Some sources suggest Tituba was named a witch because she allegedly practiced voodoo and taught the Salem Village girls fortune telling, but there are no references to this in the court records and no evidence that she did this.
The three women were promptly arrested. It was this confession and her dramatic testimony that convinced the people of Salem that this was not an isolated incident and that the Devil had invaded Salem:. Tituba went on to describe conversations she had with evil pigs, dogs and rats who all ordered her to do their bidding and said she personally witnessed Sarah Good and Sarah Osbourne transform into strange, winged creatures.
There are many reasons why Tituba may have made these dramatic confessions. Many sources, including Tituba herself, indicate she was forced to confess after being beaten by Parris. Also, as a slave with no social standing, money or personal property in the community, Tituba had nothing to lose by confessing to the crime and probably knew that a confession could save her life. It is not known what religion Tituba practiced, but if she was not a Christian she had no fear of going to hell for confessing to being a witch, as the other accused witches did.
Tituba and John Indian did reside with the Parrises; Samuel Parris had a plantation in Barbados, and he owned two slaves after he returned to Boston, and she could have come from Barbados. However, the story that Tituba struck the "fatal spark" and ignited simmering tensions in Salem Village by enthralling the local teenage girls with her stories of African or Caribbean voodoo and magic spells must be recognized for what it is --a story.
It was not her "voodoo spells and stories" which, in fact, caused the girls' initial hysterics but their practice of forbidden fortune telling. Nowhere in the court records or contemporary accounts is Tituba said to have taught the practice of fortune telling to the girls in Rev Parris' house. The fortune telling technique that the girls' used, as reported by one of them to the Rev. John Hale, was an egg white in a glass of water.
This was a commonly known device in New England at the time, and it was condemned by the Puritans as a demonic practice. According to the Rev. Hale, one of the girls saw a "specter in the likeness of a coffin" in the glass, and she and another girl fell into fits. Tituba did not confess to the teaching of fortune telling; she confessed to signing the Devil's book, flying in the air upon a pole, seeing a cats wolves, birds, and dogs, and pinching or choking some of the "afflicted" girls.
She also said she was beaten by her owner, Rev. Parris, and was told to confess to witchcraft, which she did -- and what she confessed to was all culturally European, not African or Caribbean.
According to one source, Tituba would retract every word of her sensational confession, into which she claimed her master had bullied her. By that time, arrests had spread across eastern Massachusetts on the strength of her March story, however. The woman hanged, denying—as did every victim—any part of sorcery to the end. Others among the accused adopted her imagery, some slavishly.
Described as Indian no fewer than 15 times in the court papers, she went on to shift-shape herself. As scholars have noted, falling prey to a multi-century game of telephone, Tituba evolved over two centuries from Indian to half-Indian to half-black to black, with assists from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who seemed to have plucked her from Macbeth , historian George Bancroft and William Carlos Williams. He has Tituba sing her West Indian songs over a fire, in the forest, as naked girls dance around.
After The Crucible , she would be known for her voodoo, of which there is not a shred of evidence, rather than for her psychedelic confession, which endures on paper. Why the retrofitted racial identity? Arguably bias played a role: A black woman at the center of the story made more sense, in the same way that—as Tituba saw it—a man in black belonged at the center of a diabolical conspiracy. Her history was written by men, working when African voodoo was more electrifying than outmoded English witchcraft.
All wrote after the Civil War, when a slave was understood to be black. Miller believed Tituba had actively engaged in devil worship; he read her confession—and the 20th-century sources—at face value. By replacing the Salem justices as the villain of the piece, Tituba exonerated others, the Massachusetts elite most of all. Her details tallied unerringly with the reports of the bewitched.
Moreover, her account never wavered. A liar, it was understood, needed a better memory. It seems the opposite is true: The liar sidesteps all inconsistencies. The truth-teller rarely tells his story the same way twice. Before an authority figure, a suggestible witness will reliably deliver planted or preposterous memories. In the longest criminal trial in American history—the California child abuse cases of the s—children swore that daycare workers slaughtered elephants.
Whether she was coerced or whether she willingly collaborated, she gave her interrogators what she knew they wanted. If the spectral cats and diabolical compacts sound quaint, the trumped-up hysteria remains eminently modern.
We are no less given to adrenalized overreactions, all the more easily transmitted with the click of a mouse. A 17th-century New Englander had reason for anxiety on many counts; he battled marauding Indians, encroaching neighbors, a deep spiritual insecurity. He felt physically, politically and morally besieged. And once an idea—or an identity—seeps into the groundwater it is difficult to rinse out.
The memory is indelible, as would be the moral stain. We too deal in runaway accusations and point fingers in the wrong direction, as we have done after the Boston Marathon bombing or the University of Virginia rape case. We continue to favor the outlandish explanation over the simple one; we are more readily deceived by a great deception—by a hairy creature with wings and a female face—than by a modest one. When computers go down, it seems far more likely that they were hacked by a group of conspirators than that they simultaneously malfunctioned.
A jet vanishes: It is more plausible that it was secreted away by a Middle Eastern country than that it might be sitting, in fragments, on the ocean floor.
We like to lose ourselves in a cause, to ground our private hurts in public outrages. We do not like for others to refute our beliefs any more than we like for them to deny our hallucinations. Having introduced flights and familiars into the proceedings, having delivered a tale that could not be unthought, Tituba was neither again questioned nor so much as named.
She finally went on trial for having covenanted with the devil on May 9, , after 15 harrowing months in prison. The jury declined to indict her. The first to confess to signing a diabolical pact, she would be the last suspect released. She appears to have left Massachusetts with whoever paid her jail fees.
It is unlikely she ever saw the Parris family again. After no one again attended to her every word. She disappears from the record though did escape with her life, unlike the women she named as her confederates that March Tuesday.
Tituba suffered only the indignity of a warped afterlife, for reasons she might have appreciated: It made for a better story. Vladimir Nabokov , which won a Pulitzer Prize. Her book The Witches: Salem, comes out in October The pivotal accuser at the trials, Tituba, would go down in history as a purveyor of satanic magic. An s engraving depicts her in the act of terrifying children. Post a Comment.
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