The Evolution of Tituba

When I was reading Act IV of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a play that uses the Salem Witch Trials as a metaphor for Cold War era McCarthyism,  I was confused about something so started to do some research on the actual events of the witch trials to see if they could help me get some facts straight. The main subject of my research was Tituba, the slave of Salem's priest- Parris - who was an accused of witchcraft and was the first to admit it to being a witch (albeit under duress).

Image of Tituba performing sorcery. Source

I stumbled upon an interesting piece of information while doing this research: Tituba was referred to in historical documents as being "Indian." So why in Miller's play is she portrayed as African? Actually, Miller only tells us that she is from Barbados, but at the time of the Salem Witch Trials (1692), Barbados' native population was long gone and African slave workers were common. So, Miller's character certainly seems to be African.

In a 1972 article titled "The Metamorphosis of Tituba, or Why American Intellectuals Can't Tell an Indian Witch from a Negro" (which is a great name) Hansen states that Tituba's "race has been changed from Native, to half-Native and half-Negro, to Negro. Currently she is being represented (as in Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible) as a Negro practicing voodoo." So Tituba is definitely portrayed as of African descent in The Crucible, despite the fact that she was not. Actually, according to Hansen, Miller was the first to portray Tituba as having no trace of native heritage.


The article goes on to discuss how even the witchcraft involved in the trials changed. In reality, the girls poured an egg white into a glass to try and figure out what their future husband's occupations would be. Hansen states that "The egg and glass is an English Folk method of divining." The magic portrayed by authors changed from an English fortune telling practice with eggs and water to Indian practices brought by Tituba to the girls to voodoo - like it is in The Crucible. Now, on one hand it makes sense for Miller to change this element of the witchcraft because the egg white thing  is far less interesting or scandalous to us than girls dancing naked in the woods while drinking soup with live frogs in it. But he did more than change the magic, he changed the culture that the witchcraft came from to match Tituba's, which very clearly shifts the blame for the witchcraft to Tituba.

Miller almost certainly knew Tituba was not of African descent (because NO ONE before him had suggested she was of solely African descent) and that the girls were reading eggs in water not drinking chicken blood, so why did he choose to portray her and the witchcraft as he did?