LISTEN · EPISODE 9
Tituba: "The Devil Came to Me"
Content note: this post discusses slavery, racism, and a coerced confession.
On March 1, 1692, two magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, asked an enslaved woman named Tituba, "Why do you hurt these poor children?" According to the written record, her first answer was, "I have done nothing." By the end of the day, she had confessed to serving the Devil, and the Salem witch trials were underway.
Tituba is one of the most famous names in the story of Salem, and one of the people we know least about. This episode of Witches, Bitches, and Sluts separates what the records say from what later writers invented.
What the records call her
The court papers call her "Tituba Indian" or an "Indian woman," enslaved in the household of Samuel Parris, the village minister. That's a colonial label, not a birthplace. Parris had lived in Barbados, and one historian found a rare, similar name on a Barbados plantation list, but nothing proves it's the same person. The honest answer is that we don't know where she was born or who her people were.
The questions had the answers built in
The magistrates didn't ask whether she had hurt the children. They asked why. They didn't ask whether the Devil was involved. They asked what her relationship with him was. And the afflicted girls were in the room. When Tituba denied the charges, they screamed. When she confessed, they went quiet. Her confession, full of a Devil, a book with nine marks, and animal spirits, turned three accusations into a conspiracy, and the panic spread from there.
Survival wasn't freedom
Tituba lived. Sarah Good, who denied everything, was hanged. Sarah Osborne died in jail. But Tituba spent about thirteen months in jail, and in 1693 a grand jury refused to send her to trial. She was still enslaved, and she still owed the jail. Someone paid her fees and took her, and she vanishes from the record. Years later, a Boston merchant reported her own explanation: her master "did beat her and otherways abuse her, to make her confess."
How she became a "voodoo" witch
No record shows Tituba leading girls in a forest ritual, drinking blood, or practicing voodoo. The one piece of folk magic in the records, a "witch cake," was an English recipe, and a Puritan neighbor's idea. The forest scene came later, built up by nineteenth-century writers, a Victorian illustration, and finally Arthur Miller's The Crucible in 1953. Each retelling made her more foreign, more magical, and more to blame. And each one let the magistrates, the court, and Puritan New England off the hook.
What we actually know
She was enslaved. She denied it. She was pressured until she confessed. She survived, and was sold. Everything else, from her face to her "magic," is somebody else's story.
Sources behind the episode
Read or download the Episode 9 source list (PDF).