One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  In the Puritan mind, Satan was the true author of religious difference, and so it was deemed natural that those people who seemed most different of all must be on the closest terms with the devil. Many Puritan writers assumed that it was Native Americans who led English settlers astray.

  Mather himself counted the “Sorcery” of Indians to be their greatest threat, and saw the source of their magic-making to be the Enemy himself. Not even English pets were safe: “The Indians, in their wars with us, finding sore inconvenience in our dogs, which would make a sad yelling if in the night they scent the approaches of them, they sacrificed a dog to the devil; after which no English dog would bark at an Indian for divers months ensuing.” Increase Mather had likewise declared the war waged by the Indians against the English to be “devil-driven.” Reverend William Hubbard, meanwhile, framed his 1677 history of the “Troubles with the Indians” entirely in terms of their “devilish idolatry.” What little religion they have, he wrote, “they have learned from the Prince of Darkness.” And even one who seemed to convert, he claimed, would be found out to be a “diabolical miscreant who hath put on a garb of religion… performing religious worship amongst the Indians in his way” while having “very familiar converse with the devil.” The most popular literary genre of the day was the “captivity narrative,” which recounted, with varying degrees of exaggeration, tales of colonists kidnapped by Indians. A common trope of these stories was the place of the devil in native cultures.

  With no distance between the physical world and the realm of the spirit in such tales, the wilderness itself was often described as the source of both Satan’s and the Indians’ power. This was among the reasons for Tituba’s arrival in Massachusetts. It was not legal to own or indenture a member of the local tribes as a servant; it was felt that such servants would still draw power from the land, bringing demonic influence into Puritan homes. Instead, Massachusetts Indians were regularly captured and sold into slavery as far away as Barbados. Natives from the south, in turn, were sent to New England. It was hoped that these “Spanish Indians” were sufficiently removed from their own sources of demonic power that they could be Christianized without risk of spiritual contamination to the households they served.

  Eight years after he had arrived in Boston, the newly ordained Reverend Samuel Parris moved his family to Salem Town. His household now included not just Tituba and John Indian but a wife and three children, the second of whom—his eldest daughter, Betty—would soon cause more trouble than any preteen in American history.

  To Tituba it might have been a relief to be away from the city where the smoke of execution fires still lingered in the air. Yet, as she soon would discover, greater scrutiny can also be found in a smaller town. Salem would turn to her as another in a long line of troublemaking women disturbing New England’s Puritan peace.

  The infamous religious troublemakers of Massachusetts are rarely mentioned in the same breath as Tituba. After all, she arrived in Boston nearly fifty years after Anne Hutchinson was driven out, Dorothy Talbye was driven mad, and Mary Dyer swung from a tree. Yet the Indian woman from Barbados was the logical extension of the question previous outliers had asked. To what extent could a community built on the myth of religious uniformity tolerate or survive spiritual difference?

  While the earlier cases involved women who actively sought to assert their religious differences, Tituba may never have drawn attention to herself were it not for the real hunger for spiritual alternatives within the Puritan community. Especially in children—born in this new land, believing they were surrounded from birth by the threat of Indian attack, throughout their young lives witness to, and survivors of, epidemics that emptied households as surely as had the arsonists’ fires—there was at large a rampant desire for practices not sanctioned by the divines who had exiled Hutchinson and condemned Maria and Mary Dyer to death.

  Such practices were apparently so widespread that Puritan religious writers were particularly drawn to this theme. “Some young persons through a vain calamity to know their future condition, have tampered with the devil’s tools,” the Beverly minister John Hale wrote in 1697. He further described one such young person he knew who “did try with an egg and a glass to find her future Husbands Calling.” Using a device called a Venus Glass, this credulous and unfortunate girl, Hale reported, looked into her future and saw a coffin. So upset was she by this vision that “she was afterward followed with diabolical molestation to her death.” Like the preacher who used the executed woman’s temptations as a warning to those who had watched her hang, Hale offered this story as “a just warning to others, to take heed of handling the devil’s weapons, lest they get a wound thereby.” Nor was this an isolated case. There was another girl, he writes, who suffered “sore fits and vexations of satan.” She, too, he discovered, had dabbled with the Venus Glass.

  These activities were not merely the pastimes of children. They were the last best hopes of a people clinging to the fringes of their own half-remembered folk traditions—practices brought from England that were likely far older than the orthodoxies to which they formally ascribed. To the consternation of official representatives of sanctioned belief, improvised rituals were blended with established doctrine by the English in Massachusetts no less than by the Indians and Africans of Barbados.

  “I knew a man in the East, who possessed the art of curing wounds, and stenching blood by a form of words,” Hale writes. “I discoursed him about it, and he told me, he had been in the practice of it; and believed it to be the gift of healing given him from God, upon the use of some Scripture words he used as he had been taught by an Old woman.” This man, Hale explained, had begun his career as a healer by trying such incantations out on himself. During a mishap while chopping wood, he had cut halfway through his leg with an adz. He tied up the gash with cloth, recited the magic verses the crone had taught him, and was healed within days. When he recounted the words to Hale, the shocked minister found this backwoods healer “almost as ignorant in Scriptures as an heathen.” The minister informed the man that his words were in fact “a perverse addition to the Scriptures,” and “that if any such healing followed upon such a form of words, it could not come from the efficacy of the words themselves or from a divine concurrence working a wonder because of those words, which were indeed a lye in the additions made; therefore if any vertue were in them, it came by the devil, and so those words a kind of Sorcerery.”

  Hale does not condemn those who did these things, for to do so would condemn far more of Puritan society than would be sustainable. In this spirit-haunted world, appeals to powers beyond the bounds of religious propriety were the norm. He excuses “those that ignorantly use charms, spells, writings, or forms of words, &c. being taught them by others, which are a kind of Witchcraft” because those who used them may not have realized that what they were doing stretched the limits of orthodox practice. Whether they were engaged in rituals involving pulling “fish bones out of a wound,” using spells to cure tooth aches, fevers, and warts, or indulging in other such “devilish means,” Hale suggests that those using such magic were “beguiled by the Serpent that lies in the grass unseen.” In fact, they were merely appealing to an alternate spiritual authority, a system of practice and belief that perhaps seemed more responsive to their actual needs.

  It is within this dual context of Puritans’ frequent use as individuals of transgressive religious practices, and their inability as a community to be so broadminded, that we should consider what befell the Indian woman Tituba in the spring of 1692.

  All that is known for certain about the onset of this infamous time in Salem is that two members of Reverend Parris’s household began one day to behave in strange ways. It has become part of the story of the Salem witch trials that these two young girls, nine-year-old Betty Parris and her cousin, eleven-year-old Abigail Williams, had been experimenting with the kinds of practices described by John Hale before they were afflicted, yet the historical record does not provide proof
of this beyond Hale’s reference to two unnamed youngsters tampering with “the devil’s tools.”

  Contrary to the usual narrative, the first and only act that one might call magic or witchcraft known to have occurred in the Parris household was performed by Tituba. In the days following the beginning of the girls’ affliction, Tituba and John Indian were asked by a member of Parris’s church, Mary Sibley, to make a “witchcake.” Taking rye flour and a measure of the sick children’s urine, the two servants then baked this mixture into an unappetizing biscuit which they fed to a dog in hopes that the animal’s behavior might reveal to them the source of the girls’ torment. According to a sermon Parris himself soon gave, this was the real start of Salem’s troubles:

  It is altogether undeniable that our great and blessed God, for wise and holy ends, hath suffered many persons, in several families, of this little village, to be grievously vexed and tortured in body… It is also well known, that, when these calamities first began, which was in my own family, the affliction was several weeks before such hellish operations as witchcraft were suspected. Nay, it was not brought forth to any considerable light, until diabolical means were used by the making of a cake by my Indian man, who had his direction from this our sister, Mary Sibley; since which, apparitions have been plenty, and exceeding much mischief hath followed.

  Though Parris did not name Tituba in his sermon, she apparently received far worse attention than merely being mentioned for her involvement in this kitchen magic. According to at least one source, the minister of Salem beat his servant in an attempt to force a confession that the witchcake was indeed her doing. While such practices were known as part of the kinds of English folk traditions described by Hale, they likewise were present among the enslaved and indentured laborers of Tituba’s Barbados, where “victuals,” as that early English observer called ritual food items, were regularly used to discover the source of spiritual powers. Whether the baking of a witchcake originated in England or in the Caribbean, however, what is most significant here is that it was apparently a practice recognizable across a huge cultural divide, and it was two Indians who were seen as actively responsible for introducing it to the Parris household. “By these means,” Parris concluded, “the Devil hath been raised amongst us, and his rage is vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows.”

  It was not merely the girls’ distress and the accusations which followed that created witchcraft hysteria in Salem. It was also, perhaps especially, terror at the prospect that Indian sorcery had been carried out within the very heart of New England society, the godly household of a Puritan minister. It was fear of Tituba and what she represented as an Indian woman within a Christian home. She was the overwhelming metaphysical power of the wilderness suddenly brought into the one place where they imagined they were safe from its reach.

  In this it is tempting to see Tituba’s actions as a kind of spiritual rebellion. Despite the ambient influence of Christianity, she—enslaved though she was—believed her own skills and traditions could make a difference where conventional religious authority had not. In the days following the revelation that she had performed magic for the benefit of Betty Parris, Tituba was arrested for the crime of witchcraft.

  As had been the case in the court proceedings against Anne Hutchinson, it is in the transcripts of her interrogation that Tituba’s true mettle as a religious outlier is shown. She had been brought in for questioning along with Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, two middle-aged women plainly unliked and unsupported by the townspeople of Salem. For each, an accusation of witchcraft may have seemed the inevitable end of a decades-long string of bad luck. Good’s father, once a well-off innkeeper, had killed himself twenty years before, when Sarah was a teenager. When her mother remarried, she was left without her promised inheritance. She then married a former indentured servant who died in short order, leaving her without a home, deeply in debt, and with a four-year-old daughter, Dorcas, who would soon be accused of witchcraft as well. Sarah Osborne, meanwhile, was not poor but had been accused of sexual misconduct many years before. At sixty, she maintained her infamy by keeping her distance from church. Questioned over the course of three days after she had already received a beating, and now arraigned beside two people the community only needed an excuse to censure severely, Tituba no doubt feared for her life. The beginning of her testimony is understandably defensive:

  “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” she was asked.

  “None,” she replied.

  “Why do you hurt these children?”

  “I do not hurt them.”

  “Who is it then?”

  “The devil for ought I know.”

  Her first word, as Anne Hutchinson’s had been in her own interrogation, was one of defiance. Given the likely consequences of admitting anything having to do with magic or other devilish behavior, she naturally hoped to distance herself from it. Even her first reference to the devil is dismissive; a pointed insistence that she had nothing to do with the children’s suffering. But then something dramatic happened. Perhaps she realized, as Jacob Lumbrozo had some thirty-five years before, that in this situation simple denial would not suffice, for when she was next asked, “Did you never see the devil?” she gave an astonishing answer.

  “The devil came to me and bid me serve him,” she said.

  Reading the transcripts, one can almost feel the air sucked out of the room. From one question to the next, Tituba moved from flat denial to descriptions of a visit from Satan himself. The effect this had on her audience—people who believed what she was saying truly happened—could only have been terrifying. What then followed, over the course of two long examinations, was a remarkably detailed account of just how Tituba served the devil and why. She recalled feeding the witchcake to the dog, and visits from spirit animals. She described flying on a stick from Salem to Boston and ultimately admitted making her mark in a “Devills Booke” that pledged her in service to a man who came to her in the night and, she said, “tell me he god.”

  It is a striking moment in America’s religious history. For here is a woman forced into a life of labor, completely dependent on her pious master and his god-fearing congregation, and by professing religious experiences that they could only deem demonic, she managed to break free of the powerlessness expected of her. In so doing, she took control not only of her own story but of the entire community.

  As her interrogation continued, a question was put before her that would later make her testimony seem meaningful to any situation in which an accused person is asked to “name names”—an open invitation to widen the net of suspicion.

  “Who have you seen?”

  “Four women sometimes hurt the children,” Tituba said.

  “Who were they?”

  “Goode [Mrs.] Osborne and Sarah Good and I doe not know who the other were. Sarah Good and Osborne would have me hurt the children but I would not.”

  “When did you see them?”

  “Last night at Boston.”

  “What did they say to you?”

  “They said hurt the children.”

  “And did you hurt them?”

  “No, there is four women and one man, they hurt the children,” she insisted, “and then lay all upon me and they tell me if I will not hurt the children they will hurt me.”

  “But did you not hurt them?”

  “Yes, but I will hurt them no more.”

  “Are you not sorry you did hurt them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why then doe you hurt them?”

  “They say hurt children or wee will doe worse to you.”

  Her testimony became more fantastic by the moment. The more she embellished, the more it seemed her audience was willing to believe. And her ability to make them believe was certainly what saved her life. Of the three on trial that day, only Tituba would survive the accusation of witchcraft. Sarah Goode would hang before the year was out. Sarah Osborne would die in jail whi
le waiting to learn her fate.

  Unlike Anne Hutchinson, whose answers in court ring with the confidence of a woman of some social standing, Tituba is humbly agreeable. Yet under the surface of her testimony, she was laying claim to an alternate spiritual authority no less than Hutchinson had. While her accusers had only fears and accusations, she had answers—detailed answers—about powers beyond their imagining. As the Tituba scholar Elaine Breslaw notes, in her creative response to impossible circumstances, this “reluctant witch of Salem” reframed her role in the drama. No longer a passive player and victim, she “improvised a new idiom of resistance.” The key to this, for her, was drawing on the wealth of eclectic religious ideas she seems to have brought with her into this supposed bastion of Christian conformity. “Hidden in that confession,” Breslaw adds, “was not so much a Puritan concept of evil but one derived from non-Christian cultures; a set of ideas that was familiar and strange.”

  In the end, Tituba was one of the lucky ones in Salem. More than one hundred people would eventually be accused throughout 1692; two dozen would die as a result. Tituba, as the first arrested for the crime, seems to have escaped execution at least in part because of her audacious attempt to control the story of which she had unwittingly become a part.

  Today the Salem witch trials are remembered mainly as a moment of hysteria over imagined transgressions of the established religious order. Yet while the community response certainly was hysterical, it does appear that many of these transgressions were not imagined at all. The practices we might call witchcraft today, carried out by the English and by the native peoples of the Americas before them, can be thought of as a kind of spiritual equalizer, providing religious authority outside social structures that were inevitably defined at the time by class and gender.

  In this sense, the understandable feeling of outrage with which the witch trials are recalled serves inadvertently to write religious difference out of history. By insisting that these so-called witches were not what some of them clearly were—women and men who experimented outside accepted religious practices, who lived by circumstance or choice on the margins of the dominant faith—we ignore the permeability of boundaries between faiths, and the fact that individuals living in close quarters are bound to influence one another’s practices and beliefs.