Word: tituba
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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...
When the Reverend Samuel Parris took the ministry of tiny Salem Village in 1689, he brought with him two dark-skinned slaves he had picked up while trading in Barbados. One of the slaves, an ageless woman named Tituba, became the darling of Salem's teen-age girls. In a stern Puritan community that shunned amusement, Tituba's stealthy demonstrations of West Indian voodoo could be wonderfully thrilling. But to children like Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail the shows also brought spasms of guilt, for they were convinced they were trafficking with the devil...
...group of ministers-in-conclave queried the girls: "Who torments you?" At first, they did not know. Only after a dish of "witch cake" (a blend of rye meal and the sufferers' urine baked in ashes) was fed to a dog, were their tongues loosened. Betty Parris named Tituba; the others also accused a village tramp and a matron who did not attend church regularly...
Suckle a Bird. Stimulated by a thrashing from her master, Tituba quickly confessed to witchcraft and spun a richly embroidered tale that held Salem spellbound. Red cats and red rats had come to her one by one and said, "Serve me." Though as an earthly creature she could not read, she had in her spectral phase seen nine Salem names in the devil's book...