![]() The people of Salem associated supernatural practices like voodoo with people of color and Indians, and the townspeople identified Tituba as both. “They said serve me.” Tituba confessed to pinching the girls and told the court that she had signed a “devil’s book.” She had seen “two rats, a red rat and a black rat,” she told the magistrates. Tituba’s testimony was bizarre and deeply disturbing to the people of Salem. All three women were perfect targets for accusations of deviant, even evil, behavior. ![]() Sarah Osborne lived on Salem’s margins, too-she was involved in a dispute with her children over their dead father’s estate and was reviled for an affair with an indentured servant. Sarah Good, who was arrested along with Tituba, was a beggar who was looked down on by the town for her financial instability and her debts. However, it was all too easy to scapegoat people of color and marginal members of society. New England witches were traditionally marginals: outliers and deviants, cantankerous scolds and choleric foot-stompers. “She could not have expected to be accused,” writes historian Stacy Schiff for Smithsonian. Tituba was formally accused of witchcraft and two other women were accused and arrested along with her. This was enough to spark hysteria in Salem. She and the girls rode on sticks, she confessed, and a black dog told her to hurt the children. Tituba did confess-and embellished her confession with an embroidered tale of how she had been told to serve the devil. He beat her in an attempt to get her to confess that witchcraft was the reason behind the girls’ increasingly odd behavior. Parris, who had already begun praying and fasting in an attempt to cure the girls of what he saw as possession, became incensed when he heard Tituba had fed them the cake. She baked a “witchcake” from rye meal and urine and fed it to the girls. Though she apparently had nothing to do with the girls’ attempts at fortune telling (a grave sin in the Puritan religion), Tituba tried to help them. After the girls saw a coffin in one of the glasses, they began barking like dogs, babbling and crying hysterically. Supposedly, the form the egg white took in the water could help predict whom the girls would marry and show the shapes of their future lives. The girls had been playing a fortune-telling game that involved dropping an egg white into a glass of water. ![]() Tituba cared for the Parris children, and Parris’ daughter and niece were among the first girls who began showing strange symptoms in 1692. At some point, she is thought to have married another enslaved man named John Indian, and she had a daughter, Violet. He brought her to Massachusetts in 1680, when she was a teenager. Reverend Samuel Parris bought Tituba in Barbados, where she had been enslaved since her capture during childhood. At the time, slavery in the colonies was on the rise, and the West Indies was rapidly becoming Europe’s most important center for the slave trade. What is certain is that Tituba was a woman of color, and likely an Indigenous Central American, who was an enslaved worker in the house of Reverend Samuel Parris, Salem’s Puritan minister. It’s hard to untangle them from a distance, and all historians know for sure about Tituba comes from the court testimony she gave during the infamous trials. Even during the events of the 1690s, which led to 20 deaths, legends and rumors were common. Tituba’s story is as convoluted-and potentially fictitious-as any other part of the Salem witch trials. She had just given some of history’s most explosive testimony, a convoluted and riveting tale of a witch’s coven, a devil’s book and evil animals and spirits that seemed to explain away the odd symptoms that overtook a group of Salem girls in 1692.īut what do we really know about the woman whose testimony sparked Salem’s witch hunt? So ended the court appearance of the woman who kicked off the Salem witchcraft trials: Tituba, an enslaved woman who was the first to be accused of witchcraft in Salem.
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