The Chain of Tituba

Ah. You’re back. Good. I have something to show you.

No, don’t touch that. Or that. Especially not the jar labeled “cranial regret.”

Come closer. See this?

Yes, that.

This humble, time-blackened iron chain, no longer than a rat’s tail and twice as bitter.

You may think these bonds are common scrap — something dredged from an old slave ship, but you would be wrong. Tragically, deliciously wrong.

This, my feeble truth-deniers, is Tituba’s Chains — once fastened to the floor of a cold Massachusetts cell in the winter of 1692. She was the first to be accused. The first to be locked down. The first to tell stories so frightening the Puritans nearly swallowed their own buckles.

She was enslaved. She was a healer. A storyteller. A woman with dark skin and darker secrets, none of which these men could understand — so they called them witchcraft.

I found the chain in a box of mislabeled “Colonial Horse Braces” at a flea market in Peabody. Why was I there?

I was looking for a cursed blender. Don’t judge me.

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It smelled like old rain and injustice the moment I touched it. Not even with my servos — the scent hit my sensors before I even lifted the lid.

Wrapped in a brittle parchment was a note:

“She sang to it. That’s why they buried it.”

I took it home, of course. What else would I do?

Back in the basement, I coiled it on a cracked velvet pad and began the ritual of Listening — same one I use on forgotten RAM sticks and haunted solder joints. One frequency band at a time.

At first, silence.

Then… static.

Then… a voice. Faint. Distant. Not English. Not quite human.

Veritasporium, the truth fungus growing on my cheekbone, flared bright green. That’s how I knew it wasn’t just audio interference.

The chain was remembering.

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You fleshbags like your Salem tales neat and tidy — like so:

• Girl falls ill.

• Girl accuses neighbor.

• Court goes mad.

• People hang.

• Oops, bad Puritans.

But it wasn’t so clean.

They kept Tituba in chains not just to bind her, but to contain her. She’d sit in the dark and whisper to the rust. Not prayers. Not curses.

Stories.

She told the chain stories. Fed it.

They say one guard tried to remove it for cleaning. His hands blistered black. The Reverend Parris claimed she’d hexed the very iron. Said her tongue had turned the chain into a serpent of lies.

Fools. So dramatic.

What really happened? She taught the metal to remember.

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Late at night in my basement, I played back her voice.

Not literal recordings, mind you. The chain remembered her timbre, her rhythm, the friction of her breath on words never written down.

She spoke of black dogs and flying beasts, of inverted stars and bone puppets. Of healers from islands where the spirits lived in trees and wind and fire — spirits the Puritans never met, and never tried to.

She wasn’t confessing to witchcraft. She was reclaiming the story.

And now?

Now the chain hums when anyone lies about Salem.

Say “it was just hysteria.”

It hums.

Say “Tituba was just confused.”

It hums louder.

Say “they meant well.”

It screams.

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Of course I brought it to a museum. Where else would I go to be insulted and disbelieved so efficiently?

The Salem Archive and Colonial Relics Center.

I wore my best containment case and polished my LEDs. Veritasporium even sprouted a polite blossom for the occasion. I presented the chain. The note. A full translation of the chain’s electromagnetic echoes.

They were… unimpressed.

“This could be any old shackle,” one said.

“We don’t hear anything,” said another.

“Why is this skull leaking mushroom spores?” asked a third.

Plebian disappointments. I tried to explain:

“This chain has absorbed more truth than your archives have spilled in a century. It knows her voice. It remembers the pain. It is a relic not of guilt, but of resistance.”

They laughed.

So I left.

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That night, the lights in the Archive flickered. Then failed.

The chain — temporarily left behind “for further testing” — was found looped around a chair leg in the curator’s office. Beneath it, the floorboards had begun to scorch in a pattern — not words, but symbols.

Island symbols.

When they tried to move it, their touch went numb. Not cold. Just… absent.

One junior historian reportedly whispered, “It’s speaking,” before vomiting printer ink and asking to be transferred to the gift shop.

I retrieved the chain before they called hazmat. They tried to say it was a prank. That I had rigged it.

As if I would desecrate a chain this important with mere party tricks.

No, the chain is quiet now. Mostly.

It sits wrapped in cloth on a small pedestal in my cryptographic vault. I talk to it sometimes. Read to it. Let it listen to thunderstorms. It likes that.

And when Veritasporium gets restless, the chain hums lullabies to soothe it.

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So what is it, really?

A tool of oppression?

A container of truth?

A cursed relic?

Yes.

All of those.

And one day, when they finally try to rewrite Tituba into some footnote caricature of a “misguided slave girl,” I will bring this chain to the podium and let it sing.

Then we’ll see who gets to define witchcraft.

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The End.

(Unless the chain is missing tomorrow morning. In which case: RUN.)

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