An idea that struck me while I was sanding boards today for a table I'm building. I was listening to Delta Rae's "Bottom of the River" and thinking about the new season of American Horror Story: Coven.
Plus, I was in Salem this time last year. ;-)
Disclaimer: The characters are 100% not mine.
She was payment for a debt, settlement of an agreement between gentlemen on the island of Barbados. A local man, known for poor decisions at the gambling tables, owed Reverend Samuel Parris a fair sum of money. Instead of paying that sum, he gave Mr. Parris an Indian slave from his stock.
She was barely fifteen at the time and Parris was unmarried. He took the girl with him to the Colonies, to a small village just north of Boston where a newly arrived group of settlers were in need of a man of the cloth.
She brought her name and all she owned with her that new world. She brought a husband and birthed a daughter, Violet, along the way. She cared for the good Reverend and his family, helped raise his two daughters in that new land.
But then the Trouble came. Unwelcome and unexplained, a sickness swept over the village and took hostage once quiet and cheerful girls. Whispers ran like wildfire and blame landed in one single place, on the Indian slave who had come with Reverend Parris to the village.
Her mother had taught her well, though. She pointed a finger at Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, waited for the Puritans to change their minds, and slipped away into the night with her husband and daughter before Bridget Bishop swung from the end of a noose.
No one knows where she landed and spent the rest of her days. Her name disappeared from the registries in 1694, with her last known entry belonging to a family in a northern fishing village in Maine. From there, she became a ghost.
No matter what became of her, though, we know she kept her name. Her script is perfect and easy to read on the worn and faded pages of the Haven Town Registry.
Tituba.