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a_reader_is_me2011-06-07 11:27 pm
dorothean) wrote in a_reader_is_me2011-06-07 11:27 pm
Book 2/12: The History of Mary Prince
Title: The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself
Author: Mary Prince. Penguin edition edited by Sarah Salih.
Publication date: 1831 (this edition 2000)
Number of pages: 115
Genre: History/slave narrative/antislavery tract
Book number/goal: 2/12 books on United States history; 4/18 chapters of Capitalizing on Change
Review: This is not actually about United States history at all, but it is about American history, particularly the West Indies, as well as British history.
This was the first life history of a black woman published in Britain.
Mary Prince was born enslaved in Bermuda in 1788. She was sold several times and moved to Turks Island and then Antigua (where she married a free man), and in 1828 accompanied her current owners to England, whose climate she hoped would improve her rheumatism. This did not happen and her owners (the Wood family) forced her to continue her work of washing clothes, which she was unable to do. Knowing that legally no one could be enslaved in England, she left the Woods and consulted a lawyer with the Antislavery Society. She then worked as a servant while she and the Antislavery Society attempted to enable her to return to Antigua and her husband as a free woman. During this process, she related her life story to Susanna Strickland, a white woman. There are no records of whether she succeeded in petitioning for her freedom or whether she ever returned to Antigua.
A lot of slave narratives were written because their author ran away. This one shows a different strategy. Mary Prince's disability might have prevented her escaping by swimming through an alligator-infested swamp *fangirls Solomon Northup* but she did know that she was free on English soil.
It was common for slaveowners then to never really think about their slaves wanting to be free; earlier, when Mary Prince had offered to buy her own freedom (she had some money saved up and would have had a loan from someone else), "Mrs Wood was very angry -- she grew quite outrageous -- she called me a black devil, and asked who had put freedom into my head. 'To be free is very sweet,' I said: but she took good care to keep me as a slave."
Mary Prince was very, very clear on exactly what she hated about slavery, and that she wanted to be free. But as it turned out, freedom was complicated for her, because she found it on the other side of the ocean from her home and her family. I think that must have been a great difficulty for many enslaved people: how seriously can you contemplate freedom, if it's even possible, if attaining it means leaving behind everything and everyone you've known and loved?
You can read the narrative online here, but I do recommend this Penguin edition for its introduction and its inclusion of other texts, especially court memoranda of Mary Prince's further statements about her life -- these were made at her petition before Parliament to return to Antigua as a free woman, and during a lawsuit in which her former owner, John Wood, sued the editor of her narrative for libel. They include some information about her life which Susanna Strickland left out of the published narrative in an attempt to better portray Mary Prince as an innocent victim (e.g. the fact that before her marriage she was in a sexual relationship with a white man; this sort of information was often censored from slave narratives by their white transmitters).
Author: Mary Prince. Penguin edition edited by Sarah Salih.
Publication date: 1831 (this edition 2000)
Number of pages: 115
Genre: History/slave narrative/antislavery tract
Book number/goal: 2/12 books on United States history; 4/18 chapters of Capitalizing on Change
Review: This is not actually about United States history at all, but it is about American history, particularly the West Indies, as well as British history.
This was the first life history of a black woman published in Britain.
Mary Prince was born enslaved in Bermuda in 1788. She was sold several times and moved to Turks Island and then Antigua (where she married a free man), and in 1828 accompanied her current owners to England, whose climate she hoped would improve her rheumatism. This did not happen and her owners (the Wood family) forced her to continue her work of washing clothes, which she was unable to do. Knowing that legally no one could be enslaved in England, she left the Woods and consulted a lawyer with the Antislavery Society. She then worked as a servant while she and the Antislavery Society attempted to enable her to return to Antigua and her husband as a free woman. During this process, she related her life story to Susanna Strickland, a white woman. There are no records of whether she succeeded in petitioning for her freedom or whether she ever returned to Antigua.
A lot of slave narratives were written because their author ran away. This one shows a different strategy. Mary Prince's disability might have prevented her escaping by swimming through an alligator-infested swamp *fangirls Solomon Northup* but she did know that she was free on English soil.
It was common for slaveowners then to never really think about their slaves wanting to be free; earlier, when Mary Prince had offered to buy her own freedom (she had some money saved up and would have had a loan from someone else), "Mrs Wood was very angry -- she grew quite outrageous -- she called me a black devil, and asked who had put freedom into my head. 'To be free is very sweet,' I said: but she took good care to keep me as a slave."
Mary Prince was very, very clear on exactly what she hated about slavery, and that she wanted to be free. But as it turned out, freedom was complicated for her, because she found it on the other side of the ocean from her home and her family. I think that must have been a great difficulty for many enslaved people: how seriously can you contemplate freedom, if it's even possible, if attaining it means leaving behind everything and everyone you've known and loved?
You can read the narrative online here, but I do recommend this Penguin edition for its introduction and its inclusion of other texts, especially court memoranda of Mary Prince's further statements about her life -- these were made at her petition before Parliament to return to Antigua as a free woman, and during a lawsuit in which her former owner, John Wood, sued the editor of her narrative for libel. They include some information about her life which Susanna Strickland left out of the published narrative in an attempt to better portray Mary Prince as an innocent victim (e.g. the fact that before her marriage she was in a sexual relationship with a white man; this sort of information was often censored from slave narratives by their white transmitters).
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