August 12, 2025

What Did We Do To Mother Leeds? What Did She Do To Him?

I want you to think about Mother Leeds. She is alone in the Pine Barrens with twelve children already. She is pregnant with a thirteenth child that she cannot feed. The Pine Barrens in winter are unforgiving. Cedars are twisted into impossible shapes. Cranberry bogs are frozen solid. Winter in New Jersey in the 1730s was that sort of silent that hurts, I imagine. The snow burns the eyes to look straight at.

Did she really curse her unborn child to become the devil - to kill herself, her children, her husband? To destroy their home on the way out? Or did she say out loud what any exhausted mother might think in a moment of desperation: that she couldn't do this anymore?

Picture her in that moment. Hands cracked from cold. Belly heavy with another new life she cannot provide for. The scent of woodsmoke from the single hearth. What if she'd survived? (In some tellings she does, we'll get to that in the next email.)

The story doesn't really care what happened to Mother Leeds after. In the version I grew up with, the Jersey Devil kills everyone in that house before disappearing into the night. Clean ending. Convenient. The monster destroys the evidence of its own creation and vanishes into folklore.

But what if that's not what happened? What if Mother Leeds survived the birth? What if she delivered a baby that was born different, and the community decided this was proof of her wickedness?

So when that thirteenth child was born, when the community decided it was proof of her wickedness, what might have happened to her? Maybe she wasn't killed by the monster she supposedly birthed. Maybe she was killed by the monster story that others created to explain away the violence of their world.

Mother Leeds's blood is seeping into the sandy soil that still refuses to grow anything but wild things.

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I haven't heard my mother’s voice in nearly two years. Sometimes, in the quiet spaces between sleep and waking, I wonder if I am the Jersey Devil.

The Jersey Devil has three origin stories, and I think about all of them when I try to understand my own beginning.

In the first version, from 1735, Mother Leeds is giving birth to her thirteenth child and exclaims "let the child be the devil!" The child grows wings and claws and flies away immediately. This is the story of exhaustion, of a woman pushed beyond her breaking point, cursing what she cannot control.

In the second version, Mother Leeds is a witch and the child's father is the devil himself. The baby is born monstrous by design, beats everyone with its tail, and flies up the chimney. This is the story of predetermined monstrosity, of children born to be exactly what their lineage demands.

But it's the third version that haunts me most. In this telling, from around 1855, Mrs. Leeds becomes pregnant and rejects her baby, wishing a stork would deliver a devil instead. The winged devil is born and flies out the window, but here's the crucial detail: it returns intermittently, and each time, the mother shoos it away.

That third devil comes back over and over again, expecting there to have been some sort of intrinsic shift between trips. Reminded of this version of the legend, I remember picturing it as a child and imagining that it wasn’t the mother’s love that brought the creature back but instead a delicious pie that she would place on the window sill to tempt him. In my imagination, Mother Leeds enjoyed shooing the devil away, goaded him so that she could do so.

My mother told me everything. She told me about the life she imagined if she'd had no children at all. I can’t believe this was done with cruelty, but with the kind of awful intimacy that happens when you love someone so much you can't imagine keeping anything from them. When you believe that sharing your pain is the deepest form of connection possible.

I was her first child, her confidant, her repository. The small person who would understand her in ways no one else could, because I carried her stories in my body from birth.

She told me about how my dad cut his hair after I was born, this man who had worn it long for years, and was so upset about losing this piece of himself to fatherhood that he kept a lock of it to remember who he used to be. When I was born, I took away a future. From both of them.

My mother told me about all the awful things she was going to make sure I didn't experience. The violence, the abandonment, the men who hurt women because they could. She was going to be different. We were going to be different.

And in many ways, we were. My father was gentle. Our home was free from the physical violence that had marked her childhood. But we were still poor. Life was still stressful. And I became the keeper of not just her protection, but her emotional universe.

Growing up as the eldest meant being not just the child, but the evidence. Proof that my mother had healed enough to choose love, to choose life, to choose creating something beautiful from all that pain.

I was her redemption story made of bones and guts and flesh.

But I also became the lockbox for everything she'd survived. The keeper of family secrets, the understander of adult pain, the small person tasked with carrying forward the weight of generations while also being the proof that the weight could be carried at all.

My mother shared her stories because she loved me. Because she'd chosen me deliberately, consciously, as the answer to everything that had gone wrong before. Because making me the keeper of her healing felt like the deepest form of trust she could offer.

The Jersey Devil doesn't just fly away from Mother Leeds. It carries something with it: the weight of being both cursed and chosen, both burden and salvation. After all, it was Mother Leeds herself who asked the stork for a devil, wasn’t it? Didn’t she get what she wanted?

I think about that creature in the Pine Barrens, alone with the knowledge of what it represents.

Except that in telling me this story, in making me the keeper of her triumph over trauma, she forgot that I was still a child. The real transformation happened when I understood that I could love my mother without being responsible for her recovery. That I could honor her choice to have me without making my entire existence about healing what hurt her.

The most loving thing I could do was refuse the position of living proof.

My mother wasn't wrong for choosing me as her redemption story. She was human, trying to create meaning from survival, trying to transform pain into purpose. She loved me so completely she made me both the answer to everything that had gone wrong and the keeper of everything she'd endured.

But some love is too purposeful to survive intact.

I love you, this was a long one,
Liah

This is a continuation of a short series on The Jersey Devil (and mother grief and rural mythos). Read the first email about it here and the second here.