The first time I visited Salem, Massachusetts I was with a friend, scouting out a possible field trip destination for a university class on witches. We did the witch tour (self guided) – witch museum, wax museum, gallows hill, the cemetery, witch memorial, and a good number of the kitschy little shops where one could buy key chains with witches on them, shot glasses with witches on them, “floaty” ballpoint pens with tiny witches gliding through a liquid sky. Witches were on everything in Salem – signs for pizza restaurants, ice cream shops, even the Salem Overhead Door company used a witch in its logo.

 
Some years later I found that’s still true – witches are on everything, including a sign for the Overhead Door Company of Salem. (Sadly though they don’t use it on their website.)

This time it wasn’t witches that brought me to Salem. It was a different friend, scouting out a possible field trip destination for a nineteenth century literature class. We did the Hawthorne tour.

As you might imagine the Hawthorne tour is fairly limited and somewhat more reserved in mood than the witch tour. It includes the Custom House, where Hawthorne worked and the House of the Seven Gables, which Hawthorne wrote about.

At the Custom House, run by the National Park Service, we were greeted by a stalwart and serious looking Park Ranger who instructed us in where we could go, what we could look at. We saw Hawthorne’s desk, his seal, his inkwell and quill. We saw ledgers and other office supplies belonging to other Custom House employees. There was nothing (or very little) about the literary Custom House, Hawthorne’s introduction to The Scarlet Letter wherein the writer, a disaffected government employee, claims to have found the text of Hester’s tale in an upstairs room. The place seems to have been preserved because of its connection to Hawthorne, but that connection is presented at the Custom House as a strangely tenuous one. It was as if, my friend noted, he were to become famous and the cubicle where he once worked were put on display – a stapler, keyboard, waste-paper basket under plexiglass.

 
At The House of the Seven Gables (one of America’s top ten favorite houses, by the way, coming in around number seven after such places as Fallingwater and The Breakers) we bought our tickets and waited for the 2:30 tour. The guide instructed us not to lean on the walls and we were off. Those who see the House are treated to more information about Hawthorne’s connection to the site and its use in his novel that at the Custom House. Today that information is imparted straightforwardly by the guides who also tell of the rather fanciful way tours used to be run at the House. A long-time tourist destination, the thing to do in former years was to enter through the penny store (Hepzibah’s cent shop in the novel) and play along as though you were a character in the novel. The guides, no doubt, cajoling those unwilling into uncomfortable and one-sided exchanges.

 
The two Salems are indeed very different – the commercialized, glitzy witch Salem and the staid literary and national history Salem. That was made most apparent in the House of the Seven Gables gift shop: the Hawthorne floaty pen, perhaps the most pathetic floaty pen in existence, has a quill and parchment glide past a rough image of the House. (Come on people – marketing!)
 
Perhaps the two Salems come together at the curiously sinister looking Museum of Hawthorne and Poe, in a little storefront across from the Witch Museum. Alas, we didn’t go in.
 
And there is, of course, a third Salem, one we will never know … the everyday Salem, where people go to work at dentist offices and at Walmart. What secrets it holds …

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