Today in Salem: It’s been pouring for two days, and the frozen ground is liquifying to mud. It’s a relief to Tituba, who’s spent most of the brutally cold winter longing for the warmth of Barbados and telling its old stories to Betty and Abigail. Some are about duppies, the ghosts of dead people who manifest as humans (or animals!) and make people do and say strange things. Even worse is the Heartman, who carves the hearts out of disobedient children, then gives their hearts to the Devil. Then there’s the tale of the baccoo, a tiny man who lives in a bottle and can decide a person’s destiny.
Tituba has also taught the girls how to drop an egg into a mug of water so they can see their future husbands. So far they haven’t seen more than a few white swirls, but Tituba can see their husbands clearly – working large farms, with warm houses, and plenty to eat.
Recently, though, the girls have been suffering from strange afflictions, and now a neighbor approaches Tituba with an idea. Rev Parris and his wife are gone for the day, she says, so it’s a perfect time to make a witch-cake. If the girls’ afflictions are caused by a witch, the cake will reveal who that is.
This is not one of the old stories from Barbadoes, but Tituba does believe in witches, so when the neighbor explains it to her it makes sense. When someone is bewitched, the witch is inside every part of the person’s body. So if a dog bites the bewitched person, he’s also biting the witch. That makes the real-life witch cry out in agony and reveal who they are.
The trick is to find a way for the dog to bite the bewitched person without hurting them. But there’s a solution: Since a witch inhabits every part of a person’s body, that includes urine. If you take out the urine and find a way to feed it to the dog, it should work. Hence, the witch-cake.
Tituba fills a small iron pan with rye flour and ashes from the hearth. She’s already scooped a small bit of urine from the girls’ chamberpot, and now she mixes it into the flour and ashes until it makes a paste. She slides the pan into the fire and waits until the mixture cooks into a flat biscuit. Then she feeds it to the family dog, and waits. And waits.
The Parris family dog is only too happy to eat anything that’s given to him, including the witch cake. But then nothing happens. No one is screaming or running away. The dog just finishes his snack, curls up in front of the warm hearth, and goes to sleep.
LEARN MORE: What were some other ways to identify a witch?
There were many ways to identify witches. In Salem, these were the ones used most frequently.
Moles, birthmarks, skin tags, scars, or any other mark or protrusion of flesh could be marks of the Devil. For additional proof, the examiner would nick the mark with a blade. If it didn’t bleed or hurt, it was the Devil’s mark. During the Salem Witchcraft Trials, some examiners used knives with retractable blades, so when they “punctured” the mark, nothing happened, proving the person was indeed in league with the Devil.
The inability to recite scripture correctly pointed to the Devil’s influence. In Salem, the judges most frequently used the Lord’s Prayer as the test. Not only was it Scripture, but any devout churchgoer should be able to recite it perfectly. The Devil, though, or anyone in league with him, would not be able to say it.
The touch test said that if a witch touched someone they were bewitching, the witch’s evil power would immediately transfer back to them, leaving the bewitched person “cured” (at least for the moment).
WHO was Tituba?
Little is known about Tituba’s background, though scholars have traced her roots to an Arawak-speaking group in present-day Venezuela. At the time, there was a labor crisis in Barbados, with a huge demand for indigenous slaves. So it’s possible (or even likely) that Tituba and her husband were taken from South America and enslaved in Barbados before they were purchased by Reverend Samuel Parris.
In white Puritan Salem, Tituba had three strikes against her: She was a black, female, slave. This plus her exotic accent and culture made her an easy target. So it may not be a surprise that she was the first person to be accused.
Although Tituba was the first person who was accused, she languished in prison for 15 months until she was sold to an unknown person for the price of her jail fees. (It’s presumed that Rev Samuel Parris refused to pay them because he was so angry at her involvement.) We know nothing about what happened to her after that.