Tituba was an enslaved woman in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris at Salem Village in 1692. She was the property of the man whose daughter and niece first showed the afflictions that began the crisis, and she was among the first three people accused. She was examined at the beginning of March, and unlike the two women accused beside her she confessed.
The confession is long and vivid. It describes a creature that appeared to her, a book to be signed, other women in the company. It is also, on any fair reading, the product of the situation she was in. She was a woman owned by the household that was accusing her, in a colony where an enslaved person had no protection against anything, and there is testimony that Parris beat her before she spoke. What she produced was an account built from the questions she was asked, delivered by someone with no safe way to say no.
It mattered enormously. A denial can be dismissed as a lie; a detailed confession that names others turns a local disturbance into a conspiracy with a shape, and gives the magistrates something to look for. The crisis that followed took nineteen lives on the gallows, one man pressed to death under stones for refusing to plead, and several more in gaol.
Tituba survived. She was held for more than a year and released in 1693 when her fees were paid by someone other than Parris. She then vanishes from the record.