The girls who in that fateful final decade of the seventeenth century were bewitched or thought of as being bewitched in Salem Massachusetts were often orphans who had lost one or both parents in the frontier wars. There was for instance Mercy Short who had been abducted from Salem Falls, New Hampshire by Abenaki warriors in 1690. Both her parents and three of her siblings were among the thirty-four villagers killed during that raid. Freed eight months later through ransom Short became a maiden in Salem to a widow named Margaret Thacher. In 1692 after an errand to the Boston jail where some accused witches were being held, Mercy Short fell into fits. She had been "bewitched." But there can be little doubt her imagination was affected by her recent captivity and the horrors she had witnessed. Short gave a testimony to the fanatical Harvard-trained cleric Cotton Mather in which she said she had seen the Devil. He was, she said, "a short and Black Man." But she clarified, he was "not of a Negro, but of a Tawney, or an Indian color."
...
The Infamous witch hunt that convulsed the Salem Colony in 1692 and that swept along with them some twenty-four blameless souls. most of them women, most of them killed by hanging, had its beginnings in the false accusation made against Tibuba, an enslaved woman likely of Taino or Carib origin who was described by her neighbors simply as "Indian." Under torture and after beatings Tituba confessed to being a witch. Because she confessed and because she was subsequently coered into accusing others she was spared hanging. But the man who had enslaved her in Barbados, and in whose home she lived in Salem. the Purtian minister Reverend Samuel Parris - he too had been trained at Harvard - now sold her off into a further and likely more brutal slavery. After that second sale Tituba, who had been forced to leave her toddler daughter in the Parris household, disappeared from historical record. When Reverend Parris died twenty-eight years later in 1720 Tituba's daughter was bequeathed to his son Samuel Parris, Jr. and from that moment nothing further is known of the girl except for her name as written in the will of the old man: Violet.

From: Teju Cole: "Tremor," 2023