Salem Witch Trial Sparknotes

The Salem Witch Trial is a historically located incident stirred by the accusations of an Indian slave woman, named Tituba, who confessed to the practice of witchcraft under the pressure and physical force of colonial slave owners in 1692. She escaped execution, unlike many accused women, because of her ability to acclimate to the culture and society of her oppressors. In Breslaw’s portrait of Tituba’s life starting with her ambiguous Amerindian-Caribbean roots, she shows how Tituba’s first step in acclimating to British-colonial society was to force her mother tongue to take a backseat to the language introduced and enforced by English colonizers who captured “American Indians to sell as slaves in Barbados” for the purpose of providing slave labor to British colonies in

The disglossia present during the seventeenth-century when Caribbean Islands were being colonized was one that placed the English language above all other languages. The English language was associated with civilization, while all other native languages of the Island and of the slaves were seen as symbols of savagery. Although Tituba was no longer an inhabitant of Barbados after she was sold into the slave trade, she carried that sense of disglossia with her when she moved into the Parris household in Massachusetts in 1689.2 This sense of knowing when to use the English while living in the Puritan community was ultimately the reason for her survival. The fact that she knew when and where to use the English language, especially while giving her testimony in the trials in 1692, afforded her the power to go undetected where her white counterparts who were accused of witchcraft did