The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

was extremely low. 68 That slaves could not testify against their masters in court made it highly unlikely
that such a case was likely to arise absent a public scandal. Instead, we must see the power of the
owner over the owned as an example of petty sovereignty: the slave's relation to the master was similar
to the subject's relation to the state.
Reverend Parris had in fact obtained ownership of Tituba during his time as owner of a small
sugar plantation in Barbados – in other words, his experience as a slave owner would have been
informed by the practice of slavery in the Caribbean, where the treatment of slaves was far less
constrained by the law than in Puritan New England – and as the long history of slave rebellion and
repression indicates, it was quite common for owners to torture slaves in order to detect slave
conspiracies. Although there is no indication that Parris treated Tituba as a field-slave (for whom the
most barbaric treatment was reserved), it is highly likely that Parris would have been willing to make
use of the full extent of his power as master of a human being in order to find out who else was
afflicting his daughter. In other words, Parris had the motive, as well as the opportunity, and even the
semi-legal justification to torture Tituba for information.
But perhaps the strongest evidence that Tituba told the truth to Calef when claiming to have
been beaten into confessing lies in the manner in which she confessed. Tituba's experience with magic
was very much in the tradition of folk beliefs regarding witchcraft – using black and white magic to
harm others or to find out who had harmed them. That it was Tituba who was contacted by Mary
Sibley in the matter of the witch cake' fits this pattern precisely – using magic in order to fight magic.
Such beliefs were antithetical to the elite-view of witchcraft: magic could only come from the Devil –
humans could not use magic on their own – and so such methods were more likely to draw the attention
of devils and imperil the souls of those attempting to wield them than they were to identify witches.
And yet when Tituba confessed, it was not to this sort of maleficium – consistent with the folk-beliefs
regarding witchcraft – that she admitted, but to signing a pact with Satan. In other words, she
confessed in court to exactly the charge that Parris was most likely to have believed. And to have done
so in open court was to have declared herself an enemy of God and society – to have marked herself for
death.
68 “Both Peter Kalm and Benjamin Franklin declare that a master who killed his slave was liable to the death penalty;
though Peter Kalm says that he does not know of an instance where the sentence was carried out. He observes, however,
that a case having arisen, even the magistrates secretly advised the guilty master to leave the city, since if he remained he
must certainly be put to death.” (Turner, p. 147)
71