“Candy No Witch in Her Country”: What One Enslaved Woman’s Testimony During the Salem Witch Trials Can Tell Us About Early American Literature

Abstract

As historians have already noted, those of African descent were actively involved in constructing new identities in a new and often hostile American landscape. Often, their actions conflicted with larger social and political structures that sought to dehumanize and silence them as slaves and racialized others. This essay interrogates the ways in which their active engagement in the social, religious, political, and economic life of colonial America affected the literature produce in and about that region. What is the relationship between black Africans as material presences in colonial America and their representations in the early American literary archive? In the essay, Smith examines the court testimony of an enslaved black African woman to illuminate the ways in which multicultural contact shaped formation of the literature.