[On March 1st,
1692, authorities in Salem, MA questioned Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and
the slave known as Tituba over allegations of witchcraft, the first event in
what would become the
Salem Witch Trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Salem
Witch Trials contexts and legacies.]
On a couple
significant histories to which the mysterious Witch Trials figure helps us
connect.
As I mentioned
in yesterday’s post, one of the three Salem women initially accused of
witchcraft—alongside two older Puritan women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne—was Tituba,
an enslaved woman owned by John Parris (father of one of the initial accusers,
Elizabeth). Tituba had been brought to the town from Barbados some years prior,
and by 1692 was married to an enslaved Native American man
known as John Indian. As the first hyperlinked article above argues, much
of Tituba’s life story remains unknown and mysterious, and as a result has
often been represented inaccurately; for example, she has frequently if not
consistently been depicted in cultural images and texts (including recent TV
shows such as Salem and American Horror Story: Coven
as well as books like Ann
Petry’s 1956 Tituba of Salem Village
and Maryse
Condé’s
1986 I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem)
as African American, but most historians now believe she was the descendent of
native peoples in the Caribbean rather than African arrivals. In any case, she
played a central role in the unfolding Witch Trials, and can help remind us a
couple important historical contexts for them.
For one thing, I
think it’s worth repeating and dwelling on one of my concluding points in
yesterday’s post: that late 17th century Salem (and Massachusetts
and New England more broadly) was
a slaveholding community. When we include non-Anglo communities in our
collective narratives of the Puritans at all, it’s almost always to recognize
Native American cultures outside of Puritan New England—too often still as helpful
neighbors, sometimes as the victims
of genocidal violence, but almost always as an external presence in any
case. Of course those cultures are worth remembering (much more on their own
terms than in relationship to the Puritans), but in terms of American histories
it’s at least as important to recognize that by the end of the 17th
century Puritan New England itself was potently (if complicatedly)
multi-cultural, featuring both Native American and African American slaves among
other presences. As the case of Tituba reveals, it can be very difficult to
trace the individual stories and histories of those 17th century enslaved
peoples (and she’s one of the most well-known bya long shot)—but the broader communal point,
the presence of these peoples and all their resulting contributions to Puritan
New England, nonetheless holds and is a vital one. To quote Mechal
Sobel’s book, we have a long way to go in considering the world they made
together.
On a more
individual note, the story of Tituba’s role in the Salem Witch Trials also
reminds us of a community we tend to minimize in our collective memories of the
trials: the hundreds
of accused witches who were imprisoned. It’s of course natural that
memories have tended to focus on the 20 accused witches who were executed in
the course of the trials, but many imprisoned victims likewise died, often in
painfully ironic circumstances; exemplifying those ironies is the case of Lydia Dustin
(or Dastin), who was imprisoned in April 1692, found not guilty in January
1693, but could not pay her jail fees and thus remained in prison where she
died in March 1693. While most imprisoned
people did not die in jail (including Tituba, who was released sometime in
late 1692 after more than half a year in prison), all of their lives—and the
lives of their families, loved ones, and communities—were inexorably changed by
their time in prison, and remembering them thus helps us understand the true
scope and effects of the witch trials far more fully and accurately. One more
reason to remember the mysterious, telling life of Tituba.
Next Witch
Trials context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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