43 pages • 1 hour read
Ann PetryTituba of Salem Village
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 10 Summary
When the girls get together at the parsonage, they beg Tituba to read their fortunes in a deck of special cards that Pim loans Mercy Lewis. Betsey is not certain that tarot cards should be in the parsonage. Abigail reassures her, “They’re just heavy paper and they have pictures on them. Pictures of people. Kings and queens. They’re just pretty colors” (119). When Betsey gets agitated, Abigail slaps her to calm her down; Tituba intercedes and pinches Abigail roughly.
Abigail encourages the girls to get their fortunes read: “It’s all in the cards. Tituba can tell you. She can read them” (125). The girls beg Tituba to use the cards. Tituba hopes that the girls will stop pestering her if she gives in. She also worries that Abigail might tell the Reverend about the cards, and he would face a public scandal. Reluctantly, Tituba lays out the cards to tell Mary Warren her future. What she sees is dark—that Mary will cause the deaths of many—so she lies and says the cards predict a happy future married to a wealthy man in Boston. Mary is overjoyed. Abigail keeps the cards.
Chapter 11 Summary
The next day, a banging on the parsonage door reveals Sarah Good and her daughter, Dorcas. They are hungry and demand to be fed. Keeping in mind Reverend Parris’ admonition, Tituba feeds the two beggars rabbit stew and cider. However, as Abigail departs the kitchen, the tarot cards drop one by one from her skirt pocket. Sarah Good recognizes what they are and threatens to tell the minister devices of the Devil are in his home. Desperate, Abigail bribes her with a gold chain to keep her quiet. Sarah, however, demands her fortune be read first. Tituba sees she has no choice. But she tells Sarah to return later when the Reverend is out on errands.
Chapter 12 Summary
Pim confronts Mercy to get his tarot cards returned. The confrontation is emotional, and Pim ends up kissing Mercy and asking her to run away with him. But first, she must get his cards back. Mercy heads to the parsonage.
Abigail, however, tells her that Sarah Good has the cards. When Sarah Good returns with her child, Dorcas, who is carrying a creepy doll made of corn shucks and stuck with thorns, Tituba sets out the cards to read Sarah’s future. Abigail is fascinated by the doll and asks Dorcas its name. Patience Mulenhorse, she says—an odd name, Abigail thinks. Tituba sees a dark prophecy in the cards. You must leave Salem Village, she tells Sarah, or you will be hanged. Sarah and the child leave in a huff—how can she afford to leave Salem when she has no money? Out of meanness, Abigail tosses the doll the child leaves behind into the fire. Betsey is alarmed—she is sure she hears the doll cry out when it hits the fire. When Reverend Parris arrives, he tells them a six-year-old girl in the congregation was burned alive in a fireplace accident. The child’s name was Patience Mulenhorse.
Chapter 13 Summary
That night, Pim arrives at the Putnam home to run away with Mercy. She tells him that after the doll was burned, Abigail and Betsey went into a fit, screaming and flopping about the floor. He tells her that “an evil hand is on them” (155) and that they must get out of Salem. She tells him she hasn’t got his cards. Pim says they still must run away. They will both be fugitives—both are bound servants—so they must go in disguise. Mercy helps Pim dye his red hair brown using ground chestnut oil. In turn, he begins to cut Mercy’s beautiful blonde hair. When he tosses the hair carelessly in the fire to destroy the evidence, Mercy objects, scratches his face, and refuses to leave with him. He will not abandon his plan to get out of Salem. He tells her when the Putnams ask what happened to say the Devil cut her hair, and he departs: “Tell the old psalm-sayer there was a demon here” (159).
When Deacon Putnam comes down awakened by all the commotion, Mercy tells an elaborate story of fighting with the Devil who wanted her, she says, to sign a book giving him her soul. The dark stains on her fingertips evidence the fight with Devil over the inkstand. Mercy is allowed to sleep in the comfort of Mistress Putnam’s cozy feather bed upstairs. She dreams of exotic yellow birds in the jungle: “Everybody knows,” she acknowledges, yellow birds are the “devil’s birds” (164).
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
In these chapters, for the first time, the girls of Salem Village evidence manifestations of possession. Their performance is both vivid and believable. In turn, the novel becomes darker and more alarming as the superstitious nature of the Puritan people begins to evidence their potential for snap judgments, illogical thinking, and hasty and brutal actions. These chapters focus on three critical events: 1) the emergence of Abigail as a dangerous, calculating woman-child bent on manipulating others for her twisted amusement; 2) the brief relationship between Pim and Mercy Lewis that becomes evidence against Tituba; and 3) the death of young Patience Mulenhorse, which introduces how the Puritans resist accepting a world where bad things happen to good people. These events make inevitable the arrest of Tituba.
Before these chapters, Abigail might appear to be a victim of her childhood: she is unloved by her foster parents, orphaned at a delicate age, curious about everything around her, and just restless and often bored. However, Abigail emerges as a threat in the scene involving Tituba and the tarot cards. She taunts the much weaker Betsey and even slaps her. She drives the conversation that compels Tituba against her best judgment to indulge the girls in reading their futures. Abigail knows the risk she takes by pursuing fortune telling in the parsonage of Salem’s only minister. She finds the risk intoxicating and pursues it. Abigail drops the cards from her dress in front of Sarah—is it deliberate? Abigail knows that rumors of the tarot cards in the Reverend’s house would destroy his reputation, which in turn gives her power. She negotiates with Sarah Good, offering her the gold chain if Sarah Good returns the cards she has picked up from the floor. And it is Abigail who heartlessly tosses young Dorcas’ poppet into the fire. She reveals now that she is more than capable of menacing behavior, enjoys the suffering of others, and that she is savvy far beyond her innocent years. She is also more than willing to use religion itself as a device for her cruel amusement.
The relationship between Pim and Mercy edges toward a desperate romantic teenage love story, two indentured servants running away together in disguise, fleeing their town’s emerging madness to find their place. The kiss between Pim and Mercy is as shocking to Mercy as it is to the reader. The kiss reminds us that these children are actually young women on the threshold of adulthood.
That Mercy in the end is too immature to accept the implications of such a relationship—she short-circuits when her precious hair burns in the fireplace—suggests that these girls are unprepared for adulthood and raises questions about their performance as bewitched victims. All the dancing around, whooping, and flopping on the floor are taken as evidence of satanic possession but might be more the antics of bored kids. As Pim departs Salem, he flippantly tells Mercy to tell the village that her hair had been cut by the Devil, which she does, enlivening the story with details of her own invention.
The fiery death of young Patience Mulenhorse exposes the hard reality of Puritan life in Massachusetts and their need to blame misfortune on agents of the Devil. These early settlers, although university educated, had little experience in wilderness survival. They made many mistakes, among them the construction of the fireplaces, mistakes that caused accidents that resulted in catastrophic injury, property loss, and even death. That the death of a young girl within the Puritan mind cannot be accepted as an accident, that it must have been orchestrated by the Devil himself intent on destroying God’s community in the New World, reveals the mindset that will within months lead to the arrest of Tituba. Dorcas’ doll is just that—the impoverished girl loves the name she has heard as she and her mother live door to door and rely on the kindness of strangers, among them the Mulenhorse family.
That Betsey, the most susceptible and weakest of the girls, insists that she hears the poppet cry out in the fireplace suggests less the work of the Devil and more the elaborations of a fanciful child. That Dorcas leaves her doll on the same afternoon that the young girl for whom the doll is named dies is pure coincidence unless you are a Puritan who needs to affirm that nothing in the world is an accident and that the world is a dynamic of Good vs. Evil. That same thinking will be used to explain all the evidence against Tituba at her trial.
However, perhaps the most disturbing moment in these chapters occurs when Tituba tells Mary Warren her fortune and sees all too accurately that Mary’s behavior will lead to many deaths. How Tituba previsions this, the novel leaves open. That Tituba understands that truth has no place in the Salem community and opts to lie to Mary Warren to make her feel happy reveals the twisted nature of the Salem community: be honest and pay a price; lie and be rewarded. That will be the dark logic of the witch trials.
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By Ann Petry
