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I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

Maryse Condé,

Richard Philcox (Translator),

Angela Y. Davis (Forward)

4.01 · Rating details · 4,949 ratings · 482 reviews

"Stunning...Maryse Conde's imaginative subversion of historical records forms a critque of contemporary American society and its ingrained racism and sexism." THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

At the age of seven, Tituba watched as her mother was hanged for daring to wound a plantation owner who tried to rape her. She was raised from then on by Mama Yaya, a gifted woman who shared wi ...more

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Paperback, 225 pages

Published January 3rd 1994 by Ballantine Books (first published 1986)

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Jul 07, 2020 leynes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: in-french, black-writers

Wow. Wow. Wow. I have no words. I was recommended this book by my Black literature professor, and I already knew that all of her recommendations slap ... so I don't know why I am as shocked as I am right now but this book, man, this book is it. I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem will go down as one of my favorites of 2020, if not of all time.

Before we get into it (and boy, we will get into it), I would look to draw your attention to the wonderful Maryse Condé who crafted this masterpiece. Maryse C ...more

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Mar 24, 2015 Rowena rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: woman-authors, caribbean-lit

"What is a witch? I noticed that when he said the word, it was marked with disapproval. Why should that be? Why? Isn't the ability to communicate with the invisible world, to keep constant links with the dead, to care for others and heal, a superior gift of nature that inspires respect, admiration, and gratitude?"- Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

With my interest in discovering hidden stories, this book was right up my alley. I can hardly think of a worse fate than being an enslav "What is a witch? I noticed that when he said the word, it was marked with disapproval. Why should that be? Why? Isn't the ability to communicate with the invisible world, to keep constant links with the dead, to care for others and heal, a superior gift of nature that inspires respect, admiration, and gratitude?"- Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

With my interest in discovering hidden stories, this book was right up my alley. I can hardly think of a worse fate than being an enslaved black woman in the New World in the 17th Century. I know about the Salem Witch Trials but I didn't know that there was a black witch who had played a role. Tituba, who was born and raised in Barbados but moved to America, ends up playing such a pivotal role in the Salem witch trials, yet I'd never heard of her until I came across this book. I think it's obvious that what was omitted in history clearly shows what (or who) has been valued in history. It also shows that in many cases black people weren't even considered worthy of a footnote.

Angela Davis' foreword is very powerful, and one part I kept coming back to because it resonated with me, as I believe it would resonate with anyone who wasn't taught their proper history:

"Tituba looked for her story in the history of the Salem witch trials and could not find it. I have looked for my history in the story of the colonization of this continent and I have found silences, omissions, distortions, and fleeting, enigmatic insinuations."

But literature is powerful and gives life and a voice to people long dead and sometimes long forgotten. It is indeed a moment of triumph when Condé decided to give Tituba a voice. Even if someone didn't get justice then, they can at least get some sense of justice through literature, especially when their story, which may have been ridiculed, is finally understood.

"Tituba's revenge consists in having persuaded one of her descendants to rewrite her own moment in history in her own African oral tradition." ...more

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Jan 02, 2014 Aubrey rated it really liked it

Shelves: reality-check, french, translated, person-of-reality, person-of-translated, person-of-reality-translated, antidote-translated, person-of-everything, 500-wm, 4-star

4.5/5

I'm flabbergasted by anyone proclaiming the "death of the novel" in this day and age, I really am. Not only is the word "novel" built on arbitrary Eurocentric standards that weren't even validated by academia until men wrested the structure away from female writers, where's that infamous lust for weirdly wrought frontiers so proudly held up by the status quo? Is it the fanfiction spanning thousands of 250-word-average pages that scares one to pieces? Or is it the burgeoning non-European sen 4.5/5

I'm flabbergasted by anyone proclaiming the "death of the novel" in this day and age, I really am. Not only is the word "novel" built on arbitrary Eurocentric standards that weren't even validated by academia until men wrested the structure away from female writers, where's that infamous lust for weirdly wrought frontiers so proudly held up by the status quo? Is it the fanfiction spanning thousands of 250-word-average pages that scares one to pieces? Or is it the burgeoning non-European sense of the word nibbling at the bulwarks of colonial sanctity that's walking over one's grave? Whatever it is, it's exemplified by this book here, one written more than 20 years ago and still sparking enraged "It's not historical fiction! It's not apolitical (an impossible state btw)! I can't like it if I can't pigeonhole it!" in the reviews below. Despite the absurdity of the lot, I can't help but look fondly on such flustered hullabaloo, for it's guaranteed to lead me somewhere interesting.

If you mixed Mr. Fox and Omeros together, you wouldn't get anything like this, but it's a good grounding for the postmodern-parody-forging-of-identity-reclamation-of-post-colonial-culture jargon one's going to be throwing out whenever someone encounters a black female writer who doesn't write in English about serious endeavors with which she insists of having fun. Fun's a poor word for it, but 'joyful humanity' is a bit too bogged, so find your own worded intermediary in this tale of Tituba, come back to get her revitalizing revenge on a slighting history that is never about the usual death and destruction and all that patriarchal jazz, but life. There's torture and murder and not a bit of shying away from the reek of bodily functions propagated by poor pieces of historical works that encourages such misbegotten yearnings for a time of little bathing and no indoor plumping, but ultimately, there is life.

Getting back to the "death of the novel", I'd believe it if there weren't works like these so concerned with the erasure of history, the eradication of selves due to physical characteristics, and the creation of a rich and wonderful reality through the powers of composition and a devil-may-care equalizing of "truth" and humanity. Times may have changed, but the world remains one where the very existence of certain combinations of traits in particular persons is cause for consternation and critical evaluation, making for works such as these that question the reader as much as the values of past, present, and future. Best of all, this is no looming straightjacket of academic hogwash, but a fascinating piece of sex and magic and areas of the world too often brushed over by official pens and papers. In short, those "death of the novel"-ers don't know what they're missing.

P.S. Bisexuality! They didn't say it, but fanfiction senses don't lie. ...more

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Mar 07, 2018 Teresa rated it it was amazing

4.75 (the last-quarter star left off due to my own failings)

I came to this novel expecting historical fiction of a sort, a reimagining and expansion of the story of a woman central to the Salem witch trials of the 17th century. Though the author makes use of the historical record, this is not ‘mere’ historical fiction; it’s so much more: folklore, feminist text, epic tale, even speculative fiction of a sort.

Condé works from one of the assertions that Tituba was from Barbados, taken from there by 4.75 (the last-quarter star left off due to my own failings)

I came to this novel expecting historical fiction of a sort, a reimagining and expansion of the story of a woman central to the Salem witch trials of the 17th century. Though the author makes use of the historical record, this is not ‘mere’ historical fiction; it’s so much more: folklore, feminist text, epic tale, even speculative fiction of a sort.

Condé works from one of the assertions that Tituba was from Barbados, taken from there by Reverend Parris, who eventually settles in the village of Salem (different from the town of Salem, not sure I realized that before), now Danvers. Condé’s story starts with Tituba narrating her conception, the rape of her mother, an Ashanti woman, by a white English sailor on a slave ship ironically named Christ the King, part of the slave trade from Africa to the West Indies.

Due to my assumption, I didn’t know what I was reading at first. I noted some continuity errors, or what I thought were such, wondering if they were translation choices. But when I got to the middle section with Tituba’s meeting Hester in jail, I was astounded and had to reevaluate all that came before. Hester does not end up with the same fate as that in her originator’s story and she speaks as a white feminist of today; but, undoubtedly, she is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester. Confused as I was at first, this meeting between the two women was my favorite part of the book. (Traditional as my reading can be, I guess I'm a postmodernist at heart.)

The treatment of the Jewish people in Puritanical Massachusetts becomes a theme; and around this point of the story, the language of the book changed, becoming much smoother and all-knowing. I was having issues with the latter (again wondering if some of it was a translation choice); but, due to what happens after Tituba returns to Barbados, that too ends up making sense.

The afterword, written by Ann Armstrong Scarboro, which also includes her interview with Condé, helped me feel better about my confusions. Armstrong Scarboro admits that on her first reading she completely missed the parody of the last section. I certainly did, and I know I would benefit from a reread as well.

For the same stated purpose of this novel, I was reminded of another short novel I recently read, Ana Historic by Daphne Marlatt. Both are written by women who wanted to add to and expand the story of a woman whose fuller story was left out of the historical record by the men in charge.

In the interview Condé says she wanted the title of the work to be merely I, Tituba but the publisher said it was too “laconic”. I can’t help but think the subtitle was added for a sensational effect, as Condé’s Tituba is a healer, not a witch (in the sense it's defined here), and she’s certainly not ‘of’ Salem. ...more

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Dec 02, 2018 Paul Fulcher rated it liked it

Shelves: 2018

There would never, ever be a careful, sensitive biography recreating my life and its suffering.

The Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé was the first - and probably the last given its one off purpose - winner of The New Academy Prize in Literature - create after the problems that prevented the Nobel Prize being awarded this year. See https://www.dennyaakademien.com/

The citation read:

Maryse Condé is a grand storyteller. Her authorship belongs to world literature. In her work, she describes the rava

Maryse Condé is a grand storyteller. Her authorship belongs to world literature. In her work, she describes the ravages of colonialism and the postcolonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming. The magic, the dream and the terror is, as also love, constantly present. Fiction and reality overlap each other and people live as much in an imagined world with long and complicated traditions, as the ongoing present. Respectfully and with humour, she narrates the postcolonial insanity, disruption and abuse, but also human solidarity and warmth The dead live in her stories closely to the living in a multitudinous world where gender, race and class are constantly turned over in new constellations.

Her 1986 novel Moi, Tituba, sorcière... noire de Salem was translated into English in 1992 as I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Richard Philcox, her husband and well as her long-term translator.

It tells the first person story of Tituba, the alleged witch at the centre of the Salem witch trials, but one pushed to the periphery in historical accounts of the incidents. In the historical record both her origins but even her fate after the trials are at best vague, her identity usually confined, as she complains in the novel, to a footnote: a slave originating from the west indies and probably practising 'hoodoo'.

Like I suspect many English language readers, my literary recognition of Tituba stems from the Arthur Miller play The Crucible, one Condé dismisses in an interview included in the book, noting that while she had seen the play in the past, during her research for this novel she didn't bother revisiting it: I knew that Miller as a white male writer would not pay attention to a black woman.

She is rather less dismissive of the other major fictional account, Ann Perry's Tituba of Salem Village, which she read halfway through writing her novel, although she admits to being a bit surprised and disappointed because Ann Perry turned the story into a book for adolescents ... a story of hope and dynamism. This was not the type of story that I wanted to tell ...I am not interested in giving role models to young people.

Condé's novel gives Tituba back her past and her future, but also her agency. It opens, brutally:

Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt.

Condé's account is also very intentionally not a historical novel, but the opposite. Other than one brief two page chapter taken verbatim from the transcript of Tituba's historical trial testimony, Condé says she was not interested at all in what her real life could have been.

Indeed this is a highly playful novel - in prison Tituba encounters the fictional character Hester Prynne from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and the two have a deliberately rather anachronistic discussion of feminism.

Condé's Tituba is also one blessed with special, one could say from a Anglo-Saxon perspective, supernatural, powers, but ones she uses for good not evil. When someone - actually her soon-to-be-lover (Condé's Tituba is also a highly sexualised character) first mentions as a warning, while they are still in Barbados, that some may see her as a witch, she thinks:

What is a witch? I noticed that when he said the word, it was marked with disapproval. Why should that be? Why? Isn't the ability to communicate with the invisible world, to keep constant links with the dead, to care for others and heal, a superior gift of nature that inspires respect, admiration and gratitude? Consequently shouldn't the witch (if that's what this person whp has this gift is called) be cherished and revered rather than feared?

And imbuing her with these powers - including her return to Barbados where she is urged to use them to lead a slave rebellion - Condé 's narration takes on a deliberately mock-epic tome. As she noted to her interviewer in the book: Do not take Tituba too seriously, please … the element of parody is very important if you wish to fully comprehend Tituba.

And just as Miller (although one suspects she would not welcome the comparison) cleverly used The Crucible to make points about McCarthy America, Condé notes that: writing Tituba was an opportunity to express my feelings about present-day America. I wanted to imply that in terms of narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and racism, little has changes since the days of the Puritans.

A very readable novel but one with surprising depth. ...more

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Dec 19, 2013 Shawnta rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, caribbean-women-writers

Firstly, it haunts me still, that I have only heard of Condé from the recent call for papers for the upcoming 2013 Medgar Evers National Black Writers Conference. Immediately, I had to take a look at anything that was hers translated into English. What a magickal experience it was to read this fictional rendition of this mythic character for whom I have made many a frame of reference, but had not heard this version of her story.

Condé's writing is eloquent, sharp, intriguing, and will grip your ...more

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Sep 26, 2020 Janelle rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2020, library

This novel imagines the life of Tituba, one of the first 3 women arrested in the Salem witch trials. She was a slave in the household of the Reverend Parris and little is known of her life before or after the trials. This is a fascinating book that I found hard to stop reading. The treatment of slaves, the ridiculous beliefs of the puritans, racism and sexism, and how history has forgotten this black woman as unimportant, are all covered. It’s told from Titubas point of view. Nineteen women were ...more

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Nov 06, 2020 Barbara rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2020-read, award-winner, carribean, historical-fiction, women-s-lives, women-in-translation, women-s-history, person-of-color-author

This novel by Marysé Conde, originally from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, was published in 1986 and translated from French to English in 1992. It was awarded France’s Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme in 1986. It recounts the story of Tituba, whose history has been excluded from most accounts of the Salem Witch Trials. Conde did extensive research to create this novel told in the voice of Tituba.

Tituba was the product of the rape her16-year-old mother experienced on a British ship sailing ...more

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Mar 29, 2014 Christine rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poc-on-cover, poc-unclear-hero-or-heroine, minority-and-women-writers, literature-french, witches-and-wizards, literature-guadeloupian

It is a rite of passage for many, if not all, American students to read Miller’s The Crucible. That pretty much is the coverage of the Salem Witch Trials, but not McCarthyism.
Conde’s book is the story of Tituba, who many see as the starting point of the Salem crisis. Conde’s plot starts with Tituba’s mother and her enslavement. The focus is on Tituba, not on the trials. Tituba’s mother and father’s tale is all too tragic, and all too true. Tituba’s escape and then her enslavement not only allow ...more

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Sep 11, 2011 Alex rated it did not like it

It is risky to damn a clearly feminist text when you're a man. Thankfully, that is a risk I'm happy to take. There are times when we need to accept that quality does not mean ideology, and I feel this is a perfect example thereof.

For starters, there is a decided discrepancy between the book's decided purpose (giving a voice for a character in history who has been marginalized) and the actual result of any speculative historical fiction. This can be no more a true take on who Tituba was than the It is risky to damn a clearly feminist text when you're a man. Thankfully, that is a risk I'm happy to take. There are times when we need to accept that quality does not mean ideology, and I feel this is a perfect example thereof.

For starters, there is a decided discrepancy between the book's decided purpose (giving a voice for a character in history who has been marginalized) and the actual result of any speculative historical fiction. This can be no more a true take on who Tituba was than the menial information we may have from the Crucible and the historical texts which inspired both that and "I, Tituba." If the real Tituba could come back and read this, she may well be just as offended by the presumptions of this text as she would be of the mere footnote she registers in historical text.

There's also the fact that Tituba -is- a witch. The text makes quite a bit of ado about the nature of the word... she is not a witch in the negative sense that we read the word most often, but she still conjures and brews and has magic at her fingertips. This magic is real, in terms of the book. She can cure people with concoctions and charms, influence fate with ritual sacrifice, and even allow a man to speak with his dead family. The horror of the witch trials was how the fervor grew like a flame, and ended with so many innocent women imprisoned or slain for literally doing nothing. By framing Tituba as a literal sorceress of her own sort, it is harder to be sympathetic. The reader knows she is a "good witch," but even without the religious overtones to Puritan society, how many modern people would not still fear someone who, if magic existed, knew how to harness that energy? We can look at the sexist and racist undertones of these decisions, but that becomes little more than a mask when the protagonist is no longer falsely accused, especially when Tituba herself invokes venom against her tormentors with the same blindness they use to judge her as a black woman. We understand, yet something still rings false.

No less difficult is that Tituba, in some way, brings this upon herself. She lives free in Barbados, but in pursuing a man, one known for his flightiness and trickery, she finds herself enslaved as the wife of a slave. There was fair warning from the magic world. She ignores it. Tituba, unconstrained by the mores of an incredibly conservative white population, is very sexual, but what keeps her ensnared time and time again through the novel is not this freedom of sexual expression, but her inability to keep it separate from love. From her first enslavement with Joe Indian to the final liaison leading to her death, it is not men who trap her, but herself who allows herself to wander into the snares. Further, it is she who practices her magic in a world that is already suspicious. It is she who lets the children know of her powers. We see what could be a strong female character continually undone not only by a world that is ideologically oppressive to what she is from the start, but by her own naivete in how she forges her way in that world.

By the time Hester Prynne makes her way into the narrative, I was asking myself, who is still reading this? This is the point where we leave the already tenuous historic elements behind for pure ideology. Hester exists as a device, another unfairly accused woman kept down by the patriarchy. But Hester is so quintessentially fiction as a character (not to say she could not be real, but that she isn't), and her existence in this text so immaterial to who that character is, she becomes an elephant that everyone but Conde seems to notice in the room. She is a fictional take on a fictional character, which blows open the conceit of this being a more real interpretation of Tituba than the very brief sketches left over from the witch trials. Hester makes the suspension of disbelief we willingly engage in early on, accepting the spiritual world, feel all for naught. It becomes artifice for a fully different agenda, and is heavy handed in that delivery. In the long run, we're left with a story that becomes too self conscious of a subtext to do either the stated purpose of the text or the reader thereof much good. ...more

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Sep 28, 2020 Emily M rated it liked it · review of another edition

A flawed, if interesting, historical retelling.

Little is known about Tituba Indian, the black slave accused of witchcraft in Salem. Historically, it’s unclear even if she was from the Caribbean or was an indigenous American. She “confessed” to her crimes and so was spared the noose, but disappeared from history.

Maryse Condé here reimagines her life from childhood to death in a narrative that includes witchcraft, voodoo, musings on racism and sexism, and metafictional crossovers. That descriptio A flawed, if interesting, historical retelling.

Little is known about Tituba Indian, the black slave accused of witchcraft in Salem. Historically, it’s unclear even if she was from the Caribbean or was an indigenous American. She “confessed” to her crimes and so was spared the noose, but disappeared from history.

Maryse Condé here reimagines her life from childhood to death in a narrative that includes witchcraft, voodoo, musings on racism and sexism, and metafictional crossovers. That description, unfortunately, makes the book sound much more interesting than I personally found it to be.

We open with the usual atrocities of slavery: Tituba is conceived when her mother is raped aboard a slave ship; her mother is later hung for attacking a plantation owner. Tituba eventually comes into the possession of Samuel Parris, and embarks for America, where she will play her historical role in the Salem witch trials.

The book is described in its blurbs and its supplementary material as “postmodern” and as having “mordant wit.” In fact, it’s quite uneven. The first half is very much a traditional slave narrative with touches of magical realism. The second half is occasionally postmodern (Tituba fumes prophetically that within a century there will be some retribution for the falsely accused men and women but that “no one will write a sensitive biography of Tituba;” in prison she meets and becomes friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, whose fate in this telling is dramatically different to what befalls her in The Scarlet Letter). The mordant wit, unfortunately, is either absent or lost in translation.

The afterword contains an interview with Condé in which she explains her project in some depth: we are not to take Tituba seriously. She is meant to be epic, but also mock-epic. The book is a parody of what it purports to be. This is an intriguing thought, but not at all clear from the text. Tonally, the book is very strange, and this strangeness might have been the humour going over my head. The editor, writer of the afterword, admits it went over her head too until she interviewed Condé, who says "I hesitated between irony and the desire to be serious."

I sympathize with Condé’s intent here, which is that, to a black Caribbean, history is never for history’s sake; you must find history to discover yourself and what was taken from you. The book didn’t quite work for me (the writing style curiously flat and rather didactic, but I appreciate it was written in the 1980s when postcolonial studies were at a different place than they are now).

All in all, I would probably recommend reading the afterword, and particularly the interview with Condé, over the book itself. At the same time, this would make for good fodder for a course about American historical fiction, witchcraft, or what have you. There are depths and strangenesses in it that make for proper conversation. It’s an interesting book; I’m not convinced it’s a good one. ...more

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Jan 10, 2020 Kiki rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, caribbean, literary-fiction, translation, classics

Updated: February 24, 2020.
4. 5 stars

I, Tituba is, amongst other things, a parody of the heroic journey readers may be familiar with from Greek/Roman myths. Tituba is aware of how White historians erased her from history and Condé is the conduit through which she can finally tell her tale.

On a second read one thing that stands out to me is how Condé shapes the book to exist in that in-between space between "authentic" slave narrative in which she gives the illusion the reader is learning the st ...more

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Aug 03, 2015 Jimmy rated it really liked it

Shelves: caribbean-guadeloupe, female, and-a-half-stars, novel, poc, year-1980s

If you don't know Maryse Condé, read her now. She wrote this book in 1986 about Tituba, a black slave from Barbados. We know very little about Tituba's actual life from the history books. Only what she said leading up to and pertaining to the Salem Witch trials.

Other than that, she may have not existed. It reminds me of the one mention in history books of the Moroccan slave who survived the Spanish expedition in Florida in The Moor's Account. So much is covered over, a hand moves over the eyes, If you don't know Maryse Condé, read her now. She wrote this book in 1986 about Tituba, a black slave from Barbados. We know very little about Tituba's actual life from the history books. Only what she said leading up to and pertaining to the Salem Witch trials.

Other than that, she may have not existed. It reminds me of the one mention in history books of the Moroccan slave who survived the Spanish expedition in Florida in The Moor's Account. So much is covered over, a hand moves over the eyes, wipes away the stain, or paints on new eyes. Lives forgotten, hidden, never lived. Maryse Condé brings Tituba back to life, much as Tituba does when she summons the spirits of her Mama Yaya and Abena from the dead for a conversation.

Condé's conversation with Tituba allows her to recreate an entire life and time, not only the Salem episode. And she has fun with it. Turns out Tituba really was a witch, a black witch, but the word witch changes hands a million times. To Tituba it's simply a way of being in touch with the elements around her, to listen to the earth and give back a little, as in a conversation. Spirits come and go and she talks with them, consults them, has sex with them. Tituba struggles in her new environments, sold once, twice, three times. And though she is known as the black witch from Salem, that is but one small chapter of her life. She struggles to understand the white man, this creature so afraid of nature as if he does not come from it. He innately pulls back from the sight of a black cat. How long did he take to forget and learn to live in this world? But to her the danger is more real, it is hidden in the hearts of white men and women and children. It is very much of this world and not the spirit world. Of course it is. The evil that will say anything to put an enemy's family on the line, while appearing "civil".

Such a strange book. It's historical fan-fiction, re-imagined and unapologetic about its idiosyncrasies. At one point she meets Hester--probably Prynne given her adulterous charge and becomes her lover. At another point she uses anachronistic terms like "feminism" and "nth degree". The language is fiery, poetic, and matter of fact, depending. At one point she wonders if the history books will erase her, which sounded more like Condé speaking than Tituba. The voices meld as in any recollection of a conversation, don't worry it's just a communion of spirits. ...more

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Oct 17, 2016 Obsidian rated it liked it

I really really really wish I had liked this more. Instead I found myself bored throughout the book. If the author, Maryse Conde had actually I think been able to make me feel like she had a good sense of who Tituba was I would have enjoyed this more.

Conde decides to have Tituba tell her mother's story and her stepfather's story and how she came to be a free slave until she went to live with John Indian.

I didn't really like the set-up to Tituba's life since it really didn't make much sense tha I really really really wish I had liked this more. Instead I found myself bored throughout the book. If the author, Maryse Conde had actually I think been able to make me feel like she had a good sense of who Tituba was I would have enjoyed this more.

Conde decides to have Tituba tell her mother's story and her stepfather's story and how she came to be a free slave until she went to live with John Indian.

I didn't really like the set-up to Tituba's life since it really didn't make much sense that a black woman was somehow free and then voluntarily went to live and become a slave to her husband's owner because she was so in love with him. I don't know much about voodoo practices in Barbados so I imagine Conde did some research. I didn't really get the importance of Mama Yaya while reading. In fact a lot of things that Tituba mentions learning about I didn't really get since I don't know much about voodoo practices. I wish that had been explained more.

We spend a lot of time with Tituba in Barbados before she and her husband are sold to Samuel Parrish and settle in Salem. And we know that eventually Tituba will be accused of witchcraft along with other women in Salem.

What I thought was weird was that the Salem passages went quickly. Conde did have the real life transcripts from what Tituba confessed to inserted into the book as dialogue. And she did the same thing to the character of John Indian. However, everything after that appears to be fictional. She instead has Tituba sold to someone else, returning to Barbados only to meet a tragic end. She includes a fictional Hester Prynne in this book (which really threw me) who is also imprisoned along with the other accused who is being brought to court for her adultery. I don't get why Conde included a fictional literary character in this book.

I have done my best to find out what became of Tituba, but unfortunately not much seems to be out there. And there are some disputes about whether she was a black woman or a Native American woman.

I didn't really care for the writing in this book. It seems everyone called everyone the "N" word and I hated reading it. Also a lot of the dialogue just didn't appear to be written for the times (1690s) and instead there seemed to be too much modern speech in this book.

The flow was not that great. I can't believe how short the Salem passages are, to me that should have been the main focus of the book. I don't know why Conde moved the action away from there and back to Barbados. ...more

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Oct 25, 2010 Tinea rated it liked it

Shelves: high-lit, race-and-racism

Feminist reclamation lit. At first glance, the Salem Witch Trials from the perspective of Tituba, the Black enslaved woman from Barbados who was the friend and first accused of the bewitched girls. Condé used this woman's jarring omission from history (a mere mention, and none of the later absolution given the other "witches," in most works about the Trials) to write an entire life-- inner and outer-- of which the witch trials play only a role. Tituba is a healer, an erotic lover (in contrast to ...more

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Dec 04, 2020 Claire rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, translated, around-the-world, guadeloupean-literature, women-in-translation, around-the-world-2020

When I opened I, Tituba to begin reading, on the first page there is a quote from the author Maryse Condé that reads:

Tituba and I lived for a year on the closest of terms.
During our endless conversations she told me things she had confided to nobody else.

It gave me such a good feeling to read that, to know that Condé was doing here, what she does in her novel (though she calls it a work of non fiction) Victoire: My Mother's Mother, when the grandmother she had never met, would awaken her from he ...more

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Nov 07, 2018 Jamie rated it really liked it

This was a quick but powerful novelization of Tituba's life and it clearly illustrated the horrific trauma and hypocrisy of slavery, racism, sexism, and also the Puritan religion. I was fascinated by Tituba's use of spirits, herbs, and magic as a matter of course in her life, though not so enraptured with the animal sacrifices.

Of course, Condé, doesn't let modern readers off the hook at all, nor should she, so we are often confronted with the bitter fact that the horrors and injustices of Titub ...more

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Dec 05, 2014 Chris rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Five stars but for lack of subtlety

Damn! The beginning was so promising and then... This book would have been much better without the anachronisms and the oh-so-obvious agenda/reference to ideology. It's feminist and anti-racist and liberal and you know how I know? Because it states it! You can find the terms: racist, feminist, holocaust, welfare state in the book. They are mentioned by 17th century women! Thus what could have been an interesting, insightful, albeit fictional rendering of the li ...more

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Aug 15, 2016 Jennifer (the_pumpkin_reads) rated it liked it

Shelves: bookends-book-club, 2016-reads

What happened to all the meat of this story? Some books I complain are too long and needed a good editing, this book needing some more time to cook.

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Sep 27, 2020 Jalilah rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, into-the-forest-challenge-2020

Although it's hard read, as books about slavery are, this novel is also a very compelling and I highly recommend it! Little is recorded about the actual historical person Tituba who figured in the notorious Salem Witch Trials, in fact it is not even sure if she was a slave originally from Barbados or an indigenous one. Henry Miller casts her as being from Barbados in The Crucible, as does Maryse Conde. This book however has little to do with the Henry Miller play, rather Conde wished to give lif ...more

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Feb 07, 2021 Becky rated it really liked it

I’ve been looking forward to reading Maryse Condé for ages, and I always wanted to start with this title: I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (translated from French by Condé’s husband, Richard Philcox). This book did not disappoint. It’s a fictional exposition of the real life of Tituba, an enslaved woman who was the first person accused of witchcraft during the 1692 Salem witch trials. She was imprisoned for over a year after confessing to her “crimes” under duress, and then was once again enslave ...more

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May 02, 2019 Kobe Bryant rated it liked it

More of a regular story than I expected

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Oct 06, 2010 Silver rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction

I am fascinated with the Salem Witch trails and I loved the Crucible, one of my favorite characters from the Crucible was Tituba, though she did not play a very large role, I always found her quite intriguing so I loved the concept of this book and was quite excited about it.

After reading it I am left with mix feelings. On the one hand it was interesting to see things from the persepctive and to watch how things unraveled from an outsiders point of view and it was also interesting seeing the wa I am fascinated with the Salem Witch trails and I loved the Crucible, one of my favorite characters from the Crucible was Tituba, though she did not play a very large role, I always found her quite intriguing so I loved the concept of this book and was quite excited about it.

After reading it I am left with mix feelings. On the one hand it was interesting to see things from the persepctive and to watch how things unraveled from an outsiders point of view and it was also interesting seeing the way in which the issue of slavery played into events. I also liked the way in which the supernatural and realism played together within the book. But one of the things I found disappointing about the book is that I would have liked to have seen more of the actual witch trails themselves. It felt to me that the trails themselves did not play a prominent enough role within the book, of course part of the reason for this is becasue we are seeing the story from Tituba's point of view, and being she spent a great deal of time during the trails imprisoned the reader is only subject to the information which she possess. Though one of the most interesting aspects of the book was the fact that it included an excerpt from transcripts of the real Tituba's actual testimony during the trails.

One of the other major complaints I had about the book is that it felt to me that in the middle of the book it sort of moved away too much from the story itself, as the author I think tried to hard to hit the reader over the head with both a feminist and racial message behind the story, and she stepped out of the time period in which the story was being told and introduced modern ideas. She also gave Titbua a sort of "prophetic" voice in which she spoke back upon the witch trails from a modern point of view, as if the author herself was speaking through Titbua, as she spoke of events of things that were not yet to happen within the setting of the story itself, and it felt out of place in the story and did not really work. It was too much like trying to enclose a lecture on the witch trials within the story.

But towards the end of the book it started to pick up against and become more interesting, and over all I really did enjoy it and I really enjoyed the parts of the book which dealt with the culture of Barbados, which is another area of interest of mine, and where Titbua is said within the book to have originally came from. ...more

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Jan 09, 2016 David Anderson rated it really liked it

Condé takes a forgotten figure from history and gives her a compelling voice to tell her story. But be forewarned, this is not historical fiction. Stylistically this is a post-modern mock-epic that uses the known historical basics to rift on a large number of issues well beyond the religious bigotry of the Salem witch trials as they were treated by Arthur Miller in The Crucible, including slavery and racism, colonialism, and the patriarchy. The novel is intentionally anachronistic as Tituba at t ...more

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Apr 11, 2015 Angie Taylor rated it really liked it

This is a very interesting fictional depiction of a real black woman named Tituba, who was accused of being a witch during the Salem Witch trials. From a historical point of view it was interesting and informative to learn about someone, even if the majority of the details are fictitious, for whom there is hardly and written documentation about. Slavery is portrayed in all its gory awfulness, and again has left me confused with history and why anyone could ever think slavery was okay. From a wri ...more

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Nov 22, 2015 Colette rated it really liked it

Would recommend this historically-based tale to readers looking to hear a different perspective on the Salem Witch Trials.

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Nov 26, 2018 Orla Hegarty rated it it was amazing

Shelves: friends, africa-writes, sentbynlpl

This book is an imagined history of an actual person, Tituba. A person I didn't know existed until this year. Tituba was a black woman persecuted during the Salem witch trials in 17th century Puritan America.

Tituba's herstory comes to life in this imagining - complete with parody and current day intersections of feminism and racism.

This edition also had an author interview from the early 1990s that reveals a lot of information about the French novelist and the genre of Caribbean literature that ...more

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Oct 22, 2018 Carrie rated it really liked it

I don't write a review for everything, and I'm not going to for this. But you might want to check out my blog post on Unbound about this book.

...more

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Dec 01, 2020 Katy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Great beginning and ending. A bit slow in the middle.

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May 12, 2008 Violetsin rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: teachers, friends, family.

Recommended to Violetsin by: teacher

if anything, this book was intense. i liked it, above all, but there were some very descriptive parts where not very pleasent things were going on, but i stuck through it and loved it all in the end.
basically, what happens is this: tituba somehow gets sold or bought into slavery and has to move to Salem, Mass. everyone knows about her healing powers, that she refuses to use for evil even though poeple tell her to, and she gets convicted of being a witch. even her own husband turns on her so he c ...more

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About Maryse Condé

Maryse Condé

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Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean, French language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu. Maryse Condé was born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, the youngest of eight children. In 1953, her parents sent her to study at Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, an Guinean actor. After graduating, she ta ...more