Especially close to 9-year-old Betty Parris, she had worked and prayed alongside the family for years, for at least a decade in Boston and Salem. Although she was officially charged with having practiced witchcraft on four Salem girls between January and March, we do not know precisely why Tituba was accused. She belonged to Samuel Parris, the minister in whose household the witchcraft erupted his daughter and niece were the first to convulse. Enigmatic to begin, she has grown more elusive over the years. How did the epidemic gather such speed, and how did it come to involve a satanic plot, a Massachusetts first? The answers to both questions lie in part with the unlikeliest of suspects, the Indian slave at the heart of the Salem mystery. As often as we have revisited Salem-on the page, on the stage and on the screen-we have failed to unpack a crucial mystery at the center of the crisis. We dust it off whenever we overreach ideologically or prosecute overhastily, when prejudice rears its head or decency slips down the drain, when absolutism threatens to envelop us. America’s tiny reign of terror burned itself out by late September, though it would endure allegorically for centuries. It threatened to topple the church and subvert the country.īy the fall, somewhere between 144 and 185 witches and wizards had been named. By early spring it was established not only that witches flew freely about Massachusetts, but that a diabolical conspiracy was afoot. Others followed suit, because they suffered the effects of witchcraft, or because they had observed it, often decades in the past. In their distress the girls cried out against those they believed enchanted them they could see their tormentors perfectly. Their symptoms spread, initially within the community, ultimately well beyond its borders. After some hesitation, after much discussion, they were declared to be bewitched. They alternately interrupted sermons and fell mute, “their throats choked, their limbs wracked,” an observer noted. They contorted violently they complained of bites and pinches. Early in 1692, several young girls began to writhe and roar.
Few corners of American history have been as exhaustively or insistently explored as the nine months during which the Massachusetts Bay Colony grappled with our deadliest witchcraft epidemic.
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