Word: tituba
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...winter, the young girls of the neighborhood began to gather in the evening at the home of the local minister, the Reverend Samuel Parris, who had several children of his own. The chief object of their attentions was the Reverend's servant, an aged West Indian Negro woman named Tituba. To those impressionable children from austere Puritan households, Tituba told romantic stories of the colorful land of her birth. All through the winter of 1691-1692, the girls sat entranced by the fire-side and heard chilling tales of voodoo charms, witches' curses, and the like...
Soon alarming things began to happen in Salem Village. In the spring of 1692, many of the regular members of Tituba's audience developed pronounced symptoms of hysteria. Their actions can doubtless be easily explained by modern psychiatry. But to the Puritans of Salem, indeed to any seventeenth century man, these were puzzling and frightening phenomena. The most plausible explanation seemed to be that the children had been bewitched. After all, everyone know the power of the Devil and no one doubted the existence of witches. Does not the Bible say: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live...
...rate, it was not long before the strange behavior of the Salem girls goaded the town authorities to action. On March 1, 1692, Tituba and two other rather disreputable women of the neighborhood were brought to trial as witches. Surprisingly enough, Tituba readily admitted her guilt and identified the other defendants as co-conspirators in a plot to bewitch the devout Puritan community. Apparently enjoying the limelight into which she had been so unexpectedly cast, she called upon her exotic imagination to supply the judges with new tales of mystery. She told of elaborate witches' convocations which she herself...