43 pages • 1-hour read
Tituba of Salem Village
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Chapters 18-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary
The trial begins. The meetinghouse is crowded. The charges are read that “many persons in several families of this little village have been vexed and tortured in body and soul by witchcraft” (222). Even as the girls shriek, each woman denies trafficking in witchcraft or hurting the girls. The girls go into a frenzy of howls and claim they are being choked and even bark like dogs. When one of the girls mentions the Devil as a tall, black man, suddenly John, sitting in the back, begins to howl and runs about the meetinghouse, running into people and benches. The crowd clamors that he is bewitched.
The presiding judge calls Tituba to testify. As she testifies to her innocence, the girls begin to shriek again. Reverend Parris instructs her to touch the howling Abigail, and the girl quiets down when she does: “It was like magic” (228). Then Reverend Parris offers as evidence the confession he beat out of Tituba. She denies the document, her voice “small and weak” (229). The signed testimony of Abigail is read, testifying that Tituba had afflicted her with headaches and had pinched her, which Tituba admits. She had boxed the girl’s ears once and had pinched her arm but only to control the girl’s unruly behavior. Tituba is asked about her familiar, the cat—she says Puss is a stray cat she feeds and who follows her. Do you talk to the cat? Yes, she answers, “just as any person would talk to an animal, horse or a cow” (232). As she testifies, Mercy erupts in a howling fit. Again, Tituba is told to touch the girl, and again the girl calms down.
Chapter 19 Summary
The three accused women spend the night in a makeshift jail cell near the meeting house. The next morning, they are returned to the courtroom, and again it is packed.
Reverend Parris reminds the three women that witches who confess their guilt would be allowed to live, but witches who refuse to admit their guilt would be summarily hanged. The only way to live would be to admit to practicing witchcraft, which would mean lying. Witnesses testify that the women were seen in the monstrous shape of a ravenous wolf, were responsible for killing neighbors’ animals or ruining their crops, and had flown over the woods on broomsticks. A farmer testifies that just the night before, when the women were locked up, he had seen a strange beast in the roadway. When he approached it, it vanished and was replaced by three shadowy women who vanished. The crowd murmurs angrily to hang the women. The judge recalls Tituba and asks her specifically about her medicinal tea. And he asks her about how she transported herself some nights back to Barbados, although she explains she was just dreaming.
The questioning lasts four days. The judge finds it most compelling that Tituba signed a confession and refuses to allow Tituba to defend herself. Suddenly a man rises to address the court—it is Samuel Conklin, the weaver who had helped Tituba learn how to spin back in Boston years ago. He dismisses the court: “I have listened to the evidence against her. It has as much value as a bucket of broken shive” (246). The judge ignores Conklin’s criticism. Citing Tituba’s signed confession and the evidence of the girls’ possession, the judge remands the three women to jail in Boston.
Conditions in the Boston jail are primitive, smelly, cold, and dirty. Two days after they arrive, they are chained to the wall to prevent them from flying back to Salem. Tituba is not chained—her confession marks her as a reformed witch. As the weeks pass into summer, the jail steadily fills with others, more than 100 men and women accused of witchcraft. In the fall, 19 of those accused are hanged, including Sarah Good.
By May, however, the hysteria comes to the attention of the Royal Governor, who sees no foundation in law to any of the charges and orders that all those still imprisoned on charges of witchcraft be released as soon as they settle the standard room and board fee for being housed in the king’s jail. Alone of those jailed, Tituba does not have the money, and she stays an extra few days before Samuel Conklin arranges to pay her bill. He tells her he has bought her and John and wants her to return to weaving for him; “such abundant kindness” brings tears to Tituba’s eyes. She is now finally ready to live a “full and useful life” (254) in Boston.
Chapters 18-19 Analysis
These two closing chapters bring the tragedy of the Salem witch hysteria to a dramatic close. Three ideas are critical to the novel’s happy ending: 1) the cruel logic of the Puritans’ accusations revealed in the trial’s presentation of evidence; 2) the emergence of the Royal Governor as the novel’s unexpected voice of reason; and 3) the reemergence of Samuel Conklin as Tituba’s guardian.
“Say yes, you’re a witch and you’ll live. Deny you’re a witch and you’ll die” (222), so says an angry voice that rises from the mob gathered in the meeting house, a mob all too ready to hang a witch. For the Puritans, the logic is airtight. If the women confess to trafficking with the Devil, that confession evidences their redemption. If the women refuse to acknowledge their complicity with the dark forces, then their damnation is evidence that they must be destroyed for the community good.
By the standards of contemporary jurisprudence, of course, the logic is absurd. The choice given to Tituba is unwinnable. She is too moral, too righteous to lie. Her confession is the result of a physical beating. She does not have it in her to lie, particularly that she would ever harm the girls. Instead of valuing that honesty, Tituba is condemned and jailed. Ironically, the only thing that saves her from hanging is the bogus confession. It is a wonderland courtroom where being honest condemns a person, and lying is rewarded, encouraged, and even made attractive. Even as her co-defendants bristle with outrage, Tituba understands the absurdity of their position and remains calm. Indeed, her advice to her husband saves him. By pretending to be possessed, John is exonerated. Lies are rewarded, and truth is punished.
Generations of American schoolchildren are taught that the cause of the righteous anger of the American Revolution against Britain was the discontent among the colonists directed against the government installed by the King. The Royal Governor is an easy villain, a representative of a tyrant and an extension of the British intention to exploit the colonists in the name of a King whose myopic vision and cruel laws more than justified the rebellion. How strange it is then to find the Royal Governor, the much-maligned and much-hated William Phips, emerge in these closing chapters as the voice of reason who stops the hysteria by royal fiat and releases those absurdly (and illegally, according to the Governor) accused of consorting with the Devil. Without the intervention of the hated British, these overheated American colonists would have done far more damage to the psychological well-being of the colony. It is the Governor who exposes the behavior of the Puritans as entirely without foundation in law. The Puritans never regret their actions, never apologize, never admit the absurdity of their pursuit of witches, and never learn the danger of their zealotry.
But if the novel offers an unsuspected hero, it is not Governor Phips but rather the humble weaver Samuel Conklin. His brave testimony occurs as Tituba’s trial draws to its predetermined guilty verdict. Conklin stands up to the judges and dismisses their entire case against Tituba even as the testimony itself grows more and more bizarre, culminating in the testimony that the three women were seen in the shape of a terrifying beast on the road outside Salem just hours before the trial began. Conklin provides the most reasonable testimony: he knows Tituba and knows she is no witch. He dismisses the evidence as worthless as a “bucket of broken shive” (246). Because a shive—a cork designed to keep casks of wine secure and intact—once broken not only contaminates the wine but ruins any chances of revenue, the image suggests that Conklin wisely sees that the Puritans, in their hysteria, are not only destroying those accused but are destroying their community as well.
Appropriately, author Ann Petry makes Samuel Conklin instrumental in the novel’s happy ending. No historic records indicate what actually happened to the real Tituba after her release from the Boston jail. Petry gives the novel its happy ending—Conklin negotiates Tituba out of the Boston jailhouse, arranges to purchase both Tituba and her husband, and gives them the chance of a happy and useful life in his house. That entirely invented ending gifts the novel and its much-maligned and long-suffering moral heroine long-overdue respect and admiration.
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