Reclaiming Tituba: What The Crucible left out

Abstract

Reclaiming TitubaWhat The Crucible left out Winsome Pinnock According to historical records of the 1692 Salem witch trials, Tituba, an enslaved woman who was part of Reverend Samuel Parris's household, was the first person accused of witchcraft to make a confession. Confession was a clever strategy: it ensured her survival and, because prosecutors needed her to share the identities of her necromantic consorts, it gave her the agency to turn the tables on her captors. The more than two hundred denunciations that followed overwhelmed Salem Village, unleashing havoc and profound devastation in the community. For a brief moment, power was wrested from the white men on the church committee and given to an enslaved woman. Why, then, has Tituba been relegated to the shadows of history, the story [End Page 104] of her heroic resistance to her enslaved condition going largely untold? Why did avowedly liberal playwright Arthur Miller reduce her to a minor character in The Crucible, his beautifully dramatized evocation of the trials? Why did he portray her as a stereotypical African voodoo priestess, denying her the complexity and humanity that he bestowed on other characters? I do not know of any fellow playwrights who do not admire The Crucible for Miller's impeccable stagecraft and his skillful use of historical research. As he portrays, Salem Village did become enthralled by the trials in 1692. We now know that many of those who pressed charges against their neighbors did so for financial gain or to settle property rights disputes. Miller subtly adapted that history to enhance the drama of the trials and ratchet up the tension: when a handful of flawed and ordinary individuals are accused of witchcraft, they face the moral dilemma of securing their freedom by owning up to the charges or by professing their innocence (in other words telling the truth) to face condemnation and execution. Will they risk their lives to speak out against the witch-hunts? I fully appreciate Miller's approach to this question. Where I have trouble is reconciling the historical Tituba, the clever strategist, with Miller's version of her. While other characters are tested to their limits, Miller's Tituba is denied agency and interiority, known in the play only for allegedly leading girls in salacious naked dancing and in the sacrifice of chickens. ________ i first encountered tituba as a thirteen-year-old in mid-1970s England, when my school produced an excerpt from The Crucible. I was one of four Black girls in my drama class, but none of us was cast as Tituba. I was assigned to play John Proctor's servant Mary Warren, who becomes an accuser in the witch-hunt. (Out of necessity, productions at my progressive all-girls state school—the equivalent of a U.S. public school—used color- and gender-blind casting long before they became a theatrical trend.) I was a keen drama student with aspirations to become an actress, and my ambitions were encouraged and nurtured by my teachers. My school [End Page 105] drew from a pocket of disadvantage and deprivation embedded in the rather well-to-do environs of Islington, in North London, and the teachers believed that involvement in the arts would give the students aspirations as well as the skills to achieve them. Most of my female teachers were heavily involved in second-wave feminism; in 1972, the school hosted Britain's first feminist conference. The teachers wove the second wave's newly won liberation into their teaching, urging us—their young, female students—to interrogate literature from a feminist perspective. They made no mention of race as such. I suppose the thinking then was that feminist ideas were true for all women regardless of economic background or ethnic identity. One of my beloved drama teachers explained that The Crucible was allegorical, that Miller used the Salem witch trials to speak out about McCarthyism—a period of moral panic in U.S. history in the late 1940s and the 1950s when many institutions and individuals with left-leaning politics were accused of being Communists or fellow travelers whose goal was to overthrow the U.S. government. So seriously was this perceived threat...