Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831)

Mary Prince was born into enslavement in 1788 in Bermuda. As narrated in her first-person slave narrative, The History of Mary Prince, published in 1831, over the course of her life Prince was bought and sold to enslavers in different parts of the Caribbean. She was forced to travel from Bermuda to the Turks and Caicos Islands, to Antigua, and then to London, where she escaped into freedom. As becomes evident in Prince’s narration, she was frequently beaten and brutalized by all of her “owners.” Besides a passage that relates the great emotional turmoil of being sold away from her mother and sisters as a child, some of the most harrowing sections of the book consist of her unflinching descriptions of the work camps on the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Bahamian Archipelago, where the enslaved were made to rake and harvest salt, with severe consequences to their health, or of the sexual violence and humiliation Prince had to endure at the hands of some of her owners. After ten years in the salt ponds, Prince was sold to John Wood and subsequently taken to Antigua, where she joined the Moravian Church, earned some money on the side, and married a freedman, Daniel James, without asking her owner’s permission—an act of defiance. In 1828, after thirteen years of being enslaved to them, she accompanied the Woods to England. Under British law, Prince was free on English soil, and she decided to leave the family with the assistance of Christian missionaries and abolitionists. In 1829 she found employment as a domestic servant in the household of Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in London. It is from this perspective that Prince dictated her story to the Quaker Susanna Strickland, who also lived in Pringle’s household, and from which readers encounter Prince as she retrospectively unfolds her life narrative. The History, which was edited by Pringle, was published to great acclaim and ran to three editions in 1831. It slotted into the heart of the heated campaign for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire as the first account by a Black woman published in England—the Slavery Abolition Act was passed just two years later, in 1833. After the book’s publication, very little is known of Prince’s life; it is generally thought that Prince remained in England, perhaps continuing her work as a servant. Prince’s story fell into oblivion, and it is only with recent renewed scholarly attention that Mary Prince is recognized for her historical and literary importance.