Tituba of Salem Village

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Tituba of Salem Village

by Ann Petry

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Saiern Village, Massachusetts, about 1992; publtshefi in 1um.

SYNOPSIS

A female slave is accused, tried, and convicted of practicing witchcraft in colonial New England.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Story Was Written

For More Information

Born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1908, Ann Petry grew up in one of the small town’s only two black families. She moved to the predominantly poor, black community of Harlem, New York, in 1938. Tituba of Salem Village is one of the author’s many novels that focus on the lives of black people and the racial tensions of American society. Although it chronicles the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials, the novel concerns issues that reappear in twentieth-century America.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Puritanism in colonial Massachusetts

Puritanism was a Protestant sect that had its roots in sixteenth-century England. It originally grew from a desire to “purify” the country’s national religious institution, the Church of England. Puritans wanted to eliminate all the church’s similarities to Catholicism by simplifying worship, reducing its elaborate administrative hierarchy, and employing clergy with more extensive religious education. Due in part to the slow progress of reform in England, many Puritans were motivated to emigrate to America. There they established a new society in Massachusetts based entirely on their own ideals.

The Puritans held several strong religious convictions. First, they believed in the absolute sovereignty of God. They thought that God was active in the world and that God’s forces of good were in constant battle with Satan’s forces of evil. They further believed that human beings were sinful by nature and completely dependent on divine grace for salvation. Puritan beliefs held that God “elected” some people before birth to be saved, but also condemned others to damnation in hell. There was no way to change one’s fate; grace could not be earned by human action. But many believed that their chances of salvation might be revealed by the way that they led their lives. An evil or idle life was seen as a sign of eventual damnation; piety, hard work, and success were signs of grace. This provided the Puritans with a strong incentive to lead virtuous and productive lives.

The Puritans placed high value on seriousness and hard work. They regarded idleness as an awful sin, and viewed dancing, merrymaking, and drunkenness as wicked distractions from productive tasks. When they weren’t engaged in work, much of the Puritans’ lives centered around the local church. They frequently read the Bible, listened to sermons, and attended prayer meetings. Puritans typically attended two church services, each three hours in length, on Sundays.

Indentured servants

A number of characters in Tituba of Salem Village, such as Pirn and Mercy Lewis, are indentured servants. In the late seventeenth century, indentured servants made up one of the largest elements of New England society. They were obligated to work for a master for a fixed number of years; most served for between two and seven years. The majority of the region’s indentured servants had traveled from England voluntarily, selling their labor in return for passage to America. Others became servants against their will. Involuntary servants included a few groups of convicts shipped by the English government to be sold into servitude, poor white children, orphans, and paupers from London’s slums. Some had been kidnapped by unscrupulous merchants.

Indentured servants were usually white and held their positions only temporarily. Their situation was similar to that of slaves in some ways, however. Indentured servants, like slaves, received food and shelter for the length of their servitude. Both classes owed complete obedience to their master, who sometimes indulged his authority to order brutal beatings of both white servants and slaves. Finally, both were often stereotyped as lazy, unruly, dishonest, and inferior people. Like slaves, indentured servants were considered to be among the lowest elements of Puritan society.

Slavery in colonial America

Twenty blacks are known to have been sold to the settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Whether they were indentured servants or slaves remains uncertain. It is known, however, that members of the Puritan community in Massachusetts owned slaves as early as the 1630s, although there was no mass settlement of slaves there. The small number of slaves was due in part to geography of the region. Massachusetts soil did not lend itself to large-scale plantations that demanded massive labor forces. Another reason for the small slave population was the Puritan desire to keep out those who were strangers to their ways. Despite this relatively closed society, some seventeenth-century Massachusetts Puritans did buy slaves to work on their farms or perform various other tasks for them. Even ministers, such as Reverend Samuel Parris, were slaveowners.

Many Puritans believed that blacks were more closely related to animals than to human beings. Some argued about whether they even had souls to save. In addition, Puritans closely associated black, the color of the slaves’ skin, with evil. They often referred to Satan as the Black Man. The Puritans associated white, on the other hand, with goodness and virtue. These prejudicial attitudes helped the Puritans rationalize their enslavement of blacks.

Belief in witchcraft

As in other areas of the world at the time, people in Massachusetts believed in the ability of Satan, the major spirit of evil, to assert his power on earth. One way he was thought to do this was through human agents called witches, who allegedly caused a great deal of mischief in the world. Witches promised to honor, worship, and obey Satan by putting a mark, or signature, in his book. In return for her service, the witch received various supernatural powers.

According to those who believed in witchcraft, the witch’s main instrument in performing crimes was her own specter or spirit. She could send her invisible specter anywhere to do harm while her physical body remained far from the scene of the crime. Only the victim could see the specter of an attacking witch. In addition, Puritans charged that a witch was often aided by one or more familiars. Familiars were low-ranking evil spirits given to witches by Satan; they typically appeared in the shape of a small animal such as a cat or a bird. A familiar was the witch’s constant companion.

The Puritans of Massachusetts believed that witches tormented others by squeezing and pinching articles of their victims’ clothing, or by sticking pins into dolls or puppets made to resemble their victims. According to the Puritans, some of the physical symptoms that resulted from these devilish activities included convulsive fits; temporary loss of hearing, speech, or sight; loss of memory or appetite; choking sensations; and terrifying hallucinations. Anyone who had the power to hurt others in such frightening, supernatural ways was considered to be a major enemy of society. Consequently, the punishment for practicing witchcraft was very severe. If a person was convicted of being a witch, the judges often sentenced the person to death. Confession—the accused person’s admission that he or she was a witch—sometimes resulted in a reprieve from execution. In Salem, a “witch” who confessed would escape the death penalty. Tituba receives such a reprieve in Tituba of Salem Village.

The real-life Tituba

Little is known about the historical Tituba, a woman who did in fact live in Salem during the witch trials of the late seventeenth century. It has been determined that she had originally lived on Barbados, an island of the West Indies, and that she was married to a slave named John Indian. Whether Tituba was black or Indian remains uncertain. Purchased along with her husband, she departed for Salem Village, Massachusetts, to work in the household of the minister Samuel Parris, where she was to care for Parris’s children.

It is thought that Tituba spoke about the practice of voodoo, a religious cult of the West Indies, to a few young girls in Salem. The girls also experimented with fortunetelling. Huddling over a makeshift crystal ball, they tried to foretell the occupations of their future sweethearts, as people in various parts of the world often did in those days. In February 1692, two of the girls began acting strangely and complained of pains similar to those described in a popular 1689 book on witchcraft by the Reverend Cotton Mather. The doctor who examined the two girls announced the cause of their behavior: they were bewitched.

Tituba was quickly accused of involvement in witchcraft. She confessed to contact with the devil, but said that she had resisted orders to hurt the children. Much later she explained that her owner, Samuel Parris, had beaten her until she confessed to being a witch and named other residents of Salem as witches. Tituba named the beggarwoman Sarah Good and the poorly regarded Sarah Osborne (sometimes spelled Osburne) as fellow witches.

The three women—Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne—were arrested on March 1, 1692. During her examination by the court, Tituba stuck to her story of dealings with the devil. She remained in prison for months, escaping execution because she had confessed. Charges against her were dropped in 1693 and she was released. Before leaving, she had to repay the cost of her chains, shackles, and other prison expenses because her owner refused to make payment. Tituba was then sold for the price of her prison fees, possibly to a slave trader. Meanwhile, a few other slaves besides Tituba had been named as witches at Salem. Among them was a female slave, the maid of a Mrs. Thatcher, who had been confined along with Tituba in quarters separate from the white “witches” of Salem.

The Salem witch trials

The hysteria over witches erupted at Salem Village while the trials were held at nearby Salem Town. Other witchcraft cases had been investigated earlier in the century; at least eighty-three trials resulted in executions in the colonies of Massachusetts and Virginia dating back to 1647. These incidents, however, were small-scale episodes that featured no more than four accused witches at a time. By contrast, the panic at Salem resulted in the jailing of more than 100 colonists before the hysteria ended. Nineteen were convicted and hanged. One more, a man named Giles Corey, was pressed to death by heavy weights, the common English punishment for someone who refused to plead innocent or guilty.

The hysteria began with the two girls who had been examined and pronounced bewitched. At first these two girls, who were the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, were the only ones to behave oddly. Soon, however, other girls in the village were seized by similar fits. Villagers grew frightened, and a frenzy against witches spread throughout the community. An account by the onlooker John Hale described the villagers’ fear that “the witches design was to destroy Salem Village, and to begin at the minister’s house, and to destroy the Church of God, and to set up Satan’s kingdom” (Hale in Robinson, p. 7).

Public hearings were convened on the cases of the accused witches. To a large extent, each case relied on testimony about specters, or ghostly visions, invisible to all except the bewitched witnesses. Though this spectral evidence was impossible to confirm, the judges accepted such testimony as completely valid. It was on the strength of this evidence that Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were all convicted of witchcraft and imprisoned.

Judges John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin questioned Tituba on March 1st, 3rd, and 7th. An excerpt from the examination of March 7th follows:

Hathorne: Did you never see the devil?
Tituba: The devil came to me and bid me serve him.
Hathorne: Who have you seen?
Tituba: Four women sometimes hurt the children.
Hathorne: Who were they?
Tituba: Goody Osburne [Osborne] and Sarah Good and I do not know who the other were. Sarah Good and Osburne would have me hurt the children but I would not... they hurt the children and they lay all upon me and they tell me if I will not hurt the children they will hurt me.
(Adapted from Records of Salem Witchcraft, pp.44-5)

Judge Hathorne persisted, asking Tituba how the witches traveled. She informed him that they would ride to places on sticks.

ANN PUTNAM V. TITUBA INDIAN

The deposition of Ann Putnam who testifieth and saith that on the 25th of February 1691-92 I saw the [ghostly] apparition of Tituba, Mr. Parish’s Indian woman, which did torture me most greviously by pricking and pinching me most dreadfully till the first day of March, being the day of her examination….

(Adapted from Records of Salem Witchcraft, p. 49)

Examinations continued as the number of prisoners grew and formal trials followed. Eventually, with the jails overflowing and people openly questioning how valid it was to convict someone based on spectral evidence, the hysteria began to abate. The governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phipps, granted a reprieve in 1693, freeing those in jail. In 1711 the heirs of alleged witches were voted compensation by the state government. At least one of Tituba’s original accusers, Ann Putnam, Jr., later admitted that her stories of being a victim of witchcraft had been made up. Today there is disagreement among scholars about why she or the other “bewitched” girls behaved as they did.

In Petry’s novel, Tituba observes that the “bewitched” girls mostly have their fits in public, when they have an audience. Their fits and accusations garner them more attention than they’ve ever had before. The girls are even excused from doing any chores. Over the course of the novel, such observations imply a particular interpretation of the whole affair. They suggest that the girls were motivated by self-interest to pretend to be bewitched. Others suggest that the girls’ behavior can be traced back to the combined effect of Cotton Mather’s 1689 book on witchcraft and local talk about witches. Proponents of this theory contend that the two factors produced such an intense fear of being possessed by the devil that the girls’ behavior was affected.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

Tituba of Salem Village opens in Barbados, an island in the West Indies, in the late seventeenth century. The slave Tituba and her husband John are sold to a Massachusetts minister named Samuel Parris. Within a day of discovering they have been sold, the couple must sail from their home of many years to Massachusetts. On board the ship, they meet their new master’s sickly wife, as well as the minister’s daughter, Betsey, and his niece, Abigail. Tituba also meets Pirn, a young stowaway who is later caught and sold as an indentured servant to a resident of Salem Village, Massachusetts.

The Reverend’s family remains in Boston for the winter while he seeks employment. Living next door to the family is a weaver named Samuel Conklin, who teaches Tituba the art of spinning thread. Finally, Reverend Parris is offered a job as minister of Salem Village, where the family soon moves.

During one winter in Salem Village, Tituba tells some of the village girls vivid stories about Barbados. At one of these gatherings, Betsey Parris falls into a trancelike state from staring at a bowl of water. After this episode, Abigail and the other village girls try to induce this state in her again. They also become interested in fortunetelling after Tituba tells their fortunes with tarot cards brought to the Reverend’s house by Mercy Lewis, the indentured servant of the Putnam family.

A few days later, a village vagrant named Sarah Good and her daughter Dorcas arrive at the Reverend’s house and beg for food. Upon their departure,

Dorcas accidentally leaves behind a doll that she calls Patience Mulenhouse, the name of one of the other village children. Abigail throws the doll into the fire, where it seems to writhe with eerie expressions of almost human anguish. Later, Abigail and her companions learn that the Mulenhouse girl has recently burned to death. The coincidence greatly disturbs everyone, and Abigail and Betsey begin having strange fits.

The girls are examined by a doctor, who declares that they must be bewitched. Before long, four other village girls join Betsey and Abigail in their strange behavior. A public fervor develops to find out who is tormenting the girls. A woman named Mary Sibley prepares a “witch cake” at Reverend Parris’s house. The purpose of the cake is to attract the witches to the house and reveal their identity. Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osburne all appear at the house and are accused of being witches.

Reverend Parris intimidates and beats Tituba into confessing that she is a witch. Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osburne are arrested and put on trial. All three publicly deny being witches. Many witnesses come forward, however, and claim that the women are indeed witches who did them harm. Meanwhile, the “bewitched” girls continue to have fits that instantly disappear when the girls are touched by the alleged witches.

This phenomenon helps convince people of the women’s guilt, and the judges sentence Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osburne to a Boston jail.

As the weeks pass, more and more accused witches from Salem Village crowd into their jail. Eventually, some of the prisoners, including Sarah Good, are put to death. The furor gradually subsides, and the trials come to an end. Governor William Phipps pardons all the prisoners, but they are not allowed to leave prison until the money spent for their upkeep—on necessities such as food and blankets—has been repaid. Reverend Parris refuses to pay Tituba’s fees. Having no money of her own, she therefore remains in prison longer than any of the others accused of practicing witchcraft. Eventually, she is bought by Samuel Conklin, the weaver who had taught her to spin thread when she had lived in Boston.

The nature of slavery

Tituba of Salem Village describes life in seventeenth-century Massachusetts through the eyes of a female black slave. While the story focuses on the Salem witch trials, it also provides a sense of what it was like to be a slave in those times. Many of Tituba’s experiences illustrate the hardships of slavery. When she and her husband are sold by their mistress in Barbados to a Boston minister, they are forced to leave within a day. This short period of time gives them little opportunity to prepare for their journey. Moreover, they have no desire to leave their warm island for an uninviting home in the cold, harsh climate of New England, but they are powerless to stop the move.

The gravest example of the abuses of slavery occurs toward the end of the novel. Reverend Parris has learned of the accusations leveled against Tituba. Angry that she has brought this humiliation to his house, and concerned about his reputation (and the possibility that he might be implicated as some kind of associate of witches), Parris demands a full confession from Tituba. She refuses until the Reverend begins beating her with great force. The beating, which marks the first time she has been hit over the course of the story, affects her very deeply. She finds it both painful and humiliating, “an unspeakable hurt to the spirit, to the soul” (Petry, Tituba of Salem Village, p. 194).

Other parts of the novel, however, suggest that relations between blacks and whites were not always so grim and hostile. Tituba seems to have a close relationship with the young Betsey Parris. Betsey turns to Tituba for comfort on many occasions, such as times when the girl is frightened about her sickly mother’s bad health. “Sometimes she thrust her small, cold hand into Tituba’s hand whispering, ‘Don’t let her die, Tituba. Don’t let her die’” (Tituba of Salem Village, p. 176). Tituba also enjoys a positive relationship with Samuel Conklin, the Boston weaver who introduces her to spinning. He visits Tituba in the Boston jail at least once a week, bringing her extra bread and cheese. Even Mary Sibley, the person who first suggested making the witch cake, confesses to Tituba that if she had “known the way the witch cake would turn out, I would have cut off my right hand rather than make it” (Tituba of Salem Village, p. 207). None of these relationships changes the fact that Tituba is a black slave, obligated to obey the orders of a white master. Tituba’s experiences with these people, however, indicate that not all relationships between blacks and whites in the days of slavery were hostile. There were whites who respected black slaves like Tituba and treated them like human beings.

Sources

Tituba of Salem Village is based on accounts of the 1692 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. The main characters are people who actually participated in the trials, but there is scant information on their lives and personalities. Petry’s novel expands on the little direct evidence that exists. For example, Petry notes that the real Tituba insisted that she loved her owner’s daughter. The novelist subsequently portrays the relationship between the two characters as a close one.

The novel ends with a postscript that contains facts about the trials and how they ended. It claims that the Boston weaver Samuel Conklin purchased Tituba, but historical records suggest that her purchaser, while not known for certain, may have been a slave dealer.

Events in History at the Time the Story Was Written

The Cold War

In 1692 the belief that witches posed a serious threat to the well-being of New England society led to the Salem witch trials. In the 1950s and 1960s, Communists, rather than witches, were seen as dangerous conspirators against America. Across the country, all kinds of institutions—state and local governments, schools and universities, labor unions—tried to purge themselves of real or imagined Communists. Anti-Communist fervor reached a climax in the 1950s with the McCarthy trials. Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted highly publicized investigations into the Communist sympathies of hundreds of people working in the government. Just as in the Salem witch trials, there was little hard evidence against the accused, but mere suspicion of Communist tendencies was usually enough to ruin a person’s reputation and gain a conviction.

Congress singled out people suspected of being committed to the Communist cause. In the House of Representatives, members of the House of Un-American Activities committee interrogated and arrested people who were suspected of being Communists. Among them were actors and singers such as the black star Paul Robeson. Like Tituba nearly 400 years earlier, Robeson was swept up in the frenzy of fear that gripped his era.

Congress questioned Robeson, determined to find out whether blacks in America had become dedicated to an international movement to make communism the dominant form of government in the world. The answer was “no,” although Communists had made attempts to win blacks over to their cause in the United States. After World War II, members of the Communist Party sought to cultivate a separateness among African Americans that would weaken their commitment to the nation. But the attempt failed miserably. Blacks such as Paul Robeson reiterated their support for the existing United States plan of government. In 1958 Robeson co-wrote Here I Stand, in which he declared that his first allegiance was to his own community, not to international communism.

For a while, even President Dwight Eisenhower was too intimidated to oppose McCarthy. In 1954, however, the Eisenhower administration and members of Congress organized a special investigation of McCarthy’s charges against Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and the armed services in general. In December 1954 the Senate voted to condemn McCarthy for conduct unbecoming a senator. But while McCarthy and his allies were discredited, America’s fear of communism continued in different forms in the 1960s. It was most evident in American attitudes toward the Soviet Union, the largest Communist country in the world, and in the reaction of some officials to the growing civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement

The institution of slavery lasted in the United States for many years after the times depicted in Tituba of Salem Village. Even after slavery was abolished in 1865, racism and prejudice against blacks remained a powerful force. It was openly practiced in the southern states, where segregation provided a legal foundation for an elaborate system of racial separation. Blacks were required to ride in separate railroad cars, sit in different waiting rooms, use their own bathrooms, and entertain themselves in “blacks only” theaters. They were denied access to many parks, beaches, and picnic areas, and barred from some hospitals. Isolated acts of resistance to these laws occurred for many years before a unified movement devoted to full and equal civil rights for blacks began to emerge. Not until 1964, the year that Petry published her novel, did the efforts of these civil rights champions result in changes to the nation’s laws.

J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), believed that the civil rights movement was part of a Communist plot. He therefore tapped the phones of black leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., but in the end he came up with no indication that they had ties to Communist organizations. Just as the Puritans several hundred years earlier had to abandon their witch-hunt for lack of hard evidence that the accused were witches, Hoover’s opinion that the civil rights workers were Communists fell into disrepute.

The civil rights movement reached a high point in 1963. Blacks and whites held sit-ins and demonstrations at whites-only facilities throughout the South. In a series of nonviolent demonstrations by civil rights workers in Birmingham, Alabama, the police resorted to the use of attack dogs, tear gas, electric cattle prods, and fire hoses in brutal efforts to break up the peaceful protests. Hundreds of people were arrested. Later the same year, a crowd of 200,000 gathered in Washington, D.C., for the largest civil rights demonstration in the country’s history. The March on Washington provided dramatic proof of the growing power of the movement.

The efforts of the protesters paid off early in 1964, when the Senate passed the most comprehensive civil rights bill in the nation’s history. Segregation in public places such as stores, restaurants, and theaters was prohibited, along with discrimination in employment. Neither the abandonment of the witch trials in Puritan New England nor the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 ended prejudices in the societies of their times. But both events acknowledged the nation’s commitment to justice and the rights of the individual.

Reviews

Tituba of Salem Village has been widely praised since its publication in 1964. Admired elements of the novel include its believable characters and its exciting and informative story line. It has been called the finest novel on the subject of witchcraft ever written for young people. Reviews also cited the novel’s relevance to such important issues of modern times as prejudice and race relations. In the New York Times Book Review, for example, the novelist Madeline L’Engle described Tituba as a well-written historical novel about racial problems at a time when such problems were at the forefront of everybody’s mind.