#salem.

[jofms]

it was as if the colour in josette's face had been sucked out at the mention that amelia could be here with her as she was seemingly drinking her sorrows when it was supposed to be an uplifting treat to herself. "unfinished-" the woman was about to interrupt the other but then the last words left her mouth, the words that mentioned him. amelia turning up had certainly been a catalyst for matthew, the reason why he had lost himself in a way he'd never done with josette before and it had left her in a bad physical state and even worse mentally. however, she didn't think that he had ever thought she was his daughter after he had been the one to interact with her first. the woman squinted her eyes; she could have sworn she had just seen the lights of the establishment flicker in their entirety but no one else flinched.

"unfinished business?" was her biological daughter now haunting her because her death had been so extreme and what she could only imagine as horrific? it had taken a second for the younger woman to get her to unravel in the ivy. it no longer felt cosy, it felt like a trap. "don't mention his name, please. people will hear and he'll get upset with me." it was clear that josette was still terrified over his capabilities despite having moments when she wished she was still with him. a chill at the side of her makes her jump but she turned to see nothing. desperate eyes looked back at the unexpected company. "what are her questions?"

Grabbing people's attention in unsavory manners was nothing new to Salem; she'd never touted an immaculate image as prima ballerina, though she could put on a good show to assuage the newsprint that she was suitable for the image that they'd like to project. Fine arts of the dance world were a subject of astute scrutiny, after all. But now she had nothing holding her back — or the gift she had estranged to keep to herself. Salem's thumbs wrestled together as she sat across from the other, a vague smirk resting upon her visage, her eyes darting in the direction of the empty seat as if listening to another unseen party at the table with them. "Well, that's rude to ask when she's sitting here with us, isn't it?"

The inflamed denigration from the other was not paid mind, looking away from the empty space to Josette's hands, saying bluntly, "You won't hurt me." If you know something — "I only know what she's telling me right now. That she has unfinished business with you and... I think his name is Matthew?" Black fingernails tapped against the tabletop, eyes as dark as coal gauging the movements and reactions she was garnering from the former therapist. "I think you probably already know the answers, right?"

[hawkeabelas]

you're allowed to say "sex" on the internet. See? I just did it. Sex. Sex sex sex. You don't have to say s*x or smex or Adult Fun Times or s3x or "spice" any other variation of self-censorship on tumblr dot com you can just spell out the word SEX i am going to scream until the heat death of the universe

[the-elder-polls]

appalachia is devastated. towns i loved, towns i visited all the time, are gone. not damaged, GONE. they are leveled to the ground. there is nothing left but rubble and ruin. people are dead. appalachia is poor to begin with and relies on tourism for a lot of its income, and multiple of those tourist locations are just...gone.

my town is okay, but it's flooded and wrecked. trees are blocking all but one way out of our neighborhood. power lines are hanging limp in the roads. we've been without power for over 24 hours and will continue to be without power for likely another 24+. disabled people and poor people are GOING to die from this. gods save appalachia.

[thebusytypewriter]

Hey Glitch you didn't need to get that personal--

[noradaydreams]

September 30th ㅤㅤ ㅤㅤㅤㅤ October 1st

[beggars-opera]

On the road leading into the center of Concord, Massachusetts, there sits a house.

It is a plain, colonial-style house, of which there are many along this road. It has sea green and buff paint, a historical plaque, and one of the most multi-layered stories I have ever encountered to showcase that history is continuous, complicated, and most importantly, fragmentary, unless you know where to look.

So, where to start? The plaque.

There's some usual information here: Benjamin Barron built the house in 1716, and years later it was a "witness house" to the start of the American Revolution. And then, something unusual: a note about an enslaved man named John Jack whose epitaph is "world famous."

Where is this epitaph? Right around the corner in the town center.

It reads:

God wills us free; man wills us slaves. I will as God wills; God’s will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK a native of Africa who died March 1773 aged about 60 years Tho’ born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho’ he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho’ stolen labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom; Tho’ not long before Death, the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with kings. Tho’ a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves.

We don't know precisely when the man first known only as Jack was purchased by Benjamin Barron. We do know that he, along with an enslaved woman named Violet, were listed in Barron's estate upon his death in 1754. Assuming his gravestone is accurate, at that time Jack would have been about 40 and had apparently learned the shoemaking trade from his enslaver. With his "honest, though stolen labors" he was then able to earn enough money to eventually purchase his freedom from the remaining Barron family and change his name to John, keeping Jack as a last name rather than using his enslaver's.

John Jack died, poor but free, in 1773, just two years before the Revolutionary War started. Presumably as part of setting up his own estate, he became a client of local lawyer Daniel Bliss, brother-in-law to the minister, William Emerson. Bliss and Emerson were in a massive family feud that spilled into the rest of the town, as Bliss was notoriously loyal to the crown, eventually letting British soldiers stay in his home and giving them information about Patriot activities.

Daniel Bliss also had abolitionist leanings. And after hearing John's story, he was angry.

Here was a man who had been kidnapped from his home country, dragged across the ocean, and treated as an animal for decades. Countless others were being brutalized in the same way, in the same town that claimed to love liberty and freedom. Reverend Emerson railed against the British government from the pulpit, and he himself was an enslaver.

It wouldn't do. John Jack deserved so much more. So, when he died, Bliss personally paid for a large gravestone and wrote its epitaph to blast the town's hypocrisy from the top of Burial Hill. When the British soldiers trudged through the cemetery on April 19th, 1775, they were so struck that they wrote the words down and published them in the British newspapers, and that hypocrisy passed around Europe as well. And the stone is still there today.

You know whose stone doesn't survive in the burial ground?

Benjamin Barron's.

Or any of his family that I know of. Which is absolutely astonishing, because this story is about to get even more complicated.

Benjamin Barron was a middle-class shoemaker in a suburb that wouldn't become famous until decades after his death. He lived a simple life only made possible by chattel slavery, and he will never show up in a U.S. history textbook.

But he had a wife, and a family. His widow, Betty Barron, from whom John purchased his freedom, whose name does not appear on her home's plaque or anywhere else in town, does appear either by name or in passing in every single one of those textbooks.

Terrible colonial spelling of all names in their marriage record aside, you may have heard her maiden name before:

Betty Parris was born into a slaveholding family in 1683, in a time when it was fairly common for not only Black, but also Indigenous people to be enslaved. It was also a time of war, religious extremism, and severe paranoia in a pre-scientific frontier. And so it was that at the age of nine, Betty pointed a finger at the Arawak woman enslaved in her Salem home, named Titibe, and accused her of witchcraft.

Yes, that Betty Parris.

Her accusations may have started the Salem Witch trials, but unlike her peers, she did not stay in the action for long. As a minor, she was not allowed to testify at court, and as the minister's daughter, she was too high-profile to be allowed near the courtroom circus. Betty's parents sent her to live with relatives during the proceedings, at which point her "bewitchment" was cured, though we're still unsure if she had psychosomatic problems solved by being away from stress, if she stopped because the public stopped listening, or if she stopped because she no longer had adults prompting her.

Following the witch hysteria, the Parrises moved several times as her infamous father struggled to hold down a job and deal with his family's reputation. Eventually they landed in Concord, where Betty met Benjamin and married him at the age of 26, presumably having had no more encounters with Satan in the preceding seventeen years. She lived an undocumented life and died, obscure and forgotten, in 1760, just five years before the Stamp Act crisis plunged America into a revolution, a living bridge between the old world and the new.

I often wonder how much Betty's story followed her throughout her life. People must have talked. Did they whisper in the town square, "Do you know what she did when she was a girl?" Did John Jack hear the stories of how she had previously treated the enslaved people in her life? Did that hasten his desperation to get out? And what of Daniel Bliss; did he know this history as well, seeing the double indignity of it all? Did he stop and think about how much in the world had changed in less than a century since his neighbor was born?

We'll never know.

All that's left is a gravestone, and a house with an insufficient plaque.

[hazbinshusk]

I don't know what is more precious, that moxxie made cookies based on blitzø's scribbles of them as horses, or that he made one to include stolas because he's family too.

[sincerelystesichorus]

i have spent so long trying to place who astarion reminds me of

his dry little sarcastic bits gets me every time and like it's automatically funny but it felt so familiar...

this bastard.

and some more similar comparisons i think

thank you for coming to my ted talk

[asasdemorcego]

me lately once again

[lilia-calderus-pet-goat]

[roses-and-lightnings]

Shoutout to that time Alice Wu-Gulliver, a Fire Witch, one of the few coven members able to cast actual magic, woke up and chose to beat a Salemite with a fucking broomstick

[bountyhaunter]

You should be passionate about it. This is a serious thing.

Okay. Fair enough. I'm certainly not going to fight you on it. You seem way more passionate about the subject than I could ever hope to be.

[hawkeabelas]

while kissing my cat's little head: you're a problem *smooch* you're a terror *smooch* you're a menace to society *smooch smooch smooch*

[halloweentrickortreat]

Salem, Massachusetts 🎃

[dykesbat]

Palestinian wedding at a tent in Rafah on January 18, 2024. Their names are Shahad (bride) and Mohammed al-Ghandour (groom). Photos taken by Mohammad Salem of Reuters.