Tituba

Tituba (flourished 17th century, Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony) was the first person to be accused of witchcraft during the 1692 Salem witch trials. An enslaved Indigenous American woman, she was questioned about her involvement alongside two other women, who were social outcasts in the village. Under duress, Tituba confessed to making a pact with the Devil; this coerced admission saved her life but helped to fuel the hunt for more supposed witches. There are few details about her personal life, and the scant biographical information available has been embellished, often to fit with popular stereotypes about enslaved women.

Before the accusations

Very little is known of Tituba’s life outside of her involvement with accusations of witchcraft. She was enslaved in the household of Samuel Parris and lived with the family in both Boston and Salem Village. Her origins are unknown. In contemporaneous records, she is consistently described as “Indian.” Although most scholars take this to mean the obvious—that she was originally kidnapped from some Indigenous American group before being enslaved—a few attribute this descriptor not to her ethnic identity but to her presumed marriage to another enslaved person in the Parris household called John Indian. Such scholars posit a West African origin for the woman, a conclusion that fits popular ideas about her, but there is not direct evidence that supports this claim. In her book Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem historian Elaine G. Breslaw argues that Tituba was of South American extraction, likely from an Arawak-related group, based on British raiding practices in the mid-17th century. Though this identification is speculative, it has proven influential in 21st century accounts of Tituba.

Further details of Tituba’s life are murky. If Breslaw’s analysis is correct, Tituba was between 25 and 30 years old when accused of witchcraft, but there are no mentions of her age in court documents. She understood English, though it was not her first language. She might have been somewhat literate, based on mentions of her reading names during her questioning. Tituba may have been the mother of Violet, an enslaved woman listed as part of the Parris household in 1720.

Accusations of witchcraft

In spring 1689 (or perhaps the summer before) Parris—along with his wife Elizabeth, their three children, Tituba, and John—moved from Boston to Salem Village, where Parris served as minister to the Puritan congregation. The people of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed in witchcraft, and they made it a crime. Convicting a person, however, took a lot of evidence, and only a handful of people had been accused of practicing witchcraft in the decades prior to the Salem witch trials.

In January 1692 in the Parris household, 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams, Samuel Parris’s niece, began displaying mysterious signs of illness. The children writhed and convulsed. They screamed or stayed stubbornly silent. They threw things. They complained of biting and pinching sensations. A dizzying number of possibilities for these behaviors have been suggested by modern researchers, including, for example, asthma, encephalitis, Lyme disease, epilepsy, child abuse, boredom, or convulsive ergotism, a disease commonly contracted by consuming infected rye. Seemingly having exhausted other options, the local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed that the girls had been the victims of witchcraft.

A neighbor and member of Parris’s congregation, Mary Sibley, suggested that to help the girls Tituba should bake a witch cake: a mixture of rye flour and urine from the afflicted person. The cake should be fed to a dog, and, if the dog also displayed symptoms, this should be taken as proof that the afflicted individuals are bewitched. Tituba followed these instructions (although the dog’s reaction was not recorded), upsetting Parris, who considered the act blasphemous. Shortly after this event the two girls accused Tituba of bewitching them. Tituba later said that it was about this time that Parris began beating her to implore her to confess.

In late February two more accusers came forward, displaying similar afflictions. In addition to Tituba, they identified Sarah Osborne (also spelled Osborn) and Sarah Good, both outcasts in the community, as witches. Tituba, Osborne, and Good were arrested, and on March 1, 1692, two magistrates from Salem Town, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, went to the village to publicly question the women in the village’s meeting house. Both Good and Osborne protested their own innocence, though Good accused Osborne. Initially, Tituba also claimed to be blameless, but, after being repeatedly badgered (and undoubtedly fearful owing to her vulnerable enslaved status), she told the magistrates what they apparently wanted to hear—that she had been visited by the Devil and made a deal with him.

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Tibuba’s testimony

Tituba’s testimony captivated her questioners. She confessed: “The devil came to me and bid me serve him.” She told the assembled about the various forms of the Devil by which she had been visited. Satanic animals she described included a great black dog, a hog, a red cat, a black cat, a yellow bird, and malevolent figures nearly straight from mythology. She condemned the other two women on trial, claiming that the three rode about in the night on sticks, but professed not to know the names of the other witches in her visions. Blaming the other two women for forcing her to hurt the children, Tituba claimed that “they tell me if I will not hurt the children they will hurt me.”

Tituba was brought back for questioning several times between March 1 and March 7, when she was sent to a jail in Boston along with Good and Osborne. Her storytelling confirmed the possibilities her accusers feared. Her testimony was in part used to set off the conflagration that spread through Salem Village and beyond it, with legal action taken against 144 people accused before the ordeal ended. The accused suffered in overcrowded, unsanitary jails, and many were tortured. But Tituba’s testimony also saved her life. Good and Osborne maintained their innocence and so faced a jury and a death sentence. (Osborne would die in prison before her sentence could be carried out. Four others also died in prison, including two infants who were imprisoned with their mothers.) This pattern held for the others who were accused in Salem: the 55 people who confessed were spared, whereas the 19 who professed their innocence were tried, convicted, and sent to the gallows. One man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death after refusing to enter a plea.

Tituba later recanted her testimony, as a number of others did. She remained in prison for more than a year as the Parris family declined to pay her bail for unknown reasons. On May 9, 1693, the grand jury declined to indict her. About the same time another enslaver bought her for the price of her jail fees (seven pounds). No records exist of her life following her release from prison.

In popular culture

Over time Tituba’s role in setting the Salem witch trials in motion has been embellished. In the 18th century some historians suggested that without Tituba’s accusations against Good and Osborne, the Salem witch trials would have never happened. However, this ignores the fact that Good also accused Osborne during her questioning. Possibly influenced by John Neal’s 1828 novel Rachel Dyer, 19th-century writers—both those writing works of fiction and those endeavoring to write historical accounts—began expanding Tituba’s role in the witch panic. They suggested that Tituba brought stories of magic from her homeland with her to Massachusetts and told them to the local girls, inflaming their imaginations and setting the whole incident in motion.

With changes in Tituba’s role in Salem came changes in the perception of her racial identity. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow portrayed her as half-Indigenous and half-Black. This change is significant, as in his 1868 play Giles Corey of the Salem Farms she not only tells stories, but also she is a practitioner of African magic learned from her father. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) she is cast as a “Negro slave” from Barbados who practices black magic and Voodoo. The new features of Tituba drew on associations that are grounded in history: the majority of those enslaved in the United States were of African descent, and the Caribbean played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade. However, there is no contemporaneous evidence of Tituba being described as anything but Indigenous American, and the depiction of witchcraft in her testimony was largely, if not entirely, based on European traditions.