Tituba of Salem Village

These chapters juxtapose genuine elements of the supernatural that cannot be easily explained against events that the cheerless Puritans, in their superstition and paranoia, make into serious magic and, in turn, see as a threat to their community.

We begin with the magic. Two events occur here that defy logical, rational explanation: the door to the Reverend’s study “slowly, slowly” (71) opens of its own volition “as if an invisible hand were pushing it” (71); and later, Tituba has a vision as she stares into the surface of the water in the animals’ trough. Up until that door opens by itself, the novel is a straightforward, carefully researched history.

When Tituba was first published in 1964, it was marketed as a young adult biography; after all, the name Tituba appears in the meticulous records kept by the Puritan government during the witch trials that indicated her West Indian roots, her servitude in the Parris household, her confession to being a witch, and her incarceration and eventual release. However, the book edges the traditional limits of biography by introducing these supernatural elements that are not part of any historic record.

Over the years, Tituba was re-labeled as an historical novel; however, the novel is not strictly historical. It introduces conversations for which there are no public records, details scenes with extravagant care, and even shares Tituba’s thoughts. Those are acceptable liberties that novelists take when using historical characters.

But still, there were these strange moments of magic. After the 1987 publication of Beloved, by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, a novel in which a grieving mother, a former slave, meets what appears to be the ghost of her dead daughter, Petry’s novel was reclassified again as a novel grounded in history that nevertheless takes wide liberties with reality itself and reimagines history by introducing elements that cannot be explained away, elements that are recounted without any authorial interference and no attempt to explain them. These events are recorded in the same voiceover that accounts of, say, milking a cow or planting a garden are relayed. Thus, even as Tituba suffers from a community uneasy with magic, the novel introduces the powerful persuasion of magic, reflecting the legacy of Black culture that reaches into both African and West Indian identities.

These chapters then juxtapose the dangers of magic as the white Puritans perceive them. If the visions of Tituba are genuinely supernatural, that is, they violate the Western idea that everything can be understood, then what the Salem community views as magic reflects their ignorance, superstition, and paranoia. The girls are certain that when Puss meows, the cat is talking with Tituba; Betsey’s odd fits, most likely the result of undiagnosed epilepsy, are taken to be trances; when Tituba cautions the ever-forgetful Mercy Lewis to not forget her coat, it does not indicate Tituba’s ability to see the future as much as it shows how she understands the girl’s flighty character; the unkempt homeless mother and her child are regarded as witches rather than as an economic problem facing the struggling community. The Puritans emerge as joyless and judgmental, their cold thinking uncomplicated by logic or compassion.

In this, Reverend Parris emerges as a force of ignorance, pettiness, and cruelty. First, there is his unreasonable reaction to the happy tavern song that John sings. The song celebrates a life of ease without worries or serious commitment to work. John’s voice is energetic, and there is authentic energy in the otherwise moribund parsonage for the first time. But “the rhythmic sound of John’s foot hitting the floor disturbed the master” (85), and Reverend Parris emerges from his study and shuts down the boisterous singing as “evil” (86). Then the children, as they listen to Tituba’s wonderful stories about life in Barbados, cannot conceive of such an exotic world that is perpetually summer, with monkeys swinging through lush jungles and beaches that line radiantly blue water. That world is so foreign to the forbidding coastal world of Massachusetts that they quickly whisper that Tituba is conjuring that world, magic tinged, necessarily, by the Devil, as a way to distract them from their dedication to their God and their work.

Later, despite the parsonage being overrun by field mice and rats, Reverend Parris orders Tituba to get rid of the cat because cats are demonic, and the congregation might think he is harboring evil spirits. Only Tituba’s wisdom allows Puss to remain. In both cases, the Puritans reveal their disposition to joylessness and their willingness to recklessly translate events into evidence of demonic presence.

The novel sets up what will become the tragedy of Salem, a town too eager to see the Devil while all the time ignorant of those supernatural events that suggest the world always exceeds the ability to explain it.