According to author Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem was written "to express (her] feelings about present-day America" (Conde 203). Conde believes that little has changed in America since the days of the Puritans: many Americans are still hypocritical, narrow-minded racists (Conde 203). The main point that Conde makes in her fictional account of the life Tituba, who was actually accused of practicing witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 (Conde 183), is that America was (and is) a racist country. Conde uses her fictional account of Tituba's life to show that the United States was ruled by whites who made life miserable for the slaves. And Conde wants her readers to compare Tituba's life to that of black Americans today; in fact, Conde maintains that "for the majority of the (American) blacks, life is still hell" (Conde 203).
One of the problems that many African-Americans have encountered is their lack of knowledge of their own race's history. As Conde points out, "we hardly know what happened to our people before the time that they met the Europeans" (Conde 203). When Conde speaks of the Diaspora, she is talking about people who were formerly held captive, in a Biblical sense. Just as the Jews were dispersed among the Gentiles after being held in captivity in Babylon, Africans were taken as slaves to America, Brazil, and the West Indies. When the slaves were later freed, they had lost much of their knowledge of their own history and origins. Hence, a black person experiences a sense of Diaspora in the same sense that the Jews were taken from their homeland. Conde alludes to Tituba's mother's sense of Diaspora early in the story when she says that Tituba's mother, Abena, "played with the long plaits of her mistress' hair" as Abena told her mistress the stories Abena's mother had told Abena while she was growing up in the Ashanti village of Akwapim (Conde 4). Although Abena had been sold into slavery at ...