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 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Abitha wakes, naked and alone, to the carnage of the previous night. She buries the dead Indigenous man by the side of the road with a sign to mark his grave.
Wallace, having made an arrangement with the town to evict Abitha and regain possession of the farm, arrives at the property with Sheriff Pitkin, Reverend Carter, and two of Pitkin’s deputies. The men see the grave of the Indigenous man on the side of the road and proceed with caution. Abitha accuses Wallace of having burned her corn down, which prompts Wallace to ask her for his payment, which is due today. Abitha reveals that she has Wallace’s payment in the form of honey. The Revered and Sheriff agree that the payment is sufficient, and Wallace storms off, accusing Abitha of witchcraft in procuring so much honey. When they leave, Samson arrives and asks Abitha if he should kill Wallace; she says no. Samson spots a group of Indigenous men at the edge of the forest and tells Abitha that he needs to follow them.
Wallace, believing that Abitha must have engaged in dark magic in order to best him, goes to find Ansel Fitch, whom he knows is on the lookout for such wrongdoing. Ansel is eager to share what he knows. Samson, meanwhile, follows the Indigenous men to a cave where he sees a Shaman—the same one he’s seen in his visions of spiders. The Shaman tells Samson that he has much to learn.
Chapter 10 Summary
Wallace returns to Abitha’s farm with his son, Isaac, and Ansel. The men spy Abitha making a laurel that includes her own hair while her cat watches; they interpret this to be unassailable evidence of witchcraft. Wallace attacks Abitha, wounding her, while Ansel steals the laurel. Wallace intends to kill Abitha, but she summons her bees to attack him. Wallace flees and gathers a group of people to go with him to Reverend Wallace’s and show him their proof of Abitha’s witchcraft. Wallace shows the laurel and his bee-stung face, and his daughter and other women from town show him various love charms Abitha made which, the women claim, now burn them. The reverend’s daughter, Martha, asks her father if she is cursed because Abitha helped to cure her. Carter, distressed and unsure of what to do, agrees that Abitha should be arrested. Sheriff Pitkin goes back to Abitha’s property with the intent of arresting her. She shoots his ear off, but he manages to subdue her and bring her in.
Samson, meanwhile, learns that the Shaman is really a being called Mamunappeht. Mamunappeht has a collection of mask-like skulls on his walls; he tells Samson to look at one in particular—the skull of a stag—which Mamunappeht says is actually Samson’s own head. As Samson looks at the skull, he sees visions of people worshipping him and then visions of him killing those very people. Mamunappeht tells him that he was once a great nature-god of this land, but the wildfolk infested him with demons and turned him into a slayer because they didn’t want to share their land with the Pequot. Samson is horrified by this and agrees that Mamunappeht should put him to sleep to put him out of his misery.
Chapter 11 Summary
Sheriff Pitkin feeds Abitha before taking her to the meetinghouse, where she’s to be tried by a Magistrate from Hartford, Cornelius Watson. Watson expels Reverend Carter from the proceedings, saying that he and his family have become too close to Abitha to be impartial. Ansel and Wallace present their evidence, and various young women, led by Wallace’s daughter, Charity, come forward saying that Abitha’s charms now burn their skin. The townspeople present further evidence: Ansel stole Edward’s drawings of a nude Abitha, which are presented as ungodly; one woman says that she saw Abitha’s cat die and Abitha resurrected it; and the magistrate gets Sarah Carter to admit that Abitha healed Martha through unusual means. After some deliberation, Abitha is found guilty, as is Sarah for aiding Abitha. Sarah insists that she is innocent, so Watson determines that the truth must be obtained through interrogation.
Later, the two women are taken from their prison cell by their jailers, Garret and Norton, and put in cages outside. Reverend Carter tries to get food and bedding to his wife, but the jailers force him away. The jailers find the braid of Abitha’s mother’s hair on Abitha and burn it; Abitha also sees that the men have hanged her cat in anticipation of hanging her. Abitha, feeling entirely alone, pleads for Samson’s intervention.
Chapter 12 Summary
Abitha wakes to find Garret, Norton, and Watson at Sarah’s cage. They demand that she confess, but she won’t. They then strip her naked and search her body for scars which, if opened and don’t give blood, would be signs of witchcraft. The men find three such marks on Sarah which they cut open with sharp tools, but Sarah bleeds from all of them.
Forest, having been informed by the other wildfolk that Samson is with Mamunappeht, goes to the Pequot village. Mamunappeht sees Creek and Sky and chases after them with a net; this gives Forest time to slip into the demon’s cave.
The next day, Abitha is taken to hang in front of the town. Watson gives her a choice: if she confirms that Sarah Carter aided her in witchcraft, she’ll be hanged by her neck; if she doesn’t, she’ll be hung by her feet until dead. Abitha instead incriminates Wallace, who is standing in the crowd. This causes some agitation in the crowd, which Watson gets under control by placing Sarah under a door and laying rocks on top of it until she confesses. Martha Carter eventually comes out of the crowd and begs her mother to confess and survive; Sarah finally gives in. Watson has Abitha hung by her feet.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
This fourth section of the novel significantly develops the theme of Self-Knowledge and the Possibility of Self-Definition. Samson’s quest for self-knowledge comes to a head in these chapters. Through the previous sections of the novel, Samson goes through many names: He is “Father” to the wildfolk; “Samson” to Abitha; “Hobomok” to the Pequot; and “the devil” to the colonists who have seen him. His name changes depending on who he is in conversation with. However, in this section, Samson chooses to call himself by the name Abitha has given him. This shift suggests that Samson has found a way of defining himself. The “Samson” identity allows him to disavow the possibility that he was ever the demonic figure that the Pequot see him as, and allows him to shed the obligations he has to the wildfolk implied by the name “Father.”
Because this is the section of the novel in which Samson finally makes a movement toward self-definition, it is also the section that is primed for revelations about the truth of Samson’s history and identity. Indeed, at the end of these chapters, Samson has his first encounter with Mamunappeht, who reveals to Samson the extent of his past savageries. These revelations create momentum in the plot by destabilizing the momentary, fragile self-definition that Samson achieves after weeks of struggling. The conversation with Mamunappeht introduces a new conflict as the novel builds towards the climax regarding whether Samson can ever be at peace with the weight of self-knowledge.
These chapters also introduce a new dynamic in the way that Slewfoot portrays community: the prospect of mass hysteria. Abitha’s trial is a watershed moment in the way that the community views her. Until she is taken into custody, Abitha has become a secretly sympathetic figure for some of the women in town. Sarah Carter, and others, respect the way she’s trying to resist Wallace and carry on Edward’s legacy; many women, like Helen, also feel indebted to Abitha for the love charms that she’s made them. The trial, though, sees most of these women publicly turning on Abitha. When Wallace’s daughter lies about Abitha’s charms burning her, the other women who have been exposed as receivers of charms immediately agree with her. This “hysteria” among the women of Sutton speaks to the fragility of female networks in a patriarchal society. The kinds of networks of women that Abitha was slowly building could only exist in secret; as soon as they are exposed, they are seen as a threat to patriarchal control. The imprisonment of Abitha and Sarah demonstrates the consequences of deviation; the other women have no choice but to perform hysteria lest they face the same fate. The mass hysteria of the trial underscores the nature of the patriarchal community of Sutton: These types of communities demand conformity and punish deviation, often with death.
