Uncover the many mysteries of Tidoba, the star witness in the Salem witch trials

Few corners of American history have been explored as thoroughly or persistently as the Massachusetts Bay Colony's nine-month battle against our deadliest witchcraft epidemic. In early 1692, several young girls began to squirm and growl. They squirmed violently and complained of being bitten and pinched. Sometimes they interrupted the sermons, sometimes they were left speechless, "throats choked, limbs twitching," one observer said. After some hesitation and much discussion, they were declared to be bewitched. Related content is

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Their symptoms spread, initially within the community and eventually far beyond its borders. In their agony, the girls cried out against those they believed to be bewitched; they could clearly see their tormentors. Others follow suit because they have been affected by witchcraft or because they have observed witchcraft, often decades ago. By early spring, not only are wizards flying freely across Massachusetts, but a sinister plot is brewing. It threatens to overthrow the church and subvert the state.

By the fall, approximately 144 to 185 witches and wizards had been named. 19 men and women were hanged. America's little reign of terror was burned to the ground in late September, though it would last, allegorically, for centuries. Whenever we overemphasize or overachieve in our thinking, when prejudice rears its ugly head, or when despotism threatens to surround us, when decency slips down the drain, we erase it. As we relive Salem on the page, on the stage, and on the screen, we fail to uncover a key mystery at the center of the crisis. How did the plague spread so quickly, and how was it connected to a satanic conspiracy, starting with Massachusetts? The answers to both questions lie partly in the unlikeliest of suspects, the Indian slaves at the heart of the Salem Mysteries. In the beginning, she was mysterious and became increasingly elusive over the years.

We only know her as Tituba. She belonged to Samuel Parris, whose family had an outbreak of witchcraft; his daughter and niece were the first to suffer convulsions. Although she was formally accused of practicing witchcraft on four Salem girls between January and March, it is unclear exactly why Tituba was accused. She was especially close to 9-year-old Betty Parris, whom she worked and prayed for in Boston and Salem for at least 10 years. She ate with the girls and she probably slept next to them at night. Tituba may have sailed from Barbados with Paris in 1680, when he was a bachelor and not yet a priest. Her origins are unclear, although she was most likely a South American Indian.

She could not have anticipated the charges. New England witches have traditionally been fringes: outliers and deviants, vicious scolds and petulant stompers. They are not people of color. Tituba does not appear to have been involved in early attempts to identify village wizards, a superstitious experiment conducted in a parsonage in the absence of adult parrots. This angered the minister. She had never appeared in court before. At least some villagers believed she was the wife of a second Parris slave, an Indian named John. English is obviously not her first language. (To "Why did you hurt these children?" Tidoba replied, "I didn't hurt them at all.")

She was probably not a grown-up woman; she wanted Judge Salem to believe that the other two The suspect armed her with a powerful weapon and sent her traveling at high speed through the air while all held tightly together on a pole. She was the first person in Salem to mention the flight, which is now just 12. You can subscribe to Smithsonian Magazine for US$

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Tituba came to the authorities. Responding to accusations of witchcraft in Salem Village on March 1, 1692. The first two suspects denied knowing anything about witchcraft. As Tituba met her interrogators on Tuesday morning, In front of a crowded, tense conference room, it's the one she's been praying for for the past three years.

Before she spoke, the local *** seemed to understand that she had a confession to make. No other suspect would attract such attention; multiple reporters sat ready to take note of Tituba's words. The decision to question her one last time was supposedly made by a hard-line 51-year-old Salem City Judge, John Hathorne. She began with a denial, which court reporters showed little interest in. Hathorne asked the first suspects who they had hired to harm the girls. The question was posed to Titoba in another way. "The devil came to me," she revealed, "and asked me to serve him." As a slave, she could not make defiant noises so easily. What is indisputable is that she admitted that it was much easier for her to serve a powerful man than for a white woman who was a fellow prisoner. While in captivity, it was jeered that the words of a smooth-talking slave should not carry any weight. She said it fluently and the rest was so wrong.

Who was it, asked Harton, who tormented those poor girls? "The devil, as far as I know," Titoba replied before describing him, coming to a quiet room. She introduces a whole, malevolent cast with their animal killers and various superpowers. She is a Satanic Scheherazade, very skillful and persuasive. Just the day before, a tall, white-haired man wearing a dark serge coat had appeared. He and his accomplices set out from Boston. He ordered Titoba to harm the children. If she didn't, he would kill her. Did that man appear to her in any other disguise? Hathorne asked. Here Tituba makes it clear that she must be the corn-mashing, pea-husking Parisian kitchen of her life. She submitted a graphic and horrific report. More than anyone, she was instrumental in promoting America's notorious witch hunt, providing its imagery and defining its shape.

She saw a pig, a large black dog, a red cat, a black cat, a yellow bird and a furry animal that walked on two legs. Another animal also appeared. She didn't know what it was called and couldn't describe it, but it had "wings and two legs and a head like a woman." A canary accompanied her guest. If she serves the man in black, she gets the bird. She implicated two of her accomplices: one had shown up only the night before, while the Parris family was praying. She tried to bargain with Titoba by blocking her ears so that Titoba could not hear the Bible. She later became deaf for a while. She explained that the creature she claimed was indescribable (which she described vividly) was another of Hahorne's suspects, disguised as

She proved herself to be an intelligent speaker, she Simple declarative statements are more convincing. An accent may help. She is remarkably clear-headed and convincing when describing translucent cats. She was a generous person and had the longest testimony of all in Salem. After answering no less than 39 questions on Tuesday, Tituba showed the same sense of responsibility in the following days. She admitted that she strangled victims in several homes. She answered every major question Hathorne had. If he mentioned a book, she could describe it. If he asked about the devil's disguise, she could provide it to them. Tituba's testimony about the devil (here is a record from 1692) captivated the court: "I must serve him six years, and he will give me many good things." (North Wind Picture Archives)

While she is hauntingly specific, she is also gloriously vague. She did get a glimpse of the evil book. But she couldn't tell whether it was big or small. The devil may have white hair; maybe he doesn't. Although there were many marks on the book, she could not decipher the names except those of the two women who had been arrested. Other penitents would not be so careful. Has she seen the book? "No, he wouldn't let me watch them, but he told me I should watch them next time," she assured Hathorne. Can she tell where at least nine people live? "Yes, some are in Boston and some are in this town, but he won't tell me who they are," she replied. She has signed a pact with the Demon in the Blood, but it is unclear how this will be accomplished. God was barely found in her testimony.

At a certain point, she found she simply couldn't go on. "I'm blind now. I can't see!" she wailed. The devil incapacitated her, furious that Titoba had generously revealed his secret. There was a reason why the girls who had wailed at the earlier hearings were keeping animals for an Indian slave.

Tidoba later caused adult men to freeze in their tracks for the same reason. Hours after she testified, they shuddered at the sight of "strange and unusual beasts," transparent creatures that mutated before their eyes and melted into the night. She herself would undergo some strange and unusual transformations with the help of some of America's most famous historians and literary figures.

Confessions of witchcraft are rare. Compelling, satisfying and the most colorful kaleidoscope of the century, Tituba changes everything. It reassures authorities that they are on the right track. The number of suspects doubled, underscoring the urgency of the investigation. It introduced a dangerous recruiter into the proceedings. It encourages authorities to arrest more suspects. The devil's conspiracy is underway! Tidoba saw what every villager had heard and everyone believed: a real pact with the devil. She had spoken to Satan, but had also refused some of his entreaties; she wished she could stop him altogether. She is respectful and cooperative. If she hadn't been so accommodating, everything would have been very different. The

section of her March account will soon disappear: The tall white-haired man in Boston will be replaced by a short dark-haired man in Maine. (If she had a culprit in mind, we never found out who it was.) Her nine co-conspirators soon turned into 23 or 24, then 40, then 100, and eventually a jaw-dropping 500. According to a source, Tituba would retract every word of her sensational confession in which she claimed her master bullied her. By then, however, arrests had spread across eastern Massachusetts, according to her March story. A pious woman refused to admit that witchcraft was at work: she was asked, how could she say so much, given Titoba's confession? The woman was hanged and until the end she, like every other of the 1,692 victims, denied any witchcraft. Everyone agrees on Tituba's top priority. “So,” one minister wrote in her hypnosis report, “was this thing driven?” Her revelations went viral; an oral culture that in many ways resembles online culture. Her testimony was followed by satanic books and wizarding meetings, flights and acquaintances. Others among the defendants adopted her image, some servilely. It's easier to borrow than to make up a good story; one confessor changed her story to be closer to Tidoba's, and then there wasn't much knowledge, Especially on the issue of Titoba’s identity. Described as Indian no less than 15 times in court documents, she continued to alter her image. As scholars have noted, Tituba, a victim of the telephone game for more than a century, played the role of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (who appears to have stolen her from Macbeth), With the help of historians George Bancroft and William Carlos Williams, the story goes from Indian to half-Indian to half-black to black again. more than a century. When Arthur Miller wrote "The Crucible" in 1952, Tituba was a "black slave" practicing a different kind of dark art: To carry on her new inheritance, Miller provided a live frog, A kettle and a little chicken blood. He had Titus-Barbara singing her West Indian songs over a fire in the forest, with naked girls dancing around. Sounding like Mammy's distant cousin in Gone with the Wind, she says, "Mr. Reverend, I really believe someone is going to turn these children into witches." She was last seen in a moonlit prison, listening to Up a little crazy, begging the devil to take her back to Barbados. After her crucifixion, she would be better known for her witchcraft, for which there was not even a shred of evidence, than for her psychedelic confessions, which remain on paper.

Why reinvent racial identity? Arguably, prejudice plays a role: a black woman at the center of the story makes more sense, as Tituba sees it—a black man at the center of a sinister conspiracy. Her history was written by men, working at a time when African witchcraft was more exciting than outdated British witchcraft. Both were written after the Civil War, when slaves were considered black. Miller believed Tidoba had been actively engaged in devil worship; he read her confessions and 20th-century sources at face value. By replacing Justice Salem as the film's villain, Tituba absolves others of the blame, most importantly the Massachusetts elite.

In both her testimony and her afterlife, preconceptions subtly shape the story: Tidoba was led by Hathorne because she knew her scriptures well. Her details fit perfectly with reports about the wizard. And, her narrative never falters. "It was thought that had she pretended to confess, she would not have been able to remember her answers so accurately," one observer later explained. It is understood that liars need better memories.

Quite the opposite seems to be true: Liars avoid all inconsistencies. A truth teller rarely tells his story the same way twice. With the right techniques, you can pry out answers from anyone, although what you extract won't necessarily be factual answers. In the presence of an authority figure, a suggestible witness will reliably convey an implanted or absurd memory. Children in 1980s California child abuse case swear daycare workers slaughtered elephants in the longest criminal trial in US history. With each retelling, Tituba's details become richer and richer, like a forced confession. Whether she was coerced or willing to cooperate, she told her interrogators she knew what they wanted. One gets the sense that a servant is taking her cues, dutifully playing a pre-written role, telling his master exactly what he wants to hear as she would have heard it in the time of Shakespeare or Molière.

If ghost cats and devilish pacts sound quaint, fabricated hysteria is still very modern. We also have adrenalized overreactions that are more easily spread through mouse clicks. A seventeenth-century New Englander had reason for anxiety in many ways; he fought marauding Indians, invaded neighboring countries, and felt a deep spiritual insecurity. He felt surrounded physically, politically and morally. Once an idea or an identity seeps into the groundwater, it's difficult to flush away. Memories are indelible, and so are moral stains. We also deal with accusations that get out of hand and point in the wrong direction, as we did after the Boston Marathon bombings or the 2012 University of Virginia bombings. We prefer outlandish explanations to simple explanations; we are more likely to be fooled by a furry creature with wings and a female face than by a modest one. When computers fail, it seems more likely that they were hacked by a group of conspirators rather than all at once. A jet has disappeared: it's more likely it was hidden away by a Middle Eastern country than it is likely to be sitting in pieces on the ocean floor. We like to lose ourselves in a cause, justifying our private hurts in public outrage. We don't like it when someone refutes our beliefs any more than we like it when someone denies our illusions.

Introducing flights and acquaintances into the proceedings told a story that could not be ignored, it was our faith that Tuba was neither questioned nor named again. On May 9, 1693, after 15 painful months in prison, she was finally tried for making a pact with the devil. The jury declined to indict her. She was the first to admit to signing a sinister pact and she would be the last suspect to be released. She appears to have left Massachusetts to be with the man who paid for her imprisonment. It was unlikely that she would ever see the Parris family again. After 1692, no one listened to her every word. She disappeared from records, although she did escape with her life, unlike the Confederate woman for whom she was named on March 2. Tidoba was only insulted by the twisted afterlife, probably because she admired it: it was a better story