I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem

Award-winning book by one of the most important black writers of our time.

Tituba , a Black woman born in Barbados in the 17th century, is reborn three centuries later. She becomes real again, thanks to award-winning writer Maryse Condé, winner of the 2018 New Academy Prize (Alternative Nobel Prize).

At the beginning of the book, Maryse Condé notes: "Tituba and I lived a close intimacy for a year. It was during our endless conversations that she told me these things she had never confided to anyone before." Likewise, anyone who reads Tituba will hear her speak of the invisible, destabilizing crystallized structures, mediating new conceptions of identities and cultures, and protecting insurgents.

Here, this fascinating character is brought out of the silence historiography has consigned her to. The daughter of an enslaved Black woman, she experienced the terror of seeing her mother murdered for defending herself from the rape of a white man and of learning that her father killed himself because of the same white man. She grew up under the care of a woman who possessed the power of healing and who initiated her into the mysteries. As an adult, she fell in love with John Indien and gave up her freedom for him.

One of the first women tried for witchcraft in the Salem courts in 1692, Tituba had been enslaved and taken to New England by Pastor Samuel Parris, who denounced her. Even protected by spirits, she could not escape the lies and accusations of the Puritan hysteria of the time.

Tituba's story is the story of women of the diaspora and of Black people. It is also the story of all those who follow their own truth, rather than professing the colonizer's faith. It is the story of dissidents and free souls. That is why it is a beautiful and complex story, whose ending, despite misfortunes, is always benevolent, for it is the story of those who resist.

"To learn about Tituba , the Black Witch of Salem, you need to follow someone who knows how to handle the alchemy of words. Maryse Condé has the formulas, the magic potions of writing." - Conceição Evaristo