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Tituba (pronounced Titchewba)
is named after the woman who was convicted as a witch during
the This is a photo of Tituba on "her" rug. It is a silk rug from Saudi Arabia-- and ever since we got it, Tituba has claimed it as the only floor covering worthy of a cat of her stature. |
)
 This is Tituba
as a kitten. She was so tiny, and it is hard to believe that
she was ever this small. You can't really tell in this photo,
but her curly tail is already starting to show up. We don't know
what kind of kitty has a tail as curly as hers, but she has always
had it. She's playing with a little cloth mouse. Usually her
favorite prey is the lizard colony in our back yard. |
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Poetry For Cats: The Definitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse humans, feral delirious rabid, overgrown railyards, searching for a catnip hit, intoxication leaping to bat the hard white moon ball bouncing in the black top sky, pedestrians and strolled with ominous nonchalance under window-washers ladders, A.S.P.C.A. shelter hoping that the lunatic in the loden green loungewear would adopt the paranoid parrot instead. . . . who ran through the subway tunnels pursued by herds of rats as big as broncos rhinos hippos, enormous ar- moured rodents hammering along the knife-bright rails on horny hooves, who were chased by stir-crazy dogs in Central Park and clambered up Cleopatra's Needle using the edges of the smog-softened hieroglyphs as paw holds and sat laughing on the pointed peak at the impotent must below, who whined and shrieked like car alarms in the brown- stone gardens of uptown matrons until they put out the leftover gravlax appetizers in a Spode china dish, who fell off a ledge of the Plaza hotel trying to evade the house dick after browsing on room service trays and landed on little cat fee ten stories down this is a true story and walked away totally intact, and didn't even rate a photo in the Post let alone Animal of the Year of the cover of Time magazine, who caught and killed and actually ate a pigeon in Her- ald square that tasted of rust & grease & pizza crusts & bus exhaust, dived into a storm drain and thereby narrowly avoided ending u pin a lab cage at Brookhaven wear- ing a plutonium flea collar, . . . |
Salem witch trials. She
is also featured in Arthur Miller's The Crucible and a
book by Maryse Conde called I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.
I had always wanted to name a cat after this woman, whose
story intrigues me-- some scholars say that the popular notion
that she was black is incorrect, that Tituba was probably what
we would call today a Native American (from South America). Was
she really a witch? She probably was an herbalist, and probably
was not a Christian-- at least not the kind of Christian that
the Salem residents recognized. But she refused to back down,
knowing as she did that the residents really did not want her
to be freed. I love her spirit-- which my kitty shows as well.