John and His Tituba
Rev. S. Parris’s Slaves
Mr. Parris brought with him from the Spanish Main, as his slaves, a couple called John Indian and his wife, Tituba. The ignorance of the Spanish population found its summit of pleasure in dancing, singing, sleight of hand, palmistry, fortune-telling, magic, and necromancy (or spirit communication with the dead); and John and his Tituba in all those things were fully up to date.
Parris’s Witch School, Apt
Pupils, Their Personnel
To the pastor’s house (as he wrote, “When these calamities first began, which was at my house”) the village maidens, by surreption, went under the tuition of Tituba. Those of us who have some remembrance of the rise of spiritualism, the phenomenon of table-tipping, and the slightly more refined practice of the élite with scribbling planchet, can picture in some degree Tituba’s pupils and how they got there.
First Church Edifice and Parsonage
Danvers Highlands
Of those pupils (“children,” as the court called them) two were of the pastor’s family—Ann Williams, aged eleven, and his daughter, whom he quickly sent away; Ann Putnam, daughter of Ann and Sergeant Thomas, a precocious miss of only twelve, who easily became a leader; Mary Warren, domestic in John Proctor’s family, aged twenty; Susannah Sheldon and Elizabeth Booth, neighbors and eighteen; Sarah Churchill, helper to George Jacobs, senior; Elizabeth Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, former domestic for Mrs. Burroughs, and Mary Walcott, daughter of Deacon Jonathan, each of them eighteen.
Had those “children,” the pioneers of the awfully fatal mischief, been scourged at the whipping post,