Tituba Quotes

The truth always arrive too late because it walks slower than lies. Truth crawls at a snail's pace.

Life is too kind to men, whatever their color.

Salem has become this... Mecca for Wiccans, but no witches died here. Aside from Tituba, no one practiced anything like witchcraft near here in colonial times. It was a bunch of bored Puritans who thought killing their neighbors at the behest of teenage girls was a fine, Christian form of entertainment and land acquisition.

Everyone believes he can fashion a witch to his way of thinking so that she will satisfy his ambitions, dreams, and desires...

They hanged my mother. I watched her body swing from the lower branches of a silk cotton tree. She had committed a crime for which there is no pardon. She had struck a white man. She had not killed him, however. In her clumsy rage she had only managed to gash his shoulder

There was one thing, however, that I didn’t know: evil is a gift received at birth. There’s no acquiring it. Those of us who have not come to this world armed with spurs and fangs are losers in every combat.

Those of you who have read my tale up till now must be wondering who is this witch devoid of hatred, who is mislead each time by the wickedness in men’s hearts? For the nth time I made up my mind to be different and fight it out tooth and nail. But how to work a change in my hear and coat its lining with snake venom? How to make it into a vessel for bitter and violent feelings? To get it to love evil? Instead I could only feel tenderness and compassion for the disinherited and a sense of revolt against injustice.

Deprived of my shackles, I was unable to find my balance and I tottered like a woman drunk on cheap liquor. I had to learn how to speak again, how to communicate with my fellow creatures, and no longer be content with a word here and there. I had to learn how to look them in the eyes again. I had to learn how to do my hair again now that it had become a tangle of untidy snakes hissing around my head. I had to rub ointments on my dry, cracked, skin, which had become like a badly tanned hide. Few people have the misfortune to be born twice.

But when I heard that this old man, who went from accuser to being the accused, had been staked out on his back in a field and the deputies had piled stone upon stone on his chest, it made me wonder about the kind of people who were convicting us. Where was Satan? Wasn’t he hiding in the folds of the judges’ coats? Wasn’t he speaking in the voices of these magistrates and men of religion?

Goody Putnam thereby became the first to follow Tituba in describing the devil’s book—an object that, in many guises, was eventually to appear in numerous statements by both accusers and confessors. The afflicted later referred repeatedly to being tempted to write their names in Satan’s book, while confessors typically described actually having done so. More than two decades earlier Elizabeth Knapp had been the first New Englander to indicate that the diabolic covenant was embodied in a book rather than merely a piece of paper.

Another form of divination resorted to was the Witch Cake. The servants of Parris (Tituba and her husband) made a "cake" from the urine of the afflicted girls mixed with rye. The cake was then fed to a dog. This was supposed to reveal the identity of a witch, since it was believed that she would suffer pain as the cake was eaten. Even Parris, on March 27, 1692, preached against this practice as a dangerous divination, that helped ignite the explosion:

En John Indien havia tornat a casa de'n Deacon Ingersoll i el meu llit era buit i fred com la tomba que alguns ja em cavaven. Vaig descórrer les cortines i vaig veure la lluna, asseguda com una amazona al mig del cel. Una bufanda de núvols se li va lligar al coll i el cel de la vora es va tornar de color de tinta.

By the time the older girls began to contort, additional forces had come into play. The five who were to become the most vociferous accusers stepped in only after Tituba’s high-voltage testimony. Every one was a servant. They had reached the age when one ecstatically ambushes the grown-ups, when dependence grades into revolt. They may have had an agenda, which they pursued more subtly than did Abigail Hobbs. They knew stresses the younger girls did not, having ventured farther into the forest of sin and temptation that Elizabeth Knapp so brilliantly charted. They were more attuned to adult collisions, demands, confidences, advances, to wolves in sheep’s clothing. Was there a sexual element at play? One can make what one will of the piercing and pecking and pricking, of pitchforks thrown down, of backs arched suggestively upward and knees locked fiercely together.

Boyer, Paul S., and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cross, Tom Peete. Witchcraft in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1919. Davies, Owen. Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft Myths in American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007. Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Goss, K. David. Daily Life During the Salem Witch Trials. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989. Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: G. Braziller, 1969. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987. Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Harlow, England, New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991. Matossian, Mary K. “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair.” American Scientist 70 (1970): 355–57. Mixon Jr., Franklin G. “Weather and the Salem Witch Trials.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (2005): 241–42. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Parke, Francis Neal. Witchcraft in Maryland. Baltimore: 1937.

Comecei a duvidar seriamente da convicção fundamental de Man Yaya, segundo a qual a vida era um presente. A vida só seria um presente se cada um de nós pudesse escolher o ventre que nos carregaria. Mas, ser jogado na carne de uma miserável, de uma egoísta, de uma cadela que se vingará de nós pelos reveses de sua própria vida, de ser parte da horda de explorados, dos humilhados, daqueles que são obrigados a um nome, a uma língua, a crenças, ah, que calvário!

noticed. That’s when you use your power. Sometimes you got to act like you are nothing—so long as you remember that it’s a lie. So long as you remember you’re as strong as you believe you are.” Salem, 1693 Tituba, little Dorcas Good, Sarah Carrier, and ninety-three other falsely accused women, men, and children stumble out of Salem and Boston jails when the court of Oyer and Terminer is suspended by the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Judge Hathorne watches them limp back into Salem—the orphaned children, the widows, the daughter who testified against her mother. He rages at the magistrates who recant their verdicts and at the accusers—Betty Parris and Ann Putnam first among them—who apologize for the terror they wrought. “The victims believed Satan was here and I still believe it,” Hathorne tells his wife. “You

Eu já havia me arrependido de ter apenas, em todo esse caso, interpretado um papel de comparsa, rapidamente esquecida e cujo destino não interessava a ninguém. "Tituba, uma escrava de Barbados que provavelmente praticava hoodoo." Algumas linhas em longos tratados dedicados aos eventos de Massachusetts. Por que eu deveria ser ignorada? Essa questão também atravessou meu espírito. É porque ninguém se preocupa com uma negra, com seus sofrimentos e suas tribulações? É isso? Eu procuro a minha história junto às histórias das Bruxas de Salem e não a encontro.

Não pertenço à civilização do Livro e do Ódio. É dentro do coração que os meus guardarão minha memória, sem necessidade de grafia alguma. É dentro da cabeça. Em seu coração e em sua cabeça.

Tabitha is classical spinster—similar to Tituba, the Caribbean servant at Salem, Massachusetts, who allegedly taught the spells and charms that led Sarah Good and nineteen others to be burned or hanged for witchcraft. And “Tabitha” would be long associated with single women—tabbies, tabby cats, would become common nineteenth-century single nicknames—and with witches.