Calligraphy of the Witch
Description:... Born of a Spaniard and a mixed-race woman, young ConcepciÑn Benavidez was apprenticed as a scribe to a convent. At nineteen, she escapes and is captured in the siege of Vera Cruz in 1683. She unexpectedly becomes the property of the Dutch pirate Laurens-Cornille de Graffe, who rapes her repeatedly on the long, deadly journey to the Massachusetts Bay Colony where he will sell his cargo. Realizing the young mestiza has fine penmanship, the pirate promptly sells her when they reach the cold New England coast. ConcepciÑn is thrust into a strange world where she doesnÍt understand the language or the customs. Bought by a prominent Puritan, Merchant Greenwood, to tend to his old father-in-law and his chicken farm, the girl from New Spain is regarded with suspicion. She is considered a papist half-breed who speaks the language of the devil and practices an ungodly religion. Greenwood immediately forbids her to speak her native tongue, and he changes her name to Thankful Seagraves. The merchantÍs barren wife discovers that the girl is pregnant with the pirateÍs child. And she covets the baby. In the following years, the two women spar for the childÍs love and affection. But when several women in Salem Village, including ConcepciÑnÍs friend Tituba Indian, are imprisoned for witchcraft, itÍs not long before peopleand even her own daughterstart whispering about ConcepciÑn. After all, doesnÍt she keep a cat for a familiar and burn letters for the dead in the woods? DoesnÍt she appear lasciviously in menÍs dreams? How else could she have coerced the old man to marry and free her? This riveting historical novel combines the horror of the Salem witch trials with the philosophy and poetry of the nun and writer known as the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana In?s de la Cruz. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this novel takes a mesmerizing look at women in the New World in the 17th century and the stubborn men who accuse them for no reason.
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