What are some quotes from I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem?

Here are some important quotes from the novel:

• "Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt" (page 3). This passage begins the book and establishes the idea that Tituba was born from the violence of racism and sexism that surrounded slavery. One of the themes of the book is the power of women in the face of discrimination and violence. While Tituba is born from white male aggression, she goes on to fight against this type of violence.


• “They hanged my mother. I watched her body swing from the lower branches of a silk cotton tree. She had committed a crime for which there is no pardon. She had struck a white man. She had not killed him, however. In her clumsy rage she had only managed to gash his shoulder.” Tituba's mother is hanged for resisting the sexual advances of a white man, showing the power of slave owners to do what they want to their slaves, particularly the women. Slaves were treated as sexual and material property. 


• "You would have said I wasn’t there, standing right there on the threshhold of the room. They were talking about me, but at the same time they were ignoring me. They were scratching me off the map of human beings. I was a non-being. An invisible." In this passage, Tituba discusses the cruel and dismissive way her white owners treat her. They don't see her has a human, but as an invisible pawn who they can do with what they want.


• "At this point in my life I was haunted by the temptation to kill myself. It seemed that Hester had set me an example to follow. Alas! I didn't have the courage" (page 112). In jail in Salem, Tituba meets Hester Prynne, the fiction heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Hester kills herself in protest, as she has been jailed for having an out-of-wedlock child while the father of her child remains free. Tituba yearns for this type of escape, but she does not succumb to the temptation to kill herself.


• “Life is too kind to men, whatever their color” (page 130). This quote is about the power of men over women; even slave men, such as John Indian, do not treat women as equals.