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A Question the Record Does Not Answer

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A Question the Record Does Not Answer

Tituba appears in the documentary record as a legal object and a witness, and in almost no other capacity. The Salem papers record that she was enslaved in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris, that she was examined at the beginning of March 1692, what she said, that she was gaoled, and that she was released in 1693 when her fees were paid. They describe her as an Indian. They do not record where she was born, when, how she came to Massachusetts, or what happened to her afterwards.

That silence is ordinary. Enslaved people appear in colonial records at the moments they touch property, law or the church, and the records are kept for the benefit of the people who owned them. A question about her origin is therefore a question about indirect evidence: shipping and inventory records, the movement of the Parris household, the vocabulary colonial clerks used for different peoples, and what the word Indian meant in a Massachusetts court in 1692.

Elaine Breslaw's study is the serious attempt at it. Working that indirect trail, she argues that Tituba was an Arawak taken from South America and brought to Massachusetts by way of Barbados, where Parris had lived. The argument is careful, and it is circumstantial, and it has not closed the question. The atlas records it as unresolved rather than adopting it, and records what has been asserted without evidence separately, as false.

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