Very little is known about Tituba, and a great deal has been written. The court papers call her an Indian. Nineteenth and twentieth century retellings made her African, or of mixed African and Indigenous descent, and gave her a role the records do not support: the exotic servant teaching Caribbean magic to the children of the house, from whom the whole affair supposedly spread. That picture is a literary invention. It appears in fiction, in popular history and in a good deal of school teaching, and it has done real work, because it locates the origin of Salem in a black woman's foreign practices rather than in a Puritan community's own theology and its own courts.
Her origin is a genuine open question rather than a settled one. Elaine Breslaw's study argues from the documentary trail that she was an Arawak taken from South America and brought to Massachusetts through Barbados. Others read the same records differently. The honest position is that the surviving papers describe her legal status and her testimony and say almost nothing else about her.
What can be said with confidence is what was done to her. She was owned. She was accused by the household that owned her. She was questioned until she produced what was wanted, and what she produced was used to build a prosecution that killed twenty people, none of whom she had any reason to harm. She was then kept in gaol for over a year and sold on to pay her fees.
She is not a footnote to Salem. She is one of the first people it was done to.