Tituba’s story begins on a slave ship bound for Barbados. In first-person, past-tense narration, the protagonist’s opening lines establish the setting and tone of her story: “Abena, my mother was raped by an English sailor […] I was born from this act of […] hatred and contempt” (3).

In Barbados, a plantation owner named Darnell Davis buys the pregnant Abena and two men, who, like Abena, are Ashanti, an ethnic group from central Ghana. When Darnell discovers her condition, he gives her to Yao, one of the male slaves, to keep as a concubine. Tituba describes her mother’s shame and grief at having to explain to Yao that her baby is the child of a white man. Compassionately, Yao vows to adopt the yet unborn Tituba as his own. In the four months preceding Tituba’s birth, her parents are happy, but as Tituba points out, it is a sad happiness given the condition of their people.

Yao chooses the name Tituba. Tituba’s early years are a mixed experience of love from Yao and her knowledge, by age five, that her mother does not love her: “I never stopped reminding my mother of the English sailor […] of the pain and humiliation” (6).