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 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses murder, death by suicide, torture, and anti-Indigenous racism.
In Sutton, Connecticut in 1666, an ancient being in a pit at the base of a tree is awoken by whispering voices. This is the being who is later named Samson.
Meanwhile, Abitha, a farmer’s wife, chases Samson, a wayward goat. The goat eventually falls into a dark pit; when Abitha approaches the pit, she’s unnerved by the feeling that there’s a dark presence within, and she hears voices. She’s followed by her husband, Edward, who consoles her about the loss of the goat. They head back to their home, where they find Edward’s brother, Wallace, waiting for them. The conniving Wallace explains that he’s losing money on the tobacco he’s tried to grow, and in order to make the money back, he’s sold Edward’s farm to his lender, Lord Mansfield. Edward will, for the next 20 years, have to give half of his yields to Mansfield. Wallace is able to do this because the farm is technically in his name—he sold it to Edward, and Edward is still one season away from fully repaying his brother. Abitha is horrified by this and by her husband’s seeming passivity; she berates Wallace and is eventually forced to apologize for overstepping her place as a woman.
Later in the week, Edward and Abitha go to church. The church is highly punitive—outside, a man is being held in stockades for having missed an earlier service, and inside an old man is made to kneel for the duration of the service for having fallen asleep during an earlier sermon. Abitha resents the church, but she still attends to keep Edward in good standing with the rest of the town. She herself ignores the sermon, and during it she looks at the local Sheriff Pitkin while having sexual fantasies about him. After the service, Abitha gives a young woman, Helen, a love charm that she made using her mother’s knowledge of old magic. Abitha is reprimanded for this by Sarah Carter, the minister’s wife. Abitha then watches as Edward, at her coaxing, takes Wallace to speak to the ministers about their conflict. Edward argues his case, and the minister agrees that the debt should be Wallace’s to pay without selling the farm to Mansfield.
Chapter 2 Summary
Home again, Edward and Abitha discuss Edward’s discomfort with confronting his brother; Abitha assuages his fears. Abitha reads to Edward in bed while he draws her. Abitha, aroused by the drawings, initiates sex with her husband.
Meanwhile, Wallace visits Lord Mansfield and explains the trouble with Edward and Abitha, placing the blame primarily on Abitha. Mansfield says that he’ll tell the minsters about Abitha’s disobedience, and that Wallace may have to resort to ungodly measures to deal with this ungodly woman.
Later, Edward and Abitha return to the pit, not knowing that the being inside yearns for more blood to fully awaken from its slumber. Abitha tries placing warding charms around the pit but gets into a fight with Edward about her use of old magic, so she leaves. Edward approaches the pit alone and, hearing the voice of a child, tries to lower himself in. He falls, and inside he sees impossible things: animals with the faces of children and a terrible beast that then devours him. Abitha eventually realizes that Edward has fallen in, and she gets a group of men, including Wallace, to try to get him out. Wallace sees only a human tooth in the pit, and Abitha realizes that no one could have survived a fall into the pit.
Later that week, a funeral service is held for Edward. Wallace offers to take Abitha into his home now that she is without a husband, but Abitha refuses. She argues to the ministers that it’s her right to continue her husband’s work on the farm to grow one last season of produce and pay off their remaining debt. To Wallace’s dismay, the minsters agree with her.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
These opening chapters of Slewfoot introduce some of the unusual structural elements of the novel. The narrative perspective shifts from section to section in the first two chapters, using a third person point of view that slips between limited and omniscient. Sometimes these sections are written from the perspective of a character who has a clear sense of themselves and their surroundings—like Abitha’s sections—but sometimes they are from the perspective of characters who are lost, confused, or not clearly defined—like Samson. Brom emulates Samson’s absolute loss of identity in these early chapters by maintaining a close, limited third person: mirroring Samson’s limited knowledge, the narrative does not clarify who he is or who he is talking to, and the wildfolks’ dialogue is rendered in italics without dialogue tags. The oscillation between different perspectives also allows Brom to create tension through dramatic irony. As Abitha chases the original Samson into a pit, for instance, the narrative has already suggested what awaits the goat in that pit: a being in search of “more blood” (4). At the same time, though, the nature of what is in the pit is unclear; this withholding of information develops tension.
Like in any speculative novel set in a world that closely resembles the real world, the first section contains exposition for the narrative’s speculative elements. Abitha first becomes aware that something fantastical is happening when she approaches the pit and hears voices: “[S]he didn’t just hear the words, she felt them, as though they were crawling beneath her skin. […] A chill raked her body and suddenly she did understand” (9). The description of the wildfolks’ language physically penetrating Abitha gives shape to just how unexpected and intrusive the introduction of the speculative element feels for Abitha. The way the wildfolks’ words act on Abitha’s body prefigures the embodied nature of magic in this novel. The wildfolks’ first words to Abitha, “Let go. We will catch you” are rendered in the same italics without dialogue tags as they are in Samson’s point-of-view sections (9). This immediately connects different sections, creating a more broadly contextualized view of the fantastical elements across the narrative while Abitha’s own view is limited.
This section introduces the theme of Self-Knowledge and the Possibility of Self-Definition, since both Abitha and Samson experience awakenings. The first chapter characterizes that start of Abitha’s awakening in overtly sexual terms. She begins to diverge from the practices of this Puritanical society not only in her assertiveness toward Wallace, but also in the way she thinks about men. While sitting in church, ignoring the sermon and watching Sheriff Pitkin, she thinks about “how nice it would be to feel the press of his mouth on her lips, his strong hands on her breasts” (27). Abitha’s journey toward self-definition begins as a sexual awakening, and her transformation over the course of the novel deals heavily with embodiment and the ways in which Abitha learns to navigate bodily desire. Furthermore, Abitha’s unfulfilled sexual yearning for Sheriff Pitkin prepares her for the possibility of a connection with Samson that goes beyond the purely intellectual. This scene sets the stage for the first encounter between Abitha and Samson and the erotically transformative experience that Abitha has in the next section.
