Warnings And The Denial

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Before we start, this episode discusses slavery, racism, and a confession that was beaten out of a woman, as well as imprisonment and execution. Please take care of yourself while you listen. Why do you hurt these poor children? What harm have they done unto you? They do no harm to me. I no hurt them at all. Why have you done it? I have done nothing. This week we are talking about Tichiba from the Salem Witch Trials. This is Witches, Bitches, and Slucks. I'm your host, Christina Rose. Welcome to the second episode of our Witch series and the first of the Salem women. I am still sick, so I apologize for my voice. I'm just going to call these my um Phoebe episodes because hopefully they make me sound sexy or maybe hexy. Okay, if hexy is not a word, it's going to be now. And um I think I'm gonna have to have some merch soon. Okay, on to the episode. That opening quote comes from a courtroom. Well, a meeting house being used as a courtroom in Salem Village, Massachusetts on March 1st, 1692. The questions came from a magistrate. The answers came from a woman the record calls Tichuba, an Indian woman, who was enslaved in the house of the village minister. And that's where we're going to start. Not with a dance in the woods and not with a cauldron, but with a denial. Because before Tichuba ever confessed to anything, before the devil, before the book, before the yellow bird, the first thing the record says she said was, I have done nothing. And I'm going to emphasize that line because it's the first thing she said, and it gets forgotten in the future retellings.

Why Tituba Is Hard To Know

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Here's the strange thing about Tichuba. She is one of the most famous names connected to the Salem witch trials, yet she is the one we know the least about. And that's a dangerous combination. When the name is famous and the evidence is thin, every generation gets tempted to fill in the blanks. And oh, did they get creative? So in this episode, I'm going to be really strict about four categories what the records from 1692 actually say, what historians can reasonably infer, what's still disputed, and what somebody made up later. So let's start with what we can call her. In the Salem court papers, she's written down over and over as Tichuba Indian or an Indian woman or Samuel Paris' Indian woman's servant. And the spelling changes every time someone new picks up the pen. Tichiba, that's T-I-T-I-B-A, Tichabi, T-I-T-I-B-E, Tichaba, which is the one we're using, T-I-T-T-U-B-A, and Tichapa Tichapa, T-I-T-T-A-P-A. Her name doesn't even get to stay the same from one document to the next. The records list her husband as John Indian. Now, Indian in these records is a colonial label. It's not a birthplace, it's not a nation, and it's not a family tree. But it's the label people used consistently when they actually saw her in Massachusetts. But notice what it wasn't. The clerks never called her African or Negro, even though they used that word when they meant it. So the honest sentence is neither Tichiba was definitely Arawak, nor Tichaba was definitely black. It's this. The records call her Indian, and we don't know where she was born or who her people were. And one more thing needs fixing. The records call her a servant. She was enslaved. Samuel Paris claimed her labor. He could sell her and she couldn't quit.

What “Indian” Meant In Records

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I'm going to say enslaved every time because servant makes it sound like a job and it wasn't a job. So how did she end up in that house? Here's what we know about Samuel Paris. Before he was a minister, he was a merchant. His family owned property in Barbados, an English sugar colony built on slavery. And he spent years in that world before returning to Boston around 1680. In the 1990s, the historian Elaine Breslau found something in an old Barbados plantation inventory. A list of enslaved people on a plantation owned by a man named Samuel Thompson. And on that list is a child named Tachuba, T-A-T-T-U-B-A. Now that's a very rare name, and it's very close. Bresla built an argument that this child could be our Tichuba, maybe an indigenous girl taken from South America, carried through Barbados, and eventually brought into Paris' household. It's a clever and important argument, but it's still not proof. No bill of sale connects that child to Paris. The inventory doesn't say the child was indigenous. And other historians like Bernard Rosenthal have pointed out that a similar name in the same region doesn't explain the mystery of where she came from. So Barbados is a reasonable guess, maybe even a likely one, but it's still a guess. And I get why people want one clean answer. Giving someone back their origin story feels like giving back something that was stolen. But a beautiful answer can still be made up. Tichiba has spent more than 300 years carrying other people's fantasies, and I'm not going to add to that. Since this is the first of our three Salem episodes, I'm going to set the scene properly. There were two Salems in 1692. Salem Town was a busy port on

Enslaved In Parris’ Household

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the coast, and that's the Salem on all the Halloween t-shirts. Salem Village was the farming community a few miles inward. Today it's the town of Danvers. In which I am personally glad that I found that out because now I need to change my bucket list from going to Salem to going to Danvers. And I would have been so mad if I went to Salem only to come back and find out that I was supposed to go to Danvers. So if you were also planning a trip out there and didn't know that, you're welcome. Okay, back to the story. In 1689, Salem Village hired Samuel Paris as its new minister. And the village was a mess. People were fighting over taxes, over land, and over whether the village should even have its own church. Many of them were fighting about Paris himself, his salary, his firewood, and whether the parsonage belonged to him or the village. And by the way, a parsonage is a house the church or village provides him. I had to look that up, so I'm sharing. Obviously, I am not religious. And the whole colony was on edge. New England was at war with France and its Wabunaki allies on the northern frontier in what's now Maine. Towns there had been raided and burned, and refugees from those attacks had come south into Essex County, the same county as Salem Village. The historian Mary Beth Norton argues that this fear of attacks by Native people ran right through the witch trials. And keep that in mind, because it means an Indian woman was accused of witchcraft in a colony that was at that moment terrified of Native people. The records can't tell us how much that shaped what happened to Tichaba, but we know anti-native sentiment was in the air. Now picture Tichaba's daily life inside that house: cooking, cleaning, carrying, obeying. The man she answered to was her enslaver, the head of her household, and the minister in charge of her soul. All three at once. And that house ran on prayer: morning prayer, evening prayer, scripture, psalms, and lectures on sin and the devil. So later, when Tichuba talks about the devil, a covenant, a book, and quote unquote serving someone, we don't need to invent some secret foreign religion to explain where she heard those words. It's safe to assume she heard them at the dining table. Then in the winter of 1691 into 1692, two girls in that house got sick. One was Betty Parris,

Barbados Theory And Missing Proof

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the minister's nine-year-old daughter. The other was her cousin Abigail Williams, who was about 11 or 12. The accounts written later describe fits, twisted limbs, crying out, crawling, and saying they were being bitten and pinched by someone or something no one else could see. So what caused it? We still don't know. Theories have included illness, stress, trauma, performance, lying, and even moldy rye bread. There's also the theory that it was mass hysteria. And before you roll your eyes, it has happened as recently as 2011. The breakout, which took place in LaRoy, New York, was covered in a 2012 British documentary called The Town That Caught Tourette's. Eventually, 19 students were affected, and 18 of them were girls. The town panicked. Environmental activist Aaron Brockovich even showed up to investigate an old chemical spill near the school. But in the end, doctors attributed it to mass psychogenic illness, also called conversion disorder. Real physical symptoms triggered by stress, not by a disease or a toxin. The documentary also suggests many of the girls had been through serious trauma. So a group of teenage girls, real symptoms nobody could explain, in a scared town looking for something to blame. Sound familiar? I'll just let you decide what to make of that. Because in the end, none of those theories about what caused the fits in Salem are solid enough to conclude as fact. What we do know is how the adults around those girls decided to explain it. A doctor reportedly said the girls were under an quote evil hand. Ministers prayed, and adults asked the girls over and over who was hurting them. By the end of February, the list of afflicted girls had grown to include Anne Putnam Jr., a 12-year-old from one of the village's most powerful families, and Elizabeth Hubbard, a 17-year-old who lived with the village doctor. Now, if you learned about Salem from Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, yes, the same Arthur Miller married to Marilyn Monroe from episode two, or the movie based on it, you probably have a picture in your head. Girls dancing in the forest at night with Tichuba leading them, maybe a cauldron, maybe some blood. Well, I hate to break it to you, but there is no evidence that any of that happened. There's no record of a forest dance, no record of blood drinking, and no record of Tichuba teaching a secret magic class for girls. Although if she did, that would have been cool. I'm picturing it like the American horror story coven season. But it didn't happen. There was one piece of magic in that house that did appear on the records, the witchcake.

Salem Village Fear And War

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Paris's own church records says a church member named Mary Sibley told Paris' Indian man, John, how to make it. You mix rye meal with the afflicted girl's urine, bake it, and feed it to a dog. And that's supposed to reveal who's bewitching them. So I tried to find out how this reveal is supposed to happen, but there was no record of exactly what happened next. So in my head, I'm imagining that the dog poops out the witch's image or something like that. But notice that the witchcake idea did not come from the Caribbean, it came from a neighbor, a white Puritan neighbor. If anything, that was English folk magic. There is a small dispute because Robert Caliph, a local merchant who documented the trials a few years later, says Paris's quote, Indian man and woman made the cake together. But Paris's own record only names John and it names Mary Sibley as the one giving the directions. Either way, the idea didn't come from the enslaved woman in the kitchen, it came from the neighborhood. On February 29th, 1692, about two months after the girls started having fits, four men from the village filed a complaint naming three women. Sarah Good, who was poor and sometimes homeless, and known for having a bit of an attitude. Sarah Osborne, who was older, sick, and tangled up in a family fight over property. Apparently, her first husband died and left his farmland to be held for their sons. But Sarah ended up remarrying and the two of them tried to keep the land for themselves. The executors of her late husband's will were the Putnams. And who was the one accusing her of witchcraft? Also the Putnams. Hmm. So anyway, there were three women. Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the third was Tichuba. One was poor, one had remarried and was fighting over a huge plot of land, and the other was enslaved. That's three women with three different kinds of vulnerability. Each one was already a victim of othering, and this way they wouldn't have to accuse any of their own. But Tichiba's situation was different from the other two. Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne weren't owned by the father of one of the girls accusing them. Tichiba was. She had to answer the magistrates and then go back to the man whose house it all started in. The warrant ordered the women to be brought to Nathaniel Ingersoll's tavern for questioning. So many people showed up that they had to move the whole thing down the road to the meeting house. The magistrates were John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin, two leading

The Girls’ Fits And Explanations

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men from Salemtown. And fun fact, Hawthorne is spelled H-A-T-H-O-R-N-E, which actually looks more like Haythorne. But he is the great-great-grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne with the W, author of The Scarlet Letter. In the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, he writes about how ashamed he was about the role his ancestors played in the witch trials. Some say he even changed the spelling of his last name to distance himself. I thought that was some interesting trivia, so I thought I'd share. But now back to the story. So the magistrates were John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin. And note how they framed the questions. Why do you hurt these poor children? Not did you hurt them? Why? This question already assumes guilt. What familiarity have you with the devil? Not is the devil involved? The question assumes there is already a relationship with the devil. Tell the truth. Who is it that hurts them? Again, this question assumes she knows who did it. Every single question already set her up as guilty. They had no intention of letting her prove her innocence. And at first, Tichuba still tried. She said, I no hurt them at all, and I have done nothing. And she said she'd never seen anything. Then the magistrate asked again who was hurting the children. And Tichuba's answers started to take a turn. The devil, for aught I know, she said. Notice her words, for aught I know. They keep asking her who did it. She keeps saying she doesn't know, but it isn't working because they keep asking. So she throws an answer at them. I don't know, maybe it's the devil. And once she saw their reaction that this was the answer they were looking for, a story poured out of her. She went on to say, There was a thing like a man that told her to serve him. There were Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne who wanted her to hurt the children, and two more women she didn't know from Boston. There was a hog, a great black dog, a red cat, and a black cat, and a little yellow bird. There was a thing with wings, two legs and a woman's head, and she rode through the air on a stick. And over and over in the middle of all of it, she kept saying some version of the same thing. They made me, they pulled me, they said they'd hurt me if I didn't. I am very sorry for it. Now keep in mind, this isn't a transcript. Nobody in that room had a tape recorder. What we have are notes written by men on the prosecution, summarizing what they heard. Jonathan Corwin and a clerk named Ezekiel Cheever both wrote down the same examination, and their versions don't even use the same words. So when you hear me say, Tichiba said, what you're really hearing is a magistrate's version of what Tichiba said. And unfortunately, it's the only version we have. And while Tichaba is trying to answer the questions, something else is happening. The afflicted girls were there. And as Tichiba was denying her involvement, they were screaming, twisting, and suffering. Samuel Parris later swore that the girls were grievously distressed until Tichaba began to confess, and then they were quiet. Elizabeth Hubbard and Anne Putnam Jr. both said the same thing in their testimony. Once she confessed, her apparition mostly stopped hurting them.

Witchcake And First Accusations

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So think about what Tichibha was being taught in real time in front of the whole village. Deny it and the children scream. Confess and the room goes quiet. And there's one more line from that first day that stays with me because it's a little chilling. At the very end, the magistrates asked her, who was hurting the children right then? According to Cheaver's notes, she said, I am blind now, I cannot see. If that was true, it's pretty chilling. If she was lying, then she's a genius. And I'm going to go with the genius story. Either way, this ended the testimony for the day, and we'll get to day two after this break. The next day, March 2nd, they brought her back, and this time the questions were about a covenant, a deal. Tichubba told them the man came to her, said he was God, and told her she had to serve him for six years and he'd give her fine things. She said she told him she'd ask her master first and tried to go upstairs, but he stopped her. Then she said the man made her go upstairs. Go into the room and pinch the children. And she said, I would not hurt Betty. I loved Betty. Out of hundreds of lines in these records, that's one of the only places that the record conveys her as a human being who loves the child she helped raise, who then maybe got an illness and led to her arrest, but that's beside the point. It was just notable that the men documenting the trial kept this moment in there. Then they asked about the book. Did the man make you write your name? She said yes. She made a mark in it. Were there other marks? Yes, a lot of them. Red ones and yellow ones. How many? Nine. And he told her the names of only two of them, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Who were the others? He wouldn't tell her. Somewhere in Boston, she said, and somewhere here in this town. And that right there is the moment Salem changed shape. Before Tichuba's confession, the authorities had three women. After her testimony, they had a whole story. A devil recruiting followers, a book with signatures in it, meetings, flying, animal spirits carrying out orders, and most importantly, names nobody knew yet. But the important part is that Tichiba didn't come up with any of that. The devil's book, familiar spirits and witches meeting in secret, those were all standard witch hunting lore that had spread across Europe and New England. And the magistrates' questions were designed around that lore. What shape? What service? Did you write? Who else? But her answers gave the village something to act on. A conspiracy whose members were unknown. Once a hidden network exists, every new confession can reveal another member. And

Courtroom Questions Built To Convict

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every denial looks like the devil keeping his secrets. Tichiba's words suddenly mattered enormously, but not because anyone respected an enslaved women's truth, they mattered because they matched exactly what powerful men already believed. Her words got power the moment they became useful to the people who had power over her. Now, here's the big picture for the whole Salem series. This episode and the two more that follow. From there, the accusations spread from the poorest women in the village to respected church members, then to men, and then to whole neighboring towns. It spread so far that Andover, a farming town northwest of Salem village, ended up with more people accused than Salem village itself. In the end, hundreds of people had been accused. In May 1692, the colony's new royal governor, Sir William Phipps, arrived from England and found the jails full. So he set up a special court, the court of Oyer and Terminer. That's legal French for to hear and to determine. And that court accepted something called spectral evidence. That means testimony that the accused person's spirit, their specter, had appeared to someone and hurt them. Which means that you could be at home in front of your whole family, and someone across town could swear your specter was pinching them. And this was admissible in court. You can't have an alibi for your spirit, and you can't cross-examine somebody's vision. So once a court accepts that, whatever the accuser says counts as proof. On June 10th, about three months after Chichiba told her story, the hangings began. And they didn't end until September 22nd. Nineteen people were hanged in total. Giles Corey, an elderly farmer, was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to stand trial, and at least five more people died in jail, including a baby born to Sarah Good behind those walls. By the fall, the colony's ministers were turning against the trials, especially those based on spectral evidence. In October, the minister Increase Mather put it this way, it were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned. At the end of October, Governor Phipps shut down the court. A new court heard the remaining cases without spectral evidence, and almost everyone was acquitted. So what happened to John Indian, Tichuba's husband during all of this? Well, interestingly, within weeks of Tichuba's arrest, John started having fits himself. He appears in the records as one of the afflicted, and he's named as a victim in cases against several accused people, including two sisters, Sarah Cloyce and Mary Eastie, whom we'll meet again soon. And of course, we don't know what he was actually thinking at the time, but I know that if I were in a town where everyone was being accused as a witch, including your wife, I'd start having fits too, because look, I can't

Confession, Quiet Room, Day Two

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be a witch. I've been afflicted. Watch me convulse. So Tichiba survived by confessing and repenting, while her husband John may have survived by becoming one of the accusers. Those two were not dumb. I might have to switch this to an icon episode. So what about the other two women who were accused with Tichiba? Unlike Tichiba, both Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good maintained their innocence. Sarah Osborne died in jail on May 10th, still awaiting trial. Sarah Good was hanged on July 19th. So the women who confessed lived, and the two women who said they were innocent died. And I don't think that's a coincidence. Tichiba had spent her life enslaved. She'd had to learn how to read powerful people and give them what they wanted, because her survival depended on it. While Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, yes, they were poor and unpopular, but they were still free, white, and English, and most likely had never been put in a life or death situation like this. So maybe they believed the truth would be enough. In fact, during the trials, no one who confessed was executed. An Andover man named Samuel Wardwell did confess, but he took it back and then he was hanged. This proves that the system rewarded people for agreeing to a lie while punishing them for telling the truth. But of course, Tichiba didn't know any of this, so many people still question why she confessed. And we do have one big clue. Years later, Robert Caliph, the merchant from the Witchcake story, reported that Tichiba herself said her master beat her to make her confess. Most historians agree on that account. However, they disagree on whether the beating explains the whole story she told or whether she also figured out what the room wanted and gave it to them. But honestly, for this episode, it doesn't matter. Beat in the scared, strategic, or all three, that woman was just trying to survive. But surviving didn't get her out of anything. On March 7th, Tichaba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne were sent to the jail in Boston. And back then, jail wasn't a sentence, it was a waiting room, and you had to pay rent on it. Prisoners were charged for their own food, their own board, and even their own chains. Tichiba sat in that jail for more than a year. Even after the original court was shut down, the jails didn't empty. A new court had to work through all the remaining cases, and Tichiba didn't come up until May 1693. Her master didn't come get her, and the bill kept growing. On May 9th, 1693, so this was the following year because remember the accusations were made in February of 1692. A grand jury finally looked at the indictment against Tichiba. The charge was making a covenant with the devil and signing his book with a mark like a C. And the grand jury wrote one word on it, ignoramus. I have to admit, that made me laugh. Apparently, that's legal Latin for we don't know. It meant there wasn't enough evidence

How One Story Ignites A Witch Hunt

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to send the case to trial. For the record, I am going to start using that word as an answer for anything I do not know. Like if my kids ask me what's for dinner, I'm just going to shout, ignoramus. Okay, that needs to go on merch too. So the woman whose confession helped set off the Salem witch trials was never even put on trial. For anyone else, this would mean they were free. But Tichiba was still enslaved and she still owed the jail a lot of money. So according to the records, someone paid her jail fees and took her. In other words, they sold her to cover her jail bill. And we don't know who bought her. We also don't know where she went or whether John went with her. We don't even know when she died or where she's buried. That's literally all the records have verified. As for the witch trials in general, Massachusetts took a long time to admit what it had done. In 1697, about five years after the trials began, the colony held a day of fasting and repentance. Just one day, by the way. And Samuel Sewell, one of the trial judges, had his apology read aloud in his church. In 1711, about 19 years after the trials began, the colony reversed the convictions of people whose families had petitioned and paid some compensation. And in 1957, about 265 years after the trials began, the state issued an apology that named one victim and referred to the rest as, quote, certain other persons, end quote. In 2001, it added five more names. And in 2022, only four years before the recording of this episode, and about 330 years after the trials began, the last person still convicted, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was finally cleared after an eighth-grade civics class took up her case. And don't mess with eighth graders, man. They're full of hormones and angst. But none of those names was Chichuba. She was never convicted, so there was nothing to reverse. The woman whose confession set it all in motion never shows up in a single official apology. And I'm not sure how I feel about that. She wasn't convicted, so it makes sense, but I feel like she deserves some recognition. Not as the one to blame for starting it all, but as a woman who's put in an impossible situation where she had no real choice. And even though she was never convicted, she was still jailed for over a year and charged for every bit of it. The woman was enslaved. How did they expect her to pay? I feel some kind of, I don't know, like honoration is owed to her. And yeah, I don't think that's a word, but it felt right. And so I'm gonna make it a word. Like hashtag honoration for Tichiba. And on that note, we're going to take a quick

Survival, Jail Debt, Sold Away

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break. So far, we've been talking about what we know about Tichiba from the records. After the break, we'll look at the myth and the legends. So after Tichiba is sold to a stranger whose name we don't know, the record goes quiet. But Tichiba's story continues because the minute she disappears, other people start writing about her. In 1867, a Salem historian named Charles Uppham published a long, influential history of the trials. He wrote that Tichiba and John came from, quote, New Spain, meaning the Spanish Caribbean and nearby mainland, and he suggested their foreign superstitions helped set the fire, with Tichiba leading the girls in fortune telling and magic. FYI, no document states that she taught the girls anything. But look at how convenient that is. If she was using magic before she even got to New England, then it's not really their fault. Blame the foreign woman in the kitchen, not the Puritan magistrates asking leading questions. Then come the pictures. There is no portrait of Tichuba. None. Zero. Nada. Nobody painted her from life. The one I use in the episode R is just a conceptualization. Yet in 1878, an illustration by the artist Alfred Fredericks titled Tichuba and the Children appeared in a popular American history book. And it shows her in a way many viewers read as a black woman. Honestly, I don't think it looks like any woman at all. I'll post a photo on Instagram for you and you tell me what you think. But through the next century, Tichuba slowly changed in people's imaginations from Indian to black, Caribbean, African, and mixed. Some of those writers were just careless with colonial labels. Some were leaning into old racist ideas connecting blackness with superstition. Some were thinking about the real fact that Barbados was a majority African slave society. And some, particularly black writers, reached for Tichiba on purpose to give a voice to a woman the archive silenced. They all had different motives for how they portrayed her, but in the end, none of them are accurate because there's no record of what she looked like or where she came from. Then there's the word people love to attach to her, voodoo. Voodoo from Haiti and Voodoo from Louisiana are both real religions. So are Hoodoo and Obiya. Each has its own history, but the Salem records don't mention any of them. And calling Tichiba a voodoo witch doesn't even make sense historically. New Orleans didn't exist until 1718, and Marie Laveau, the famous voodoo queen of New Orleans, lived in the 1800s. And Haitian vaudou didn't take shape until the 1700s. Tichiba was in Salem in 1692, well before all of those. Plus, no Salem record says Tichuba practiced any of these traditions. The closest thing in the records is when the magistrates asked her point blank whether she ever practiced witchcraft in her own country. And she said no. Now, obviously, we can't just take her word for it because even if she did, she probably wouldn't admit it. But that's not the point. The point is that her denial is all there is. The records say nothing about voodoo, voodoo, hoodoo, obia, or anything else, not a word. So slapping voodoo on Tichiba takes four real traditions, melts them down into a generic spooky, and uses race to explain something the evidence never says. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of generic spooky shit, but not when it's used to make shit up about a woman, just to make her story more interesting. So who benefits from Tichiba being labeled the voodoo witch who started it all? The girls, whose testimony actually sent people to the gallows. Samuel Parris, who by her own account beat the confession out of her. The magistrates who asked loaded questions and hanged 19 people. And Puritan New England itself. Because if the witchcraft came from the Caribbean, then the magic got in from the outside. It was all because of a voodoo witch makes you forget that the magic in Salem was English. An English cake, English witch lore, and English fear. And then in 1953, Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, which made famous The Girls in the Woods, Tichiba from Barbados, and the themes of dancing, conjuring, and chaos. It makes great theater. I just watched my daughter play Abigail Williams, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it's not based on what the records say. Miller was writing an allegory about the anti-communist witch hunts of his own time. He changed ages, merged people, and invented motives.

Myths, Voodoo Labels, Crucible Fallout

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That's what playwrights do. For example, my daughter's character in the play, Abigail Williams, is 17 years old and has an affair with John Proctor. He used this as the motive behind her actions. But the real Abigail was 11 or 12, and the real John Proctor was around 60. So yeah, that definitely did not happen. But Miller's fictionalized version of events had an unintended effect. It gave generations of students an invented, racialized woman who seems to have started the whole witch hunt with a dance and a cauldron in the forest. And that forestine now gets repeated online as if it really happened. And it didn't stop with Miller. Later, writers went in other directions. In 1964, the African-American novelist Anne Petrie wrote Tichuba of Salem Village, a sympathetic novel for young readers that treats her as a fully realized person. And in 1986, the Guadalupian writer Maurice Conde published I, Tichuba, Black Witch of Salem. Conde doesn't pretend her book is history. She openly imagines the life the archive never bothered to keep. A tichuba with love, sex, rage, humor, a spiritual life, and a point of view. It's fiction, and it's brilliant fiction. It asks what you do when the only records of a woman were written by the men who enslaved her and the men who judged her. And both of these are great. I am a huge fan of historical fiction. I love that it can add real emotional truth to what would otherwise be a dry historical document. The problem, though, is replacing reality with fiction. So let's recap. Here's what we know Tichiba was enslaved in Samuel Parris' household. The records call her Indian. She was one of the first three women accused in Salem. She denied it at first. Then, under leading questions and in front of screaming children, she confessed. Her confession named Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne and described a devil, a book, animal spirits, and more witches nobody had named yet. She sat in jail for more than a year. A grand jury refused to send her to trial. Someone paid her jail fees and took her. And then the record ends. Here's what's reasonable to believe. Paris's history in Barbados makes a Caribbean connection likely. She did domestic labor under that household's religious routine, and her confession helped turn three accusations into a conspiracy. And here's what's still disputed where she was born, who her people were, whether she was the Tachuba. On the Barbados list, what John was to her, and how much of her confession was beaten out of her, fed to her, performed, or chosen. And here's what was made up the forest dance, the blood, the magic lessons, the voodoo, and every face anyone has ever put on her, including mine. So the record presents Tichiba most clearly at the exact moment powerful men needed her to be a witch. They asked questions that assumed the devil was already in the room. They treated the children's screaming as proof. They wrote down the confession while dismissing the actual woman or human being. And then for 300 years, everyone else tried to fill in the gaps. Her birthplace, her face, her beliefs, her life after prison, and they filled those gaps with whatever Tichiba their story needed. A foreign investigator, a voodoo priestess, a black witch, an indigenous captive, a clever survivor, a feminist rebel, a plot device. And I'm going to be honest here too. I caught myself doing this. While I was writing this, I kept wanting her to be a clever survivor who outsmarted the room. And maybe she was, but I don't know that. Nobody does. Every one of us who tells her story, me included, ends up filling in the silence with something. Now, some of those versions insult her, and some of them, like mine, are trying to love her, but neither is the same thing as knowing her. Tichiba did not cause Salem. Salem's authorities took her words and turned them into a blueprint. She survived when Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne did not. But surviving carried her from a jail cell into the hands of another owner whose name we don't have. And then right off the edge of the page. And that is an incredibly unsatisfying ending. She played a major role in one of the most famous events in American history. And we don't know where she was born, what she looked like, or when she died.

What We Know, Guess, Invent

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But that's not a mystery. That was a choice. The people who wrote things down in 1692 recorded every word of her confession and then didn't care enough to record what happened to her afterward. And that silence is exactly why everyone else rushes in to fill it. So maybe the best thing we can do for Tichiba isn't to fill it in again. It's to leave the gaps where they are and to remember who made them. Before I wrap up, if you liked this episode and want to support the show, the best way is to follow it, share it, and leave a rating or review. Especially if you have a friend who had to read The Crucible in high school. You can also support the show directly through Buy Me a Coffee. The link is in the show notes, along with the full research list and links to the actual 1692 court records so that you can read them yourself for funsies. And I want to hear from you. Have you ever told the truth and realized it wasn't the answer the room wanted? Send me a DM on Instagram at the t-h-e dot wbs dot pod. That's the th.wbs dot pod pod. Or email me at the WBSpod at gmail.com and let me know if I can share your story. Now I'm going to leave you with the closest thing to an apology I could find for Tichuba. Remember Nathaniel Hawthorne, the famous novelist and the great great grandson of one of the magistrates who questioned Tichuba? In 1850, he wrote about his family's role in the witch trials. Quote, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes and pray

Support The Show And Final Quote

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that any curse incurred by them may be now and henceforth removed. Okay, so he's not really apologizing. He's really just trying to uncurse himself. But he does admit that what his ancestor did was shameful. So over 300 years after Salem, the closest thing to an apology I could find was a man worried about his own bad luck. This has been Witches, Bitches, and Slugs. Thanks for listening. I'm Christina Rose, and I'll see you next week when we meet Rebecca Nurts, the 71 year old grandmother whose jury said not guilty, but she was paid anyway.