44 pages • 1 hour read
BromSlewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Abitha and Father, who’s now calling himself Samson, sit outside her house and discuss divinity. Samson wonders if he might be some type of god. Later, Abitha goes into town where Helen tells her that she looks “radiant”; Helen also tells her about a woman who was killed while picking berries, but her bucket was never found. This information troubles Abitha, given the recent bucket of berries she received from Father. While sitting in mass, Abitha reasons that Samson cannot be evil because he was made by God. She notices that Reverend Carter leaves the mass early; she follows him outside to give him honeycomb candy, and he tells her that he’s been distracted because his daughter has measles.
Meanwhile, Forest has snuck into Abitha’s house. He plans to summon snakes to bite her when she gets into bed, but he finds that he no longer has the power. Figuring that he needs more help to dispose of Abitha, Forest heads outside where he sees Wallace coming. When Wallace arrives at the farm with the intent of trampling Abitha’s corn with his horse, he sees the ghostly figure of Edward; he flees in fear.
Abitha returns to the farm after Wallace has fled. Remembering her mother’s cures, she retrieves a knitbone root, and together she and Samson infuse it with healing properties. Abitha heads to town with the empowered root; as she walks, she wonders about whether or not she’s making deals with dark powers and feels the presence of a serpentine being beneath her. When she gets to the Carters’, Abitha convinces Sarah to let her use the root on the ailing child. Sarah reveals that her grandmother also “dabbled in the cunning arts” (142). The women grind the root and smear the paste on the child while Abitha chants to Father, masking the chanting as prayer. The child is quickly healed. When Abitha leaves, she’s greeted by Ansel Fitch, who tells her that he knows what she’s up to.
Chapter 7 Summary
Abitha goes to the forest to find an increasingly despondent Father. She cheers him up by singing him bawdy tunes, one of which ends with a man searching for “hare” that has run up a woman’s skirt; he tells her, “Wrap your legs round me, dig in your heels/For the closer we get, O, the better it feels” (154).
Wallace goes to a local tavern where the tavern owner complains about the rising price of honey for mead. At the tavern, Wallace meets up with an Indigenous man called Jesus Thunderbird. Wallace proposes that if Jesus and some of his friends can help him take corn that is rightfully his from Abitha, they could all make a great profit. Jesus is suspicious of Wallace’s motives but could use the money, so he agrees. Jesus and two of his friends meet Wallace—costumed as an Indigenous man—later that night at Abitha’s farm. All of the men are shocked by the sheer quantity of corn there; Wallace worries that Abitha will still be able to pay back her debts even if he steals from her. In his fury, Wallace begins to set the barn on fire. They are interrupted by an infuriated Samson and Abitha carrying a musket; one of Jesus’s friends recognizes Samson and calls him “Hobomok.” Father, distressed by this word, kills the man.
When Abitha wakes in the morning, she finds Jesus’s dead friend along with the complete destruction of her crop. Samson is with her, and he questions the wildfolk about “Hobomok.” They tell him that this is the Pequot word for the death spirit, but he shouldn’t be bothered by it. Samson tells them that his dreams have been haunted by spiders, and he intends to find the Pequot to ask them about who he is; this prospect distresses the wildfolk.
Abitha, trying to figure out how to make money now that her crops are gone, approaches Samson about the issue. Knowing that he can spur the productivity of living things, Samson works with Abitha to produce a spell that will increase her bees’ honey production.
Chapter 8 Summary
The wildfolk, worried about how Abitha and Samson’s tightening relationship is keeping him from preserving Pawpaw and is making him more visible to Mamunappeht, plan to kill her themselves.
Abitha, having produced a tremendous amount of honey, sits in the grass with a troubled Samson. Samson worries about Hobomok and how the word brings visions of spiders. Abitha leaves him for a moment to go to the outhouse, and there she is ambushed by the wildfolk who have summoned snakes and centipedes. A snake bites Abitha. Samson finds the wildfolk attacking Abitha and is outraged. Abitha draws on Samson’s power to heal herself—something the wildfolk didn’t think possible. At Abitha’s request, Samson doesn’t kill the wildfolk but banishes them.
Samson, convinced that he felt the power of Mother Earth moving beneath them when Abitha healed herself, wonders if further connection with Abitha might show him more of himself. Abitha is initially wary of this, because she felt the power of the serpent moving beneath them when she healed herself. Eventually she agrees, though. He implores her to “[s]let us both free” (172), and she strips naked. Samson gives her a broom and tells her that she has the power to fly, just like a fairy queen. Abitha and Samson fly together, not just over the forest but also into the past. As they fly, Samson demands that the heavens tell him who he is; the sky only laughs at him, and the laughter knocks the pair from their flight.
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
Abitha’s sexual connection with Samson only intensifies through this third section of the novel. In Chapter 7, Abitha mollifies a brooding Samson by singing heavily euphemistic ditties to him. Here, Abitha uses norm-shattering, explicit content as a way of creating an emotional and intellectual connection with Samson. He begins to understand her sense of humor and, in doing so, finds himself better able to understand her ambitions and motivations. When Abitha and Samson fly together at the end of Chapter 8, “[s]he felt his need, his want, but now also her want, and as it grew, as it filled her up, she ached to satisfy it” (174). The language here is erotic and conjures images of penetration and mutual sensations of pleasure. Abitha’s use of sex here, though, isn’t only about accessing the power found in transgressing social norms and expressing one’s desires. Sex through this section not only helps Abitha find her freedom from Sutton, but also to create a more intellectually and emotionally fulfilling connection with Samson.
The means by which Samson helps Abitha find her freedom initially appear to be primarily sexual, particularly when she strips naked. However, the dynamics of Samson’s drive for freedom are more complicated than pure libido and instead suggest a desire for Self-Knowledge and the Possibility of Self-Definition. He asks Abitha to ride the broom because she once told him that this is what she dreamed of as a child—flying through the air like a fairy queen. Samson encourages Abitha to pursue freedom by returning to her childhood desires—the desires she had before leaving London and entering this heavily Puritanical society. Freedom for Samson comes, in part, through sexual liberation, but it is also about a return to innocent thoughts formed in a time before society could shape them.
This section also starts to explore the importance of female communities. In Sutton, Abitha is completely isolated from any female communities that might exist there: she spends nearly all of her time on the farm, and the women of the church view her as an outsider who is too far from God’s teachings to be welcomed into their fold. Abitha is only able to connect to nurturing communities of women through the talismans and teachings of her mother and grandmother. In this section, it’s revealed that Abitha isn’t the only woman who gained connection to her female ancestors through pagan crafts; Sarah Carter also discusses her grandmother. Sarah, though, was made to give up this knowledge—and this tie to her grandmother—upon entering the church. Sarah’s and Abitha’s experiences highlight the theme of Gender and Institutional Power since they speak to the way in which patriarchal institutions isolate women from one another and, in doing so, force women to conform to the patriarchy and give up their knowledge and practices.
