An enslaved woman in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris at Salem Village, and the first person to confess in the crisis of 1692. She was examined at the beginning of March, and her long, detailed confession, which named others, gave the magistrates the shape of the conspiracy they went on to look for. She survived. She was held in gaol for more than a year and was released in 1693 when her fees were paid by someone other than Parris, after which she disappears from the record entirely. Almost everything written about her since has been supplied by other people.
Facts
Identity
GenderSourced to the subject's own account Debunked
Place of OriginAfrican, or of mixed African descent, and a practitioner of Caribbean magic who taught it to the children of the house. 2 Elaine G. Breslaw's Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies (New York University Press, 1996) checked the popular image of Tituba as an African or part-African slave who introduced voodoo practices into the Salem household against the 1692 court papers themselves. Breslaw's method is direct archival examination of the contemporary trial and property records, which consistently describe Tituba as an Indian, almost certainly from a Native American population brought to Massachusetts via Barbados, with nothing in the contemporary record supporting an African identity or any specific occult practice she introduced. Breslaw argues the African-voodoo image is a literary invention of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that locates the origin of the Salem panic in an exotic foreign woman rather than in the Puritan theology and court procedures of the community that ultimately hanged twenty of its own members. Life
Lifespan or FloruitSourced to the subject's own accountDates unrecorded. She was alive and enslaved at Salem Village in 1692 and was released from gaol in 1693. 1 Open Questions
Place of OriginHer birthplace and how she came to Massachusetts are not established. 2 Nobody has settled this. The surviving papers record her legal status and her testimony and say nothing about her birth or her passage. Elaine Breslaw's study argues from the documentary trail for an Arawak taken from South America and brought to Massachusetts through Barbados, which is the most careful reconstruction available and remains circumstantial. See the linked study and the open question. Current StatusWhat became of Tituba after her release from gaol in 1693 is not known. She does not appear in any subsequent record that has been identified. 2 Not a case of scholars disagreeing. Nobody has an account of her later life, because she leaves the documentary record at the point where she stops being anyone's legal property in a way the colony needed to write down. Attestation
HistoricitySourced to the subject's own accountHistorically attested, in the surviving court papers of 1692 Origins
Defining MomentSourced to the subject's own accountShe was examined at the beginning of March 1692 and, unlike the two women accused beside her, confessed. The confession named others and gave the magistrates the shape of a conspiracy to look for. There is testimony that Parris beat her before she spoke. 1 Status
Current StatusSourced to the subject's own accountShe survived. Held in gaol for more than a year, she was released in 1693 when her fees were paid by someone other than Parris, and she does not appear in the record afterwards. 1 Legal StatusSourced to the subject's own accountEnslaved, in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris at Salem Village. She was accused by the household that owned her, and had no legal standing of any kind with which to refuse anything asked of her. 1 Learn More
A Woman Enslaved, Interrogated, and Written Over
Tituba was an enslaved woman in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris at Salem Village in 1692. She was the property of the man whose daughter and niece first showed the afflictions that began the crisis, and she was among the first three people accused. She was examined at the beginning of March, and unlike the two women accused beside her she confessed.
The confession is long and vivid. It describes a creature that appeared to her, a book to be signed, other women in the company. It is also, on any fair reading, the product of the situation she was in. She was a woman owned by the household that was accusing her, in a colony where an enslaved person had no protection against anything, and there is testimony that Parris beat her before she spoke. What she produced was an account built from the questions she was asked, delivered by someone with no safe way to say no.
It mattered enormously. A denial can be dismissed as a lie; a detailed confession that names others turns a local disturbance into a conspiracy with a shape, and gives the magistrates something to look for. The crisis that followed took nineteen lives on the gallows, one man pressed to death under stones for refusing to plead, and several more in gaol.
Tituba survived. She was held for more than a year and released in 1693 when her fees were paid by someone other than Parris. She then vanishes from the record.
What the Record Cannot Tell Us
Very little is known about Tituba, and a great deal has been written. The court papers call her an Indian. Nineteenth and twentieth century retellings made her African, or of mixed African and Indigenous descent, and gave her a role the records do not support: the exotic servant teaching Caribbean magic to the children of the house, from whom the whole affair supposedly spread. That picture is a literary invention. It appears in fiction, in popular history and in a good deal of school teaching, and it has done real work, because it locates the origin of Salem in a black woman's foreign practices rather than in a Puritan community's own theology and its own courts.
Her origin is a genuine open question rather than a settled one. Elaine Breslaw's study argues from the documentary trail that she was an Arawak taken from South America and brought to Massachusetts through Barbados. Others read the same records differently. The honest position is that the surviving papers describe her legal status and her testimony and say almost nothing else about her.
What can be said with confidence is what was done to her. She was owned. She was accused by the household that owned her. She was questioned until she produced what was wanted, and what she produced was used to build a prosecution that killed twenty people, none of whom she had any reason to harm. She was then kept in gaol for over a year and sold on to pay her fees.
She is not a footnote to Salem. She is one of the first people it was done to.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Related To
Enslaved in the household where the crisis began, and the first person to confess. Her confession named others and gave the magistrates a conspiracy to look for.
Studied By
The question of where she was born and how she reached Massachusetts is unresolved.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
Where was Tituba born, how did she reach Massachusetts, and what became of her after her release in 1693?
The 1692 court papers record her enslaved status and her testimony and nothing about her birth, her passage or her later life. Elaine Breslaw's reconstruction of an Arawak origin by way of Barbados works from indirect records and is explicitly circumstantial; other readings of the same material remain open, and the later life is a blank rather than a dispute.
What would resolve this Documentary evidence tying her to a named vessel, cargo manifest, inventory, parish register or estate record, in Barbados, Massachusetts or elsewhere. A subsequent record of her under any name after 1693 would answer the second half.
Colonial American and Caribbean archival history; the history of slavery and of Atlantic shipping recordsElaine G. Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies
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