43 pages • 1 hour read
Tituba of Salem Village
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Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
It is November 1688, and another beautiful day in Barbados. Tituba and her husband John, slaves married for 10 years who work on the estate of a widow Susanna Endicott, are told by their mistress that she has sold them both because of financial setbacks (Tituba finds out later her mistress had gambling debts). Reverend Samuel Parris, a failed New England entrepreneur who now hopes to secure work as a minister in Boston, purchased the two—they are to leave that afternoon for the Bay Colony. Mistress Endicott gifts her beloved slaves with heavy woolen clothes—she cautions them that Boston gets brutal winters.
Tituba packs their meager belongings, careful to include her thunderstone, a magic rock given to her in gratitude by an old man she cured of fever. Later that day, Tituba and John meet the Parris family at the dock: the Reverend, who leads everyone in a lengthy prayer before they board; his wife, Elizabeth, an invalid; his five-year-old daughter Betsey; and his nine-year-old niece, the orphan Abigail.
The boat trip is difficult. The rolling waves toss the tiny ship; the stench below deck is thick; and the farther north they go, the colder the air becomes. John assures Tituba stoically, “Whatever happens to the master, the slave must survive” (12).
Tituba finds sleeping below decks impossible; one night, while she walks the deck, she meets a boy named Pim, a stowaway. Tituba offers to secure food and water and promises to keep his presence a secret. What she does not know is that Abigail followed her.
Chapter 2 Summary
The boat arrives in Boston harbor. Tituba is upset to see two men lead Pim off the boat—she is told stowaways are whipped and then sold into indentured servitude. Abigail had reported the boy.
The Parris family heads for their new residence; they have rented the ground floor of a house near the wharf. The house is damp and cold. Samuel Conklin, a neighbor, arrives with wood to help get fires going.
Reverend Parris seeks a ministerial appointment in Boston; after all, he attended Harvard. But no posting is forthcoming, and the family settles in for the winter. The Reverend contracts John out to work in a tavern; Tituba is offered work by Conklin, who sees in Tituba’s powerful hands the potential for an expert spinner. One night, John returns home and tells Tituba he watched a woman accused of witchcraft hanged.
Chapter 3 Summary
One night Tituba returns home from the Conklins to find her mistress begging for her herbal tea, which Abigail refused to make. Tituba says she cannot be in two places at once; Abigail responds, “You could if you were a witch” (35). Tituba does not see the humor and boxes Abigail’s ears. Abigail says, “You hurt me […] some day I’ll hurt you” (36). Tituba understands she has made an enemy.
With spring, Tituba finds herself dreaming of Barbados—“dreams so vivid that she thought she could smell the sweet smell of the crushed [sugar] cane” (38). Tituba heads to the forest to find herbs for her medicinal tea. She meets a mysterious neighbor woman, Judah White, who offers to show her where the most succulent roots and plants can be found in the woods. Reverend Parris, however, forbids Tituba from fraternizing with Judah White; she is a witch, he says, and friends of witches could be hanged.
Chapter 4 Summary
In the first weeks of spring, a contingent from Salem Village, a remote farm community some 20 miles north of Boston, offers Reverend Parris a posting as their minister. Reverend Parris declines the offer—he did not go to Harvard to work for such a tiny congregation.
One night, when Tituba and John talk about Barbados, Tituba admits that a gypsy woman had once shown her how to tell fortunes using cards. Abigail overhears and asks Tituba to read her fortune, which Tituba refuses. The next day, Reverend Parris announces he will accept the Salem post in return for a handsome deal: ownership of the parsonage, free firewood, two acres of land, and a salary paid half in money and half in provisions. The appointment begins in November, two months away.
While packing, John hears that Pim has been sold to a farmer in Salem and is bound until he is 21. The family loads horse-drawn carts and heads to Salem. It is a difficult passage through dense woods. When they arrive at the village and Tituba sees the parsonage, she is disappointed. It is big, yes, but it “had a forbidding, desolate air, and if she could have refused to enter, she would have done so” (55). As they unload their carts, Tituba notices on the front steps that someone has left them a welcome gift: two eggs. Only when she inspects them does she discover they are rotten, left there as a prank.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
These opening chapters set up three critical ideas: 1) the generous heart and stoic endurance of the slave Tituba; 2) the greed and hypocrisy of the Reverend Parris; and 3) the threat of young Abigail Williams.
Tituba is a slave and, as such, is regarded by the white people as a commodity, a thing to be used. However, from the opening pages, she reveals her empathy for others, her compassion for misfits, and her moral conscience. She never complains when her mistress, without explanation, sells her (and her husband) to the New England family. Even though she must leave behind the island she loves and face an uncertain future in an inhospitable climate, Tituba accepts her mistress’s decision. She thinks momentarily of running away, but where can she run? She accepts her obligation to the mistress who bought her when she was only 14; “her mind [is] filled with questions” (3), but she accepts her fate.
On the ship during the treacherous ocean crossing, she never complains and never gets bitter. She helps the hungry stowaway Pim; she tends to other slaves tormented by seasickness, loneliness, and anxiety. When she takes stock of the residences in Boston and then in Salem, her heart is heavy over the desolate accommodations. But she refuses to surrender to despair. Without complaining, she tends to her cloying invalid mistress, works to organize both households, disciplines the children when they act selfishly or in ways that offend Tituba’s moral sensibility, and even masters the difficult craft of weaving as a way to express her creative soul and help with the household finances. She emerges as the novel’s moral and emotional center.
However, from the moment Reverend Parris is introduced, his hypocrisy is evident. He leads an extended prayer before the family boards the boat only because he is showing off to the boat’s owners in the hopes of securing a favorable (and for Reverend Parris, that means lucrative) posting in Boston. He scolds Tituba because she does not pay sufficient attention to his rambling invocation, which he takes as a sign of her paganism, although Tituba is a baptized Christian. Although he never actually completed his studies, he trumpets to anyone who will listen that he attended Harvard. He coolly negotiates with the Salem congregation to secure what he thinks is a sweetheart deal.
When he announces his new posting to his family, he only emphasizes the formidable size of the parsonage. Nothing religious motivates Reverend Parris; in fact, he went to Barbados to be a commodities trader but failed. The ministry is little more than his fallback career. Fretting over perceptions of him and his household, he acts like a devout minister. His complete lack of perception is revealed when he is pleased to see that his new congregation left him a welcome gift of two eggs, only to discover that the eggs are rotten and intended as an insult.
These opening chapters hint at the dark personality of Abigail Williams. She is a mean girl, but is she entirely to blame? Reverend Parris divides his affection between his daughter and his niece, making it clear Abigail is not a real part of his family. She is only eight and already marked. Isolated, Abigail struggles to find ways to connect to others, but she is more motivated by anger and resentment. She is petulant and says things she knows will get a rise out of her uncle because the alternative is his indifference to his ward. In ratting out the stowaway Pim, for instance, she simply enjoys making someone’s life miserable. She gets nothing out of Pim’s punishment except that cruel satisfaction. When she casually jokes about witchcraft, Tituba, warned by her husband about the seriousness of witchcraft to the Puritans, punishes Abigail. Because of this reprimand, Abigail vows revenge and is thus set up in these opening chapters as a threat despite her age and emotional problems.
These opening chapters set up what will become a triangulated plot that makes inevitable the tragedy of the Salem witch hysteria: Tituba, the heathen who is misunderstood and underappreciated and the most thoughtful, moral, and compassionate soul in Salem; the Reverend Parris, the pretend-minister whose heart is judgmental and whose soul is a cash register; and young Abigail with her sullen eyes and thin smile, a bad seed whose only way to connect with others is to hurt, anger, insult, or use them for her own amusement.
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