[Newman is an American educator. In the following review of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and Tree of Life, he discusses Condé's use of apparitions and ghost imagery.]

Maryse Condé's Tree of Life is a story of a West Indian family on the island of Guadeloupe. Told by the adolescent great-granddaughter, Coco, the story begins with the family's sire, Albert Quentin Louis, and his decision to leave the bondage of the island's cane fields in search of a better way of life. Albert travels to Panama, lured by the prospect of a job with the Americans who are paying $.90 an hour for laborers to work on the canal project. Coco recreates her ancestor's encounter with the first of his life's trials, and a family legacy of economic success at the expense of personal happiness is set into motion.

Coco ends her family's odyssey with the revelation that it is she who will be forced to "recount this story … a story of very ordinary people who in their very ordinary way had nonetheless made blood flow." Coco is right. The story is indeed about ordinary people who, when faced with the hand life dealt them, played it out. There are no real heroes in The Tree of Life, only fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters who love and hate each other. They demand much of the world and get little for their trouble.

Predictably, the men drink, marry as best they can, take mistresses, try politics, run their businesses, and in between have children who break their hearts, resent them for selling out to the establishment, spend their money, and act injured when their parents do not understand the motives for their childish abuses, Prejudice, politics, oppression, and, on an occasion or two, natural disasters all prove obstacles that the Louis family must overcome.

Condé's use of the family's ghosts to advance the plot or explain away the bizarre, however, tests the reader's patience. True to what I have come to believe is a cultural tendency, Condé revives her use of apparitions in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Her cadre of benign ghosts includes Mama Yaya, the woman who reared Tituba when her mother, Abena, was hanged by her owner; Abena herself; and Yao, Abena's husband, who killed himself when Abena was hanged. Arming Tituba with an arsenal of supernatural kinfolk, herbal medicines, fervent prayer, and blood sacrifices, Condé creates a credible scenario of Tituba's part in the Salem witch trials. The Caspar-like apparitions and the self-martyrdom of Louis's granddaughter Thécla, whose disappointment with life results in her abandoning her family for the life of a wandering slut in search of redemption sets the reader's blood pounding.

What is most affecting in this story, however, is the chillingly realistic retelling of the Salem witch hunts. Condé weaves the fabric of her story so tightly that the reader is pulled through the Salem trials as if tied to the end of a spinner's shuttle. It is difficult to tell when reading the novel whether the air is sucked out of the reader's lungs by the very powers Tituba is supposed to have or by the sense of foreboding Condé creates with her powerful words. I closed the book more than once when the hair on the back of my neck began to rise at the deeds of Sam Paris in the name of God. I wanted no part of this vivid recreation of the acts of slavers, zealots, and mean-spirited humans.

Tituba is born to a life of troubles, observes Mama Yaya and, with the innocence of youth and a surge of hormones, Tituba strides boldly to her destiny. "Oh, God, why can't women do without men?" This is Tituba's epitaph and the theme for the novel. Her trials start with John Indian, a slave who appears outside her house. From then on, her every move seems to be dictated by her need for a man.

Tituba is a victim, first of the master who drives her off his land after he kills her mother, then of John Indian. When she fights back; she is forced into a life of servitude by John Indian's owner, who sells him to Paris. Since Tituba cannot live without John Indian, she becomes a slave to the Paris family as well. Tituba leaves her beloved island, Barbados, and her family of apparitions only to face the cold and unerring justice of the people of Salem. "Do I have to go on to the end? Hasn't the reader already guessed what is going to happen?" Tituba cries. To Condé's credit, the answer is no. Although Condé alludes to Tituba's destiny from the beginning, those of us who believe in happy endings or justice for the oppressed read on, hoping to see our heroine vindicated or, at least, at peace.