I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem     by Angela Y. Davis and Maryse Conde, Translated by Richard Philcox Published by Ballantine Books (Trd Pap) Pub. Date: January 1994 Format: 225 pages Dimensions: 0.58 x 7.96 x 5.10 in. ISBN: 0345384202 List Price: $12.95, £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.36

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Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean writer (Guadeloupe is a small French/Creole-speaking carribbean island, an overseas département of France). She is quite preoccupied with the issues and histories of people of African descent in the Caribbean, especially women. Tituba is her masterpiece where the strength of the narrative and the ingenuity of the basic idea overcome a tendency towards the programmatic and preachy.


Tituba is the daughter of a Barbadian slave woman who ends up in Massachusetts in the village of Salem of witch-trial fame, a story more famously told in a play by Arthur Miller. Tituba tells her side of the story, the story of a life that begins and ends in Barbados.


I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem originates with an historical character who was arrested and confessed to witchcraft in 1692. There is little known about this woman in the historical record, which gives Condé the chance to explore whole landscapes of slave life in the Caribbean and the early North American colonies and what it might have felt like to live in those circumstances. The book overall is an inspired and imaginative commentary on the strange meeting in America of North European and West African cultures and value-systems during the seventeenth Century.


There’s plenty of story in this story for as well as the drama of the witch episode — here told as a punchy critique of Christian Fundamentalism, sexual repression and the oppression of women — Tituba has a whole series of other encounters too, many of them intimate, with a diverse series of white and black, male and female characters.


With its recounting of slave revolts (and ensuing massacres) and continuous ill-treatment of people who were then legally and morally classified as less than human Tituba is a bitter story beautifully told.

‘I soon realised that someone else shared my fear and aversion for Samuel Parris: Elizabeth, his wife. She was a young woman who was pretty in an odd way. Her lovely blond hair hidden under a sombre hood fuzzed up and formed a luminous halo around her head. She was wrapped in shawls and blankets as though she were shivering despite the warm, stuffy air in the cabin. She smiled at me and in a voice as pleasant as the waters of the River Ormond she said: so you’re Tituba? How cruel it must be to be separated from your own family. >From your father, your mother, and your people.’ p38