08: Tituba: Origins

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A PRODUCT OF THE WHISPERFORGE: SOUND & STORY, BROUGHT TO LIFE

[[MUSIC: “Lakeside Path” by Blue Dot Sessions]]

KATE: Hello, and welcome to Remarkable Providences, the podcast about Christians and colonizers, messy misconceptions, and, of course, the Salem witch trials. I’m your tour guide, Kate Devorak.

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It was Tituba’s turn to speak.

Or rather, it was Tituba’s turn to be ruthlessly interrogated by an imposing man about her assumed exploits with the devil. And so she was brought to the front of the makeshift court, looked down upon both physically by the magistrates, and metaphorically by, most likely, a good deal of her Puritan neighbors.

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You’re probably wondering how she got here. It’s a complicated and sordid story, with few satisfying conclusions, and has therefore become twisted in a game of historical telephone.

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Tituba is an important and recognizable figure in the trials, but she is also often unfortunately greatly misunderstood and vilified, probably more than anyone else. Any expert on the witch trials, professional or amatur, owes it to her to try to flesh her out as best as we can. We need to understand who she was, where she came from, and how the society would have viewed her. And to do that, we need to get into some heavy topics, like slavery and genocide in the late 1600s. So here’s another spot where I’m going to level with y’all- these are some tricky subjects, and while I’m doing my best to cover them, I am a white woman living in the 21st century, so if I get something wrong, please reach out.

I’m going to start by breaking down some common misconceptions about Tituba and try to build her origins as best as I can. If any silver lining can be found in these trials, it is that the recordkeeping and historical interest since have allowed us a glimpse into the lives of people, namely women, who otherwise would have been completely forgotten by time. Even so, as an enslaved woman of color, Tituba still remains a bit of a mystery, but at least we have some decent leads. Then I’ll talk about the role of chattel slavery in 17th-century New England, specifically as opposed to the practice of indentured servitude. While I might make some references to slavery in the southern colonies, such as Virginia, I’m not going to get too too into it, since the cultures were different enough from New England that it’s not hella relevant right here. Okie dokie. Let’s get into it.

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So here’s what we know about Tituba, based on what we get from court transcripts and contemporary records. She was recorded as enslaved by Samuel Parris, and was married to another slave in the household, John Indian, though we don’t know how long they had been married by 1692. Records state they did not have any children. As I mentioned in episode one, John and Tituba were listed as part of the Parris household in Boston, along with a young enslaved African boy who died at some point before Samuel Parris took the ministry position in Salem. We don’t know when or how Samuel Parris acquired these human beings, but I think it’s safe to say that John and Tituba had been enslaved to the Parris family for at least four years. Based on the notes taken during her questioning, we can guess that English was not her first language, though she seemed fluent. And based on Reverend John Hale’s record of the trials, when she was questioned in February by the so-called “Salem gentlemen and other ministers”, she stated that, quote, “her mistress made her a witch in her own country”, which implies that she was not originally from New England, but this account is also super sketchy to me, since she never brought this incident up again, and she was not a witch. So that isn’t a ton. We can attempt to fill in the blanks where we can, but with the acceptance that we don’t have any definite answers and we probably never will. We can try, though.

The big questions surrounding Tituba have to do with her race, her religion, and how she came to be enslaved by Parris. One of the most enduring depictions of Tituba comes from Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which paints Tituba as a mambo, or Voudou priestess, who leads the Village girls in a ritual to curse Elizabeth Proctor at the behest of Abigail Williams, complete with chanting and naked dancing in front of a fire. Which sucks, because even though Tituba is presented there as a victim of sorts, another scapegoat for the trials, to portray her as some sort of mystic who holds seances and makes children drink chicken blood perpetuates the narrative that Tituba was somehow to blame. You’ll run into this assumption over and over again, where though Tituba is a victim of the trials, she’s also not totally innocent because she somehow infected the minds of the Puritan youth.

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When I worked as a tour guide in Salem, I heard it constantly.

“The girls were influenced by Tituba’s tales of magic and voodoo.”
“Tituba would tell the girls stories of black magic, and even dabbled in fortune telling.”

There was even a plaque at my old work that speculated that maybe Tituba gave Betty and Abigail drugs or rum that she had somehow smuggled with her from Barbados and kept to herself for, like, five years. And there’s zero evidence to back any of this up. I wonder, if Tituba had been a white, English indentured servant, would she be accused of the same kind of things? Probably not! Again, Mary Sibley was hanging out next door to the Parris’s, going off about folk magic, and folks aren’t going out of their way to talk about how her beliefs and practices might have influenced the youths of Salem Village! Just Tituba, who by all actual accounts, did nothing.

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So where did Tituba come from? Due to historical accounts of the trials written in the late-19th to the mid-20th centuries, plus her description in The Crucible, Tituba is most often depicted as being of African descent by way of the West Indies, specifically Barbados. This is most likely not the case, given how Tituba is described in court documents and other accounts from the time. The Puritans called her an “Indian woman” in all accounts, meaning that they at least perceived her as indigenous to the Americas, which doesn’t really narrow things down at all, but at least gives us a starting point. Some historians claim that the description “Indian” implies that she came from the West Indies, and therefore isn’t specific about her race, but I tend to disagree with that, because the English colonizers were kinda racist as hell. Enslaved people were often recorded with last names that reflected the color of their skin, such as Black or Indian, because God forbid they have last names that aren’t descriptive, or worse, their own name! Two other enslaved women were brought to trial for witchcraft in Salem in 1692: Mary and Candy, who were given the last name “Black”, denoting that they were of African descent. Fun. During Candy’s trial, she testified that her mistress made her a witch in her own country, specifying that she came to Salem by way of Barbados. Tituba gave almost the exact same line during her informal questioning back in February. If “Indian” was a name given to describe someone who came from the West Indies and not their perceived race, then why would that not apply to Candy, who clearly stated that she was from the West Indies? So that’s where that argument falls apart for me. One might also argue that “Indian” is her married name through John, but I’d say the same criticism stands. Whatever the Puritans decided her married name would be doesn’t change how she is described in surviving records, which is always as an “Indian woman”. Stop giving white people so much credit, historians! They’re not clever, they’re racist.

The most compelling argument I’ve read is that she was originally from South America, from which she was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Barbados. This comes from a couple articles and also Marilynne K. Roach’s book Six Women of Salem, which is one of my major sources and pretty good reading. But even Roach’s account is prefaced with a very big IF. IF all of these historical nuggets line up, IF we can assume that a name in an inventory in Barbados is similar enough to the one in 1692 court transcripts, IF the timing is right, then MAYBE we have a clue as to Tituba’s origins. Or not. But for now, it’s what we have to work with.

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That story maybe begins on August 2, 1674, on the banks of the Amacura River on the coast of modern day Venezuela, when Captain Peter Wroth and his men took a group of eight indigenous women and two children captive aboard his ship, the Savoy. Wroth used England’s war with Holland as justification for the raid, claiming the group to have been allies with the Dutch. They were transported to Barbados and sold as slaves in Bridgetown. Two years later, an indigenous girl called “Tattuba” was listed on an inventory of the plantation owned by Samuel Thompson. Spelling was not totally standardized at this time, so Tituba’s name appears in records spelled a bunch of different ways. This could be another instance of that. Roach cites professor Elaine G. Breslaw and her argument that the name “Tituba”, or its various spellings, could be in reference to the girl’s origins. The Tetebetana were an Arawak tribe living in the region raided by Captain Wroth, and it’s possible that Tetebetana was corrupted by English speakers to yield “Tituba”. It is also possible that this girl on Thompson’s inventory was sold to another merchant working around Bridgetown at this time- Samuel Parris, who then brought her with him to Boston in the 1680s. I should remind you that there is a great deal of conjecture going on here; this is a tale built on a handful of clues. But I think it’s the best we’ve got.

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A bit of this misconception about Tituba’s origins stems from a misunderstanding about the history of slavery in colonial New England and how it ties to the grander narrative of slavery in the United States. The general Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritan’s idea of slavery would be slightly different than the modern perspective, and that distinction is important both to get an idea of what Tituba’s life would have been like, and to understand some of the refrences that will pop up in testimony throughout the witch trials. The first recorded ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived on North American soil in 1619 in Virginia. In 1636, the first Salem ship travelled to the West Indies to trade cod. On February 28, 1638, the Salem ship Desire arrived from the West Indies carrying a group of enslaved Africans, thereby bringing the African slave trade to Massachusetts. Even then, though, chattel slavery would not become as popular in New England as it would in the southern colonies and the West Indies, which had land that was much better suited for large scale farming.

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The Massachusetts Bay Colony legalized slavery in 1641, as specified in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, which also listed witchcraft as a capital crime. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties addresses servitude and slavery in two sections. There are four liberties granted to servants, while slavery is mentioned only once, under liberties of “foreigners and strangers”. When I say “servants” here, I mean indentured servants who are bound by contract to serve a master for a certain number of years, not a Downton Abbey employer/employee kind of thing. According to the liberties of servants, servants may be protected if they run away from an abusive home until the situation can be assessed by the authorities, any servant who is maimed or disfigured by their master would be immediately freed from their contract and may be eligible for some sort of recompense as decided by the authorities, no servant can be given or loaned to anyone by their master for more than a year unless approved by the proper authorities, and any servant who faithfully serves for seven years shall be dismissed with a kind of severance package. Any servant found to be neglectful, unprofitable, or unfaithful, however, would be stuck in bondage until their master is satisfied. And then there’s bond slavery, where one person would be bound to another, presumably for life, and treated legally as property as opposed to an individual person. Unlike the section on servants, the Body of Liberties doesn’t actually lay out any rights for people in bond slavery, but instead gives freemen the right to own slaves under certain conditions. According to this, slaves could be legally obtained if they were taken captive during war, purchased from outside the colony, sentenced to slavery by the proper authorities, or sold themselves into slavery of their own free will. You know, all those folks just selling themselves into a lifetime of free labor with no clear payoff. Basically this meant that kidnapping was officially out as a way to acquire slaves, but much like today, it was easier for consumers not to dig too deep into how the industry works. In 1670, the Colony made it legal for the children of enslaved women to be sold into bondage, further cementing the idea of slavery in the minds of white European colonizers as hereditary.

The big difference here is the distinction between bond slavery and indentured servitude. At this time, the English Puritans of Massachusetts would have been most familiar with the practice of indentured servitude, in which a person enters into a contract to serve another, without pay, for a set amount of time, after which they would be allowed to go their own way with maybe some money and/or provisions to start a new life. Just to make it absolutely crystal clear- this is not the same thing as what we mean today by slavery, despite what white supremicists on the internet will try to tell you. These people actually were voluntarily selling themselves into servitude (most of the time, at least), but with the agreement that it would only be for a while, typically between five and seven years, though the contract could be extended if, as stated above, the person’s master was displeased with their job performance. Or if you got pregnant. So why would someone do this?

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The main reason was debt. An agreement like this could be struck if you owed a debt to someone else, or, as was a common occurrence in the British Colonies, in exchange for passage to the New World. Indentured servitude was a popular tactic for immigration, since travel to the Americas was expensive as hell, and there was a demand for relatively cheap labor. Many of the folks who did this were younger, generally under the age of 25, since they were likely healthier, easier to train in new trades, and were less likely to have families. Sarah Osborne’s husband had been an indentured servant for her family before they were married. Let’s not dwell too long on the implications of that arrangement.

Tituba was not an indentured servant, although some documents describe her as “Samuel Parris’s servant”. It’s clear that she was not in this position of her own free will, nor was there an end in sight to her service. Indigenous people were commonly taken as slaves at this time, with the Puritans filing them under the “taken as captives of war” provision, though many captives taken in New England would not stay there. That ship I mentioned earlier from 1638, the Desire, had actually left for the West Indies with a group of indigenous Pequot prisoners of war, whom the Puritans found to be quote, “unsuitable” as slaves, to be exchanged for Africans. “Unsuitable” here means “possibly vengeful and more likely to escape since they’re on their home turf”. So sure, why not ship them off to the West Indies where they would be completely out of their element. It seems that Tituba went in the opposite direction, going south to north, so Samuel Parris likely felt confident in her ability to work and not try to kill him and flee to the woods.

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Onto our second big question- Were she and John Christians? Uhhh, question mark question mark question mark. They were not Puritans, definitely not the Elect. They may have been brought along to church meetings, but it’s also likely that they would have been left at the parsonage to take care of the chores that the family wouldn’t be able to do on the Sabbath. From her later testimony, we can tell that Tituba was familiar enough with Puritan doctrine and culture to improvise under pressure. She did live with the minister, after all, and would have been exposed to their religion in a big way in her day-to-day life. But that doesn’t mean she was an active participant, or if she even bought into it. If John and Tituba had their own belief systems, it was almost assured that they would not be able to openly practice it while serving in the minister’s home. And also the question of conversion is… kinda tricky. And very dumb. So on the one hand, the conversion of so-called “heathens” to Christianity, specifically Puritanism, seems like it would be the best course of action in claiming this New World as God’s new kingdom on earth. Besides, the French were already doing that up north with varying success, but they were spreading Catholicism, and who needs that, right? On the other hand, there’s this tricky moral question surrounding what the Bible says about slavery, and if it is acceptable for a Christian to own another Christian. And you could debate the religious and societal logic around that whole thing until your head spins, but at the end of the day, we’re talking about forcibly converting folks to a religion or purposely not doing that to justify owning another human being. Which I feel defeats the purpose of the argument. The Puritans were also able to fall back on predetermination to vindicate any participation in the slave trade. Convenient how that always works. Our pal Cotton Mather had some choice opinions on the matter. Black people (and, I assume, any other non-white folks) were considered to be cursed by God to serve white folks. Mather referred to them as quote, “the miserable children of Adam and Noah”, and asserted that God allowed slavery as punishment. What he’s referring to here is a gross interpretation of Genesis, book 9, verses 20 through 27, in which Ham, son of Noah, was cursed by God to serve his brothers as punishment for seeing his dad naked. Once European nations started actively colonizing, white people took that story a step further, using it to justify the budding slave trade. This fed into an incredibly racist belief that Ham’s skin had been darkened as a reflection of his sins. That little tidbit is not in the Bible, or course, but that won’t stop folks from taking terrible liberties with the supposedly infallible text. This was also a belief attached to Cain, who was “marked” and cursed by God after murdering his brother, Abel. This was a real thing that a lot of people believed for a long time. Or at least claimed to believe to help them feel better about owning another human being like one would own a table. Not everyone held this view, but by and large, it fit in nicely with the Puritan acceptance that everything happens for a reason. Basically, to them, if God had not intended for people of color to be enslaved, then they wouldn’t be.

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Furthermore, in the Puritan worldview, God had intended them to spread out and build their own kingdom on earth in North America. If not, why were they even in New England, and how had they managed to hold on so long? The Puritans have these holier-than-thou blinders on that allow them to see the world as God’s gift for them and them alone. If God had not wanted them to take this land for all it was worth, he wouldn’t have put it there. Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, all that stems from these early colonists and their shitty beliefs. But there’s also a glaring lack of self-awareness here. You see, holding onto the New World was not as easy as the Puritans had hoped it would be.

[[MUSIC: “Our Names Engraved” by Blue Dot Sessions]]

Remarkable Providences was written, researched, and performed by me, Kate Devorak. It was produced by Dan Manning, and recorded by Chad Ellis. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on Twitter @RemarkablePod, and everywhere else @RemarkableProvidences. For transcripts and links to everything, visit us at whisperforge.org/remarkableprovidences

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Thanks for listening, and remember, the devil’s in the details.