I Tituba Black Witch of Salem - Maryse Conde
I Tituba Black Witch of Salem - Maryse Conde
BLACK WITCH
OF SALEM
“Powerful...It is impossible to read
her novels and not come away from
them with both a sadder and more
exhilarating understanding of the
human heart.”
-New York Times Book Review
MARYSE CONDE
Translated by Richard Philcox
Foreward by Angela Y Davis
More praise for Maryse Condé and /, Tituba
“It is impossible to read [Maryse Condé’s] novels and not
come away from them with both a sadder and more ex
hilarating understanding of the human heart, in all its secret
intricacies, its contradictions and marvels. . . . [She is] bril
liant and prolific.”
— The Neu/ York Times Book Review
Maryse Conde
ALLSTON LBRARY
Ballantine Books • New York
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N SOM ”1
CONDE
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http://www.randomhouse.com
ISBN: 0-345-38420-2
20 19181716151413
Tituba and I lived for a year on the closest of terms.
During our endless conversations she told me things
she had confided to nobody else.
MARYSE CONDE
Death is a porte whereby we pass to joye;
Lyfe is a lake that drowneth all in payne.
JOHN HARRINGTON
Foreword
Foreword
Foreword
I could not have written this essay without the extensive coopera
tion of Maryse Conde herself. I am also grateful to Richard Philcox,
Maryse’s husband and my friend, for his aid in recording the May
1991 interview. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Jim Arnold for
sharing his expertise in both editing and literary criticism.
AAS
/, Tituba
her in the village of Akwapim, where she was born. She would
conjure up all the forces of nature at their bedside in order to
appease the darkness and to prevent the vampires from drain
ing them white before dawn.
When Darnell Davis saw that my mother was with child, he
went into a rage at the thought of all those pounds sterling he
had spent to buy her. Now he was going to be burdened with
a woman in ill health and of no use whatsoever! He refused
to give in to Jennifer’s entreaties, and to punish my mother he
gave her to Yao, one of the Ashantis he had bought in the same
batch, while forbidding her to set foot in the Great House. Yao
was a young warrior who could not resign himself to planting,
cutting, and grinding sugarcane. Twice he had tried to kill him
self by swallowing poisonous roots. Twice he had been saved at
the last minute and brought back to the life he hated. By offer
ing him a concubine, Darnell hoped he would be giving him a
taste for life and thereby get a return for his money. What a
bad idea it had been to go to the slave market in Bridgetown
that morning of June 16 **
! One of the two men had died. The
other was suicidal. And Abena was pregnant!
My mother stepped into Yao’s cabin shortly before the eve
ning meal. He was lying on his bedding, too depressed to think
of food, and he hardly glanced at the woman who had been
announced.
When Abena appeared, he sat up and murmured: “Aktvaba!”
Then he recognized her. “It’s you!” he exclaimed. "
Abena burst into tears. Too many storm clouds had gathered
over her short life: her village had been burned to the ground,
her parents had been stabbed to death trying to defend them
selves, she had been raped, and now she had to endure this bru
tal separation from Jennifer, a creature as gentle and desperate
as herself.
Yao stood up, his head touching the ceiling, for he was as
tall as a silk-cotton tree. “Don’t cry. I won’t touch you. I won’t
harm you. We speak the same language don’t we? We worship
the same gods.” Then he lowered his eyes. “It’s the master’s
child, isn’t it?”
5
Abena shed still hotter tears of shame and grief. “No, no, it
isn’t! But it’s a white man’s child even so.”
While Abena stood there in front of him with her head hung
low, Yao’s heart filled with immense compassion. It seemed to
him that this child’s humiliation symbolized the condition of
his entire people: defeated, dispersed, and auctioned off. He
wiped away the tears that were running down her face. “Don’t
cry. From now on your child is mine. Do you understand? And
just let someone try and say it isn’t!”
She kept on crying, so he lifted her head up and asked: “Do
you know the story of the bird who laughed at the leaves of the
palm tree?”
My mother gave a faint smile. “Who doesn’t? When I was
small it was my favorite story. My grandmother used to tell it
to me every evening.”
“Mine too . . . And the one about the monkey who wanted
to be the king of animals? And he climbed up to the top of the
silk-cotton tree so that they would all bow down in front of
him. But one of the branches broke and he found himself on
the ground with his ass in the dust.”
My mother laughed. She hadn’t laughed for months. Yao
took the bundle she was holding and put it in a corner of
the cabin.
“The place is filthy,” he apologized, “because I’d lost all
interest in living. For me it was like a puddle of dirty water you
try to avoid. Now that you are here, everything’s going to be
different.”
They spent the night in each other’s arms, like brother and
sister, or rather like father and daughter, chaste and affection
ate. A week went by before they made love.
When I was born four months later, Yao and my mother
were in a state of happiness. That sad, uncertain happiness of
being a slave, constantly under threat, and making do with in
tangible scraps! At six o’clock every morning, with his cutlass
slung over his shoulder, Yao set off for the fields and took his
place in the long line of men in rags trudging along the foot
paths. In the meantime my mother grew tomatoes, okra, and
6
I, Tituba
quickly duck her head. She listened only to what Yao told her
to do. “Sit her on your lap. Kiss her! Fondle her!”
Yet I did not suffer from this lack of affection, because Yao’s
love was worth the love of two. My tiny fingers nestled in his
hard, rough hand. My tiny foot in his enormous footprint and
my forehead in the hollow of his neck. Life had a kind of sweet
ness about it. Although it was forbidden by Darnell, in the
evenings the men would mount their tall drums and the women
would lift their rags up on their glistening legs and dance!
Several times, however, I witnessed scenes of brutality and
torture. I saw men go home covered in blood, their chests and
backs striped in scarlet. I even saw one of them die under my
very eyes, vomiting a violet froth of blood. They buried him at
the foot of a majagua tree. Then everyone rejoiced because at
least one of us had been delivered and was on his way home.
Motherhood, and especially Yao’s love, had transformed my
mother. She was now a young woman, as lithe and purple as
the sugarcane flower. Her eyes shone from under the white
kerchief she tied about her forehead. One day she took me by
the hand to go and dig up the yam patch in a plot of ground
the master had given to the slaves. A breeze was blowing the
clouds out to sea and the sky had been washed a soft blue. My
Barbados is a flat island with a few hills dotted here and there.
We had started off along a footpath that wound through
the Guinea grass when suddenly we heard the sound of angry
voices. It was Darnell reprimanding an overseer. At the sight of
my mother, his expression changed radically and flickered be
tween surprise and delight. “Is that you, Abena?” he exclaimed.
“Well, the husband I gave you is doing wonders for you. Come
over here.”
My mother stepped back so sharply that the basket on her
head holding a cutlass and a calabash of water fell to the
ground. The calabash broke into three pieces, spilling its con
tents over the grass. The cutlass stuck upright in the ground,
icy and murderous, while the basket started to roll down the
path as if it were fleeing the drama that was about to unfold.
Terrified, I ran after the basket and managed to catch it.
When I turned back toward my mother, she was standing up
8
I, Tituba
against a calabash tree, breathing hard. Darnell stood less than
three feet away. He had taken off his shirt, undone his trousers,
and I could see his very white underclothes. His left hand was
groping for his penis. Turning her head in my direction, my
mother screamed: “The cutlass! Give me the cutlass!”
I obeyed as quickly as I could, holding the enormous blade in
my tiny hands. My mother struck two blows. The white linen
shirt slowly turned scarlet.
* * *
They hanged my mother.
I watched her body swing from the lower branches of a silk
cotton tree. She had committed a crime for which there is no
pardon. She had struck a white man. She had not killed him,
however. In her clumsy rage she had only managed to gash his
shoulder.
They hanged my mother.
All the slaves had been summoned to her execution. Once
her neck had been broken and her soul had departed, there
rose up a clamor of anger and revolt that the overseers silenced
with great lashes of their whips. Taking refuge in one of the
women’s skirts, I felt something harden inside me like lava;
a feeling that was never to leave me, a mixture of terror and
mourning.
They hanged my mother.
When her body swung round and round in the air, I gathered
up enough strength to tiptoe away and vomit my heart out in
the grass.
In order to punish Yao for his concubine’s crime, Darnell
sold him to a planter by the name of John Inglewood, who
lived on the other side of Mount Hillaby. Yao never arrived
at his destination. On the way there he committed suicide by
swallowing his tongue.
As for me, I was driven off the plantation by Darnell at the
tender age of seven. I would probably have died if it hadn’t been
for that almost sacred tradition of solidarity among slaves.
An old woman took me in. As she had seen her man and
two sons tortured to death for instigating a slave revolt, she
seemed to act deranged. In fact, she was hardly of this world
9
I, Tituba
tubers for the evening meal. She smiled knowingly. “Do you
really think it was a dream?” I remained dumbfounded.
From that moment on Mama Yaya initiated me into the
upper spheres of knowledge. The dead only die if they die in
our hearts. They live on if we cherish them and honor their
memory, if we place their favorite delicacies in life on their
graves, and if we kneel down regularly to commune with them.
They are all around us, eager for attention, eager for affection.
A few words are enough to conjure them back and to have
their invisible bodies pressed against ours in their eagerness to
make themselves useful. But beware of irritating them, for they
never forgive and they pursue with implacable hatred those
who have offended them, even in error. Mama Yaya taught me
the prayers, the rites, and the propitiatory gestures. She taught
me how to change myself into a bird on a branch, into an in
sect in the dry grass or a frog croaking in the mud of the River
Ormond whenever I was tired of the shape I had been given at
birth. And then she taught me the sacrifices. Blood and milk,
the essential liquids. Alas! shortly after my fourteenth birth
day her body followed the law of nature. I did not cry when I
buried her. I knew I was not alone and that three spirits were
now watching over me.
It was at this juncture that Darnell sold the plantation. A
few years earlier his wife, Jennifer, had died leaving him a frail,
pale baby son, who was periodically shaken with fever. De
spite the copious milk he received from a slave, who had been
forced to give up nursing her own son, he seemed destined for
the grave. Darnell’s paternal instinct was aroused for his only
white offspring and he decided to return to England to try and
cure him.
The new master bought the land without the slaves, which
was not at all the custom. With their feet in chains and a
rope around their necks, they were taken to Bridgetown to find
a buyer. Then they were scattered to the four corners of the
island, father separated from son and mother from daughter.
Since I no longer belonged to Darnell and was a squatter on
the plantation, I was not part of the sad procession that set off
for the slave market. I knew a spot on the edge of the River
11
Ormond where nobody ever went because the soil was marshy
and not suitable for growing sugarcane. With the strength of
my own hands I managed to build a cabin on stilts. I patiently
grafted strips of earth and laid out a garden where soon all
sorts of plants were growing, placed in the ground with ritual
respect for the sun and air.
Today I realize that these were the happiest moments of my
life. I was never alone, because my invisible spirits were all
around me, yet they never oppressed me with their presence.
Mama Yaya put the finishing touches to her lessons about
herbs. Under her guidance I attempted bold hybrids, cross
breeding the passiflorinde with the prune taureau, the poison
ous pomme cythere with the surette, and the azalee-des-azalees
with the persulfureuse. I devised drugs and potions whose
powers I strengthened with incantations.
In the evening the violet sky of the island stretched above my
head like a huge handkerchief against which the stars sparkled
one by one. In the morning the sun cupped its hand in front
of its mouth and called for me to roam in its company. I was
far from men, and especially white men. I was happy. Alas! all
that was to change.
One day a great gust of wind blew down the chicken house
and I had to set off in search of my hens and handsome scarlet
necked rooster, straying far from the boundaries I had set for
myself.
At a crossroads I met some slaves taking a cart of sugarcane
to the mill. What a sorry sight! Haggard faces, mud-colored
rags, arms and legs worn to the bone, and hair reddened from
malnutrition. Helping his father drive the oxen was a boy of
ten, as somber and taciturn as an adult who has lost faith in
everything.
The minute they saw me, everybody jumped into the grass
and knelt down, while half a dozen pairs of respectful, yet ter
rified eyes looked up at me. I was taken aback. What stories
had they woven about me? Why did they seem to be afraid of
me? I should have thought they would have felt sorry for me
instead, me the daughter of a hanged woman and a recluse who
lived alone on the edge of a pond. I realized that they were
12
I, Tituba
mainly thinking about my connection with Mama Yaya, whom
they had feared. But hadn’t Mama Yaya used her powers to do
good? Again and again? The terror of these people seemed like
an injustice to me. They should have greeted me with shouts of
joy and welcome and presented me with a list of illnesses that I
would have tried my utmost to cure. I was born to heal, not to
frighten.
I went home sadly, with no further thought for my hens and
my rooster, who by now must have been crowing in the grass
along the highway. This meeting was to have lasting conse
quences. From that day on I drew closer to the plantations so
that my true self could be known. Tituba must be loved! To
think that 1 scared people; I who felt inside me nothing but ten
derness and compassion. Oh yes, I should have liked to unleash
the wind like a dog from his kennel so that the white Great
Houses of the masters would be blown away over the horizon,
to order a fire to kindle and fan its flames so that the whole
island would be purified and devastated. But I didn’t have such
powers. I only knew how to offer consolation.
Gradually the slaves got used to seeing me and came up to
me, at first shyly, then with more confidence. I visited the cabins
and comforted the sick and dying.
2
“Hey! Are you Tituba? It’s not surprising people are afraid of
you. Have you looked at yourself recently?”
The speaker was a young man much older than I was, since
he could not have been less than twenty, tall, skinny, light
skinned, and with curiously smooth hair. When I tried to reply,
the words flew away as if they were unwilling to talk and I
couldn’t put two of them together to make a sentence. In my
great confusion I let out a groan that sent the young man into
fits of laughter.
“No, it’s not surprising people are afraid of you,” he re
peated. “You don’t know how to talk and your hair is a tangle.
You could be lovely if you wanted to.”
He came up boldly. If I had been more used to contact with
men, I would have seen the fear in his eyes that constantly
moved like a rabbit’s and were just as bronze. But I didn’t and I
was simply fascinated by the bravado of his voice and his smile.
“Yes, I am Tituba. And you, who are you?” I finally managed
to answer.
“They call me John Indian.”
It was an unusual name and I frowned. “Indian?”
He puffed himself up. “My father was, they say, one of the
last remaining Arawak Indians that the English couldn’t budge.
He was an eight-foot giant. He had me with a Nago woman
he used to visit in the evenings and here I am, another little
bastard on his long list.”
He spun round again in a burst of laughter. His gaiety struck
me. So there were people who were happy on this wretched
earth!
“Are you a slave?” I stammered.
14
I, Tituba
/, Tituba
Surprised, I interrupted her. “To the other side of the water?”
But she said no more, merely repeating in a distressed voice:
“Why can’t women do without men?”
Mama Yaya’s reluctance, and my mother’s lamentations,
might have warned me to take care. But this was not the case.
On Sunday I set off for Carlisle Bay.
In a chest I had discovered a mauve calico dress and a per
cale skirt that must have belonged to my mother. As I slipped
the clothes on, two creole-style earrings rolled to the ground. I
winked at the invisible spirit.
The last time I had been to Bridgetown was when my mother
was alive. Almost ten years had gone by, and the town had
grown tremendously. It had become an important seaport. A
forest of masts hid the bay and I could see flags of all nationali
ties flying. The wooden houses looked elegant to me with their
verandas and enormous roofs, their windows open wide like
the eyes of a child.
I had no trouble finding the dance, as the music could be
heard a long way off. If I had had some notion of time I would
have known it was carnival, the only season of the year when
the slaves were free to enjoy themselves. So they came in from
all corners of the island to try and forget they were no longer
human beings. People were looking at me and I heard them
whisper: “Where does she come from?”
Obviously nobody thought there was any connection be
tween this elegant young person and the half-legendary Tituba
whose deeds were related from plantation to plantation.
John Indian was dancing with a tall yellow girl with a pleated
madras head tie. He left her high and dry in the middle of the
dance floor and came over to me, his eyes sparkling like those
of his Arawak ancestor.
“You came,” he laughed. “You actually came.” Then he took
me by the arm. “Come on, come on.”
“I can’t dance,” I protested.
He burst out laughing again. My God how this man could
laugh! And as each note rang out, a locked compartment burst
open in my heart.
“A Negress who can’t dance? Have you ever heard of such
a thing!”
17
/, Tituba
average height, five feet seven, not very big, not ugly, not hand
some either! A fine set of teeth, burning eyes. 1 must confess it
was downright hypocritical of me to ask myself such a ques
tion, since 1 knew all too well where his main asset lay and
I dared not look below the jute cord that held up his short,
tight-fitting konoko trousers to the huge bump of his penis.
“Until Sunday then,” I said.
I had barely arrived home when 1 called Mama Yaya, who
was in no hurry to listen to me and appeared with a frown on
her face.
“What do you want now? Haven’t you got all you wanted?
He’s asking you to live with him.”
“You know very well that 1 don’t want to return to the white
man’s world,” I said very quietly.
“There’s no way of escaping it.”
“Why? Why?” 1 almost shouted. “Can’t you bring him here?
Do you mean to say there’s a limit to your powers?”
Instead of getting angry, she looked at me with tender com
passion. “I have always told you. The universe has its rules
that 1 cannot entirely change. Otherwise 1 would destroy this
world and build another where our people would be free. Free
to enslave the white men in their turn. Alas! I cannot.”
I could think of nothing in reply and Mama Yaya disap
peared as she had come, leaving behind her that perfume of
eucalyptus peculiar to the invisible world. Left alone, I lit the
fire between four stones, wedged in my earthenware pot, and
threw a hot pepper and a piece of salt pork into the water to
make a stew. And yet I didn’t feel like eating.
My mother had been raped by a white man. She had been
hanged because of a white man. I had seen his tongue quiver out
of his mouth, his penis turgid and violet. My adoptive father
had committed suicide because of a white man. Despite all
that, I was considering living among white men again, in their
midst, under their domination. And all because of an uncon
trollable desire for a mortal man. Wasn’t it madness? Madness
and betrayal?
That night, and for seven more nights and days, I struggled
with myself. In the end, 1 confessed 1 was beaten. I wouldn’t
20
/, Tituba
want anyone to go through the agony I went through. Remorse.
Shame. Panic. Fear.
On the following Sunday 1 packed a few of my mother’s
dresses and three petticoats into a wicker basket. I wedged a
pole against the door of my house. I set my animals free. The
hens and the guinea fowl that had given me their eggs. The cow
that had given me her milk. The pig that I had been fattening
for a year without ever having the heart to kill it.
I murmured a long prayer for the dwellers of this place I was
abandoning. Then I set off for Carlisle Bay.
Susanna Endicott was a small woman of about fifty, with gray
ing hair that was parted in the middle and brushed up into such
a tight chignon that it pulled back the skin on her forehead
and temples. I could read all the aversion she had for me in her
eyes, which were the color of sea water. She stared at me as if
I were an object of disgust.
“Tituba? Where did that name come from?”
“My father gave it to me,” I replied coldly.
She turned purple. “Lower your eyes when you speak to me.”
I obeyed for the love of John Indian.
“Are you a Christian?” she went on.
John Indian hastily intervened. “I’m going to teach her the
prayers, Mistress! And I’m going to see the vicar of Bridgetown
so that she can be baptized as soon as possible.”
Susanna Endicott stared at me again. “You will clean the
house. Once a week you will scrub the floor. You will do the
washing and ironing. But you will leave the cooking to me. I
cannot bear to have you niggers touching my food with the
discolored, waxy palms of your hands.”
I looked at my palms. Gray and pink like a seashell. Whereas
John Indian greeted this outburst with a roar of laughter, I
remained dumbfounded. Nobody had ever spoken to me, hu
miliated me, in such a manner!
“You can go now!”
John started to hop from one foot to another and in a whin
ing, humble voice, like a child asking for a favor, he pleaded:
“Mistress, when a nigger takes a wife doesn’t he deserve two
days rest? Doesn’t he, Mistress?”
Susanna Endicott spat and her eyes were now the color of
22
Z, Tituba
stormy seas. “A nice woman you’ve got yourself there and pray
God you don’t repent it!”
John Indian burst out laughing again and between two peals
of laughter, cried: “Pray God! Pray God!”
Susanna Endicott suddenly softened her tone. “Be off with
you and report back to me on Tuesday.”
In the same comical and exaggerated way, John insisted:
“Two days, Mistress! Two days!”
“All right, you’ve won,” she burst out. “As always! Report
back Wednesday. But don’t forget it’s the day the post comes.”
“Have I ever forgotten?” he said proudly. Then he threw
himself on the ground to seize her hand and kiss it.
Instead of letting him have his way she struck him across the
face. “Get out of here, nigger!”
My blood was boiling inside me.
John Indian, who knew what I was thinking, started to hurry
me away when Susanna’s voice nailed us to the spot. “Well,
Tituba, aren’t you going to thank me?”
John squeezed my fingers as if to crush them.
I managed to murmur a weak: “Thank you, Mistress.”
Susanna Endicott was the widow of a rich planter, one of
the first to have learned the Dutch art of extracting sugar from
cane. On the death of her husband she had sold the plantation
and freed all the slaves, since, because of a paradox I couldn’t
understand, although she hated Negroes, she was strongly op
posed to slavery. Only John Indian remained in her house
hold where he had been brought up ever since he was a baby.
Susanna Endicott’s beautiful and spacious home in Carlisle Bay
stretched out amidst a wooded park; at the bottom stood John
Indian’s little house, which, I must confess, I found quite at
tractive with its lime-plastered wattling and a small-columned
veranda hung with a hammock.
John Indian closed the door with a wooden latch and took
me in his arms, whispering: “The duty of a slave is to survive!
Do you understand? To survive!”
His words reminded me of Mama Yaya and tears started
to run down my cheeks. John Indian drank them one by one,
23
I, Tituba
“Time?”
“Yes, wretch, that is a clock. And you start work at six
o’clock every morning.”
Then she showed me a bucket, a broom, and a scrubbing
brush. “To work!”
The house had twelve rooms, plus an attic piled high with
leather trunks containing the clothes of the late Joseph Endi
cott. Apparently he had liked fine linen.
When I went back downstairs, tottering from exhaustion
with my dress soiled and wet through, Susanna Endicott was
having tea with her friends, half a dozen women like herself,
their skin the color of curdled milk, their hair drawn back,
and the ends of their shawls knotted around their waists. Their
multicolored eyes stared at me in fright.
“Where did she come from?”
“She’s John Indian’s woman,” said Susanna Endicott in a
tone of mock solemnity.
The ladies all exclaimed at once and one of them protested:
“Under your roof! In my opinion, Susanna Endicott, you give
that boy too much liberty. You forget he’s a nigger.”
Susanna Endicott shrugged her shoulders indulgently. “Well,
it’s better that he has all he needs at home rather than running
all over the island wearing himself out sowing his wild oats.”
“I hope she’s a Christian at least.”
“John Indian is going to teach her her prayers.”
“And are you going to let them marry?”
It was not so much the conversation that amazed and re
volted me as their way of going about it. You would think 1
wasn’t standing there at the threshold of the room. They were
talking about me and yet ignoring me. They were striking me
off the map of human beings. 1 was a nonbeing. Invisible. More
invisible than the unseen, who at least have powers that every
one fears. Tituba only existed insofar as these women let her
exist. It was atrocious. Tituba became ugly, coarse, and in
ferior because they willed her so. 1 went out into the garden
and heard their comments, which proved they had inspected
me from head to foot while pretending to ignore me.
“She has eyes that turn your blood cold.”
25
I, Tituba
I, Tituba
/, Tituba
“1’11 be so far away. It’ll take so long to cross the water. And
it’ll be so difficult. . .”
“Why will you have to cross the water?”
My mother burst into tears. Amazing! This woman, who
when she was alive treated me with so little affection, was now
becoming almost overprotective in the other world! A little ex
asperated, I purposefully turned my back on her and repeated:
“Mama Yaya, why will you have to cross the water to see me?”
Mama Yaya did not answer and I understood that, whatever
her affection for me, my mortal condition obliged her to keep
a certain reserve.
I accepted this silence and returned to my previous preoccu
pations. “1 want Susanna Endicott to die!”
My mother and Mama Yaya both got up together. Mama
Yaya said wearily: “Even if she does die you cannot change
your fate. And you will have perverted your heart into the bar
gain. You will have become like them, knowing only how to
kill and destroy. Strike her instead with an inconvenient and
humiliating sickness.”
The two shapes disappeared and I remained alone to medi
tate on my next move. An inconvenient and humiliating sick
ness? Which one would I choose? When dusk brought John
Indian home, 1 had not reached a decision. He seemed cured
of his fright and he even brought me a surprise: a mauve velvet
ribbon, bought from an English trader, which he fixed in my
hair himself. 1 recalled the pessimistic words of Mama Yaya and
Abena, my mother, concerning him and I wanted to reassure
myself.
“John Indian, do you love me?”
“More than my own life,” he cooed. “More than that God
Susanna Endicott keeps going on about. But I also fear you.”
“Why do you fear me?”
“Because 1 know you are violent. I often see you as a hur
ricane ravaging the island, laying flat the coconut palms and
raising the lead-gray waves up to the sky.”
“Be quiet! Make love to me!”
Two days later Susanna Endicott was taken with a violent
cramp while she was serving tea to the minister’s wife. The
31
latter scarcely had time to step outside and call John Indian,
who was chopping wood, before a malodorous liquid streamed
down the mistress’s legs and formed a frothy puddle on the
floor. They called for Dr. Fox, a man of science who had studied
at Oxford and published a book entitled Wonders of the In
visible World. The choice of such a doctor was by no means
unintentional. Susanna Endicott’s sickness was too sudden not
to arouse suspicion. Only the day before she had been teaching
the children their catechism with her shawl tied tightly around
her firm waist and her hair covered with a hood. Only the day
before she had marked with a blue cross the eggs that John
Indian had been sent to sell at the market. Perhaps she had
already made known her suspicions about me. Whatever the
case, Fox came and examined her from head to foot. If he was
repelled by the terrible stench that rose from her bed, he did
not show it. He stayed closeted with her for almost three hours.
When he came down, I heard him jabbering with the minister
and some of his followers.
“I have found in no secret part of her body either large or
small growths where the devil could have suckled her. Like
wise, I have found neither red nor blue spots similar to a flea
bite. And still less painless marks that when stuck with a pin
do not bleed. I can therefore make no positive conclusion.”
How I would have liked to witness the decomposition of my
enemy, now a soiled baby wrapped in dirty linen. But nothing
could be glimpsed through her door that was opened just wide
enough to let one of her loyal friends scamper up and down
with trays and chamber pots.
As the saying goes: “When the cat’s away, the mice they
will play.”
The Saturday after Susanna Endicott took to her bed, John
Indian began to play. I knew he wasn’t like me, a morose crea
ture, brought up all alone by an old woman, but I had no idea
he had so many friends. They came from everywhere, even
from the faraway parishes of St. Lucy and St. Philip. One slave
had taken two days to walk from Cobblers Rock. The tall yel
low girl in the pleated madras head tie was also one of the
guests. She merely threw me an angry look without coming
32
I, Tituba
7, Tituba
In the early afternoon a man came to see her, a man such as I
had never seen in the streets of Bridgetown, nor for that matter
anywhere else. Tall, very tall, dressed in black from head to
foot, with a chalky white skin. As he was about to go up the
stairs, his eyes fell on me, standing in the half-light with my
bucket and broom, and I almost fell over. I have already said
much about the eyes of Susanna Endicott, but these! Imagine
greenish, cold eyes, scheming and wily, creating evil because
they saw it everywhere. It was as if I had come face-to-face
with a snake or some other evil, wicked reptile. I was immedi
ately convinced that this Satan we heard so much about must
stare in the same way at people he wishes to lead astray.
He spoke and his voice was the same as his look, cold and
penetrating: “Negress, why are you looking at me in such
a way?”
I scampered off. Then as soon as I had recovered the strength
to move, I ran to John Indian, who was sharpening knives on
the veranda while humming a beguine. I pressed myself up
against him and then finally stammered out: “John Indian, I’ve
just seen Satan!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Now you’re talking like a Chris
tian!” Then, realizing how upset I was, he drew me close and
said tenderly: “Satan doesn’t like daylight and you won’t see
him walk in the sun. He’s a creature of the night.”
The next few hours were torment. For the first time, I cursed
my powerlessness, in that my art was lacking much to make it
absolutely perfect. Mama Yaya had left this mortal sphere too
early to initiate me into the third degree of knowledge, the
highest and the most complex. Although I could communicate
with the forces of the invisible world and change the present
with their help, 1 was unable to decipher the future. The future
remained for me a circular star covered with dense trees whose
trunks were so close together they kept out both light and
air.
I felt that terrible dangers were threatening me, but I was
incapable of naming them and I knew that neither Abena, my
mother, nor Mama Yaya could intervene to enlighten me.
That night there was a hurricane. I heard it coming from
35
I, Tituba
She knew full well what I could retort. She was only too aware
of the argument I could use.
“No, Susanna Endicott!” 1 could retort. “I may be John
Indian’s woman, but you haven’t bought me. You have no
deed of ownership listing me with your chairs, your chests
of drawers, your bed, and your eiderdowns. So you can’t sell
me and the gentleman from Boston will not lay hands on my
treasures.”
Yes, but if I said that, I would be separated from John Indian.
Didn’t Susanna Endicott excel in cruelty, and of the two of us
who was the more formidable? After all, sickness and death
are written into our existence and perhaps all I had done was
to get them to erupt a little early into Susanna Endicott’s life!
What was she doing to my life?
John Indian went down on all fours and crawled around
the bed. Nothing could be done! Susanna Endicott remained
inflexible under her canopy, whose curtains had been drawn
open to form a pleated velvet frame.
Mortified and in anguish we went back downstairs.
In the kitchen the minister was talking to a man in front
of the fireplace where a vegetable soup was simmering. On
hearing our footsteps, the man turned around and in horror I
recognized the stranger who had frightened me so much the
day before. A horrible foreboding came over me, confirmed by
the ruthless violence of his cutting words, spoken in a mono
tone: “On your knees, dregs of hell! I am your new master! My
name is Samuel Parris. Tomorrow, as soon as the sun is up, we
shall be leaving aboard the brigantine Blessing. My wife, my
daughter Betsey, and Abigail, my wife’s poor niece, whom we
took in upon the death of her parents, are already on board.”
The new master had me kneel on the deck of the brigantine
among the ropes and barrels. The jeering sailors watched as he
poured a trickle of icy water on my forehead. Then he ordered
me to get up and I followed him to the stern of the vessel where
John Indian was standing. He ordered us to kneel beside each
other. He came forward and his shadow covered us, blotting
out the sun.
“John and Tituba Indian. I hereby declare you man and wife
by the holy ties of matrimony to live and remain in peace until
death do you part.”
“Amen!” stammered John Indian.
I couldn’t pronounce a single word. My lips were sealed
together. Despite the stifling heat, I was cold. An icy sweat
trickled down between my shoulder blades as if I were going
to have an attack of malaria, cholera or typhoid. I dared not
look in the direction of Samuel Parris, so great was the horror
he instilled in me. Around us the sea was a bright blue and the
uninterrupted line of the coast, a dark green.
6
I, Tituba
I, Tituba
I, Tituba
to let his wife lean on his arm. I took the little girls by the hand.
1 could never have imagined that such a town as Boston
existed, with its tall houses and crowds thronging the cobble-
stoned streets jammed with carts drawn by horse and oxen.
I caught sight of a lot of faces the same color as mine and 1
understood that here too the children of Africa were paying
their tribute to misfortune.
Samuel Parris seemed to know the place perfectly well, as
not once did he stop to ask his way. At last we arrived, wet to
the bone, in front of a two-story wooden house whose facade
was enhanced by a crisscross of lighter beams. Samuel Parris let
go of his wife’s arm and said, as if it were the most remarkable
of dwellings: “Here we are!”
The place smelled musty and damp. At the sound of our
steps, two rats scampered off while a black cat that was dozing
in the ash and dust rose lazily and sneaked off into the next
room. 1 cannot describe the effect this unfortunate black cat
had on the children, as well as on Elizabeth and Samuel. Samuel
Parris seized his prayer book and began to recite a seemingly
endless prayer. When he was a little calmer, he stood up straight
and started to give orders: “Tituba, clean this room. Then pre
pare the beds. John Indian, come with me to buy some wood.”
Once again John Indian put on the affected behavior that 1
hated so much. “Go outside, Master? In this wind and rain!
You’ll soon be spending money on wood for my coffin.”
Without another word, Samuel Parris undid his large black
cloth cape and threw it to him. Hardly had the two men gone
out when Abigail asked, holding her breath: “Aunt, it was the
devil, wasn’t it?”
Elizabeth Parris’s face convulsed. “Be quiet!”
“But what are you talking about?” 1 asked, intrigued.
“About the cat. The black cat.”
“What will you think up next? It was only an animal that
was disturbed by our arrival. Why do you keep talking about
the devil? The invisible world around us only torments us if we
provoke it. And surely this is not yet the case at your age.”
“Liar!” hissed Abigail. “Poor, ignorant Negress. The devil
45
snatched from Africa. I learned that we were not the only ones
the whites were reducing to slavery; they were also enslaving
the Indians, the original inhabitants of both America and our
beloved Barbados.
I listened in amazement and revulsion. “There are two Indi
ans working at the Black Horse. If you could see how they are
treated. They told me how they were deprived of their land,
how the white man destroyed their herds and gave them ‘fire
water,’ which sends a man to his grave in next to no time. Ah,
white folks!”
These stories puzzled me and I tried to understand. “Per
haps it’s because they have done so much harm to their fellow
beings, to some because their skin is black, to others because
their skin is red, that they have such a strong feeling of being
damned?”
John was quite incapable of answering these questions,
which, moreover, had never occurred to him. He was certainly
the least miserable of any of us.
Although Samuel Parris of course never confided in me, it
was easy to guess what he was thinking just from watching
him locked up in his house like an animal in a cage, constantly
praying or leafing through his formidable book. His constant
presence affected us like a bitter potion. Gone were the secret,
intimate conversations, the hurriedly told stories, gone were
the songs quietly hummed. Instead he got it into his head to
teach Betsey her letters and used a grisly alphabet:
A In Adam’s fall
We sinned all.
B Thy life to mend
This Book attend.
C The Cat doth play
And after flay . . .
And so on. Poor Betsey, who was already so frail and im
pressionable, grew pale and trembled.
It was only from mid-April onward, when the weather
cleared up, that Parris got into the habit of going out after lunch
for a short walk. I took the opportunity to accompany the chil-
48
/, Tituba
dren into the small garden behind the house and then what
games and gallopades we played! I removed the hideous hoods
that made them look like old women, I undid their belts to
get their blood circulating and to get their little bodies in a
healthy sweat. Standing at the door, Elizabeth Parris would
plead weakly: “Be careful, Tituba! Don’t let them dance! Don’t
let them dance!” And yet the minute after she would contradict
herself and be beating her hands in time, delighted with our
dance steps.
I was allowed to take the girls to the Long Wharf, where we
looked at the boats and the sea. Beyond this liquid expanse, a
speck: Barbados.
How strange it is, this love of our own country. We carry
it in us like our blood and vital organs. We only need to be
separated from our native land to feel a pain that never loses
its grip welling up inside us. I could see Darnell Davis’s planta
tion, the arrogant Great House with its columns at the top of
the hill, the black shack alleys seething with suffering and life,
children with bloated stomachs, women wizened before their
time, crippled men; and those cheerless surroundings I had lost
suddenly meant so much that tears streamed down my cheeks.
The little girls, heedless of my mood, played in the puddles
of dirty water, shoving each other and falling over among
the ropes, and I couldn’t help thinking of what Samuel Parris
would say if he could witness such scenes. All their vitality,
which was repressed day after day, hour after hour, "surged out,
and it was as if the Evil One they feared so much had at last
taken possession of them. Of the two, Abigail was the more
excitable, the more impetuous, and once again I marveled at
her gift of dissimulation. As soon as we got back home, there
she was dumb and rigid to the point of perfection in front of
her uncle, repeating after him the words from the Holy Book.
Were not her slightest gestures characterized by reserve and
scruples of conscience? One afternoon, while we were coming
back from Long Wharf, we witnessed a sight that left me with
a terrible impression, never to be forgotten. As we came out
of Front Street, the square—around which were grouped the
prison, the courthouse, and the meeting house—was crowded
with people. There was going to be an execution. The crowd
49
was jostling around the foot of the raised platform where the
gallows stood. A group of sinister men in wide-brimmed hats
were busying themselves at its base. When we got closer we
saw an old woman with a rope around her neck. Suddenly one
of the men removed the plank on which she was standing and
her body snapped stiff as a bow. There was a terrible cry and
her head fell to one side.
I screamed and fell to my knees in the middle of this restless,
inquisitive, almost joyful crowd.
It was as if I had been sentenced to relive my mother’s execu
tion. No, it wasn’t an old woman hanging there. It was Abena
in the flower of her youth and at the height of her beauty. Yes,
it was she and I was six years old again. And my life had to
begin all over again from that moment!
I screamed, and the more 1 screamed the more 1 felt the
desire to scream. To scream out my suffering, my revolt, and
my powerless rage. What kind of a world was this that had
turned me into a slave, an orphan, and an outcast? What kind
of a world that had taken me away from my own people? That
had forced me to live among people who did not speak my lan
guage and who did not share my religion in their forbidding,
unwelcoming land?
Betsey rushed up to me and clasped me in her tiny hands.
“Be quiet! Oh, be quiet, Tituba!”
Abigail, who had been snooping around the crowd asking
for bits of information, came back and said coldly: “Yes, be
quiet! She only got what she deserved. She’s a witch. She had
bewitched the children of an honorable family.”
I managed to get up and find our way back home. The whole
town could talk of nothing but the execution. Those who had
witnessed it told those who hadn’t how Goody Glover had
screamed when she saw death, like a dog howling at the moon,
how her soul had escaped in the shape of a bat, while a nau
seous pus, proof of her evildoing, seeped down her spindly legs.
1 hadn’t seen anything of the sort. 1 had witnessed a sight of
total barbarity.
It was shortly afterward that I realized I was pregnant and I
decided to kill-the child.
Apart from stolen kisses with Betsey and the secret sessions
50
7, Tituba
with Elizabeth Parris, the only moments of happiness in my
sad existence were those I spent with John Indian.
Spattered with mud, shivering with cold, and worn out, my
man made love to me every night. Since we slept in a cubby
hole next to the Parris’s bedroom we had to be careful not to
utter any sighs or moans that might reveal the nature of our
activities. Paradoxically, this merely heightened the passion of
our lovemaking.
There is no happiness in motherhood for a slave. It is little
more than the expulsion of an innocent baby, who will have
no chance to change its fate, into a world of slavery and ab
jection. Throughout my childhood I had seen slaves kill their
babies by sticking a long thorn into the still viscous-like egg of
their heads, by cutting the umbilical cord with a poison blade,
or else by abandoning them at night in a place frequented by
angry spirits. Throughout my childhood I had heard slaves ex
change formulas for potions, baths, and injections that sterilize
the womb forever and turn it into a tomb lined with a scarlet
shroud.
In Barbados, where I knew every plant by heart, I would
have had no difficulty getting rid of an unwanted fruit. But
what could I do here in Boston? Less than half a league outside
Boston grew some thick forests that I decided to explore. One
afternoon I managed to slip out, leaving Betsey in the clasp of
her terrifying alphabet book and Abigail, her fingers busy with
her needlework, but her mind clearly elsewhere, seated beside
Goodwife Parris.
Once outside I realized to my surprise that these climes had a
certain grace to them. The trees that had remained skeletal and
sadly spindlelike for so long were now budding. Flowers dotted
the meadows that stretched to infinity like a quiet, green sea.
As I was about to enter the forest, a man, a stiff, black sil
houette on horseback, his face drowned in the shadow of his
hat, called out to me: “Hey Negress! Aren’t you afraid of the
Indians?”
The Indians? I was less frightened of those “savages” than I
was of the civilized beings I lived with who hanged old women
from trees.
51
I, Tituba
1 returned to Boston a little reassured, having learned to see
friends in the black cat, the owl, the ladybird, and the mocking
bird, creatures that I had never paid attention to previously.
1 turned Judah’s words over in my head: “What would the
world be like without us? Eh? What would it be like? Men
hate us and yet without us their lives would be sad and narrow.
Thanks to us they can change the present and sometimes read
the future. Thanks to us they can hope. Tituba, we are the salt
of the earth.”
That night, my baby was carried out of my womb in a flow
of black blood. 1 saw him wave his arms like a tadpole in dis
tress and I burst into tears. John Indian also cried. I had not
confided in him and he believed it to be another blow dealt
by fate. It’s true he was half drunk, having emptied numerous
mugs of stout with the sailors who frequented the Black Horse
tavern.
“My angel! There goes our solace for our old age! Who are
we going to lean on when each of us is old and bent in this land
without summer?”
I had trouble getting over the murder of my child. I knew
that 1 had acted for the best. Yet the image of that little face
whose actual features 1 would never know haunted me. By
a strange aberration it seemed to me that the cry uttered by
Goody Glover setting off along the corridor of death came
from the bowels of my child, tortured by the same society and
sentenced by the same judges.
Seeing my state of mind, Betsey and Elizabeth increased their
attentions and kindnesses, which in other circumstances would
not have failed to catch Samuel Parris’s attention. But it so
happened that he was constantly wrapped in an ever-growing
gloom, since matters were going from bad to worse. The only
money coming in was what John Indian earned stoking the fire
places at the Black Horse. So we were literally dying of hunger.
The children’s faces grew thinner and their clothes became too
large for them.
We were entering summer. The sun came and lit up the gray
and blue roofs of Boston. It hung leaves on the branches of
53
the trees. It planted long needles of fire in the sea. Despite the
sadness of our lives, it made the blood throb in our veins.
A few weeks later Samuel Parris announced in a surly voice
that he had accepted the offer of a parish and that we were
leaving for the village of Salem, about twenty miles from Bos
ton. John Indian, who always had the latest information, told
me why Samuel Parris seemed less than enthusiastic. The village
of Salem had a very bad reputation in the Bay Colony. On two
occasions, two ministers, the Reverend James Bayley and the
Reverend George Burroughs, had been hounded out of town
by a large group of parishioners, who had refused to pay for
their upkeep. The annual salary of sixty-six pounds was a pit
tance, especially as firewood was not included and the winters
were severe in the forest. Finally, the Indians, wild barbarians
who were set on scalping any head that came too close, lived
all around Salem.
“Our master has not finished his studies.”
“Studies?”
“Yes, theological studies to become a minister. And yet he
expects to be treated like the Reverend Increase Mather or
Cotton Mather himself.”
“Who are they?”
John Indian grew bewildered. “I don’t know, my lovely! I
only hear their names being mentioned.”
We spent a few more long weeks in Boston and I had time
to note down Judah White’s main recommendations:
I, Tituba
7, Tituba
lowered her voice. “Two women have already died in the bed
room upstairs. Mary Bayley, the wife of the first minister to
this parish, and Judah Burroughs, the wife of the second.”
In spite of myself, I let out a cry of alarm. For I knew full well
how the dead who have not been laid to rest can trouble the
living. Wouldn’t I have to conduct a ceremony of purification
and offer relief to these poor souls? Fortunately the house had
a large garden, where I could come and go as I pleased. Mary
Sibley followed the direction of my eyes and said in a troubled
voice: “Ah yes, the cats. They’re everywhere in Salem. We keep
killing them off.”
Hordes of cats were chasing each other in the grass, meow
ing and lying on their backs, nervously raising their paws that
ended in sharp claws. A few weeks earlier I would have found
nothing unnatural in such a sight. Now, instructed by Good
wife Judah White, I realized that the spirits of the place were
greeting me. How childish white folks are to choose the cat as
a manifestation of their powers! We others, we prefer animals
of a nobler breed: the snake, for example, a magnificent reptile
with dark rings.
As soon as I entered Salem, I knew I would not be happy
there. I felt that I would undergo terrible trials and that excru
ciatingly painful events would turn my hair white.
When dusk fell, the men returned from the fields and the
house filled with visitors. Anne Putnam and her husband,
Thomas, a seven-foot giant, their daughter Anne, who immedi
ately began to whisper in corners with Abigail, Sarah Houlton,
John and Elizabeth Proctor, and so many others whose names I
couldn’t remember. I felt it was curiosity rather than kindness
that brought them and they had come to judge and assess the
minister in order to find out the role he would play in their
village. Samuel Parris saw nothing suspect and behaved as he
always did—despicably. He complained that no great piles of
wood had been cut for his arrival and stacked in his barn. He
complained that the house was decrepit, that the grass in the
garden was knee-deep, and that the frogs made a din under his
window.
Our move to Salem, however, was a cause for rejoicing, but
59
little did I know how fleeting this was to be. The house was so
big that everybody could have his own room. John Indian and
I could take refuge under the roof in a rather ugly attic whose
ceiling was held up by a patchwork of worm-eaten beams. Here
we could once again give rein to our unbridled love without
fear of being heard.
In these uninhibited moments I could not help whispering:
“John Indian, I’m afraid!”
He would caress my shoulder. “What will become of the
world if our women are afraid? Things will fall apart! The
heavens will collapse and the stars will roll in the dust! You
afraid? Of what?”
“Of what tomorrow holds for us.”
“Sleep, my princess! Tomorrow will be as radiant as a baby’s
smile.”
The second piece of good fortune was that Samuel Parris was
always out and about, taken up with the duties of his office. We
hardly saw him at morning and evening prayers. When he was
at home he was in bitter discussion with men about matters
that did not sound religious.
“The sixty-six pounds of my salary come from contributions
by the villagers and are in proportion to the area of their land.”
“I must be supplied with firewood.”
“On the Sabbath the contributions must be made in pa
pers ...” And so on. And behind his back life went on as usual.
* « *
I now had my kitchen full of little girls. I didn’t like them all.
I took a special dislike to Anne Putnam and the little servant
girl, Mercy Lewis, who was about the same age and accompa
nied her everywhere. There was something in those two girls
that made me have doubts about the innocence of childhood.
Perhaps children cannot escape the frustrations and lascivious
ness of adults after all. Whatever the case, Anne and Mercy
reminded me constantly of Samuel Parris’s speeches on Satan’s
presence in all of us. The same was true for Abigail. I sensed
a violent streak in her, the power of her imagination to give
a particular twist to the slightest everyday incident and this
hatred—no, the word is not too strong—this hatred she had
60
Z, Tituba
for the adult world, as if she could not forgive it for building a
coffin around her youth.
Although 1 didn’t like them all, I pitied them with their
waxen skin and their bodies so full of promise yet mutilated like
those trees that gardeners try to dwarf. In contrast, our child
hood as little slaves, bitter though it was, seemed glowing, lit up
by the joy of our games, our rambles, and our rovings together.
We floated rafts made of sugarcane on the rushing streams. We
grilled pink and yellow fish on little crisscrosses of green wood.
We danced. And it was this pity of mine, against which I was
helpless, that made me tolerate these children around me and
encouraged me to entertain them. 1 wouldn’t stop until I had
managed to get one of them to burst out laughing and plead:
“Tituba! Oh,Tituba!”
Their favorite stories were about people in league with the
devil. They sat in a circle around me and I could smell the sharp
scent of their sparingly washed bodies. They assailed me with
questions.
“Tituba, do you think there are people in league with the
devil living in Salem?”
I nodded and laughed. “Yes, I think Sarah Good must be
one.” Sarah Good was still a young woman, but she was
hunched over and a beggar. The children were afraid of her
because of the stinking pipe she always had stuck between her
teeth and because of her constant muttering. It seemed as if she
was mumbling prayers that nobody could understand except
herself. Apart from that, she was a generous soul, at least 1
thought so.
“Do you think so, Tituba?” the children cheeped. “And
Sarah Osborne, is she one too?”
Sarah Osborne was an old woman, not a beggar like the
other Sarah, but well-off, the owner of a lovely oak-paneled
house, who in her youth had committed some fault or other to
her discredit.
1 took a deep breath and pretended to think hard, letting
them stew in their curiosity, before solemnly declaring: “Per
haps!”
Abigail insisted. “Have you seen them both fly with their
61
skin all scorched? And Elizabeth Proctor, have you seen her?
Have you?”
Mistress Proctor was one of the nicest women in the village,
the only one who was kind enough to talk to me about slavery,
about the country I came from and its inhabitants.
“You know very well, Abigail, that I’m joking,” I said se
verely. And I sent everyone away.
When I was left alone with Betsey she, too, asked me in
her high-pitched voice: “Do people in league with the devil
actually exist, Tituba? Do they?”
I took her in my arms. “What does it matter? Aren’t I here
to protect you if they try to harm you?”
She looked straight at me and a shadow that I tried to dispel
was dancing at the back of her eyes.
“Tituba knows the words that cure every sickness, that heal
every wound, and untie every knot. Don’t you know that?”
She remained silent, her body trembling even more despite
my words of consolation. I hugged her up against me and the
wings of her heart beat desperately like a bird in a cage, while
I said over and over again: “Tituba can do anything. Tituba
knows everything. Tituba sees everything.”
Soon the circle of little girls got bigger. At Abigail’s insti
gation a string of great gawks whose breasts filled out their
pinafores and whose blood, I’m sure, reddened their thighs
occasionally, thronged into my kitchen. I didn’t like them at
all. Neither Mary Walcott nor Elizabeth Booth nor Susanna
Sheldon. Their eyes conveyed all the contempt of their parents
for those of our race. And yet they needed me to season the in
sipid gruel of their lives. So instead of asking me, they ordered
me: “Tituba, sing us a song!” “Tituba, tell us a story! No, we
don’t want that one. Tell us the one about the people in league
with the devil.”
One day things turned sour. Fat Mary Walcott was hover
ing around me and finally said: “Tituba, is it true you know
everything, you see everything and can do everything? You’re
a witch then?”
I lost my temper. “Don’t use words whose meaning you don’t
know. Do you know what a witch really is?”
62
I, Tituba
“Of course we do,” intervened Anne Putnam. “It’s someone
who has made a pact with the devil. Mary’s right. Are you a
witch, Tituba? I think you must be.”
This was too much. I drove all these young vipers out of my
kitchen and chased them into the street. “I never want to see
you around here again. Never!”
When they had scattered, I took little Betsey and scolded
her: “Why do you repeat everything I tell you? You see how
they change the meaning?”
The child turned scarlet and curled up against me. “Forgive
me, Tituba. I won’t tell them anything again.”
Betsey had changed since we had come to Salem. She was
becoming nervous and irritable, always crying for nothing at
all or staring off into space with her eyes as big as halfpennies.
I became worried. Were the spirits of the two people who
had died upstairs in unknown circumstances influencing her
fragile nature? Did the child need protection like her mother?
There was nothing pleasant in my new life. From day to
day my apprehensions grew stronger and heavier, like a bur
den I could never put down. I slept with it. It hung over me
above John Indian’s muscular body. In the morning it made me
drag my feet on the stairs and gripped my hands while I was
preparing the tasteless gruel for breakfast.
I was no longer myself. To try and console myself I used a
remedy. I filled a bowl with water, which 1 placed near the
window so that I could look at it while I busied myself in the
kitchen and imagine my Barbados. The bowl of water managed
to encompass the entire island, with the swell of the sea merg
ing into the waves of the sugarcane fields, the leaning coconut
palms on the seashore, and the almond trees loaded with red
and dark green fruit. Although 1 had trouble making out the
inhabitants, I could see the hills clearly, the cabins, the sugar
mills, and the ox carts whipped on by invisible hands. I got a
glimpse of the Great Houses and the masters’ graveyards. And
all that moved silently at the bottom of my bowl of water. Yet
this presence heartened me. Sometimes Abigail, Betsey, and
Mistress Parris caught me in contemplation and would ask in
surprise: “What are you looking at, Tituba?”
I was tempted many times to share my secret with Betsey
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I had not realized the full extent of the ravages that Samuel
Parris’s religion was causing nor even understood its real nature
before coming to live in Salem. Imagine a small community of
men and women oppressed by the presence of Satan and seek
ing to hunt him down in all his manifestations. A cow that died,
a child smitten with convulsions, a girl whose menstrual period
was late in coming set off a chain of unending speculation.
Who had caused such catastrophes by driving a bargain with
the formidable enemy? Wasn’t it the fault of Bridget Bishop,
who hadn’t been to the meeting house two Sundays in a row?
No, wasn’t it rather Giles Cory, who had been seen feeding a
stray animal on the afternoon of the Sabbath? Even I was being
poisoned in this putrifying atmosphere and I caught myself re
citing incantations and performing ritual gestures at the slight
est occasion. What is more, I had very precise reasons for being
worried. In Bridgetown Susanna Endicott had already told me
she was convinced my color was indicative of my close connec
tions with Satan. I was able to laugh that off, however, as the
ramblings of a shrew embittered by solitude and approaching
old age. In Salem such a conviction was shared by all.
There were two or three black servants in the community,
how they got there I have no idea, and all of us were not simply
cursed, but visible messengers of Satan. So we were furtively
approached to try and assuage unspeakable desires for revenge,
to liberate unsuspecting hatred and bitterness, and to do evil by
every means. He who passed for the most devoted of husbands
dreamed of nothing but killing his wife! She who passed for the
most faithful of wives was prepared to sell the soul of her chil
dren to get rid of the father! Neighbor wanted to exterminate
neighbor, a brother, his sister. Even the children themselves
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wanted to be rid of one or the other of their parents in the most
painful way possible. And it was the putrid smell of all these
crimes seeking to be committed that turned me into another
woman. And in vain did I stare at the blue waters of my bowl,
thinking of the banks of the River Ormond. Something inside
me was slowly but surely coming undone.
Yes, I was becoming another woman. A stranger to myself.
One set of circumstances completed the transformation. No
doubt hard-pressed for money and unable to purchase a horse,
Samuel Parris hired John Indian out to Deacon Ingersoll to
help him with the field work. John Indian, therefore, only came
home to sleep with me on Saturdays, the day before the Sab
bath, when God orders even the niggers to rest. Night after
night then I curled myself up into a ball under a threadbare
blanket in a room without a fire, panting with desire for my
absent husband. Very often when John Indian came back to
me he was so exhausted from having labored like a beast that,
despite his robust physique that up till then had satisfied my
desires, he fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched my
breast. I stroked his rough, curly hair, filled with pity and revolt
against our fate. Who, who had created this world?
In my helplessness and despair I started to think about re
venge. But how? I devised schemes that I would reject at dawn,
only to start reconsidering them at dusk. I lost my appetite. I
could hardly drink. I wandered like a lost soul wrapped in my
coarse woolen shawl, followed by one or two black cats, no
doubt sent by Goody Judah White to remind me that I was not
quite alone. Not surprising that the villagers of Salem stood
aghast at me, I looked so awesome!
Awesome and hideous. My uncombed hair formed a mane
around my head. My cheeks became hollow and my mouth
pouted brazenly, stretched to the limits over my swollen gums.
When John Indian was with me, he gently complained:
“You’re neglecting yourself, wife. You used to be a meadow
where I grazed. Now the tall grass of your pubis and the tufts
of your armpits almost disgust me.”
“Forgive me, John Indian, and continue to love me even if I
am worthless.”
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I, Tituba
I, Tituba
out in the wind to look for a pound of treacle and braved the
snow for a few kernels of corn.
Now, in the twinkling of an eye, all that had been forgotten
and I had become the enemy. Perhaps, in fact, I had never
ceased to be one and Goodwife Parris was jealous of the ties I
had with her daughter.
If I had been less distressed, I would have endeavored to
reason and to understand this about-face. Elizabeth Parris had
been living for months in the rotting atmosphere of Salem with
people who took me for Satan’s deputy and didn’t mind saying
so, surprised that I was allowed to live with John Indian in a
Christian household. It is likely that such remarks could have
corrupted her in turn, even if at first she had strongly resisted
them. But with the pain I felt, I was quite incapable of keeping
a proper perspective. In a state of mental torture I went up to
my room and went to bed with my solitude and grief. The night
dragged on.
The next morning I came down as usual to prepare break
fast. There were some lovely fresh eggs and I was whipping
them up to make an omelet when I heard the family take their
seats around the table for morning prayers. “Tituba!” Samuel
Parris boomed.
This is how he called me each morning, but this morning
there was a particular menace in his voice. I went in slowly.
Hardly had I appeared in the doorway with the ends of my
shawl tied around me, for the fire had only just been lit and
was not yet giving off any heat, than my little Betsey jumped
from her chair and began to scream, writhing on the ground.
Her screams were not human.
Every year the slaves used to fatten a pig that they killed
two days before Christmas Eve so that the meat could mari
nate in lemon and bay-rum leaves to rid it of any impurities.
They would slit the animal’s throat at dawn, then hang it up
by its feet from the branches of a calabash tree. While its blood
flowed out, at first in great gushes, then slowing to a trickle,
it screamed. Unbearable, jarring screams, suddenly silenced
by death.
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who turned it into poison. Alas, she was the first to be poi
soned.”
I burst into tears. John Indian had no words of consolation
for me. Instead, he said in a rough voice: “Remember, you’re
Abena’s daughter.”
This brought me back to myself.
The daylight filtered in, as dirty as a rag, through the narrow
skylight. We had to get up and go about our daily chores.
Samuel Parris was already up and preparing to go to the
meeting house, as it was Sabbath day. His black hat was pulled
down low over his forehead, reducing his face to a rigid tri
angle. He turned toward me. “Tituba, I do not accuse with
out evidence. So I shall reserve my judgment. But if tomorrow
Dr. Griggs sees the influence of Satan, I shall show you the man
I am.”
“What do you call evidence?” I scoffed.
He continued to stare at me. “I’ll have you confess what you
did to my children and I’ll have you hanged by the neck. What
a magnificent fruit swinging from the trees of Massachusetts.”
At that moment Goodwife Parris and the two girls entered
the room; Abigail was holding the prayer book.
She was the first to go down and start screaming. Betsey re
mained standing for a moment, her face scarlet, hesitating, it
seemed to me, between affection and terror. Then she fell down
beside Abigail.
I screamed in turn: “Stop it, stop it! You know full well, Bet
sey and Abigail, that I never did you any harm. Especially you,
Betsey. Everything I did was for your good.”
Samuel Parris marched up to me and I staggered under the
wave of his hatred as if I had been struck.
“Explain yourself! You’ve said one word too many. What
did you do to them?”
Once again I was saved by a crowd of neighbors who, like
the day before, had come to see what all the noise was about.
They formed a circle in respect and silent horror around the
children, who continued to be afflicted by the most indecent
convulsions. John Indian, who had also come down without
saying a word, went to fetch a bucket of water from the kitchen
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and whoosh! threw it over our little devils. This calmed them
down. They got up, streaming with water, almost apologetic,
and we set off in a procession to the meeting house.
The commotion started up again while we were taking our
seats in our pews. John Indian usually went first and I next, so
that the children could sit between me and Goodwife Parris.
When it was Abigail’s turn to come and kneel beside me, she
stopped, leaped backward into the aisle, and began to scream.
And at the Sunday service in Salem, can you imagine! They
were all there, John Putnam, the rum merchant; Thomas Put
nam, the sergeant, and his wife, Anne; Giles Corey and his
wife, Martha; their daughters and their daughters’ husbands;
Johanna Chibum; Nathaniel Ingersoll; John and Elizabeth
Proctor; and all the rest. I also recognized Abigail’s and Bet
sey’s companions in their dangerous games, those young girls
whose eyes were shining with excitement. They were dying to
roll on the ground too and to attract everybody’s attention. I
felt that at any moment they would fall into a trance as well.
This time it was only Abigail who went into a fit and made
a fuss. Betsey did not follow suit. So after a while Abigail shut
up and remained prostrate with her hair straggling out of her
hood. John Indian stood up, stepped out of the pew, took her
in his arms, and went home. The rest of the service went by
without incident.
>!• £ >!•
I confess that I am naive. I was convinced that even a race of
villains and criminals could produce some good, well-meaning
individuals, just as a stunted tree can bear some healthy fruit. I
believed in the affection of Betsey, led astray by some unknown
force, but I was sure of winning her back. When Goodwife
Parris went down to meet the crowd of curious neighbors who
had come for news of the children, I took that opportunity to
go up to Betsey’s room.
She was sitting against the window, her fingers resting on
her needlework, and in the half light her little face was so ex
pressive that my heart went out to her. On hearing me come in,
she looked up and immediately rounded her mouth to let out a
shriek. I rushed over to her and placed my hand over her mouth.
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their lips before the blood curdles and loses its taste. You must
stand up for yourself and prove that these children have not
been bewitched.”
This took me by surprise and, mistrustful of this unexpected
attention, I said: “I would like to very much. But unfortunately
I don’t know how.”
She lowered her voice. “You’re the only one who doesn’t. All
you have to do is to make them a cake. But instead of kneading
it with flour and water you mix in a little urine. Then once it is
baked in the oven, it’s ready to eat.”
“Goodwife Sibley,” I interrupted, “with all due respect, go
and tell your old wives’ tales to someone else!”
She spun round to John Indian, who came in at that moment.
“Does she know, does she know what they do to witches? I’m
trying to help her and all she does is laugh in my face.”
John Indian began to roll his eyes from left to right and in a
tearful voice said: “Oh, please, Goodwife Sibley, help us! Help
poor Tituba and poor John Indian!”
But I did not move an inch. “Go and tell your old wives’ tales
to someone else, Goodwife Sibley!”
She went out, most offended, followed by John Indian, who
was trying in vain to calm her down. At the end of the after
noon, the very same girls I had driven out of my kitchen came in
one after the other. Not one was missing. Anne Putnam, Mary
Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Warren, Mercy Lewis,
Elizabeth Booth, Susanna Sheldon, and Sarah Churchill. And it
was clear they had come to tease me. They had come to wallow
in the sight of my ruin. Oh, this was still only the beginning!
I would fall much farther. I would get hurt much more. And
with this happy thought, their eyes gleamed with cruelty. They
had turned almost lovely in their shapeless dresses! They had
become almost desirable: Mary Walcott with her buttocks as
big as a trunk, Mary Warren with her breasts like two shriv
elled pears, and Elizabeth Hubbard with her teeth sticking out
of her mouth like millstones.
* * *
That night I dreamed of Susanna Endicott and I remembered
her words: “Alive or dead, I shall haunt you.”
79
She had to obey. 1 won’t linger over the difficulty she had
in undressing the girls, who writhed about like a worm cut in
two and screamed as if they were being skinned alive. She man
aged, however, to finish the job and the girls’ bodies emerged,
Betsey’s perfectly childlike, Abigail’s nearing adolescence with
her ugly tuft of pubic hair and the rosy rounds of her nipples.
Dr. Griggs examined them carefully despite the abominable
curses Abigail showered him with, since she had begun to pep
per her screams with the vilest of insults.
Finally he turned to Samuel Parris and solemnly declared: “I
can see no disorder of the spleen or the liver nor congestion of
the bile or overheating of the blood. In a word, I can see no
physical cause. I must therefore conclude that the evil hand of
Satan is upon them.”
These words were greeted by a chorus of howls, shrieks,
and barks.
Raising his voice above the din, Dr. Griggs went on: “But I
am only a humble country doctor. For the love of truth call in
some colleagues more learned than myself.”
Thereupon he picked up his books and went off.
Suddenly there was silence in the room, as if Abigail and
Betsey realized the formidableness of what had just been said.
Then Betsey burst into pitiful sobs that seemed to combine fear,
remorse, and infinite tiredness.
Samuel Parris came out onto the landing and with a shove
sent me hard up against the wall. Then he walked up to me and
gripped me by the shoulders. I hadn’t realized how strong he
was, with his hands like the claws of a bird of prey, and I had
never been so close to the odor of his unwashed body.
“Tituba,” he thundered, “if it is proved that you have be
witched my children, I’m telling you again, I shall have you
hanged!”
I had the strength to protest. “Why is it you pick on me as
soon as it’s talk of spells? What about your neighbors? Mary
Sibley seems to know quite a bit about them! Ask her!”
For I had begun to behave like an animal up against a wall,
biting and scratching whoever she can.
Samuel Parris’s face turned rigid and his mouth shrunk to a
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/, Tituba
sheep. He began to shy away and arch his back, but 1 was the
stronger and he had to follow me.
1 dragged him to the edge of the forest.
For a short moment we stood looking at each other, he the
victim, I the executioner but trembling and begging him to
forgive me and to convey my prayers with the blood of the sac
rifice. Then I slit his throat in one quick movement. He fell to
his knees and the ground at my feet became moist. I anointed
my forehead with the fresh blood. Then I gutted the animal,
oblivious to the stench of entrails and excrement. 1 divided
its flesh into four equal parts, which I presented to the four
cardinal points, and then I left the flesh as an offering to my
spirits.
After that 1 remained prostrate while prayers and incanta
tions buzzed in my head. Would they finally speak to me, my
life-giving forces? I needed them. I no longer had my island. I
only had my man. 1 had had to kill my child. 1 needed them,
they who had brought me into this world. I couldn’t say how
much time went by before there was a noise in the thickets.
Mama Yaya and Abena, my mother, appeared in front of me.
Were they at last about to break the wall of silence I kept
running into? My heart was thumping.
Finally, it was Mama Yaya who spoke. “There’s no need to
be frightened, Tituba. Misfortune, as you know, is our constant
companion. We are born with it, we lie with it, and we squabble
with it for the same withered breast. It eats the codfish from
our calabash. But we’re tough, us niggers! And those who want
to wipe us off the face of the earth will get their money’s worth.
Out of them all, you’ll be the only one to survive.”
“Will I return to Barbados?” I begged.
Mama Yaya shrugged her shoulders and merely said: “Is that
really a question?”
Then with a slight wave of the hand she disappeared. Abena,
my mother, stayed longer, uttering her usual quota of sighs.
Then she too disappeared, without having brought any further
clarification to the question.
I got up, somewhat reassured. The smell of blood and fresh
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1, Tituba
I, Tituba
/, Tituba
I, Tituba
I, Tituba
Z, Tituba
“I, too, killed my child,” I whispered to myself.
“Luckily, a little over a year ago, he left for Geneva to confer
with other Calvinists on the problem of the visible saints and
it was then that. . .”
She stopped and I understood that despite her bluster she
still loved her tormentor.
She went on: “There is something indecent about beauty in
a man. Tituba, men shouldn’t be beautiful! Two generations
of visible saints stigmatizing carnal pleasure resulted in this
man and the irresistible delights of the flesh. We started meet
ing under the pretext of discussing German pietism. Then we
ended up in his bed making love and here I am!”
She folded her hands over her belly, and I asked: “What’s
going to happen now?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. I think they’re
waiting for my husband to get back before deciding on my
fate.”
“What punishment are you likely to get?” I insisted.
She got up. “They no longer stone adulterous women. I be
lieve they wear a scarlet letter on their breast.”
It was my turn to shrug my shoulders. “Is that all they do?”
But I was ashamed of my frivolousness when I saw the expres
sion on her face. This woman, who was as good as she was
beautiful, was suffering martyrdom. She was yet another case
of a victim being branded guilty. Are women condemned to
such a fate in this world? I looked for some way to give her
hope again and whispered: “Aren’t you pregnant? You must
live for your child.”
She shook her head firmly. “She must simply die with me. I
have already prepared her for that when we talk to each other
at night. You know, she’s listening to us right now. She’s just
knocked on the door of my womb to get my attention. You
know what she wants? She wants you to tell her a story. A story
about your country. Make her happy, Tituba.”
Resting my head against this soft curve of flesh, this hum
mock of life, so that the little one inside could be near my lips, I
started to tell a tale and the familiar words of that ever-present,
beloved ritual lit up the sadness of our confinement.
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1, Tituba
* These extracts are taken from the deposition of Tituba Indian. The original
documents of the trial are kept in the Essex County Archives. A copy can be
found at the Essex County Courthouse, Salem, Massachusetts.
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7, Tituba
“Kill her with a knife.”
“How did you go?”
“We rode upon sticks and were there presently.”
“Do you go through the trees or over them?”
“We see nothing but are there presently.”
* * *
It went on for hours. I confess I wasn’t a good actress. The sight
of all these white faces lapping at my feet looked to me like
a sea in which I was about to drown. Oh, Hester would have
made a much better job of it than I! She would have used that
tribunal to shout her hatred of society and to curse her accusers
in return. I was truly quite scared out of my wits. The heroic
answers I had dreamed up at home or in my cell vanished into
thin air.
* * *
“Did you not see Sarah Good upon Elizabeth Hubbard last
Saturday?”
“I did see her set a wolf upon her to afflict her.”
“What clothes doth the man go in?”
“He goes in black clothes; a tall man, with white hair,
I think.”
“How doth the woman go?”
“In a white hood, and a black hood with a topknot.”
“Do you see who it is that torments these children now?”
I spit out with delight and venom: “Yes, it is Goody Good;
she hurts them in her own shape.”
“Who is it that hurts them now?”
“I am blind now, I cannot see,” I stuttered, remembering
Hester’s recommendations.
I didn’t have the heart to obey Samuel Parris and give the
names of innocent women.
* * *
After my examination, Samuel Parris came to see me. “Well
spoken, Tituba. You understood what we expected of you.”
I hate myself as much as I hate him.
4
/, Tituba
advanced from the widow’s barn to her bed. But even so, it
was shocking to hear us coldly described as “lesser parts.”
Little suspecting the feelings she aroused in me, Goodwife
Parris went on: “. . . then gradually attacks the limbs and vital
organs. The arms and legs can no longer move. Then the heart
is attacked and finally the brain. Martha Corey and Rebecca
Nurse have been arrested!”
I opened my mouth in amazement. Goody Rebecca Nurse!
It was incredible! She was the living image of God’s faith!
Goodwife Parris continued: “Judge Hathorne himself was
moved by her and the first jury gave a verdict of not guilty. But
that wasn’t enough it seems and she has been taken to town to
appear before another court.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “My poor Tituba, it was horrible!
If you had seen Abigail and Anne Putnam, especially Anne
Putnam, roll on the ground screaming that the poor old woman
was tormenting her and begging her to have pity on them, your
heart would have filled with doubt and horror. And she her
self remained calm and serene while reciting the twenty-third
psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh
me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still
waters. He restoreth my soul. . .’”
Hearing the ravages that evil was making in Salem, I was
worried sick about John Indian.
There was so much talk about a “black man” who forced
his victims to write in his book. Wouldn’t a perverted mind
be tempted to identify him with John Indian? And then he in
turn would be persecuted. My worries, however, seemed un
founded. On the rare occasions when John Indian came into
the barn where I lay groaning, he seemed in excellent health,
well fed, his clothes washed and ironed. He was even wrapped
in a thick, warm woolen cape. And I recalled Hester’s words:
“Life is too kind to men, whatever their color.”
One day I plied him with questions.
“Don’t you worry about me!” he said irritably.
But I insisted.
“I know how to get by,” he blurted out.
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capable of shouting: “Oh, oh, Tituba is tormenting me! Yes,
my wife is a witch!”
* * *
Did John Indian realize what I was feeling? Or was there
another reason? Whatever the case, he stopped coming to visit
me. I was taken back to Ipswich and I never saw him again.
When we reached the outskirts of Ipswich, the villagers of
Topsfield, Beverley, Lynn, and Malden ran to the edge of the
road to throw stones at me while I stumbled along, roped to
Constable Herrick’s saddle. The bare trees looked like wooden
crosses and my calvary went on and on.
As I stumbled forward, I was racked by a violent feeling
of pain and terror. It seemed that I was gradually being for
gotten. I felt that I would only be mentioned in passing in these
Salem witchcraft trials about which so much would be written
later, trials that would arouse the curiosity and pity of gen
erations to come as the greatest testimony of a superstitious
and barbaric age. There would be mention here and there of
“a slave originating from the West Indies and probably prac
ticing ‘hoodoo.’ ” There would be no mention of my age or
my personality. I would be ignored. As early as the end of the
seventeenth century, petitions would be circulated, judgments
made, rehabilitating the victims, restoring their honor, and re
turning their property to their descendants. I would never be
included! Tituba would be condemned forever! There would
never, ever, be a careful, sensitive biography recreating my life
and its suffering.
And I was outraged by this future injustice that seemed more
cruel than even death itself.
We reached Ipswich in time to see a woman who had been
sentenced for some crime or other swinging from the end of a
rope and the crowd said it was only right and proper.
On entering the prison, my first thought was to ask to be
with Hester in her cell. Oh, how right she had been about John
Indian! He had been simply a pathetic individual without love
or honor. Tears that only Hester would know how to dry welled
up in my eyes.
But without looking up from his register, the constable, who
Ill
was fond of rum, told me that being with Hester was out of the
question.
“Why, why, Master?” I insisted in desperation.
He deigned to stop scribbling and stared at me. “It’s out of
the question because she’s no longer here.”
I remained speechless, imagining a thousand things in my
head. Had she been pardoned? Had her husband come back
from Geneva and freed her? Had she been taken to the alms
house to give birth? I had no idea how many months pregnant
she was; perhaps her time was up?
“Master,” I managed to stammer out, “have the goodness to
tell me what has happened to her, for there is not a kinder soul
on this earth!”
The constable snorted. “Kind? Well, however kind you may
think she is, by now she’s damned because she hanged herself
in her cell.”
“Hanged herself?”
“Yes, hanged herself!”
I screamed down the door of my mother’s womb. My fist
broke her bag of waters in rage and despair. I choked and
suffocated in this black liquid. I wanted to drown myself.
Hanged herself? Hester, Hester, why didn’t you wait for me?
Mother, will our torture never end? If this is how things are, I
shall never emerge into the light of day. I shall remain crouched
in your waters, deaf, dumb, and blind, clinging like kelp to
your womb. I shall cling so tightly you’ll never expel me and I
shall return to dust without you, without ever having known
the curse of day. Mother, help me!
Hanged herself? Hester, I would have gone with you.
After much deliberation by the authorities, I was taken to
the almshouse in the town of Salem because no such institution
existed in Ipswich. At first I could make no distinction between
night and day. Both were blurred in the same circle of pain.
They had left me in shackles, not because they feared I would
take my life, which would have been a happy ending for all,
but because I might attack my companions in misfortune in a
fit of rage. A certain Doctor Zerobabel came to see me because
he was studying mental illnesses and hoped to be appointed
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/, Tituba
The plague that afflicted Salem very quickly spread to other vil
lages and towns and one by one Amesbury, Topsfield, Ipswich,
and Andover entered into the dance. Like hounds excited by the
smell of blood, the constables prowled the country footpaths,
hunting those whom our band of little vixens, with their gift
of ubiquity, continued to denounce. I learned through prison
rumors that so many children had been arrested they had been
housed in a hastily built thatched log building. At night the
noise of their shouting kept the inhabitants awake. I was taken
out of my cell to make room for the accused who were thought
worthy of a roof over their heads and it was from the prison
courtyard that 1 now saw the cartloads of condemned prisoners
rumble by. Some of the prisoners stood straight upright as if
they were defying their judges. Others, however, groaned in ter
ror and begged like children for one more day, one more hour.
1 saw Rebecca Nurse led off to Gallows Hill and I recalled
the time she had whispered in her shaky voice: “Can’t you help
me, Tituba?” I regretted I hadn’t, because now I could see that
her enemies had triumphed. 1 learned through prison rumor
that those very same Houltons had unleashed the hogs of their
wrath against her. Rebecca Nurse was clinging to the bars of
the cart and staring at the sky as if she were trying to find an
explanation.
I saw Sarah Good go by. She had evidently been kept in
another building and was still wearing her vulgar smirk. She
looked at me tied up to a post like an animal and shouted: “I
prefer my fate to yours, you know!”
It was after the executions of 22 September that I was put
back into a prison cell. The bedding seemed to me as soft as a
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ish with it and to end his suffering. Soon there was a song about
him: “Corey, O Corey, For you the stones have no weight, For
you the stones are as light as a feather.”
The second event, which was even more horrible than the
first, was the arrest of George Burroughs. I have already said
that George Burroughs had been minister in Salem before
Samuel Parris and like Samuel Parris he had had no end of
trouble getting the terms of his contract respected. It was one
of his wives whose soul had departed from the upstairs bed
chamber in our house. But hearing that this man of God had
been accused of being Satan’s henchman plunged the prison
into dismay.
This God, for whom they had left the meadows and woods
of England, was turning his back on them.
We learned, however, in early October that the governor of
the colony, Governor Phips, had written to London asking for
advice on legal procedures concerning witchcraft. Shortly after
ward we heard that the court of oyer and terminer would no
longer convene and that another court would meet where mem
bers would be less suspected of collusion with the accusers’
families.
I have to confess this had little effect on me. I was condemned
to live!
1 hope that the generations to come will live under a welfare
state that will truly provide for the well-being of its citizens.
In 1692, at the time of our story, this was not the case. Be it
in prison or almshouse, the state did not provide for you and,
guilty or not guilty, you had to pay for your upkeep and the
cost of your chains.
The accused were generally well-off, owners of land and
farms that could be mortgaged. They had no difficulty, there
fore, in meeting the requirements of the colony. Since Samuel
Parris had made it known very early on that he had no inten
tion of paying my prison costs, the superintendent decided he
would get his money back by making me work in the kitchens.
The foulest food is always considered too good for a pris
oner. Cartloads of vegetables were trundled into the prison
courtyard and their lingering smell left no doubt about their
rotting state. The cabbages were turning black, the carrots
green, the sweet potatoes were crawling with maggots, and the
ears of corn bought from the Indians at half price were full
of borers. Once a week, on the Sabbath, the prisoners were
treated to an ox bone boiled in gallons of water and served
with dried apples. My job was to prepare this dismal food and
1 found myself remembering my old recipes in spite of myself.
Cooking has the advantage of keeping the mind free while the
hands are busy doing their own creative work. I cut up all this
rotting food. I seasoned it with a sprig of mint growing hap
hazardly between two stones. I added what I could from an
ill-smelling bunch of onions. 1 excelled in making cakes that,
although a bit heavy, were nonetheless tasty.
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enjoyed such a truce? That I couldn’t guess. 1 knew that fate is
like an old man. It toddles along. It stops to catch its breath. It
sets off again. It stops once more. It reaches its destination in
its own time. But I had the feeling that the darkest hours were
behind me and I would soon be able to breathe again.
That night Hester lay down beside me, as she did some
times. I laid my head on the quiet water lily of her cheek and
held her tight. Surprisingly, a feeling of pleasure slowly flooded
over me. Can you feel pleasure from hugging a body similar
to your own? For me, pleasure had always been in the shape
of another body whose hollows fitted my curves and whose
swellings nestled in the tender flatlands of my flesh. Was Hester
showing me another kind of bodily pleasure?
* * *
Three days later Noyes came and opened the door of my cell.
Behind him, in his shadow, crept the Jew, more ginger-colored
and crooked than ever. Noyes pushed me as far as the prison
courtyard, where the blacksmith, a huge man in a leather
apron, unceremoniously drew my legs apart with two blocks of
wood. Then with one skillful blow of the mallet he smashed my
chains to pieces. He did the same thing with my wrists while I
screamed.
I screamed while my blood, which for so many weeks had
circulated poorly, rushed back into my flesh, pricking my skin
with a thousand darts.
I screamed, and this scream, the terrified cry of a newborn
baby, heralded my return to this world. I had to learn how to
walk again. Deprived of my shackles, I was unable to find my
balance and I tottered like a woman drunk on cheap liquor. I
had to learn how to speak again, how to communicate with my
fellow creatures, and no longer be content with a word here
and there. I had to learn how to look them in the eyes again. I
had to learn how to do my hair again now that it had become
a tangle of untidy snakes hissing around my head. I had to rub
ointments on my dry, cracked skin, which had become like a
badly tanned hide.
Few people have the misfortune to be born twice.
Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, the Jew who had just bought me,
had lost his wife and his youngest children in an epidemic of
whooping cough. He still had five girls and four boys who
urgently needed the company of a woman. S;nce he did not in
tend to remarry, as all the other men in the colony did in such
cases, he preferred to have a slave.
I was therefore confronted with nine children of varying
sizes, some with hair as black as a magpie’s tail, others as
ginger-colored as their father, all of whom had the particularity
of not speaking one word of English. Benjamin’s family had
come from Portugal, where religious persecution had forced
them to flee to Holland. From there, one branch of the family
had tried for Brazil, Recife to be exact, but had to flee once
again when the town was recaptured by the Portuguese. They
then split into two clans, one settling in Curacao, the other
trying its luck in the American colonies. And their ignorance
of the English language and this constant babble in Hebrew
and Portuguese showed how indifferent this family was to the
misfortunes of others and to anything that did not concern the
tribulations of Jews the world over. I wondered if Benjamin
Cohen d’Azevedo had even heard about the Salem witch trials
and whether he hadn’t entered the prison by accident. In any
case, if he had heard about those sad events, he would have
put them down to the basic cruelty that seemed to characterize
those he called Gentiles and would have forgiven me entirely.
In a way I couldn’t have fallen into better hands.
The only visitors who crept into Benjamin Cohen d’Azeve
do’s home were half a dozen other Jews who came to celebrate
the Saturday ritual. I learned that they had been refused per-
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mission to build a synagogue. So they huddled together in one
room of the large house facing a seven-branched candelabrum
and murmuring mysterious words in a monotonous voice. On
Friday nights no light could be lit and the troop of children ate,
washed, and went to bed in total darkness.
Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo was in constant touch by letter
and trade with other Cohens, Levys, and Fraziers who lived in
New York (which he insisted on calling New Amsterdam!) and
Rhode Island. He earned a comfortable living from the tobacco
trade and owned two ships in association with his fellow Jew
and friend Judah Monis. Benjamin was a man of consider
able wealth, but little vanity, tailoring his clothes himself from
pieces of cloth from New York and living off unleavened bread
and gruel. The day after I entered his service, he held out a flat
vial and said in his squeaky voice: “It was my beloved Abigail
who used to prepare this. It’ll put you back on your feet.”
Then he went off with his eyes lowered, as if he were ashamed
of the goodness of his heart. That same day he brought me
clothes of dark cloth and an unusual cut. “Here, these belonged
to my beloved Abigail. I know that where she is now she would
like you to wear them.”
It was beloved Abigail who brought us together.
She started by weaving between us a tissue of little acts of
kindness, little services, and little signs of recognition. Benja
min would slice an orange from the islands for Metahebel, his
eldest daughter, and me. He would invite me to drink a glass of
hot toddy with his friends or throw an extra blanket over me
when it was too cold in my attic at night. I would iron his rough
shirts carefully, brush and clean his cape that was green with
wear, and spice his milk with honey. On the first anniversary
of his wife’s death he looked so desperate that I couldn’t help
saying softly: “You know that death is merely a passageway
and the door always remains open?”
He looked at me in disbelief.
I grew bolder and whispered: “Do you want to speak to
her?”
He rolled his eyes back.
“This evening,” I ordered, “when the children are asleep,
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As I hesitated, the young girl cried out: “It’s me, Mary Black!
Don’t you remember me?”
My memory came back. Mary Black had been Nathaniel
Putnam’s slave. Like myself she had been accused of being a
witch by the clan of little bitches and taken to Boston prison. I
had no idea what had become of her.
“Mary!” All at once the past came hurtling back with its
load of pain and humiliation. We sobbed in each other’s arms
for a few moments. Then she poured out all the news.
“The sinister scheme is now being uncovered. The girls were
being manipulated by their parents. It was all a question of
land, money, and old rivalries. The wind has changed now and
they want to drive Samuel Parris out of the village, but he’s
refusing to move. He’s demanding arrears in his salary and fire
wood that was never provided. Did you know his wife had
a son?”
I didn’t want to hear another word and interrupted her. “But
what about you?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m still at Nathaniel Putnam’s.
He took me back after Governor Phips’s pardon. He’s quar
reled with his cousin Thomas. Did you know that Dr. Griggs
now says that Anne Putnam and her daughter Anne were a bit
out of their minds?”
Too late! Too late! The truth always arrives too late because
it walks slower than lies. Truth crawls at a snail’s pace. There
was one question on my lips that I refrained from asking, but
in the end I had to. “What has happened to John Indian?”
She hesitated and I repeated my question more insistently.
“He no longer lives in the village,” she said.
I was stunned. “Where does he live then?”
“In Topsfield!”
Topsfield? I grabbed poor Mary by the arm without realizing
that my fingers were digging into her innocent flesh. “Mary,
for the love of God, tell me what is going on! What is he doing
in Topsfield?”
She resigned herself to looking me in the face. “Do you re
member Goodwife Sarah Porter?”
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But my pain passed like all the rest. It faded away and I had four
months of peace, dare I say happiness, with Benjamin Cohen
d’Azevedo.
At night he would murmur: “Our God knows neither race
nor color. You can become one of us if you like and can pray
with us.”
I interrupted him with a laugh. “Your God even accepts
witches?”
He kissed my hands. “Tituba, you are my beloved witch!”
At times, however, the anguish came back. I knew that mis
fortune never gives up. I knew it singles out those of a certain
sort and I waited.
I waited.
IO
I don’t know how long the battle lasted. At the end of the day
I woke up feeling as if every bone in my body had been broken
while Metahebel in tears was changing the compresses on my
forehead.
That night I had a dream. I wanted to enter a forest, but the
trees were in league against me and black creepers hung down,
twining themselves around me. I opened my eyes and the room
was black with smoke.
In a panic I woke Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, who had in
sisted on sleeping near me to treat my wounds. He stood up
and stammered: “My children!”
It was too late. The fire that had been skillfully lit at the four
corners of the house had already swallowed up the first and
second floors and was now licking at the attic. I had the pres
ence of mind to throw some bedding out of the window. We
landed on it in the middle of burned beams, smoldering drapes,
and pieces of twisted metal. They removed nine little bodies
from the ruins. Let us hope that the children, surprised in their
sleep, were not frightened and did not suffer. And, after all,
weren’t they going to join their mother?
The town authorities granted Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo a
piece of ground to bury his children in; it became the first Jew
ish cemetery in the American colonies, even before the one in
Newport.
As if this wasn’t enough, the two ships in the port belonging
to Benjamin and his friend went up in flames. Yet I do believe
that this material loss left him quite indifferent. When he could
find words again, Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo came to look
for me.
“There is a rational explanation for all of this. They want to
bar us from the profitable trade with the West Indies. As usual,
they fear and hate our ingenuity. But I have a different view. It’s
God who is punishing me. Not so much because of my passion
for you. The Jews have always had a strong sexual instinct.
Our father Moses in his great age had erections. Deuteronomy
says so: ‘Nor was his natural force abated.’ Abraham, Jacob,
and David had concubines. Neither does He begrudge me the
use of your powers to see Abigail again. He recalls the love of
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“That’s your berth!”
To tell the truth I was in no mood to go for him hammer and
tongs. I could only think of the tragic events I had just been
through. Mama Yaya had said it over and over again: “What
matters is to survive!” But she was wrong if life is nothing but a
stone around our necks. Nothing but a bitter, burning potion.
O Benjamin, my gentle, crooked lover! He had set off for
Rhode Island with a prayer on his lips: “Sh’ma Israel. Adonai
Elohenu Adonai Ehad!”
How many more stonings? Holocausts? How much blood
had yet to be shed? How much more submission?
I began to imagine another course for life, another meaning,
another motive. The fire engulfs the top of the tree. The Rebel
has disappeared in a cloud of smoke. He has triumphed over
death and his spirit remains. The frightened circle of slaves
regains its courage. The spirit remains.
Yes, another motive for life.
In the meantime I tried to wedge my basket with its meager
provisions in between the ropes, pulled the folds of my cape
around me, and endeavored to savor my good fortune. De
spite everything, wasn’t I fulfilling the dream that had kept me
awake so often? Here I was on my way to my native land.
No less rust-colored the earth. No less green the hills. No
less mauve the sugarcane, sticky with juice. No less satiny the
emerald belt around its waist. But the times have changed. The
men and women are no longer prepared to put up with suf
fering. The maroon disappears in a cloud of smoke. His spirit
remains. Fears fade away.
Toward the middle of the afternoon I was called out of my re
treat to care for a sailor. One of the slaves working in the ship’s
galley was shaking with fever. He looked at me suspiciously.
“They tell me your name is Tituba. Aren’t you the daughter
of Abena, who killed a white man?”
Having someone recognize me after ten years of absence
brought tears to my eyes. I had forgotten this ability our people
have of remembering. Nothing escapes them! Everything is
engraved in their memory!
“That is my name,” I stammered.
His eyes filled with gentleness and respect. “I hear they gave
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sell their own subjects if laws they dare not disobey didn’t for
bid it! So the cruel white man steps in and takes advantage of
the situation!”
We often used to talk about the future as well. Deodatus was
the first to ask me outright: “What do you intend to do on the
island?” Adding: “What will your freedom mean if your own
people are in bondage?”
I could think of nothing in reply. For 1 was returning to my
native land like a child running to hide in her mother’s skirts.
“I’ll look for my cabin on the old Darnell estate,” I stam
mered.
“So you think it’s there waiting for you,” Deodatus teased.
“How long is it since you’ve been gone?”
All these questions bothered me because I could not find an
swers to them. I was waiting and hoping for a sign from my in
visible spirits. Alas! Nothing happened and I remained alone.
Alone. For although the water of springs and rivers attracts
spirits, the perpetual movement of the sea drives them away.
They remain on either side of its great expanse, sometimes
sending messages to those who are dear to them, but never
daring to cross the waves.
“Cross the water, O my fathers! Cross the water, O my
mothers!” My prayers remained unheeded.
On the fourth day Deodatus’s fever, which I had cured as
well as I could, spread to another member of the crew, then
another and another, and we had to resign ourselves to the fact
that it was an epidemic. So many fevers and sicknesses traveled
between Africa, America, and the West Indies, fostered by the
dirt, the promiscuity, and the bad food. There was plenty of
rum, lemons from the Azores, and pepper from Cayenne on
board. I administered them as scalding hot potions. I rubbed
the sweating, feverish bodies with knots of straw. I did what
I could and my efforts, no doubt helped by Mama Yaya, were
crowned with success. Only four men died. They were thrown
into the sea, who took them up in the folds of her shroud.
Do you think the captain showed any signs of gratitude ...?
On the eighth day, as the winds dropped, the water became as
smooth as oil and the ship began to rock like a grandmother’s
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The invisible trio was there among the crowd of slaves, sailors,
and idlers come to welcome me. Spirits have that particularity
of never getting old and keeping their youthful features for
ever. Mama Yaya, the tall Nago Negress with sparkling teeth.
Abena, my mother, the Ashanti princess with her jet-black skin
and ritual scarifications. Yao, the silk-cotton tree with large,
powerful feet.
I cannot describe my feelings while they hugged me.
Apart from that, my island did not exactly deck itself out to
greet me. It was raining in Bridgetown and the flock of wet tiled
roofs was huddled around the massive silhouette of its cathe
dral. The streets were churned with muddy water in which men
and beasts were splashing. It looked as though a slave ship
had just anchored because a group of English men and women
were inspecting the teeth, tongue, and genitals, of the bossales,
who were shaking with humiliation under a thatched market
awning.
How ugly my town was! Small. Petty. A colonial outpost of
no distinction, reeking with the stench of lucre and suffering.
I walked up Broad Street and almost unintentionally found
myself in front of the house of my old enemy, Susanna Endicott.
But instead of rejoicing when Mama Yaya whispered in my ear
how the shrew had given up the ghost after having marinated
for weeks in her stinging urine, I was overtaken by a sudden
emotion.
What wouldn’t I have given to relive those years when I slept
night after night in the arms of my John Indian, with my hand
on his pleasure-dispensing object! What wouldn’t I have given
to see him standing under the low door and greeting me in that
ironic and tender way he was so good at.
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me up, a Nago, left me some secret powers. But I only use them
to do good . . .”
The maroons interrupted me in unison. “Do good? Even to
your enemies?”
I didn’t know what to say. Fortunately, Christopher gave the
signal to retire for the night. Getting up he yawned: “Tomorrow
is another day.”
I had been given a hut not far from the one he occupied with
his two concubines, for he had reinstated to his advantage the
African custom of polygamy. It seemed as though I had never
slept on a softer mattress than this straw bedding placed on the
earth floor under the thatched roof. Ah yes, life had pushed me
around! From Salem to Ipswich. From Barbados to America
and back. But now I could sit down and rest and say: “You
won’t manhandle me anymore!”
The rain started up again and 1 could hear it pitter-patter like
an exasperated visitor who is kept waiting at the door.
I was about to sink into sleep when I heard a noise at the
entrance to the hut. I was thinking it must be my invisible spirits
come to reproach me for having forgotten about them when
Christopher entered, holding a candle above his head. I sat up.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t your two wives enough for you?”
He rolled his eyes and I was immediately mortified at what I
had said. “Listen, I’m in no mood for sexual banter,” he replied.
“What are you in the mood for?” 1 asked flirtatiously, as de
spite all my misfortunes, I had not lost that deep instinct that
makes me a woman.
He sat down on a stool and set his candle on the ground so
that it made a thousand flickering shadows. “I want to know if
I can count on you.”
For a moment I remained speechless, then said: “For what,
in heaven’s name?”
He leaned toward me. “Do you remember the song about
Ti-Noel?”
Ti-Noel? I gave up trying to understand.
He stared at me with a look of commiseration as if I were
a dull-witted child and started to sing in a surprisingly good
voice.
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“ ‘Oh, Papa Ti-Noel, the white man’s gun cannot kill him.
The white man’s bullets cannot kill him. They bounce off his
skin.’ Tituba, I want you to make me invincible.”
So that was it. I almost burst out laughing, but refrained for
fear of irritating him, and managed to reply very calmly: “I
don’t know whether I’m capable of that, Christopher!”
“Are you a witch?” he shouted. “Yes or no!”
I sighed. “Everyone gives that word a different meaning.
Everyone believes he can fashion a witch to his way of thinking
so that she will satisfy his ambitions, dreams, and desires . . .”
“Listen,” he interrupted. “I’m not going to stay here listen
ing to you philosophize! I’m offering you a deal. You make me
invincible and in exchange . . .”
“In exchange?”
He got up and his head almost touched the ceiling while his
shadow loomed over me like a guardian spirit.
“In exchange I’ll give you everything a woman desires.”
“Meaning what?” I said ironically.
He did not answer and turned on his heels. He had hardly
left the room when I heard sighs that I recognized immediately.
I decide to ignore Abena, my mother, and turned to the wall,
calling on Mama Yaya.
“Can I help him?”
Mama Yaya puffed on her small pipe and sent a smoke ring
into the air.
“How could you? Death is a door that nobody can lock.
Everybody has to go through it when his day and hour come.
You know full well it can only be kept open for those we love
so that they can catch a glimpse of those they left behind.”
“Can’t I try to help him?” I insisted. “He’s fighting for a
noble cause.”
Abena, my mother, burst out laughing. “Hypocrite! Is it the
cause he’s fighting for that interests you? Come now!”
1 closed my eyes in the dark. The formidable perspicacity
of my mother irritated me. In addition, I reprimanded myself.
Hadn’t I had enough of men? Hadn’t I had enough of the mis
fortune that goes with their affections? Hardly was I back in
Barbados than I was contemplating a life of adventure with no
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and one by one the victims were rehabilitated. But not a word
about me. “Tituba, a slave originating from the West Indies
and probably practicing ‘hoodoo.’ ”
I lowered my head and didn’t answer. As if he could read
my mind and did not want to upset me further, the obeah man
softened his tone. “Life isn’t always a bowl of arrowroot, is it?”
I got up, ignoring the pity in his remark. “Dusk is falling and
I have to go home.”
A cunning gleam erased his fleeting look of sympathy. “What
you have in mind is impossible,” he said. “Are you forgetting
that you’re in the land of the living?”
I set off back to the maroon camp, turning his final words
over and over in my mind. Did he mean that only death brings
supreme knowledge? That while you are alive there’s a bound
ary you cannot cross? That I would have to resign myself to
partial knowledge?
As I was about to leave the plantation, a group of slaves came
up to me. I thought they needed treatment, women asking for
potions, children needing compresses for their wounds, or men
showing me their limbs crushed by the mills, for my knowledge
of plants had rapidly given me a reputation all over the island
and the sick would come up to me as soon as I appeared.
But this was another affair all together.
“Be careful, mother!” the slaves cried out with long faces.
“The planters got together yesterday evening and they are after
your skin.”
I couldn’t believe it. What crime could they accuse me of?
What had I done since I arrived but treat the neglected?
A man explained: “They say you’ve been carrying messages
between the field hands, helping them to plan revolts, and so
they’re going to set a trap for you.”
I set off back to the camp in dismay.
Those of you who have read my tale up till now must be
wondering who is this witch devoid of hatred, who is mislead
each time by the wickedness in men’s hearts? For the nth time
I made up my mind to be different and fight it out tooth and
nail. But how to work a change in my heart and coat its lining
with snake venom? How to make it into a vessel for bitter and
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the others together and said: ‘Sisters, when we go, who will
replace us? We haven’t created a single person in our image.’
The others shrugged their shoulders: ‘Why do we need to be
replaced?’ But some of them thought they should be. ‘For who
will farm the land without us? It will lie fallow and fruitless.’
So they all started to look for ways of reproducing themselves
and that’s how they invented man!”
We all laughed together.
“Why are men as they are?”
“If only we knew, my dear!”
Sometimes they asked each other riddles. “What cures the
darkness of the night?” “The candle!” “What cures the heat of
the day?” “The water from the river!” “What cures the bitter
ness of life?” “A child!”
And they would pity me for never having had a child. And
then, moving from one thing to another, they would press me
with questions. “When the judges of Salem sent you to prison,
couldn’t you have turned yourself into a mouse, for example,
and disappeared between two loose boards in the floor? Or an
angry bull and gored them all with your horns?”
I shrugged my shoulders and once again I explained they
were mistaken and were exaggerating the extent of my powers.
One evening the discussion went farther and I had to de
fend myself. “If 1 could do everything, wouldn’t I have set you
free? Wouldn’t I have wiped away the wrinkles on your faces?
And replaced the stumps in your gums by gleaming, pearly
white teeth?”
Their faces remained skeptical and, discouraged, I said with
a shrug: “Believe me, I’m just a poor creature!”
Were my words commented upon? Distorted or misinter
preted? In any case, Christopher started to change toward me.
He would come into my hut in the middle of the night and take
me without removing his clothes. This reminded me of Eliza
beth Parris’s complaint: “My poor Tituba, he takes me without
either removing his clothes or looking at me.”
When I tried to ask him how he had spent his day, he would
answer irritably in monosyllables.
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tions. Now it had just been bought by a certain Errin, who had
brought out some sophisticated machinery from England and
intended to make a fortune as quickly as possible.
The slaves brought me a ewe that had a triangle of black hair
on its forehead as if it were predestined. They had picked up
enough courage to remove it from their master’s flock.
I sacrificed the animal shortly before dawn and let its blood
soak into the scarlet-colored earth. After that 1 set to work. I
built up a garden of all the herbs 1 needed to practice my art,
boldly descending into the wildest, most secluded valleys. At
the same time I laid out a kitchen garden that the slaves helped
me to dig, hoe, and weed once their day’s labor was over. One
of them would manage to bring me some okra and tomato
seeds, another a lemon tree cutting. Several of the slaves set to
work planting yams and soon the avid creepers could be seen
twining around their poles. Once 1 had got together a few hens
and a strutting, fighting cock, nothing was missing.
My working day was very simple. I got up at dawn, prayed,
went down to bathe in the River Ormond, had a bite to eat,
then spent my time on my explorations and healing. At that
time cholera and smallpox struck the plantations regularly and
laid to rest a good many of the slaves. I discovered how to treat
these illnesses. I also discovered how to treat yaws and to heal
those wounds the slaves got day after day. I managed to mend
open, festering wounds, to put pieces of bone back together
again, and to tie up limbs. All that, of course, with the help of
my invisible spirits, who hardly ever left me. I had given up the
illusion of making men invincible and immortal. I accepted the
limits of the species.
The reader may be surprised that at a time when the lash
was constantly being used, I managed to enjoy this peace and
freedom. Our islands have two sides to them. The side of the
masters’ carriages and their constables on horseback, armed
with muskets and savage, baying hounds. And the other, mys
terious, and secret side, composed of passwords, whispers, and
a conspiracy of silence. It was on this side that I lived, protected
by common collusion. Mama Yaya made a thick vegetation
grow up around my cabin and it was as if 1 lived in a fortified
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I, Tituba
Codrington Valley to collect the spit of the agua toad. This was
the only place where the toad could be found, because of its
liking for the rich brown soil. After twenty-four hours of con
stant attention, I was rewarded, and Iphigene opened his eyes.
On the third day he spoke. “Mother, O mother, you’ve come
back! I thought you had gone forever!”
I took his hand that was still hot with fever and already
rough and distorted. “I’m not your mother, Iphigene. But I’d
like you to tell me about her.”
Iphigene opened his eyes wider, realized his mistake, and lay
back down on the bedding in pain.
“I saw my mother die when I was three. She was one of
Ti-Noel’s women, for he had a great many scattered through
out the plantations to reproduce his seed. His virile seed, from
which I came. My mother brought me up with devotion. Alas!
She had the misfortune to be beautiful. One day she was coming
back from the mill when the master, Edward Dashby, noticed
her. Despite her rags and sweat, he ordered the overseer to
bring her to him at nightfall. Nobody knows what happened
exactly, but the next morning she was whipped to death in
front of a circle of slaves.”
How like my own story! At once, the affection I had im
mediately felt for Iphigene blossomed, finding, so to speak, a
legitimate reason. In turn, I recounted my life, bits of which he
already knew, since I had become a legend among the slaves,
far more than I could possibly have imagined.
When I got to the burning of Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo’s
house, he interrupted me with a frown: “But why? Wasn’t he
white like the others?”
“No doubt.”
“Do they need to hate so much that they hate eacjh other?”
I tried to explain what 1 remembered from Benjamin’s and
Metahebel’s lessons concerning their religion and their quar
rels with the Gentiles. But Iphigene didn’t understand any more
than I did.
Gradually, Iphigene managed to sit up in bed and then to
stand. Soon he was taking a few steps outside. His first job was
to repair the front door, which didn’t close properly.
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I, Tituba
/, Tituba
They were wearing black hoods over their faces and yet I knew
it was Samuel Parris, John Indian, and Christopher. They came
up to me holding a thick, sharpened stick and I screamed: “No,
no! Haven’t I already gone through that?”
Without heeding my cries, they lifted up my skirts and I was
racked with a terrible pain. I screamed even louder.
At that moment someone laid a hand on my forehead. It was
Iphigene. I came to and sat up, terrified, thinking I was still
suffering.
“What’s the matter? Don’t be afraid, I’m here by your side.”
My dream was so vivid that I remained speechless for a
while, reliving the horrible night before my arrest.
“Iphigene,” I begged, “give me time to pray, to make a sac
rifice and try to reconcile the unseen forces . . .”
“Tituba,” he interrupted (and this was the first time he had
called me by my name, as if I were no longer his mother but a
naive, unreasonable child), “I respect your talents as a healer.
Isn’t it thanks to you that I am alive and breathing? But please
spare me the rest. The future belongs to those who know how
to shape it and, believe me, you won’t get anywhere with in
cantations and animal sacrifices. Only through actions.”
I could think of nothing to say. I decided not to discuss the
matter further and to take the precautions I thought necessary.
However, the issue at stake was so great that I couldn’t do
without a second opinion. I withdrew to the banks of the River
Ormond and called Mama Yaya, Abena, my mother, and Yao.
They appeared and I took their relaxed and happy expression
to be a reassuring omen.
“You know what they are planning, so what do you advise
me to do?”
Yao, who was taciturn, dead or alive, was nevertheless the
first to speak.
“It reminds me of a slave revolt when I was young. It had
been organized by Ti-Noel, who hadn’t yet taken to the moun
tains and was still sweating it out on the Belleplaine plantation.
He had his men stationed everywhere and, at a given signal,
they were to burn the Great Houses to ashes.”
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Z, Tituba
drain me of all my blood. A small puddle had already formed
at my feet, reminding me of Yao’s words: “Our memory will
be covered in blood. Our memories will float to the surface like
water lilies.”
After having torn into shreds all the clothes he could get hold
of, Iphigene managed to stop the hemorrhage and carried me
into the cabin bundled up like a baby.
“Now keep still. I’ll look after everything. Who says I can’t
cook?”
The sharp smell of my blood soon began to irritate my nos
trils and it was then I remembered Susanna Endicott. That
awful shrew! Hadn’t I kept her bundled up like this for months,
for years, swimming in her own juice, and wasn’t she now get
ting her revenge just as she had promised? Blood for urine? Of
us two, who was the more formidable? I wanted to pray, but
my mind wouldn’t let me. I remained there, staring through the
crisscross of poles that held up the roof.
Shortly afterward, Mama Yaya, Abena, my mother, and Yao
came to see me. They had been in North Point calling on an
obeah man when they had seen what had happened to me.
Mama Yaya tapped me on the shoulder. “It’s nothing. Soon
you’ll forget all about it.”
Abena, my mother, of course couldn’t help sighing and grum
bling. “If there’s one thing you’re not good at, it’s choosing
your men. Oh well, soon everything will be back to normal.”
I looked her squarely in the face. “What do you mean by
that?”
But she turned a pirouette. “How many illegitimate children
do you intend to collect? Look at the hair on your head, as
white as the flock on the silk-cotton tree.”
Yao merely kissed me on the forehead and whispered: “We’ll
see you later. We’ll be there as soon as possible.”
Then they disappeared.
Around eight o’clock Iphigene brought me a gourd filled
with food. He had managed to cook up a pig’s tail, some rice,
and black-eyed peas. He changed my dressings, showing no
alarm at seeing them drip with blood again.
This was the last night before the final act, when doubt, fear,
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1, Tituba
the needlefish court the crayfish. We dried our hair under the
moon. We did not sleep for long, however. I must confess that
once the intoxication had worn off, I felt a little ashamed. This
boy could have been my son! Did I no longer have any respect
for myself? And then why had so many men passed through
my bed? Hester was right when she said: “You’re too fond of
love, Tituba!”
And I wondered whether this was not a blemish in me, a
fault that I should have tried to cure myself of.
Outside, the horse of night galloped on. Clippity-clop.
Clippity-clop. Close by my side my son and lover was sleeping.
I was unable to do the same. All the events of my life came back
to me extremely vividly and the faces of all those I had loved
and hated crowded around my bed. Oh, I recognized them all!
I could put a name to every face. Betsey, Abigail, Anne Putnam,
Goodwife Parris, Samuel Parris, John Indian. At the very mo
ment when my body had proved how frivolous it could be, my
heart reminded me that it had never belonged to anybody else
but John Indian. What had become of him in that cold and
gloomy America?
I knew that more and more slave ships were unloading their
cargo on its shores and that America was preparing to domi
nate the world with the sweat of our brows. I knew that the
Indians had been wiped off the map and reduced to roaming
the land that once was theirs.
What was John Indian doing in that country that was so hard
on us? So hard on the weak, on the dreamers, and on those
who do not judge men by their wealth.
The horse of night was galloping on. Clippity-clop. Clippity
clop. And all these faces danced in front of my eyes, vivid as
only the creatures of the night can be.
Was it Susanna Endicott taking her revenge? And were her
powers greater than mine?
Outside the wind had risen. I could hear it hailing mangoes.
I could hear it blow through the calabash tree and rap its fruit.
I was afraid. I was cold. I wanted to return to my mother’s
womb. But at that very instant, my daughter moved as if she
were calling for my affection. I laid my hand on my belly and,
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I, Tituba
his body jerk with constant lashes of the whip. His face was
so swollen that he must have been practically blind and was
looking to the sun for warmth rather than light. 1 cried out to
him: “Don’t be afraid! Above all, don’t be afraid! We’ll soon
be together again!”
He turned to the spot where my voice came from and as he
couldn’t speak, he motioned to me with his hand.
His body was the first to swing in the air, hanging from a
heavy beam. 1 was the last to be led to the gallows, for 1 was
to be given special treatment. The punishment that I had “es
caped” in Salem was now going to be inflicted on me. A man
dressed in an impressive black and red coat read out all my
crimes, past and present. 1 had bewitched the inhabitants of
a peaceful, God-fearing village. I had called Satan into their
hearts and turned them one against the other in fury. 1 had set
fire to the house of an honest merchant who had decided to
disregard my crimes, but who had paid for his lack of judgment
with the death of his children. At this point in the inquisition 1
almost screamed out that it was all untrue and nothing but vile
and cruel lies. Then I thought otherwise. What was the point?
Soon I would reach a kingdom where the light of truth burns
bright and unrelenting. Sitting astride the beam of my gallows,
Mama Yaya, Abena, my mother, and Yao were waiting to take
me by the hand.
I was the last to be taken to the gallows. All around me
strange trees were bristling with strange fruit.
Epilogue
Epilogue
7, Tituba
after I ordered the spirits of those he had tortured to play the
gwo-ka drums night after night around his bed. I accompanied
him to the brigantine Faith and saw him down glass after glass
of rum in the vain hope of ridding his sleep of dreams.
Christopher too tosses and turns on his bed and has lost all
taste for his women. I refrain from harming him further, for
isn’t he the father of my unborn daughter?
I have not crossed the sea to persecute Samuel Parris, the
judges, and the preachers. I know that others have done it for
me. Samuel Parris’s son, the object of so much attention and
pride, was to die insane. Cotton Mather was to be dishonored
and unmasked by a little vixen. All the judges were to lose
their pride. And, as Rebecca Nurse said, the time will come
for another judgment. And if I’m not included, what does it
matter!
I do not belong to the civilization of the Bible and Bigotry.
My people will keep my memory in their hearts and have no
need for the written word. It’s in their heads. In their hearts and
in their heads. Since I died without giving birth to a child, the
spirits have allowed me to choose a descendant. I took a long
time making up my mind. I spied into every cabin. I looked at
the washerwomen breast-feeding. I watched the women work
ing in the sugarcane fields as they laid their nursing babies on
piles of old clothes, for want of a better place. I made compari
sons, I fingered and prodded and finally I found her, the one I
needed: Samantha.
I think I chose her because I watched her come into this
world.
I was used to looking after Delices, her mother, a black Cre
ole living in Bottom Bay on the Willoughby plantation. As she
had already lost two or three children at birth, this time she
had me come as quickly as possible. To stave off his anxiety,
her man was downing glass after glass of rum on the veranda.
The birth took hours and the baby presented herself in the
breech position. The mother was losing both her blood and her
strength and her poor exhausted soul had but one wish and
that was to slip into the other world. The fetus refused to ac
company her and fought furiously to enter the universe from
177
/, Tituba
the heavy gates of the ghettos. They will deny us our rights and
blood will beget blood.
I have only one regret, for we invisibles too have our regrets
so that we can better relish our share of happiness: it’s having
to be separated from Hester. We do communicate, of course. I
can smell the dried almonds on her breath. I can hear the echo
of her laugh. But each of us remains on her side of the ocean.
I know that she is pursuing her dreams of creating a world of
women that will be more just and humane. I myself have loved
men too much and shall continue to do so. Sometimes I get the
urge to slip into someone’s bed to satisfy a bit of leftover desire
and my fleeting lover is delighted with his solitary pleasure.
Yes, I’m happy now. I can understand the past, read the
present, and look into the future. Now I know why there is so
much suffering and why the eyes of our people are brimming
with water and salt. But I know, too, that there will be an end
to all this. When? Who knows? I’m in no hurry now that I am
free of that impatience that is peculiar to mortals. What is one
life in relation to the immensity of time?
Last week a young bossale girl committed suicide. She was an
Ashanti like my mother. The priest had christened her Laetitia
and she jumped on hearing this barbarious and incongruous
name. Three times she tried to swallow her tongue. Three times
they brought her back to life. I followed her every step and
whispered dreams into her ear. Alas! In the morning these
dreams left her more desperate than ever. While I was not look
ing, she managed to snatch a handful of cassava leaves, which
she swallowed with some poisonous roots, and the slaves found
her stiff, with foam on her lips and the terrible smell of de
composition hanging over her. Such cases remain few and far
between and it is more usual for me to keep a slave from the
edge of despair by whispering: “Look at the splendor of our
island. Soon it will all be ours. Fields of nettles and sugarcane.
Furrows of yams and patches of cassava. All of it!”
Sometimes, oddly enough, 1 feel like changing into mortal
form. So 1 become an anoli and draw my knife when the chil
dren try to catch me with their straw lassos. Sometimes I be
come a fighting cock in the pit and the clamor of the crowd
179
Glossary
Afterword
Bibliography
Historical Note
The witch trials of Salem began in March 1692 with the arrests
of Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, who confessed her
“crime.” Sarah Osborne died in prison in May 1692.
Nineteen women were hanged and one man, Giles Corey,
was sentenced to a peine forte et dure (pressed to death).
On 21 February 1693, Sir William Phips, governor of the
Bay Colony, sent a report to London on the subject of witch
craft. He submitted the cases of over fifty women who still
remained in prison and requested permission to relieve their
suffering. This was accorded in May 1693, when the last of
the accused were granted a general pardon and released. The
Reverend Samuel Parris left the village of Salem in 1697, after
a long quarrel with its inhabitants concerning arrears in salary
and firewood. His wife had died the previous year giving birth
to a son, Noyes.
Around 1693 Tituba, our heroine, was sold for the price
of her prison fees and the cost of her chains and shackles. To
whom? Such is the intentional or unintentional racism of the
historians that we shall never know. According to Anne Petry,
a black American novelist who also became passionately inter
ested in our heroine, Tituba was bought by a weaver and spent
the rest of her days in Boston.
A vague tradition says Tituba was sold to a slave dealer, who
took her back to Barbados.
I myself have given her an ending of my own choosing.
The reader should note that the village of Salem is now called
Danvers. It is the town of Salem—where most of the trials, but
not the mass hysteria, took place—that has become famous for
its history of witchcraft.
MARYSE CONDE
Glossary
Glossary
Afterword
Afterword
After the abolition of slavery in 1848, blacks in the French
overseas colonies were entitled by law to education, but the
transition from illiterate slave to literate freeman was painfully
slow, just as it was in the United States after the Civil War.
Even when Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana be
came overseas departments of France in 1946, they continued
to suffer from domination by the ex-colonial capital, which
French speakers call le métropole (the metropolis). Today a
third of the French Caribbean people live in continental France,
where they have migrated in search of jobs or higher edu
cation. In addition to the problem of migration, there is the
reality that the overseas departments depend upon the mother
country for many supplies and staples, including food items.
One university has been created for the entire region, the Uni
versité Antilles-Guyane. The projected removal of trade and
employment restrictions among the countries of the European
Common Market in 1993 poses potential problems for the au
tonomy and livelihood of citizens of the French Caribbean.
Individuals from countries outside France who cannot now
work in the French Caribbean because they are not French citi
zens may then be attracted to settle in the islands, thus further
exacerbating the existing unemployment problem.
It is symptomatic of their postcolonial malaise that the
French themselves have not shown much interest in French
Caribbean literature to date. Maryse Condé has fared better
than most writers: Ségou, les murailles de terre (Segou: The
walls of earth) was a best-seller and was a selection by Le livre
du mois (book-of-the-month club) in 1984, the year of its pub
lication; Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem won the
Grand prix littéraire de la femme in 1986. A few other writers
in addition to Condé have been taken up by the big French
publishers, Edouard Glissant and Daniel Maximin by Le Seuil,
Raphaël Confiant and Xavier Orville by Bernard Grasset, and
Patrick Chamoiseau by Gallimard. However, most writers have
to go to smaller, specialized houses like Présence africaine,
Editions caribéennes, and L’Harmattan to get into print. In
addition, the French press except for La quinzaine littéraire—
a bimonthly literary magazine—appears to be almost unaware
190
Afterword
A fter ivord
quenched. She argues that creativity could not flourish in those
harsh conditions. Showing how Caribbean folktales became a
way of redefining the slaves’ universe, she concludes her essay
by suggesting that another kind of literature, an epic, historic
literature, with other values was needed. This new literature is
precisely the kind she and others are writing today.
The true cornerstone of French Caribbean literature is Aimé
Césaire’s long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Note
book of a return to the native land). The Cahier, which has
been republished at least nine times, including four transla
tions into English and two into Spanish, recounts the poverty
of daily life in Martinique, laments the enormous losses suf
fered by Caribbean people, explores the poet’s own anguish,
and then celebrates the internal power of Caribbean space in a
final self-revelatory movement culminating in a call to action.1
The négritude movement, by identifying itself exclusively
with Afro-Caribbean ethnicity, failed to account for the true di
versity of this multicultural region. It fell to Edouard Glissant,
Martinican novelist, poet, critic, and theoretician of Le dis
cours antillais, to transcend these limitations. Glissant coined
the neologism Antillanité or Caribbeanness, which he defines
as the documentation and celebration of the hybrid cultural
heritage of the Caribbean region. He explains that contempo
rary writers must fill in the voids left by past historiography
and bring the traditions of the collectivity to surface expression
after centuries of silence: “The rupture of the slave trade, then
the experience of slavery, introduces between blind belief and
clear consciousness a gap that we have never finished filling.
The absence of representation, of echo, of any sign, makes this
emptiness forever yawn under our feet. Along with our real-
Afterword
Afterword
Afterword
Afterword
Although Maryse Condé tells us that Tituba’s personal story
has no relationship to her own life experience, the fabric of
both journeys is woven of the same cloth. Tituba and Condé
both attack life directly, courageously, and imaginatively. The
force of moral honesty sustains them in their quests for real
relationships in a world where class differences and racism
impede human communication.
In 1959, when she was twenty-two years old, Maryse mar
ried Mamadou Condé despite her family’s strong objection to
him on the grounds that he was “an actor; he had no money,
no education.”4 Glad to leave the closed circle of West Indians
in Paris, Condé moved to her husband’s native Guinea, where
she soon realized that the marriage was a mistake. Leaving her
husband, she went alone to the Ivory Coast, where she taught
school and gave birth to their first daughter. She moved back
to Guinea, had two more daughters, and then left her husband
for good in 1964. Condé’s willingness to defy her family in her
marriage, breaking class and racial barriers they tried to im
pose, and her courage in admitting subsequently that her mar
riage was not good, demonstrate how directly she approaches
life’s challenges.
Finding original ways of looking at literature in her critical
works and daring to address fresh topics in her novels, Condé’s
body of work shows the same kind of courage and determina
tion as her personal life. Her willingness to write about what is
on her mind without camouflaging her intent manifested itself
in her first novel, Hérémakhonon, published in 1976. There
she wrote of Veronica, a young West Indian woman who goes
to Paris and then to Africa in search of herself. Full of negative
memories of her childhood in Guadeloupe, Veronica discovers
that Africa does not satisfy her either. Drawn to the politi
cal left, she also has an affair with the dictator who controls
the country. She flees the country at the end of the novel, tor
mented and angered by the unnecessary bloodshed, alone and
uncertain still. Characterized by irony and ambiguity, Héré-
4. Ibid., p. 99.
196
Afterword
5. Ibid., p. 121.
197
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whatever I write, I always have the feeling that some
thing stronger than myself forces me, urges me, to go
on writing.
a s: Yow have told me that Tituba helped write her own
book, in a sense. Did you begin your conversations
with her right away?
m c: The conversations went on all the time I was writing
the novel. I had the feeling that Tituba was involved
in the writing. Even when I left my pages at night in
my study, I believed that she would go look at them,
read them, and eventually correct what she did not
like. I cannot say when we really started conversing,
however. All along during my writing of the novel I
felt that she was there—that I was addressing her.
a s: What is your reaction to Ann Petry's novel about
Tituba?
m c: I read her novel when I was already halfway through
Tituba because her book was difficult to find . . .
it seems to me it was out of print, or something
like that. I was a bit surprised and at the same time
slightly disappointed because Ann Petry turned the
story into a book for adolescents. For her the story
of Tituba was a story of courage in the face of adver
sity. It was a lesson of hope and dynamism. This was
not the type of story that I wanted to tell. For me the
interest lies in Tituba's own destiny. So, Ann Petry's
story and mine are written from very different view
points. I like hers, of course, but I am not interested
in giving models to young people.
A s: Have you spoken to Ann Petry about your common
interest?
m c: No, never.
A s: Did you feel you were writing a historical novel?
m c: For me Tituba is not a historical novel. Tituba is just
201
Afterword
the opposite of a historical novel. I was not interested
at all in what her real life could have been. I had few
precise documents: her deposition testimony. It forms
the only historical part of the novel, and I was not
interested in getting anything more than that. I really
invented Tituba. I gave her a childhood, an adoles
cence, an old age. At the same time I wanted to turn
Tituba into a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like
the legendary “Nanny of the maroons.” I hesitated
between irony and a desire to be serious. The result
is that she is a sort of mock-epic character. When she
was leading the fight of the maroons, it was a parody
somehow.
A sz How would you describe the difference between a
historian and a writer?
M cz A historian is somebody who studies the facts, the
historical facts—somebody who is tied to reality,
somebody who is tied to what actually happens. I
am just a dreamer—my dreams rest upon a histori
cal basis. Being a black person, having a certain past,
having a certain history behind me, I want to explore
that realm and of course I do it with my imagination
and with my intuition. But I am not involved in any
kind of scholarly research.
a sz How did you find out about Puritan New England?
m cz There was a historian teaching at the same college,
and I asked her to give me some information about
the Puritans of New England. Because she was Jew
ish, she influenced me to show how petty the Puritans
really were, how their minds were narrow, full of
prejudice. The Puritans were opposed not only to
the blacks, but also to the Jews. They forbade the
Jews to settle in the colony of Massachusetts, and
forced them to go to the more liberal colony of Rhode
Island. Because of this colleague of mine, the charac
ter of the Jew that you see in Tituba came into reality.
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Afterword
A s: Would it be accurate to say that your focus was on
Tituba, and you explored the Puritans in order to
imagine her reality?
M cz Writing Tituba was an opportunity to express my feel
ings about present-day America. I wanted to imply
that in terms of narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and
racism, little has changed since the days of the Puri
tans.
a sz That is a very strong statement! Would you please
elaborate?
m cz Every black person living in America will tell you that
racism still exists. A few success stories that are told
over and over again for propaganda reasons must not
hide the fact that for the majority of the blacks, life
is still hell. As a foreigner and a French-speaking per
son, I dont suffer directly from it. On the contrary,
I am a curiosity; but I am too lucid not to see how
the society works. Being in contact with many young
black people as a university professor, I can see how
frustrated and frightened they are by their society and
how they have little hope in the future.
A s: Yow showed us your ability to use history in Ségou:
Les murailles de terre and Ségou: La terre en miettes.
I am wondering now if you actively choose to entice
the reader by creating historical verisimilitude?
M C: As I said, for a black person, history is a challenge
because a black person is supposed not to have any
history except the colonial one. We hardly know what
happened to our people before the time when they met
the Europeans who decided to give them what they
call civilization. For a black person from the West
Indies or from Africa, whatever, for somebody from
the diaspora, I repeat it is a kind of challenge to find
out exactly what was there before. It is not history
for the sake of history. It is searching for one's self,
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M c: No part at all.
A s: Tell me about your knowledge of witchcraft—how
did you get it?
M c: I don’t have any knowledge of witchcraft. It reminds
me of a story that happened when I was writing
Tituba. Two students from the Occidental College
newspaper asked me for an interview about my cur
rent writing. I told them I was writing about a witch.
After that I was flooded with calls from people saying
they wanted to meet me to discuss witchcraft. One
day a lady came to my office by surprise and said, “I
wanted to meet you because I myself am a witch.” I
had to say, “I’m sorry, I’m not a witch myself, I’m just
writing about a witch, but I don’t have any knowl
edge of witchcraft.” The recipes that I give in the novel
are merely recipes that I found in seventeenth-century
books: how to cure people with certain plants, what
kind of prayers to say in certain circumstances, and
so on. I found that in books printed and published in
America or in England.
A s: The concept of positive sorcery is central to the text.
Can you comment on that?
m c: In Africa, as you may know, the word witchcraft has a
different meaning. In any given community, you have
two types of individuals relating to the invisible forces.
The first type is working for the benefit of the society,
i.e., is working, as they say, with the right hand. The
second type is working evil on the individuals and the
community. It is said that this type is working with
the left hand. Only the second person is called a witch
and is ostracized. Tituba was doing only good to her
community. Could she be called a witch? I don’t think
so, and the book is there to prove it.
A s: And the concept of positive love is also central to
the text?
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notably by a Martinican poet called Monchoachi, the
late Sonny Rupaire.
A s: You have spoken in interviews of your life as a girl
and the relationship between that experience and your
writing. Are there new influences from your adult life
that you would like your readers to hear about now?
M c: I shall simply say that your life constantly impinges
on your writing. My new experiences in America will
certainly shape my future novels.
A sz How is your journey back to Guadeloupe feeling at
this point? Was writing Traversée de la mangrove an
important step into full Guadeloupean reality?
M c: I do not know what it is to be a full Guadeloupean
and what you mean by “full Guadeloupean reality."
If there is something that I discovered when I settled
in Guadeloupe it is that a writer should never settle
anywhere. Looking for one's native land, dreaming
about it, doing everything to go back, that is a fan
tasy, a myth. Once one is there, one realizes that one
has only one desire: to leave. I dare say that a writer
should be perpetually on the move, going from one
place to another, searching, trying to understand and
decipher things different and new all the time. I came
back to settle in Guadeloupe. However, after three
years I am already teaching half of the time in Berke
ley. I discovered that root is a very negative word. It
ties you down. Traversée de la mangrove just illus
trates a stage in my literary development. From there I
shall certainly move on.
A s: The relationship between men and women continues
to be a central theme of your work. How do you view
contemporary society in terms of women's indepen
dence?
M c: I'm surprised to hear that, because I don't see my
self as portraying the relationship between men and
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women. There is never anything dogmatic or didactic
in my thoughts. Of course men are difficult, especially
Caribbean men, difficult to handle. In Tituba, I had
the factual story that John Indian deserted Tituba. So
I could not tell anything else. I had to take that his
torical factor into account. But I wont say that Tm
portraying the relationship between men and women.
If I do, it is totally unconsciously.
as: In a speech you gave in Haiti and that was published
in the review Conjonction, you said that you learned
"race does not exist, only cultures exist.”8 Could we
say that in Tituba you portray a "culture of women?”
m c: When I say that race does not exist, only culture, I
express my viewpoint about négritude. It was simplis
tic to believe that all the blacks throughout the world
were alike. Frantz Fanon was the first to warn us
that there are not two identical cultures and that the
Negroes were an invention of the white world. I mean
by this that the culture of the diaspora has become
very different from the one of the mother continent.
There is nothing aggressive in this affirmation. I am
just stating a fact. As for a culture of women, as you
say, I do not know whether it really exists. Certainly
women share a common oppression and a common
discrimination throughout the world. But this should
not obscure the oppositions created by social class,
education, ideology, and environment. What is more
different than a woman from rural Mali and a woman
from Milwaukee for example?
A s: Would you say that racism is a more central issue in
Tituba than discrimination against women?
m C: Of course, racism is very important in Tituba. She
was forgotten by history because she was black. But
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viewed, misunderstood, unjustly criticized. I also like
Traversée de la mangrove because it is the latest. It is
like a newborn child. You don't know exactly what
the destiny of the child is going to be, which means
you have to protect him, to be there, to help him to
walk and move and talk. Maybe I would say the first
and the last of my novels are my favorites. But prob
ably I shall prefer the novel that I am now writing to
Traversée de la mangrove, because it will become the
latest in a few months.
A sz If American readers of Tituba were going to read only
one other of your works, assuming they too will be
come available in English, which one would you like
them to read and why?
m c: They could read either La vie scélérate or Traversée
de la mangrove. La vie scélérate, because it is my own
story and my family's story with, of course, the dis
tortion of fiction. So if they want to get to know me,
they might read that novel. And Traversée de la man
grove, because it is the last, as I said. Also it seems to
me that in terms of writing techniques and narrativity,
it is better than the others.
a sz If Caribbean readers were to read just one other of
your works, which one would you choose?
m c: Traversée de la mangrove, because it is closer to their
reality. I wrote it when I was in Guadeloupe. They
will find some realities that they are familiar with.
AS: I know you are tired of hearing about women writers
who are inspired to write because they heard their
grandmothers tell stories. However, it seems to me
that in Tituba you emphasize the intergenerational
connections. Is there a way in which you are inventing
a tradition for yourself?
m C: The question of grandmothers telling stories and thus
teaching their granddaughters how to become writers
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is one of the biggest clichés of black female writing.
I repeat that the element of parody is very important
if you wish to fully comprehend Tituba. As I am very
conversant with black female literature—I wrote an
essay called La parole des femmes—I know that in
any female epic, some elements must be present, and
I deliberately included them. If one misses the parody
in Tituba, one will not understand, for example, why
she meets Hester Prynne in jail and why they discuss
feminism in modern terms. Similarly, the presence of
the invisible (the conversations with the mother and
with Mama Yaya) is deliberately overdrawn. Do not
take Tituba too seriously, please.
AS: Are there other French Caribbean writers who have
influenced your writing? Who are they, and what
particular influences do you ascribe to them?
m c: No writer from the Caribbean has influenced me. I
already said how much I admire Aimé Césaire. But I
wont say that he influenced my writings. For me, he
was a kind of ancestor figure who opened my eyes and
probably brought me to literature. If I have to find
some writers who influenced me, I shall mention the
French writer François Mauriac, the American writer
Phillip Roth, the Japanese writer Mishima. Recently
I read a novel that was so important to me by Bruce
Chatwin called The Viceroy of Ouidah. I found it fas
cinating. It seems to me that the novel was telling the
same story as Ségou: Les murailles de terre and Ségou:
La terre en miettes, but with an economy of means, a
kind of power of expression, a kind of terseness that
I still have to discover. Pm not influenced by any par
ticular writers of the Caribbean. I take my influence
from everywhere.
A s: What are you working on now?
M c: I cannot tell.
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Maryse Condé does not merely retell Tituba’s story; she recre
ates it to new purposes. Part of the fiction resides in the author’s
affirmation that “Tituba and I lived for a year on the closest
of terms. During our endless conversations she told me things
she had confided to nobody else.” Condé’s primary purpose in
this text is to shift the focus to Tituba’s personal power as a
woman and as a human being. In doing this, she allows her
heroine to subvert racial and sexual domination by the double
Other (socially established whites / selfish men), and she em
powers her readers to throw off their own chains as well. But
Condé has an important secondary purpose that may appear
to be at odds with the social-realist notion of a “message.” As
she suggested in our interview, she was conscious of creating
a work of postmodern fiction that defies the norms of mime
sis. The ways in which style and narrative strategy impinge on
meaning in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem will be addressed
following consideration of the dual issue of racial and sexual
domination.
Tituba is an energetic, compassionate, gentle, and loving per
son who embraces life in a spirit of innocence. Unlike Maryse
Condé’s other protagonists, Tituba’s whole essence is deeply
tied to a celebration of being a black Caribbean woman. Her
beliefs about religion and her intimacy with the natural world
express the Barbadian half of her origins. Her openness toward
other people is a sign of her humanity.
The title of the novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, intro
duces the major themes that Condé will develop in her version
of the story of the historical Tituba. Her use of the phrase “I,
Tituba,” shows us that Condé is claiming a life, an identity, for
this woman in no uncertain terms. Making this even clearer, the
French title uses the emphatic pronoun moi, drawing attention
to the speaker: Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem. The
word I also tells us that Conde’s Tituba will tell her own story.
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Although Condé explores certain aspects of Tituba’s charac
ter such as her compassion, her sensitivity to her own sexuality,
her ability to love, and her fierceness about being mistreated,
she makes it clear that Tituba does not control her own life.
A. James Arnold suggests that this refusal to allow Tituba’s life
to be deeply independent permits us to deconstruct the social
and economic system of slavery that tied the British West Indies
to North America in the seventeenth century.11
The emphasis on Tituba’s religious/spiritual powers in the
narrative enhances Tituba’s status as a folk heroine and makes
the useful point that there are different ways of interpreting the
world. However, it is clear that Condé has exaggerated these
details consciously and intends to challenge the credulity of her
readers, once again denying verisimilitude to her own text.
At first, Mama Yaya initiates Tituba into a philosophy of
life she will later share with others, exemplifying a natural
religion based on an intimate knowledge of nature and life:
“Mama Yaya taught me the sea, the mountains, and the hills.
She taught me that everything lives, has a soul, and breathes.
That everything must be respected. That man is not the mas
ter riding through his kingdom on horseback.” The focus on
animism becomes exaggerated only after numerous explana
tions are given, and even then it is appealing material. Mama
Yaya says: “The dead only die if they die in our hearts. . . .
They are all around us, eager for attention, eager for affection.”
These thoughts refer to the African animist belief that death is
a passage, a metamorphosis from life to spirit. Once the ances
tor becomes a spirit, she or he no longer leaves the living, but
participates in their lives.
Furthermore, Tituba learns that the canal of dreams is a
passageway between the dead and the living, and that women
in particular have special religious powers with which they can
sometimes bring the spirits of the deceased back to living form.11
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12. Arthur Miller, The Crucible (New York: Bantam, 1959), p. 117.
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cities, not to mention Conde’s own statement in our interview
about the extent of racism in the United States today. It may
seem paradoxical that Conde, a foreigner from another re
gion of the Americas, should open our “American” eyes to the
rigidity and brutality of Puritan times as well as suggesting to
us metaphorically what is wrong in the United States today.
Miller makes clear—in one of the prose passages inserted in
The Crucible—his intention of linking the Salem witch trials
in 1692 with the Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy
era in the 1950s: “A political policy is equated with moral
right and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence. Once
such an equation is effectively made, society becomes a con-
gerie of plots and counterplots, and the main role of govern
ment changes from that of the arbiter to that of the scourge of
God.. .. The Church, sharp-eyed as it must be when gods long
dead are brought to life, condemned these orgies as witchcraft
and interpreted them, rightly, as a resurgence of the Diony-
siac forces it had crushed long before. Sex, sin and the Devil
were early linked, and so they continued to be in Salem, and
are today.”13
Just as the creation of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem sym
bolizes renewed ties to the Caribbean for Maryse Conde, so the
novel includes fundamental patterns of birth and rebirth. The
rhythm of re-creation runs through the plot, as Tituba brings
life back into the languishing body of Mistress Parris, as she
nurtures little Betsey’s desire for attention, as she chooses to
bear the child of her maroon lover, Christopher, and as she
heals the maroon women, her potential rivals.
Tituba herself is reborn three times in the text. First, at her
own trial, she manages to be faithful to her personal code of
ethics. From a kind of death in which she has been flooded by
doubts about her ability to stand firm, she rises up and main
tains her personal integrity by refusing to give in to temptations
to do evil and accuse innocent people. Second, she comes alive
again when she establishes a loving, compassionate relation
ship with Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, after he takes her into
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disturbing. That very feature extends an invitation to explore
one’s own limitations. I myself was embarrassed to realize that
I had missed the element of parody on first reading because I
was so eager to celebrate Tituba’s heroism and her Caribbean
ness. Wanting to honor the novel for its “ethnicity,” I ended up
missing part of the point, as Maryse herself helped me discover.
Furthermore, I was shocked to learn through our May 1991
interview that I was attributing Tituba’s generosity of spirit to
the fact that she was Caribbean rather than to her stature as a
human being! I do not especially like to see my own prejudices
in operation, but that is the principal way we learn that they
exist. My purpose in bringing them to the attention of future
readers in this essay is to suggest that others may experience
similar revelations through their experience of this fictional
version of history. Finally, in the matter of prejudices, it is per
tinent to remind ourselves here that I, Tituba, Black Witch of
Salem is partially the result of Condé’s having conquered the
prejudice against her Caribbean background instilled in her by
her own parents when she was a child. Would that all such
victories were so fruitful!
About the Author
Maryse Condd is the author of Segu (a bestseller in
France), The Children of Segu, and several other novels.
A native of Guadeloupe, sne lived for many years in
Paris, where she taught West Indian literature at the
Sorbonne. She is the recipient of the prestigious French
award Le Grand Prix Litteraire de la Femme, was a
Guggenheim Fellow in 1987-88, and in 1993 was the
first woman to be honored as a Puterbaugh Fellow by
the University of Oklahoma. Ms. Cond£ lectures
widely in the United States and currently teaches at the
University of Virginia. She divides her time between
the United States and Guadeloupe.
r
L J
MANY CULTURES ONE WORLD I
ng...Maryse Condé’s imaginative
ion of historical records forms a
: of contemporary American society
ingrained racism and sexism."
—The Boston Sunday Globe
e warm shores of seventeenth-century Barbados to the
jalities of the slave trade, and the cold customs of
cal New England, Tituba, the only black victim of the
vitch trials, recalls a life of extraordinary experiences
stical powers.
ge of seven, Tituba watched as her mother was hanged
ig to wound a plantation owner who tried to rape her.
vas raised from then on by Mama Yaya, a gifted woman
ired with her the secrets of healing and magic. But it
iba’s blind, all-consuming love of the slave John Indian
her from safety into slavery, and the bitter, vengeful
practiced by the good citizens of Salem,
lusetts. Though protected by the spirits, Tituba could
ape to the lies and accusations of that hysterical time,
►ry and fantasy merge, Maryse Conde, acclaimed author
(Life and Segu, creates the richly imagined life of a
ing woman in this lush novel.
is able to blend the fictional with the factual and
sland scenes with remarkable lushness and
tment....Just as Tituba’s voice should never have been
d, Conde is too important a discovery for American
:es to ignore."
—Chicago Tribune
e Conde is a sorcerer of prose, and in this richly
id novel, our past and present meet like the earth
' of the horizon."
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Harvard University