Having introduced flights and familiars into the proceedings, having delivered a tale that could not be unthought, Tituba was neither again questioned nor so much as named. She finally went on trial for having covenanted with the devil on May 9, 1693, after 15 harrowing months in prison. The jury declined to indict her. The first to confess to... See more

Moreover, her account never wavered. “And it was thought that if she had feigned her confession, she could not have remembered her answers so exactly,” an observer explained later. A liar, it was understood, needed a better memory.

It seems the opposite is true: The liar sidesteps all inconsistencies. The truth-teller rarely tells his story the same... See more

There was equal reason why Tituba afterward caused grown men to freeze in their tracks. Hours after her testimony, they trembled at “strange and unusual beasts,” diaphanous creatures that mutated before their eyes and melted into the night. And she would herself undergo a number of strange and unusual transformations, with the assistance of some of... See more

“The devil came to me,” she revealed, “and bid me serve him.” As a slave, she could not so easily afford to sound a defiant note. And it was indisputably easier for her to admit she served a powerful man than it might have been for her fellow prisoners, both white women. In custody, one scoffed that the word of a smooth-talking slave should carry... See more

She was presumably not a large woman; she would expect the Salem justices to believe that two other suspects had strong-armed her into a high-speed excursion through the air, while all held close to one another on a pole. She was the first in Salem to mention a flight.