התמלול המלא של 4: Tituba

Episode 4 Transcript:  [00:00] [sound effect: waves and seagulls] INTRO: “The girl tries to cling to her mother. No one at home knows they were taken. No one is near enough to hear their shrieks and wails. The headman looks toward the shore as though he expects pursuit and then barks orders to his men, who bring out firearms and warm the rigging to adjust the sails. As soon as the tide turns, the ship eases downstream. “No one comes to the shore. “No one rescues them. “How sharp the memory of that last day of freedom, of a normal life. How painful the last memory of home.” - from Six Women of Salem, by Marilynne K. Roach. [00:51] [music: tinkling piano] ALL SEASON INTRO Double double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.  Fillet of a fenny snake,  in the cauldron boil and bake;  Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog,  Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.   Welcome to the inaugural season of Powerful Trouble - a podcast about witches. This season is all about the Salem Witch Trials.  Something wicked this way comes.  [01:52] [music: “Why Fum’th in Sight” by Thomas Tallis for viol de gamba] A DEARTH OF INFORMATION Though Tituba is one of the central figures of the Salem Witch Trials, very little is known about her life before the trials. For a historian, researching or writing about Tituba is kind of a nightmare. There are no detailed records about her existence or the course of her life until her arrival in Salem, and she may have been resigned to a mention or two in a household inventory had the trials not come along.  The brutal, inhumane truth is that slaves were considered property, not people, and their lives were categorized as such. Their lives, deaths, marriages, and children were hardly worth noting if they didn’t add monetary value. A record of a slave auction in the 1600s would likely not list names, but rather details relevant to the person’s value as a laborer such as, “Negro man, approximately 20 years old, six feet tall.”  For this reason, everything I say in this episode has to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. Just assume that “ifs” are sprinkled around as liberally as Tom Haverford’s phone number at the Glitter Factory. There are multiple theories as to Tituba’s origins, and I’ve analyzed a few of the most prominent. I’ve picked the one that seems the most logical to me based on the information I’ve been able to find, but that doesn’t mean this podcast is the last word on Tituba by any stretch. This podcast should also not be taken as the authority on the Atlantic slave trade. For that, go to the incredible New York Times series, 1619. [03:36] [sound effect: birds in a forest] THEORIES OF ORIGIN I’ve mentioned Marion Starkey a few times, and now I’ll finally tell you who she was. Marion Starkey was a Massachusetts-based historian who wrote one of the major comprehensive accounts of the Salem Witch Trials in 1949, in an easy-to-read style. We’ll talk about her book, The Devil in Massachusetts, a lot more in a later episode, but it is her account upon which Arthur Miller based The Crucible. She posits, as the 19th century historians upon which her work is based did, that Tituba was probably half-Carib and half-African, implying that she was born in Barbados, and born into slavery.  The Carib are the group from whom we derive the word Caribbean, and they ruled and inhabited the Lesser Antilles, which are a group of islands in an arc shape from what is now the Dominican Republic to Trinidad and Tobago, and also the parts of South America just across the ocean from the Lesser Antilles. This area includes Aruba, Barbados, St. Lucia, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela.  When the English arrived in 1627, the Carib were by far the most powerful and influential group in the area. Barbados was actually not inhabited at the time, but the Carib  were expert sailors and as such would have certainly noticed a new band of interlopers in the area. The Carib had been clashing heavily with the Dutch, and since the English and Dutch were highly competitive on the global stage, the English and Carib formed an alliance. The English crown eventually issued an order of protection prohibiting warfare or enslavement against the Carib, but a few Carib were enslaved in the early to mid 1600s. It’s not totally clear where Marion Starkey got the information that Tituba was half-Black, except perhaps 2 and a half centuries of compounded assumptions and racism. There were almost certainly biracial and multiracial inhabitants of Barbados, but it was relatively rare. It’s not impossible, but it was rare at the time.   Peter Charles Hoffer theorizes that Tituba was from the West African Country of Ghana, or the child of Ghanian slaves in Barbados, because “uba” is a common suffix for West African slaves, and was attached to women in particular in Barbados. The magistrates in Salem did accuse Tituba of practicing “hoodoo.” Voodoo (or hoodoo as it was sometimes called then) is an amalgamation of various West African practices with some Roman Catholic iconography sprinkled in that originates with West African slaves, primarily in Haiti. While most of the slaves in the Caribbean and Lesser Antilles were definitely captured in Africa, there isn’t a lot of evidence to support this theory about Tituba, specifically. I’m leaving this theory in because it’s not completely impossible (like I said, we have no definitive way to know), but it’s the most unlikely in my opinion.  While Hoffer’s theory of naming is perfectly credible, the rest of the evidence that Tituba might’ve been of West African descent is weak at best and nonexistent at worst. Believing this theory wholesale requires believing the word of the gullible note takers who imposed suspicious xenophobia onto Tituba. It also depends on the rampant racism that didn’t bother to differentiate the cultural practices of West Africa