The Rules of Magic

by Alice Hoffman

In 1794, Aaron Burr changed the course of the stream, so his own nearby property would have a pond, and later, when the city began encroaching upon the creek, muskrats still abounded. It was an extraordinary place, but it also held great sorrow, for Minetta Creek, known by the Indian people as Devil’s Water, was a boundary for a cemetery that was in use from 1797 to 1826, a potter’s field where twenty thousand bodies were buried and where they rested, uneasily or not, to this day. The Hangman’s Elm, said to be over three hundred years old, stood in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. That was where witches were said to gather. The last execution in Manhattan took place here in 1820, when a nineteen-year-old slave named Rose Butler was hanged for burning down her master’s house. After that most people avoided the tree after dark, or at least they made certain to keep lavender in their pockets to bring them luck when they passed by. Folk magic could always be found in Manhattan, from the time English colonists valued the almanac in order to read astrology and magic parchments were sold as maps for treasure digging, along with divining rods and secret incantations. Divination and palmistry were studied. After the Revolution magic was so rampant, with peddlers selling forbidden books hidden in black covers, that ministers preached against it from their pulpits. The craft was dangerous and unpredictable, and witches were difficult to control, for they had minds of t...