I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem

Even during their own lives, the women, men, and children entangled in the Salem witch trials were caught between reality and the imagination, and as their lives have been further mythologized since, the one with perhaps the least measure of reality is Tituba, the slave accused of witchcraft about whom little is known, not even whether she was Native American or African. Into that space leaps the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, imagining a life both tragic and joyful for Tituba, in which her time in Salem—no more tragic than the rest of her days but far less joyful—is a forgettable interlude compared to her time before and after on her home island of Barbados. It is, as Tituba says, a "bitter, bitter story," but Condé, much like her hero, is a high-spirited, life-loving, sharp-elbowed storyteller.