Tracing Tituba through American Horror Story: Coven

• Published in: European journal of American culture Vol. 38; no. 1; pp. 15 - 27
• Main Author: Downey, Dara
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol Intellect Ltd 01.03.2019
• Subjects: African Americans; American culture; Breslaw, Elaine; Cultural differences; Cultural heritage; Hansen, Chadwick; Laveau, Marie; Occult sciences; Television programs; Witchcraft; Salem Massachusetts; Barbados
• ISSN: 1466-0407; 1758-9118
• DOI: 10.1386/ejac.38.1.15_1

Abstract ‘I grew up on white girl shit like Charmed, and Sabrina The Teenage Cracker. I did not know that there even were black witches. But as it turns out, I am an heir to Tituba. She was a house slave in Salem. She was the first to be accused of witchcraft. So technically, I am part of your tribe’ (‘Boy Parts’, American Horror Story: Coven) (AHS: Coven). As the character Queenie implies in the above quotation, witches in the United States, and indeed the Americas more generally, are both united as a single ‘tribe’ and starkly divided by race and ethnicity. Tituba was a slave from Barbados who may or may not have encouraged the girls of Salem, Massachusetts, to dance in the forest and tell their fortunes in 1692. In many ways, Tituba, particularly as she is employed AHS: Coven, serves to crystallize this contradiction, not least through the conceptual vagueness regarding her racial status. On the one hand, Marie Laveau asserts that Tituba was of Arawak descent, but on the other, she effectively claims that the African American witches in the show are in turn descended from Tituba, while the white witches can trace their lineage back to the formerly English inhabitants of Salem. Witchcraft in the show is therefore both one big sisterhood and radically divided along lines of race and class, lines that also divide different forms of magic from one another. The uncertainty mentioned above, where Tituba becomes simultaneously Native American and African American, reflects similar uncertainties in historical accounts of the slave. While scholars such as Elaine Breslaw and Chadwick Hansen assert that she was most likely Native American, many others have simply assumed from her slave status, and from the associations with ‘voodoo’ that hang around her possible contributions to the witch hysteria, that she was ‘black’. Such assumptions serve an important cultural purpose, especially from the nineteenth century onwards. It allows the intimations of devil worship and dark magic that remain inextricable from many depictions of witchcraft to be linked only to African Americans, often associated with abjectified religious beliefs and practices, and not with Native Americans, who were being increasingly sentimentalized as ‘vanishing Indians’ and as avatars of harmony with nature and spiritual calm. AHS: Coven makes use of these long-standing assumptions and associations, both to allow Queenie to be less marginalized and more respected within the coven at Mrs Robichaux’s, and to divide her and Marie Laveau irrevocably from Fiona Good and her acolytes. At the same time, here and in the recent TV series Salem (2014–2017), Tituba’s difference from the other women and men hanged at Salem, and her status as scapegoat for and catalyst to the 1692 trials, becomes a covert means of suggesting that witchcraft is never Anglo-European in origin, but can always be traced back to Africa and/or the New World. As I argue in this article, the confusions regarding Tituba’s own heritage serve both to cement and to unsettle these differences, rendering her a mobile sign of generalized otherness that nonetheless refuses to be as easily pinned down as her accusers, and indeed those claiming descent from her, might wish.