The Origin of Tituba of Salem Village

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.

The gap has never stayed empty for long, and what gets put into it is revealing.

In the nineteenth century Tituba became African, or half African, and acquired a repertoire: voodoo, obeah, fortune telling, a circle of girls in a kitchen learning forbidden arts from a servant. None of that is in the 1692 papers. It arrived through fiction, popular history and, later, drama and school teaching, and it has been extraordinarily durable. Ask most people what started Salem and they will describe that kitchen.

The reason it is durable is that it is useful. It supplies the crisis with a foreign origin. If the trouble came in from outside, carried by an enslaved woman with strange practices, then the Puritan community that hanged nineteen of its own neighbours, pressed one man to death and let others die in gaol is a victim of contamination rather than the author of what it did. That is a comfortable story and it is not true. The theology, the courts, the accusations and the executions were all local.

So the honest handling of the question has two parts, and they must not be merged. What has been asserted about her without evidence is marked false, because a great deal has been. What is genuinely unresolved is marked unresolved, with the best available reconstruction named and its limits stated, so that a historian with new material knows exactly where the gap is.

She is also, throughout, a person and not a plot device.