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The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave
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Themes
Freedom and Mobility
Freedom stands out as the central theme of narratives of enslavement. The History of Mary Prince is no exception. Its writing was motivated by her desire to share her experiences with the British public to influence them toward abolition. This sentiment permeates Prince’s narrative: “To be free is very sweet” (18). Ultimately, her History explores the contours of freedom, defining it as closely linked to mobility and the freedom of choice.
For many enslaved people in the Americas, enslavement entailed a state of being trapped in one place. Many of them suffered a life of forced immobility, such as those doing agricultural labor who were born and died on the same plantations. However, Prince’s experience of entrapment is the opposite. Her enslavement is closely tied to forced movement. Over the course of the narrative, Prince travels from Bermuda to Antigua, Turk’s Island, and England. In these places, she is also sold to different enslavers, changing residences multiple times. Prince experiences a great deal of movement, but it is nearly always against her will. Regarding being sent to Mrs. Pruden and away from her enslaver’s wife, Miss Betsey, and her family, Prince says, “I thought my young heart would break, it pained me so. But there was no help; I was forced to go” (2). For Prince, enslavement is characterized by mobility, but she has no autonomy or agency in that movement.
Once Prince is brought to England, her experience with enslavement and freedom is further complicated. When she leaves the Woods’ property to no longer be their slave, she is technically free, according to English law: “It said also that I left them of my own free will, because I was a free woman in England” (20). However, Wood’s refusal to formally grant her manumission meant that she remained enslaved in the Caribbean. Thus, Prince was free in England but destined to be enslaved should she ever return to see her husband in Antigua. By refusing to grant her legal manumission in the Caribbean, Mr. Wood used her freedom in England to trap her there, depriving her of full control over her mobility. This represents a tragic inversion of her previous circumstance of forced movement.
The question of freedom for enslaved people was often tied up with technicalities that made that freedom tenuous at best. Manumitted individuals in the US, for example, always had to be prepared to show their free papers to any white person who requested to see them. Fugitives from slavery such as Frederick Douglass who had not been granted their legal freedom were always at risk of recapture, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Even after Prince was free of the Woods, she was unable to return to the island she called home lest she be enslaved again. The History of Mary Prince emphasizes that freedom requires that individuals have complete control over where they stay and where they go, not simply freedom from enslavement in one location or context.
Shared Testimony in Slave Narratives
A slave narrative is the autobiography of a single person following that individual’s journey from enslavement to freedom and was a prominent genre throughout the history of enslavement and its aftermath. The History of Mary Prince follows this formula, conveying her life from birth until the moment of writing. However, a unique aspect of her narrative is its inclusion of the experiences of others in her individual narrative. In this way, her story constitutes a shared testimony that is unique in this genre but common in testimonies of enslaved people from the Caribbean.
The inclusion of other voices is fundamental to Prince’s narrative approach. She says, “In telling my own sorrows, I cannot pass by those of my fellow-slaves—for when I think of my own griefs, I remember theirs” (12). Two individuals whose stories Prince tells are Hetty and Daniel. Prince meets Hetty while they are both enslaved by Captain I–. Hetty suffers a great deal of abuse at his hands and is overworked and whipped to the point of her tragic death. Prince meets Daniel at Mr. D–’s. Daniel had a physical disability involving some paralysis in his hip. He, too, was treated harshly. Finally, Pringle’s inclusion of Asa-Asa’s narrative appended to Prince’s is consistent with Prince’s commitment to sharing others’ stories of enslavement. Ultimately, The History of Mary Prince demonstrates an ethos of shared testimony.
Prince shows a commitment to offering up testimony for those who cannot testify for themselves. In including other enslaved people’s experiences, Prince works toward her goal of sharing the horrors of slavery with the people of England. In The History, the “I” and the “we” run together: “I have been a slave—I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free” (11). Ultimately, for Prince, there is a continuity between her experience and those of all enslaved people.
In her book Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1838 (2011), Professor Nicole Aljoe concludes that a hallmark characteristic of these texts is polyvocality, or the inclusion of the voices and experiences of multiple people beyond those of the individual narrator. She points to Prince’s description of enslaved people who worked in the field. She also directs attention to Prince’s use of the first-person plural, noting that at times, “The ‘I’ of Prince’s specific situation and observation switches to ‘our’ and ‘us’” (70).
The Role of the Audience in The History of Mary Prince
The History of Mary Prince is heavily informed by Prince’s awareness of her white British reading public. At various moments in the texts, Prince addresses these readers, shifting their involvement in the text from passive to active. By both describing the negative effects of slavery on white people and making political calls to action, Prince manages to implicate the reader in the text and further promote her goals: She wants the public to fully understand the horror of slavery and act to abolish it.
Prince’s autobiography is full of her painful experiences from enslavement. She makes it clear that the life of the enslaved person is one of physical, psychological, and emotional abuse. However, Prince also describes the damage that this system inflicts on the moral character of white enslavers. She says, “slavery hardens white people’s hearts towards the blacks [...]” and concludes, “Oh those white people have small hearts who can only feel for themselves” (4). While she is criticizing white enslavers, Prince’s assertion also implores readers to examine themselves. Accusing the unsympathetic of having “small hearts,” Prince places shame on any reader who cannot sympathize with the plight of the enslaved. In this way, she implicates readers and nudges them into action.
Prince also takes more active approaches to requesting the action of the reader. She makes plain her political objectives: “I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free” (11). After earlier pushing her audience not to have a small heart but to sympathize, Prince here appeals to her audience as “good people.” According to her logic, “good people” are those who know the horrors of slavery and work to set enslaved people free. This logic is impressed upon the audience. Finally, she appeals to the audience through religious sentiment, saying, “I hope they will never leave off to pray God, and call loud to the great King of England, till all the poor blacks be given free, and slavery done up for evermore” (23).
In the composition of her narrative, Prince is as concerned with relaying her autobiography as she is with drawing readers into her experience and political objectives because her hope of spurring them to action hinges on convincing them of the horrors of enslavement. She furthers this goal by describing the damage that slavery inflicts on white people and by calling on her white readers to espouse abolitionist beliefs.
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