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Updated: June 8, 2025
"He bought the yellow bird from Tituba's mother her spectre told me so!" cried Abigail Williams. "What do you say to that, Master Alden?" said Squire Gedney. "That is a serious charge." "I never saw any Tituba or her mother," exclaimed the Captain, again growing indignant. "Who then did you buy the witch's familiar of?" asked Squire Hathorne. "I do not know some old negro wench!"
As in the Boston case, a physician pronounced them bewitched, and Tituba, an old Indian woman, the servant of Parris, who undertook, by some vulgar rites, to discover the witch, was rewarded by the girls with the accusation of being herself the cause of their sufferings. The neighboring ministers assembled at the house of Parris for fasting and prayer.
But Tituba escaped, by shrewdly also becoming an accuser. "Who else?" This set the children's imagination roving. Their first charges were not so unreasonable. Why, the vagrant Sarah Good, a social outcast, wandering about without any settled habitation; and Sarah Osburn, a bed-ridden woman, half distracted by family troubles who had seen better days. There the truth was out.
All their training, their low cunning and beastly worship, their deception and treachery were utterly unlike the characteristics of the early aborigines of America, and were purely African. John and Tituba were full of the gross superstitions of their people, and were of the frame and temperament best adapted to the practice of demonology.
"Once, when a witch was in a churn," continued Tituba, "and no butter would come, den de man, he take some hot water an' pour it in de churn, an' jist den dar come a loud noise like er gun, an' dey see er cloud erbove de churn. Bye um bye, dat cloud turned ter er woman's head an' et war an ole woman wat lib in der neighborhood and war called a witch."
Whatever fetich ideas may have been among the Indians of the New World, many more were imbibed from the Africans with whom they early came in contact. Old Tituba was a horrid-looking creature.
"That I should go no more to meeting; but I said I would, and did go the next Sabbath day." "Were you ever tempted further?" "No." "Why did you yield then to the Devil, not to go to meeting for the last three years?" "Alas! I have been sick all that time, and not able to go." Then Tituba was brought in.
It is an instructive fact, as illustrating the retributive dealings of Providence, that the direst affliction of the Massachusetts Colony the witchcraft terror of 1692 originated with the Indian Tituba, a slave in the family of the minister of Danvers.
Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn were the agents of the devil in this foul attempt against the peace of the godly inhabitants of Salem village. For it was a common belief even amongst the wisest and best of our Puritan fathers, that the devil had a special spite against the New England colonies. They looked at it in this way. He had conquered in the fight against the Lord in the old world.
It would be too uncharitable to believe otherwise," said Master Raymond thoughtfully. "There may have been at the very first on the part of the children," replied Master Putnam. "They might have supposed that Tituba and friendless Sarah Good tormented them but since then, there has not been more than one part of delusion to twenty parts of wickedness.
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