46 pages • 1 hour read
Maryse CondéI, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Tituba’s story begins on a slave ship bound for Barbados. In first-person, past-tense narration, the protagonist’s opening lines establish the setting and tone of her story: “Abena, my mother was raped by an English sailor […] I was born from this act of […] hatred and contempt” (3).
In Barbados, a plantation owner named Darnell Davis buys the pregnant Abena and two men, who, like Abena, are Ashanti, an ethnic group from central Ghana. When Darnell discovers her condition, he gives her to Yao, one of the male slaves, to keep as a concubine. Tituba describes her mother’s shame and grief at having to explain to Yao that her baby is the child of a white man. Compassionately, Yao vows to adopt the yet unborn Tituba as his own. In the four months preceding Tituba’s birth, her parents are happy, but as Tituba points out, it is a sad happiness given the condition of their people.
Yao chooses the name Tituba. Tituba’s early years are a mixed experience of love from Yao and her knowledge, by age five, that her mother does not love her: “I never stopped reminding my mother of the English sailor […] of the pain and humiliation” (6).
At the age of seven, Tituba loses her family. Darnell tries to rape Abena, who defends herself with a blade. For gashing his shoulder, she is hanged. Three times, Tituba says, “My mother was hanged” as she describes the scene (8). Soon after, Yao commits suicide, and Tituba is chased off the plantation.
Mama Yaya, an elderly woman known for her spiritual powers, adopts Tituba. Mama Yaya teaches her to use herbs for healing and initiates her into the healing and spiritual arts.
When Mama Yaya dies, that wisdom enables Tituba to live on her own at age 14, with three spirits watching her. Tituba is eventually known by the slaves for her spiritual and healing abilities.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 begins with Tituba meeting John Indian, a slave of mixed descent—half Arawak Indian and half Nago (an African Yoruba subgroup). She is instantly enamored, and she sacrifices a chicken to call for Mama Yaya to help her get John Indian to love her.
Mama Yaya warns Tituba that men will possess and subjugate her, but Tituba insists. Overcome by desire for John Indian, she ignores her mother, who warns, “Why can’t women do without men […] Now you’re going to be dragged off to the other side of the water” (15). In hindsight, she observes that she should have heeded Mama Yaya’s reluctance and her mother’s protests. Instead, she retrieves the drop of blood for Mama Yaya’s spell.
While the spell works, the consequences are not immediately appealing for Tituba, who assumes John Indian will come to live with her. He refuses and insists that Tituba live at his owner’s home and adopt the white man’s religion as he has done. John Indian says he wants to prove to everyone that she is not a witch.
Despite her alarm at John Indian’s statement, she remains adoringly by his side. Again, Tituba observes in hindsight, “And therein lay my misfortune. I wanted that man as I had never wanted anything else” (18). Tituba consents to becoming a slave just to be John Indian’s wife.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Chapter 3 opens on Susanna Endicott’s estate. Susanna instantly regards Tituba in disgust. Tituba is dumbfounded by her demeaning onslaught of questions, insults, and orders—and equally shocked by John Indian’s exaggerated submission to the humiliation. Tituba describes the image of John Indian that she sees for the first time: hopping “from one foot to another,” speaking “in a whining humble voice, like a child,” and responding “in a comical and exaggerated way” even when Susanna strikes “him across the face” (21-22).
When they retreat to his living quarters, John Indian defends his actions by taking Tituba “in his arms, whispering, ‘The duty of a slave is to survive’” (22). She remembers Mama Yaya’s warnings and is enraged by his behavior. Her rage, however, only intensifies her desire for John Indian. In the background, she hears sighs from Abena.
Susanna’s insults and John Indian’s attempts to make her a Christian become unbearable. When Susanna asks Tituba, “Aren’t you the daughter of that Abena who killed a planter? [...] Weren’t you brought up by a certain Nago witch called Mama Yaya?” (26), John Indian becomes enraged, not with his master but with Tituba. The chapter concludes with Tituba’s resolve to remove Susanna from this world.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
As Chapter 4 opens, an impatient Tituba argues with Mama Yaya about wanting a spell to kill Susanna Endicott, because she wants to take John Indian away from her. She ignores Mama Yaya’s reminder that her powers are for healing and remains fixated on revenge—despite Mama Yaya’s protests that Tituba is going to lose him regardless, and despite Abena’s comments about how he will only cause her trouble.
Mama Yaya forewarns her that her help will soon be impossible: “I’ll be so far away [...] to cross the water [...] it’ll be so difficult” (30). It is only with this warning that Tituba becomes slightly alarmed. Tituba stays resolute that Susanna must die. With Abena in tears, Mama Yaya warns, “Even if she dies, you cannot change your fate” (30).
After Susanna’s illness from Tituba’s incantations, the enigmatic warnings of Abena and Mama Yaya become clear. First, Tituba witnesses their version of John Indian. With Susanna confined to her chambers, Tituba watches John Indian engaged in drinking and debauchery and is unamused when John Indian argues, “They expect niggers to get drunk and dance […] Let’s play at being perfect niggers” (32).
Soon after, Tituba sees their other cryptic warnings unfold. Susanna threatens Tituba: “I know it’s one of your spells […] I shall get my revenge” (33). Then Tituba catches a glimpse of Samuel Parris visiting Susanna; he is a tall, chalky white man who strikes her with foreboding terror. The terror is justified. Approaching death, Susanna tells the couple that she is selling them to Samuel Parris—and that they will accompany him, across the water, to the colonies in America.
Chapter 4 ends in Susanna’s kitchen, where the evil stranger introduces himself: “On your knees, dregs of hell! I am your new master […] Samuel Parris” (36). Their departure is set for the following morning.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Chapters 1-4 cover Tituba’s time in Barbados, from birth to the last day before her departure to the American colonies. Even if only by cursory glance at the Foreword—which opens with Tituba’s declaration: “I can look for my story among the witches of Salem, but it isn’t there” (ix)—the reader an idea of the events to come.
As Tituba begins her tale, the reader has an understanding of this mock-epic heroine. This is the Tituba who is returning to America for a second visit, who has reached across the water and across three centuries, armed with the pen of her creator. The metanarrative presence of the author—that is, her role as a narrator—is visible on the opening page and through interwoven dialogue with the present-day reader in which Tituba speaks through Condé and Condé speaks through Tituba.
The awareness of Tituba’s presence as spirit allows the tale to describe her epic journey with an element of parody generally reserved for less serious topics than slavery or witch hunts, but which serves to offer a critique of the society that condoned slavery and considered people like Tituba to be insignificant.
The Tituba Condé creates is a determined, sensual woman with a weakness for passion but a strength in that she is not threatened by the idea of giving up her freedom. From the guidance of Yao, her mother’s execution, and her induction into the spirit realms with Mama Yaya, Tituba already carries a sense of the eternal that she fully embodies as the narrator of this tale.
Her major cause of worry in these chapters is the threat from Susanna Endicott—a threat that lingers in her memory, although less for what Susanna says than for what Tituba does in violating the code of doing only good in her spiritual practices.
The spirit trio have alluded to the fact that Tituba’s fate is settled, and the parody of their banter has established the tone of the novel’s satirical critique of colonial society.
