Before playing Tituba, the alleged conjurer and caster of spells from Barbados, one year in the class play at Parkview High, the most mileage I’d logged was a summer road trip’s distance between Little Rock and Baton Rouge. This was during a time when an authentic Caribbean clip was hard to hear in my Arkansas hometown.

Ignorant, I affected an accent I’m certain was astonishingly off kilter, though the drama teacher seemed hardly to have noticed. She gave me wide berth. Down on my knees onstage, I begged for mercy in some dreamt-up voice of a black woman who, in real life and in Arthur Miller’s border-shattering play “The Crucible,” was enslaved on a Barbadian sugar plantation, then carted by the plantation owner, a London-born Harvard grad and self-appointed preacher, into servitude in his Puritan household in Salem, Mass. Based on accusations by the owner’s young daughters, Tituba was the first woman tried in the famous Salem witch trials of four centuries ago.

Prepping for our respective roles in that high school performance, our cast had explored the life and themes of playwright Miller, and how his standing up to the chief witch-hunters of his era, the Red-baiting McCarthy and his congressional cohorts, cost Miller plenty. After an initially hostile reception, his work did eventually get labeled a classic.

As played out in recent headlines, the tale of former Hampton Bays Elementary School teacher Lauren Berrios and her losing lawsuit shows the timelessness of some of Miller’s themes. Berrios claimed she was fired because she was suspected of being a witch and, among other actions, for teaching her former students about the Salem witch trials, though, of course, that has long been a standard topic of study in each of the 50 states. According to news reports, one point of agreement in the case was that Berrios told other teachers that she’d visited a coven, a band of wicca or witches who devote themselves to a nature-centric spiritual practice that they say has nothing whatsoever to do with devil-worship.

The jury deliberated 60 minutes before voting to deny Berrios the $2.5 million in damages she sought. The school district’s lawyer called her a crackpot and liar. The lawyer had argued that Berrios was denied tenure and kicked off the payroll for not being up to snuff as a teacher.

The principal, whom she’d accused of going after her because he’d become a born-again Christian, told inquiring reporters he was abiding by an order of silence imposed by the judge. I wish he’d revealed something of substance about being a character in this drama - no matter its adjudicated end - given the actual questions it raises about religious freedom and understanding.

A few years ago, after this newspaper published an article I reported on the origins of celebrations of the winter solstice, a wiccan priest I’d interviewed called to thank me for shedding light but also to press me on what he considered a key point. Why had I not capitalized the “p” as in “Pagan” in the same way I would the “c” as in “Catholic” or “b” as in “Buddhist,” and so on? That would, perhaps, he told me, foster more clarity for those uninformed about his chosen construct, a spirituality predating Christianity and, in some ways, influencing it.

The unknowing often are frightened by this sort of truth. One of my nieces, born into our clan of mainly devout Christians, sounded a personal alarm the time I started babbling to a college admissions officer about the niece’s intellectual curiosity and wide-world brilliance, about her being conversant in many subjects, including paganism. (The small “p” is on account of the style format in this and other newspapers.) “People think you have two heads,” the niece said, shushing me. Explaining her spiritual searching to most people, especially those with wispy-thin religious views, did more to estrange than draw her closer.

In the rote coverage of this story out of East Hampton, the crafting of clever, catchy leads somehow overshadowed what might have been peeled back in this time of religious feuding over what is inerrant and what is not. It’s conceivable that another jury, at another moment, might find plausible another woman’s allegations of a frontal assault against her lack of orthodoxy.

Let’s not forget Tituba, who stood accused in her day. If she - born into in an era when blacks had not yet abandoned en masse the nature-centric, ancestral worship of animist West Africans - had been a conjurer, then what sort? What harm, what good might she have done as a result of her spiritual practice?

Source

• Gray, Katti. Courtroom crucible: heat but no clarity. (2007, March 26). Newsday, NY. Retrieved March 26, 2007.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Cultural, Legal Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.