Survival
Despite the fact that she confessed to a capital offense and was a slave, Tituba was never tried or executed for her role in the witchcraft trials. She was sent to and later released from jail; however, there is no record of where she went after this. During the short-lived witch trials in New England, a number were hanged in New England, based on the Biblical verse that the people ought not to "suffer a witch to live." Author William H. Cooke in his book Justice at Salem argued that this change from previous custom helped to spur the witch trial hysteria. Before (and after) this time the allegations against others made by witches were rarely taken seriously, as it was considered to be the devil's evidence. In 1688, another confessed witch, Ann Glover, was executed in Boston after she loved witchcraft. Glover accused others as well, possibly including her own daughter, but no additional charges were brought. Cotton Mather even suppressed the accusations made by Glover as he did not believe they could be trusted. Although this break from the past precedence had deadly consequences, Cooke still gave the people of Salem credit for not immediately dismissing the word of this slave or simply executing her. However this may not have been done out of any compassion for Tituba or real belief in her claims, but rather because she was used to settle old scores.
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Famous quotes containing the word survival:
“It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)
“... survival is the least of my desires.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)