Tituba Teaching the First Act of Witchcraft. Sketch from Witchcraft Illustrated, by Henrietta D. Kimball. Boston: Geo. A. Kimball, 1892. Artist unknown. (Library of Congress)
CHAPTER 5
Witches and Indians
1692
A half century after John Winthrop stood on the deck of the Arabella and warned a ship full of pious settlers about the risks involved in making and breaking covenants with God, it seemed that divine retribution had come to his colony at last.
Beginning at midnight on August 8, 1679, a fire sparked to life in an outer room of one of Boston’s dockside taverns, a small establishment owned by the publican Clement Gross, which he called the Three Mariners. It was the second time in four months that some unknown vandal had attempted to damage this particular house of ale and ill repute. In the first instance, the tavern keeper had stamped down the blaze without much trouble, smothering it before larger questions of its significance could kindle in his mind. He might have dismissed it as happenstance, the inevitable outcome of drunken men discarding clay pipe stems broken while tobacco still smoldered inside. But then, before the summer was out, it happened again. This second fire seemed more malign in its intent, and its consequences were incalculably more severe. In minutes, it spread to the inner tavern walls and then took the roof. Due to the hunger of the flames, the dry summer night on which it was set, or simply the willful refusal of Providence to intervene, the conflagration grew in size and intensity until Gross’s entire building was engulfed, flashing on the harbor’s edge like a beacon calling further misfortune to shore.
Boston at the time was a city built of sticks. The timber of Massachusetts forests made a ready resource, but it had made the quickly growing village as tinder-stocked as a smelting furnace. Thanks to the colonists’ residual tendency to pack their dwellings and businesses as close together as if they were still in London, Bostonians had known a number of fiery catastrophes before, calling more than one of them “the Great Fire,” as if in hope that each new holocaust would be the last. The first few of these great fires had been in the 1650s, when many of the colony’s original arrivals watched in horror as the parts of a city it had taken a generation to build were consumed within hours; another had occurred just three years before the current calamity. Called “the greatest fire that ever happened in Boston,” the great fire of 1676 destroyed a “meeting house of considerable bigness” and forty-six homes, including that of Increase Mather, the most prominent clergyman of the time. So susceptible was the city to this form of disaster, in fact, that a popular rhyming play on its name captured the general fear of its fate. “Lost-town,” they called it, and it had never seemed so lost as in 1679, when a series of apparent arsons characterized by one early chronicler as a “grand triumph of incarnate desire and ambition” had resulted in the “most terrible devastation of property.”
In this burning season, the “grand climax” was reached when the fire ignited at the Three Mariners spread to surrounding buildings. The blaze soon ravaged every warehouse in an active harbor—as many as seventy, by some counts—along with adjoining businesses and eighty homes. Many of these homes held households of ten or more (the average Puritan birthrate was eight children for every marriage, and single men were encouraged to board with families lest they be left to their own carnal inclinations), and the fire ultimately destroyed a not insignificant portion of the total shelter for a city of fewer than five thousand souls. When the flames reached the ships at dock, it seemed even the natural bulwark against such devastation—a whole ocean of water—was no match for whatever malevolent force had served as incendiary.
By daybreak on August 9, the first city of Massachusetts Bay looked as if fire and brimstone had rained down on it from above in recompense for some grievous sin. Any Puritans inclined to doubt might have wondered if they had built less an American facsimile of Calvin’s Geneva than New England’s very own Sodom and Gomorrah. Increase Mather, perhaps still smarting from the loss of his own home three years before, took this most recent fire as a cue to ask what had “provoked the Lord to bring His Judgments on New-England,” while his son, the soon to be equally esteemed Cotton Mather, would later say of his city’s remains, “Ah, Boston! Thou hast seen the vanity of all worldly possessions. One fatal morning, which laid fourscore of thy dwelling-houses and seventy of thy warehouses in a ruinous heap, gave thee to read it in fiery characters.… Never was a town under the cope of heaven more liable to be laid to ashes, whether by the carelessness or wickedness of them who sleep in it. That such a Combustible heap of Contiguous Houses yet stands, it may be called A Standing Miracle.”
Miracle or no, for a city upon a hill convinced of its place in the favor of the divine, the port blaze was only the latest in a series of setbacks that called into question the entire enterprise of occupying North America. In the classic jeremiad in which he pondered the source of the divine displeasure they were experiencing, Increase Mather went on to enumerate the “judgements” they had received. “That God hath a Controversy with his New-England People is undeniable,” he said, “the Lord having written his displeasure in dismal Characters against us.” Those “dismal Characters” included not only the most recent fire and those before it but a long line of agonies that made sense to the Puritan mind only if they were considered as punishments: King Philip’s War, for example, which had been fought against the Wampanoag and other local tribes in 1675–76, had decimated the English population. In the years immediately following, a smallpox epidemic nearly replicated this awful casualty rate. A people given to see the hand of the divine in all things inevitably began to look about their Lost-town for reasons why they might deserve God’s wrath.
To the elder Mather, the answers were obvious. To begin with, the August fire had started at a tavern. It stood to reason that all the activities one might find in such a place should be considered as shameful causes of such a terrible effect. “There is much Intemperance,” he wrote. “The heathenish and Idolatrous practice of Health-drinking is too frequent. That shamefull iniquity of sinfull Drinking is become too general a Provocation.”
Of course, it was not just the act of drinking “huzzahs” that warranted rebuke but the company one kept while doing so. “There are other heinous breaches of the seventh Commandment,” he said. “Temptations thereunto are become too common, viz. such as immodest Apparel, Laying out of hair, Borders, naked Necks and Arms, or, which is more abominable, naked Breasts, and mixed Dancings, light behaviour and expressions, sinful Company-keeping with light and vain persons, unlawfull Gaming, an abundance of Idleness, which brought ruinating judgement upon Sodom.”
Likewise, the aftereffects of a night at a place like the Three Mariners were without question to blame: “There is great profaneness, in respect of irreverent behaviour in the solemn Worship of God. It is a frequent thing for men… to sit in prayer time, and some with their heads almost covered, and to give way to their own sloth and sleepiness, when they should be serving God with attention and intention.” Such activities and others, including “Inordinate Passions” and “Inordinate Affection for the World,” Mather warned, were the sort that “brings wrath, Fires and other judgements upon a professing People.”
While Mather offered scriptural references for most of these offenses, establishing that the sad history of human proclivities stretched back well into biblical times, other sins worthy of punishment seemed to him peculiar enough to the American context that he offered no precedent. Too many New Englanders, he lamented, desired to leave the close confines of towns “to live like Heathen, only so that they might have Elbow-room enough in the world.” This was a symptom of a larger problem, he explained, which would become a key for understanding another set of trials soon to be endured.
“Christians in this Land,” Mather lamented, “have become too like unto the Indians.” He could not have known it, but an outgrowth of this fear would mark the Puritan legacy with a judgment more damning than fire.
Not long
after the rebuilding of Boston had begun—with bricks this time, for arson was proving a surprisingly persistent problem in this supposedly rule-bound theocracy—there arrived by ship from the English island of Barbados a woman whose impact on the North American colonies would be greater than any disaster. Rather than divine judgment, she would be regarded first as a force sent by the devil and then as a victim of human folly.
We know her now as Tituba, though in the court records from the end of the seventeenth century, when she entered the drama of history as the first person accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials, she is named variously Titiba and Titibe. She may also be the young girl referred to as “Tattuba” on a deed of all “Negroes Stock Cattle and Utensils” from a plantation in Barbados a few years before her arrival. By the laws of the day, she was the property of one Samuel Parris, a young merchant with family in both the Caribbean and Massachusetts. After several years in Barbados working as an agent for sugar plantations, Parris set off for Boston to make a new life that would eventually include a change of vocation to the ministry. This future preacher arrived in the rebuilt port in the winter of 1680 with assets that included not only Tituba but a man called John Indian, who would later become her husband.
Despite Tituba’s inclusion on a list of African-born slaves on a Barbados plantation, the court documents through which she has become known refer to her most often as an Indian, and recent scholarship agrees that this was most likely the case. Unlike Mustafa Zemmouri, she seems to have been born in the New World, but like him she did not arrive of her own free will in the place whose history she would shape. And she likewise did not leave behind entirely the person she had been before her arrival. Just as Esteban the Black and the other African-born men held in bondage by Spanish conquistadors carried something of their faith into the heart of America, “Titibe, an Indian Woman,” as the 1692 warrant for arrest named her, carried stories from her youth in the Caribbean to the top of John Winthrop’s city upon a hill.
To understand what Tituba wrought in Massachusetts, it is helpful to consider that the island of Barbados at the time was a hotbed of cultural blending. Three years before the Arabella had come to shore in Massachusetts, another British ship—this one carrying ten African-born slaves, along with eighty English colonists—landed at the island’s port of Holetown. Through the decades that followed, shiploads of English and Africans, as well as indentured Catholics sent from Ireland, would also arrive.
At the founding of this English settlement, Barbados had no native population of any kind. Though once home to a vibrant culture similar to those described on Hispaniola and Haiti by the historians las Casas and Pané, the island’s original inhabitants had been driven out of existence by the Spanish and Portuguese throughout the previous century. In an effort to help the various new populations adapt to an environment wholly unlike any they had known before, the English enticed a small group of Arawak Indians from the northeast coast of South America to come to Barbados for the purpose of instructing the colonists and their forced laborers in the fishing and farming practices best suited to the region.
Though the first Arawak in Barbados may have come willingly, these Indians and their descendants were reduced to slavery within a generation. They began to live among—and were eventually absorbed by—the much larger African population, which quickly amounted to the island’s majority, outnumbering even the English while the Indians never totaled more than 1 percent of Barbados inhabitants. Throughout the early decades of the colony, it is likely more South American Arawak were regularly added to the mix; whether kidnapped or enticed, once on the island they would not leave it except as an Englishman’s property.
According to Elaine Breslaw, the foremost scholar on the intersection of witchcraft and medicine in early America and author of an examination of the origins of the “reluctant witch of Salem,” Tituba likely came from this small group of transplanted Arawak. In one of the great forgotten ironies of history, such origins would make this woman distant kin to the Taino, who seem to have settled the islands centuries before from Arawak strongholds on the South American mainland—the same people of whom Columbus erroneously said, “They have no religion.” As the tales of devotional zemies and the prophetic visions of Taino priests remind us, this statement was far from true in 1492, and it became even less so as the diverse populations of Barbados, with their wildly different practices and beliefs, became entwined. For perhaps forty years before Tituba arrived on the island, African, Indian, and European traditions had mingled and transformed each other, creating the earliest form of Creole culture, and setting a pattern that would be followed to varying degrees throughout the islands and across the south and southwestern portions of North America.
Evidence of such blending is readily apparent in the music and languages of these regions, and religiously, too, new forms of expression were created that may have seemed to contemporary eyes mere perversions of established ceremonies but were in fact distinct traditions all their own. Not long after Tituba would have left the island, an English visitor to Barbados described hybrid African-Indian-Catholic rituals that involved using everyday items to commune with the spirit world. He claimed to have seen rituals “in which with their various instruments of horrid music howling and dancing about the graves of the dead,” the multi-ethnic servants of the English colonists gave “victuals and strong liquor to the souls of the deceased” in order to ferret out the source of malevolent spiritual powers. Inhabited exclusively by people who had left behind the places where their religious lives had been formed, Barbados was an island haunted by traditions that were perhaps more susceptible to transformation because they were dislocated and half-remembered, and thus always in the process of reinvention.
This was true not only among the population of forced laborers but among the colonial occupiers as well. The Catholic Irish occupied a rung of society only slightly higher than the Africans and the Indians and so were natural participants in the blending of religious cultures, and the Protestant English seem likewise to have followed suit in taking part in the process of hybridization.
As Tituba made her way from the harbor to her first home in Massachusetts (a small house and shop Samuel Parris had rented to establish himself in the city), she would not have seen many signs that Boston, too, was a place of the blending of cultures and beliefs—at least not at first. Within the beleaguered Puritan community, the insistence on religious conformity was regarded as a matter not only of intolerance but existential concern. Remember that in the Puritan view, society itself rested on the notion of the covenant—an understanding that all relationships were a kind of contract between mutually agreeing parties. Failure to meet the demands of a contract between people could result in being cast out of the community; failure to meet the demands of a contract with God could result in even more dire consequences. As Winthrop himself had put it, to “deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken” would inevitably “cause him to withdrawe his present help from us.”
For this reason, the Puritan fear of religious difference became manifest in actions ranging from the symbolic to the homicidal. Between the landing of the Arabella and the ship that brought Tituba, the government of the colony would pass laws banning everything from public celebration of the semi-pagan holiday of Christmas to “direct, expresse, presumptuous or high handed Blasphemie.” The responses to the crimes—a fine of a few shillings in the first case, hanging in the second—were different only in degree. They were varied means toward reaching the same impossible end, which was total consensus under a singular form of the faith.
In her years in Boston, however, Tituba would have noticed that the city’s uniformity was not what it seemed. Despite the religious motives that had led many of the colonists to emigrate, many of them had allowed their spiritual inclinations to travel as far from their origins as they themselves had from their birthplaces. Lamenting the difference between the first generation of Puritan settlers and those he reg
arded as his ministerial responsibility, Increase Mather opined, “It was not any worldly consideration that brought our Fathers into this wilderness, but Religion.… Whereas now, Religion is made subservient unto worldly Interests.”
With fear of straying from religious orthodoxy the animating concern of the Puritan colonies, it became common for crimes of all sorts to be associated with religious deviancy. While Tituba settled in Parris’s new home, another woman brought to Boston against her will, an African-born domestic servant named Maria, burned her master’s house to the ground, killing him and his family. This crime was not regarded as the inevitable outcome of a dehumanizing system in which humans were treated as property. It was instead seen as yet another religious dilemma. Convicted of “not having the fear of God before her eyes and being instigated by the devil,” Maria was burned at the stake for murder, yes, but also for the far more dangerous crime of calling into question the religious basis of Puritan order.
Tituba no doubt would have heard of Maria’s case, and perhaps she would have felt sympathy for her actions and her fate. To see the smoke over Maria’s execution pyre wafting over the city no doubt would have served as a reminder to Tituba that she had come to a place prone to conflagrations both theological and fiery; a place that often saw people like her—who carried with them signs of religious difference that was a threat to Puritan existence—as a source of a spiritual flame that must be snuffed out.
One Nation, Under Gods Page 12