Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 7, 1993 TAG: 9303070208
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MARYSE CONDE CONJURES FACTS AND FICTION
I, TITUBA: BLACK WITCH OF SALEM. By Maryse Conde. $19.95. University Press of Virginia.In 1986, Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde published "I, Tituba" in French. The novel is now available to English readers via lyrical translation by Conde's husband, Richard Philcox. In "I, Tituba," witchcraft takes on a face and a name and very noble purposes.
Here's how it starts: "Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt." At the age of 7, Tituba watches her mother hanged for striking a white man.
Thus orphaned, Tituba is taken in by Mama Yaya, who shares her healing and visionary powers with her young ward. "She taught me that everything lives, has a soul, and breathes. That everything must be respected. That man is not the master riding through his kingdom on horseback," Tituba says.
It is unfortunate that Tituba doesn't heed her mentor, instead taking up with a rake and rambling man, John Indian. Blinded by her love for him, Tituba returns to slavery, submitting to the indignities of her overzealously Christian mistress, Susannah Endicott.
When her mistress falls victim to a fatal illness, everyone but Tituba is mystified. Revenge is swift and terrible. John Indian and Tituba are sold to Puritan preacher Samuel Parris, bound for Salem, Mass.
Conde's accounts of the Salem witch trials are fittingly horrible, conveying the infectious, fearful finger-pointing that sent innocent women to the gallows or to languish in prison. It is in prison that Tituba meets Hester Prynne of "Scarlet Letter" fame, who rails against Puritan society and the suppression of women like the best of 20th-century feminists.
Such playful blending of historical fact, literary legend and poetic cadences makes for wonderfully surprising fiction.
Released from prison, Tituba is purchased by a Jewish merchant, enamored of her ability to call back the ghost of his dead wife. In exchange, and because he has come to love her, the merchant frees Tituba, giving her passage back to Barbados. There she assumes a mythic presence, allying herself with leaders of the slave rebellion. It is a crime for which she stands to be punished, though her fate, finally, is delicately ambiguous.
"I Tituba" is ripe with stinging irony and moral purpose. It's the bravest, most inventive novel I've read in a long time, and it makes me want to read more of Maryse Conde.
Joan Schroeder has a story in the anthology "Life on the Line."