Six Women of Salem (11 page)

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T
his incident may be the first sighting of
Tituba
, the slave woman who was later a catalyst of the Salem witch trials—or perhaps not. The Salem woman called Tituba
may
have been one of the children kidnapped from the Amacura River, a tributary of the Oronoco in the Viceroyalty of Granada (now in Venezuela) by Captain Peter Wroth of the
Savoy
on August 2, 1674. His excuse was that, with England at war with Holland, the women were probably Arawak allies of the Dutch—unlike the large groups of men they had traded with downstream, whom they assumed were Carib allies of the British (as well as better able to resist capture).

Wroth took the captives as slaves to Barbados.

Although he evidently had only ten captives on board, and the distance was less than that of the transatlantic routes that slavers took from Africa, the journey had to have been harrowing and humiliating. African captive Olaudah Equiano, 150 years later, having gained both his freedom and a mastery of the English language in an era when many people, white or black, were illiterate, published an indictment of the slave trade. In it he described the captives’ fear as they were packed below decks, unable to see where they were being taken and hardly able to breathe due to the “intolerably loathsome” stench of that hot, airless, confined space filled with “the shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying.” The only nod to sanitation were filthy “necessary tubs” used as latrines, awkward items into which small children often fell as they tried to balance on the rims. Some of the captives, allowed on deck for occasional exercise, managed to leap overboard in midocean. If they were lucky, they drowned. If they were rescued, they were “flogged . . . unmercifully” and obliged to live. Traumatic scenes like these introduced the captive girl to European civilization.

Finally the
Savoy
came within sight of Barbados and put in at Bridgetown, where merchants and planters came aboard to examine the cargo. In Equiano’s description of his own arrival from Africa, the sight of strange buildings ashore and of the great ships in the harbor were alien enough, but the swarm of callous white men who prodded the captives like livestock and had them jump about made the captives fear that these strangers meant to eat them. Their terrified moaning and crying through the following night below deck was such that the whites ferried some old, long-enslaved Africans aboard to calm the captives. “They told us we were not to be eaten, but to work.”

The Amacura captives would have then been herded into a slave merchant’s holding pen “like so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sex or age.” Over the next few days the merchant would signal with a drumbeat when sales began. Prospective buyers then rushed into the yard and examined the display of captives as they would examine cattle, causing even more alarm. “In this manner,” wrote Equiano, “without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again. . . . Surely this is a new refinement of cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress, and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery.”

Thus the girl was separated from her fellow Amacurans and, in a waking nightmare, torn from her own mother forever (if her mother still lived). Taken to one of the sugar plantations, the girl learned to obey strangers, to work out the meaning of the new language through which the orders came, and would never again hear anyone speak in her own tongue. She learned to wear strange clothes and live with a gang of other slave children. Even those whose parents were owned by the same operation were often cared for by one woman day and night, fed all together, and set to tasks considered light—such as hand weeding a pasture.

On poorly run plantations owners skimped on their slaves’ food and worked them “from earliest dawn to midnight, month to month without respite, or relaxation” at both high noon and on Sundays (as William Beckford observed in eighteenth-century Jamaica). These owners even expected mothers to forage for their children’s food. But these practices were not good for business, Beckford wrote, for overworked slaves would, in the long run, profit the owner as little as overworked livestock or exhausted land.

In the eighteenth century the recommended routine for a well-­regulated sugar plantation included proper food, shelter, and medical care for the slaves and no more than thirty-nine lashes for serious infractions. Slaves began the workday at 6 a.m., paused a half hour or so for breakfast between nine and ten o’clock, then continued until dinner at noon, when the whole island rested for an hour and a half. Rather than spend this time on the main meal of the day, many slaves used the respite to talk among each other “or loiter away the time in useless inactivity”—a luxury in a life of constant toil. The ringing of a bell or the wail of a conch shell signaled the time to return to the fields, where work continued until sunset but no later than 7 p.m. The workers had evening and night to themselves, with the women cooking a supper of peppery pottage.

When the cane was “in crop” the slaves worked longer to harvest the stalks. Then men boiled the sap down and down in a series of smaller and smaller copper boilers until bright crystals of sugar formed around a sticky core of molasses. Shoveled into great barrels, both products were valuable commodities.

Some women were purchased for domestic rather than fieldwork, as the owners considered the lighter tasks around the house to be an honor of sort for the slave. This work, however, required a more “constant attendance.” As a late eighteenth-century observer noticed, the women preferred fieldwork as “the more independent.” If they lived in the slave-quarter huts, they at least had fellow captives around them and time to themselves. It was taken for granted that they would also produce children, one way or another, providing an increase of fieldworkers that only added to their owners’ capital.

As Indian slaves were preferred for house work in late seventeenth-century Barbados, the girl, as she grew, may have been trained for these tasks. (The Salem Tituba knew these duties and later referred to “her Mistress in her own Country” as one who taught her countermagic— a lesson she would unlikely have received if she worked only in the fields.) For this she learned to wear the full set of European clothing: a shift, a long petticoat, a bodice, and a cap for modesty.

Two years after the
Savoy’
s raid, in 1676, a slave child called Tattuba was inventoried among the contents of a Barbadian sugar plantation owned by Samuel Thompson.
If
the girl from the Amacura were the same child, then
perhaps
she was the same young woman the merchant Samuel Parris purchased before he left the island in 1680 for New England, and thereby
may
have been the same Tituba involved in the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Or perhaps not.

For the reconstructed lives of slaves, the destitute, and social pariahs, words like “if,” “perhaps,” and “maybe” are needed when patching together the shreds of surviving fact. Slaves were counted first of all as property along with the tools and raw materials of whatever industry they were bound to rather than individuals with a lineage and identification in their own right.

What
can
be said for certain is that Captain Peter Wroth of the
Savoy
kidnapped eight women and two children from the Amacura River in the manner described above and took them as slaves to Barbados in one of the last such slaving raids into that region—an incident that Professor Elaine G. Breslaw uncovered as well as two lists of over sixty slaves belonging to the Thompson family’s three ­hundred–acre sugar plantation in St. Thomas Parish, Barbados. At the end of the columns of “Boys & Girls” on each list, and apparently referring to an Indian slave, is the unusual name Tattuba.

Also certain is the fact that Samuel Parris was then a merchant, operating out of Bridgetown in Barbados from 1673 to 1680. Born in England around 1653, he moved to the island with his father, Thomas Parris, a merchant and landowner, and then attended Harvard in Massachusetts.

His father’s death in 1673 required Samuel to cut short his time at college and return to Barbados to manage his inheritance: 20 acres in St. Peter’s parish tied up in an eighty-two-year lease; 170 acres in St. James parish, which also included three servants, seventy slaves, cattle, sheep, and coppers to boil the sugar; a storehouse at Reid Bay; and land in Bridgetown. However, Parris then faced many challenges: competition from growers in Jamaica and the Leeward Islands depressed the price of sugar; poor farming practices exhausted and eroded the island soils; a near slave revolt was foiled in June of 1675, followed by a deadly and destructive hurricane in August. According to a census taken in October 1679, Parris was single, with a household consisting of an apprentice (who is not mentioned again) and one unspecified slave. In 1680 Parris sold most of his land and, as smallpox broke out on Barbados, relocated north to Massachusetts. By 1688, having married in Boston and changed his calling from merchant to minister, Samuel moved to Salem Village.

Amid all the uncertain maybes are the more uncertain questions of Tituba’s name and origin. Spelling in the seventeenth century was still not standardized, so it depended on the creativity of the writers and how they heard a word. “Tituba” is the way that Samuel Parris, who most controlled her life, spelled her name. (Of course, he, like others, also used the alternate spelling of Putman for Putnam.) Boston jailer John Arnold used the spelling “Tituba” in his bills; Robert Calef and John Hale did likewise in their later narratives, as did Magistrate John Hathorne in his notes of court proceedings, though not consistently. Other variants include Tetaby, Titibe, Tittabe, Tittube, Tittapa, Titiba, Tittuba, and Titaba.

As Breslaw points out,
Titubear
is the Spanish for stagger or stammer, though Parris recorded no physical or speech impediment affecting his slave.
Titubo
and
titubabio
, furthermore, are the Latin for stagger and staggering in one’s gait or other action. (Cotton Mather, who stammered in his youth and mastered the affliction through dogged determination and song, wrote about the “titubation” of stammers.) With his classical education, Parris
might
have bestowed a Latin name, but this seems unlikely.

More intriguing is Breslaw’s suggestion that the name refers to the woman’s people. The Tetebetana were an Arawak people living on the Amacura River in the area of Captain Wroth’s raid. Their name apparently refers to their totem animal, a bird of the nightjar family, nocturnal birds like New England whip-poor-wills. (Another fiercer tribe, the Titetibe or Tivitivas, as different English explorers approximated the name, lived near the mouth of the Oronoco River.) In the Arawak language
Tetebetado
indicated a female, so Tituba possibly meant a Tetebetana girl or a woman of the Tetebetana.

Alternatively, Professor Peter Charles Hoffer is certain that the name is African, Yoruban specifically, and is nearly certain that Tituba was an African from Ghana or the child of a captive from Ghana. Breslaw notes that the “ba” ending
is
African but suggests that the African culture of the majority of Barbados’s slaves influenced how her name was pronunced.

Others have speculated that Tituba was Carib or half Carib and half African, or they point out that her ancestry could have been any combination of Amerindian, African, and Caucasian—the three peoples populating the seventeenth-century Caribbean.

Some of the native Algonquians of New England
had
been enslaved locally after the wars between the indigenous tribes and the English settlers—mostly women and children, with the men shipped to slaving ports elsewhere. By century’s end, apparently, few of the slaves in Massachusetts were Algonquian. The identities of Samuel Parris’s John and Tituba Indian—or, for that matter, Mrs. Hollingworth’s Indian servant or George Carr’s Indian named James—is still open to question . . . many questions, in fact.

What
is
certain is that the white, largely English population in ­seventeenth-century Massachusetts
always
referred to Tituba as an Indian. Documents call her “an Indian Woman,” “an Indian Woman servant,” “an Indian Woman, belonging unto Mr. Samuel Parris of Salem Village,” “the Indian,” and “Tituba Indian.” Some suggest that “Indian” meant West Indian—more of a geographic reference—and this supports Breslaw’s interpretation. Hoffer, however, speculates that as Tituba was married to fellow slave John Indian, she was therefore known by her husband’s name. Other non-Caucasian witch suspects like Candy and Mary Black, however, are called “Negro,” and Candy was definitely from Barbados in the West Indies.

So
was
Tituba actually from Barbados? Although this is quite possible, facts about Tituba’s life outside the witch trials are scant. Tituba herself referred to “her Mistress in her own Country” according to Reverend John Hale, who did not, unfortunately, record just what country that was. If it
were
Barbados, the mistress may well have been the widow Elizabeth Pearhouse, daughter of John Reid, who first married Edward Thompson, then Ralph Lane, and finally William Pearhouse. Mistress Pearhouse may have lived in Bridgetown rather than on the sugar plantation in the center of the island that she owned jointly with her son Edward Thompson. In addition, the family had business dealings with Samuel Parris, who worked from Bridgetown.

But
did
Parris buy Tituba in Barbados and then bring her to Massachusetts? After all, he may have purchased his slaves in New England. Cotton Mather, living in Boston, had, as he wrote, “bought a Spanish Indian, and bestowed him for a servant, on my Father” in 1681. (Spanish Indian meant an Indian from the Caribbean, generally.)

What is certain is that Tituba was an enslaved woman of color owned in 1692 by Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village. Earlier in her life she had lived elsewhere, owned by someone else.