Every March, we celebrate women who shaped history, but we rarely talk about the ones whose history was stolen. As we mark the anniversary of the first Salem Witch Trial on March 1, 1692, we are forced to confront the legacy of the enslaved woman coerced into becoming the face of a hysteria she did not create.
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Tituba— an enslaved woman— was the first individual accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, History.com wrote. But what do we really know about the woman whose testimony sparked one of the most dark and chaotic periods in American history?
We know Tituba was a woman of color. Varying accounts described her as Native Southern American or half African, half Native. She had been enslaved since she was captured during childhood, and was purchased by Reverend Samuel Parris in Barbados. He brought her to Massachusetts in 1680 when she was a teenager.
Years later, Parris’ daughter and niece began to act strange; barking like dogs, babbling and crying hysterically after dropped egg whites in water was used to determine who they’d marry and their futures. Tituba had fed the girls a “witch cake” from rye meal and urine to help cure their “fits,” according to historians. However, her actions did the opposite.
When Reverend Parris discovered that Tituba had prepared the concoction, he beat her to extract a confession that witchcraft was the reason behind the girls’ increasingly bizarre behavior.
Tituba admitted she was a servant of the devil, under duress. The “Black Witch of Salem” confessed a dog told her to harm children, how she and the girls rode on sticks and that two rats—one red, one black— obeyed her command.
“Tituba was an easy target in that she would have been considered the lowest of the low in a very hierarchical society,” Bridget M. Marshall, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts said, according to National Geographic. “This was a society under a lot of stress that was looking for scapegoats to blame for various problems.”
Tituba’s confession sparked the Salem Witch Trials between February 1692 and May 1693, leading to her imprisonment because her owner refused to pay her jail fees. Over the course of approximately 16 months, at least 200 people were accused of witchcraft. They faced imprisonment in unsanitary jails and the constant threat of execution. 19 people were executed by hanging.
Then, Tituba recanted her confession.
After she told the magistrate that she had made up everything after Parris beat her, an anonymous person paid Tituba’s bail and she went free after 13 months in jail.
By the time she recanted, the trials had already spiraled beyond her testimony and her retraction received little attention from the authorities at the time, which is why it is often absent from the primary trial records. As quickly as she had been thrust onto the center stage of American history, she vanished.
Despite history trying to turn Tituba into a footnote, she remains the most important character in the story of Salem. Her missing records are not a void, but a loud, persistent accusation against a historical canon that only values Black women when they are broken…never when they are free.
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