Unraveling the Many Mysteries of Tituba, the Star Witness of the Salem Witch Trials

Few corners of American history have been as exhaustively or insistently explored as the nine months during which the Massachusetts Bay Colony grappled with our deadliest witchcraft epidemic. Early in 1692, several young girls began to writhe and roar. They contorted violently; they complained of bites and pinches. They alternately interrupted sermons and fell mute, “their throats choked, their limbs wracked,” an observer noted. After some hesitation, after much discussion, they were declared to be bewitched.

Their symptoms spread, initially within the community, ultimately well beyond its borders. In their distress the girls cried out against those they believed enchanted them; they could see their tormentors perfectly. Others followed suit, because they suffered the effects of witchcraft, or because they had observed it, often decades in the past. By early spring it was established not only that witches flew freely about Massachusetts, but that a diabolical conspiracy was afoot. It threatened to topple the church and subvert the country.

By the fall, somewhere between 144 and 185 witches and wizards had been named. Nineteen men and women had hanged. America’s tiny reign of terror burned itself out by late September, though it would endure allegorically for centuries. We dust it off whenever we overreach ideologically or prosecute overhastily, when prejudice rears its head or decency slips down the drain, when absolutism threatens to envelop us. As often as we have revisited Salem—on the page, on the stage and on the screen—we have failed to unpack a crucial mystery at the center of the crisis. How did the epidemic gather such speed, and how did it come to involve a satanic plot, a Massachusetts first? The answers to both questions lie in part with the unlikeliest of suspects, the Indian slave at the heart of the Salem mystery. Enigmatic to begin, she has grown more elusive over the years.

We know her only as Tituba. She belonged to Samuel Parris, the minister in whose household the witchcraft erupted; his daughter and niece were the first to convulse. Although she was officially charged with having practiced witchcraft on four Salem girls between January and March, we do not know precisely why Tituba was accused. Especially close to 9-year-old Betty Parris, she had worked and prayed alongside the family for years, for at least a decade in Boston and Salem. She took her meals with the girls, beside whom she likely slept at night. Tituba may have sailed from Barbados in 1680 with Parris, then still a bachelor and not yet a minister. Though likely a South American Indian, her origins are unclear.

She could not have expected to be accused. New England witches were traditionally marginals: outliers and deviants, cantankerous scolds and choleric foot-stompers. They were not people of color. Tituba does not appear to have been complicit in an early attempt to identify the village witches, a superstitious experiment performed in the parsonage while the adult Parrises were away. It infuriated the minister. She had never before appeared in court. At least some villagers assumed her to be the wife of a second Parris slave, an Indian named John. English was clearly not her first language. (To the question, “Why do you hurt these children?” Tituba responded, “I no hurt them at all.”)

She was presumably not a large woman; she would expect the Salem justices to believe that two other suspects had strong-armed her into a high-speed excursion through the air, while all held close to one another on a pole. She was the first in Salem to mention a flight.

Along with those women, Tituba came before the authorities in Salem Village on March 1, 1692, to answer to witchcraft charges. The first two suspects denied all knowledge of sorcery. When Tituba met her interrogators that Tuesday morning, she stood before a packed, nervous meetinghouse. It was the one in which she had prayed for the previous three years. She had already been deposed in prison. The local authorities seemed to understand before she opened her mouth that she had a confession to offer. No other suspect would claim such attention; multiple reporters sat poised to take down Tituba’s words. And someone—presumably hard-edged, 51-year-old John Hathorne, the Salem town justice who handled the bulk of the early depositions—made the decision to interrogate her last.