually in Salem. Hey, I might see Sarah walking these streets! Not James, of course. It was daytime and he was sleeping. Yes, I know James and Sarah are fictional characters, but they are my fictional characters, which makes them real to me (and hopefully to anyone who reads the Loving Husband novels). 

The first thing I did was take the red trolley car around town. Salem is an easy town to walk through,  but the red trolley is nice because the tour guides are knowledgeable and give extra insights—a Salem FYI. Did you know that Salem’s name was Naumkeag, after the Native Americans who lived there? Or that Salem is probably a shortened version of Jerusalem, Hebrew for city of peace?

The Calm of a Seaside Town

There’s a quietness, a calm in Salem that I can’t associate with any other place I’ve been. It might be a New England thing, or a Massachusetts thing. But people are different there. They smile at you. Say hello. I think the seaside has something to do with it.

The coastline along the bay is beautiful, the bay stretching into the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, the trees along the coast adding green to the blue of the water. There are the little boats chugging and bobbing in the waves, caught in the mud at low tide, and there are people wandering along, some sightseeing.

The beaches are popular and families with moms and dads and children and grandparents splash in the waves and sit in the sun. I have always found something serene about the ocean, the peace of going home, if you will, and Salem has the tranquility of the bay every day, rain or shine.

After the trolley, my next stop was the Salem Witch Museum, across from Salem Commons. I looked first at the statue of Roger Conant, who helped to settle Salem (then Naumkeag) in 1626, and he looked every bit as imposing as I thought he would. Raised several feet off the ground in the center of the road, Conant stares across the town like a disapproving headmaster over a room of unruly boys.

At the Salem Witch Museum, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it looks just as I thought it would—a large brick building, a former church, in fact. I was interested in how the Salem Witch Museum portrayed those horrible days over three hundred years before. I found the way the various scenes showed the progression of the tragedy both heartbreaking and fascinating.

How does one turn against a neighbor? A friend? A wife? And not just turn on them, but spew accusations that could land the other in prison or hanged? All these years later and we still don’t know the answer, which is one of the reasons I believe that the Salem Witch Trials still fascinate us. Perhaps we recognize that such madness has happened again, and again, and again, under the right circumstances.

Readers Are Fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials

The topic of the Salem Witch Trials strikes a chord with readers as well. Not only do fans love the historical context of James and Sarah’s story, but the most popular posts on this blog are the nonfiction historical accounts of life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the late 17th century. I didn’t realize I was tapping into a topic (the Salem Witch Trials) that many find fascinating when I began writing Her Dear & Loving Husband more than a decade ago.

One of my greatest joys in writing historical fiction is prompting readers to become interested in the history behind the story. The era of the Salem Witch Trials is one that prompts fascination, which may be why I continue to return to it.