[In the following excerpt, Ferguson examines the 1831 slave narrative The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave to show that Prince's language and agenda were often at odds with white female abolitionists.]

AN EX-SLAVEWOMAN NARRATES HER EXPERIENCES

I would rather go into my grave than go back a slave to Antigua, though I wish to go back to my husband very much—very much—very much! I am much afraid my owners would separate me from my husband, and use me very hard, or perhaps sell me for a field negro;—and slavery is too bad. I would rather go into my grave!

—Mary Prince, testimony to attorney George Stephen.

In The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself in 1831, Mary Prince claims herself as a speaking, acting, thinking subject with an identity separate from Anglo-Africanist constructions of her past and present reality.¹ The text consists of a preface, several postscripts, and a sixteen-page editorial supplement that chronicle the fierce controversy following publication, and a twenty-three-page, first-person account by Mary Prince that sketches the period from her birth until 1828, concentrating on her life with four sets of owners. The last five pages chronicle her experiences in the two months prior to her oral testimony, during which she lived with Mr. and Mrs. Wood and finally walked out on them.

Given the contending agendas of such a multitiered narrative, including imposed limitations on a female slave's right to authorship and publication, several questions arise: did Mary Prince know in advance, before she arrived at the London anti-slavery headquarters and told her story to Thomas Pringle, its secretary, that evangelical assumptions and dictates would have to inform her narrative if she were to secure a public hearing? If so, how did she anticipate or set about counteracting a popular abolitionist assumption that slaves “cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”² In other words, did Mary Prince actively resist being censored or caricatured as a colonial “other” by supporters and slave-owners alike?³ Was she able to encode deliberately and discreetly, customarily unnamable privations? To what extent did she acknowledge, in directing her narrative, that both sides of the slavery debate vyed for control over her? Or perhaps more likely, were her responses to abolitionists fraught with ambivalence?

Mary Prince's insistent assertion of herself as subject show up most clearly in jousts with her abolitionist-evangelical editor, Thomas Pringle. After composing a title page featuring Mary Prince in the third person, which rhetorically establishes his command, he discusses the transcription and revisions of her narrative:

The idea of writing Mary Prince's history was first suggested by herself. She wished it to be done, she said, that good people in England might hear from a slave what a slave had felt and suffered. … The narrative was taken down from Mary's own lips by a lady … residing in my family as a visitor. It was written out fully, with all the narrator's repetitions and prolixities, and afterwards pruned into its present shape; retaining, as far as was practicable, Mary's exact expressions and peculiar phraseology. No fact of importance has been omitted, and not a single circumstance or sentiment has been added. It is essentially her own, without any material alteration farther than was requisite to exclude redundancies and gross grammatical errors, so as to render it clearly intelligible.⁴

“I went over the whole,” Pringle adds, “carefully examining her on every fact and circumstance detailed,”⁵ His use of footnotes to “explain,” “decipher,” and “elaborate” on Mary Prince's autobiographical narration certifies his desire to present and produce her narrative as emancipationist evidence in 1831 of the “civilizing mission”—to “Europeanize” people of African descent, “for their own good.” Her testimony corroborates (is) his authority and vindicates his values—or superficially seems to do so. Thus Pringle mediates between Mary Prince and the public, refracting her oral narrative according to several considerations: the demands made by the emancipation campaign in its intense final stage and evangelical views of desirable female behavior. Mary Prince does not, however, readily surrender her narrative to editorial rule. Equivocal in her presentation to a largely sympathetic European audience, she formulates herself as a slave-representative, as well as an individual slave-agent. For example, after warmly acknowledging the assistance of “very good” missionaries, she simultaneously inscribes the presence of an additional audience drawn from slave communities: “But [pro-slavery forces] put a cloak about the truth. It is not so. All slaves want to be free. … I know what slaves feel. … We don't mind hard work, if we had proper treatment [but] when we are quite done up, who cares for us, more than for a lame horse?” (Prince, A History, p. 84) The first-person plural usage not only strikes a rhetorical alliance with slaves from Caribbean and African-British communities who effectively co-relate the narrative, but also pointedly signifies a familiar but silent dialogue of lamentation based on shared experience.⁶ The language of slaves markedly differs from the language of their supporters.

Throughout her account Mary Prince responds with similar shrewdness to abolitionist control, one of the deftest examples being her panegyric on the penultimate page to the Reverend Mortimer, Thomas Pringle's evangelical friend, that reads as follows:

Nor must I forget, among my friends, the Rev. Mr. Mortimer, the good clergyman of the parish, under whose ministry I have now sat for upwards of twelve months. … He never keeps back the truth. … Mr. Mortimer tells me that he cannot open the eyes of my heart, but that I must pray to God to change my heart, and make me to know the truth, and the truth will make me free.⁷

Mary Prince proclaims that spiritual truth alone will free her when she knows full well and at painful cost that her life has been a protracted private battle against slave-owners for an elusive comprehensive liberty. Her scars, her imminent blindness, her memories of forty years' hard living speak other kinds of truths about the meaning of freedom. The mimicking, deadpan statements intimate not only her recognition of the need to accommodate her History to her allies' values, but constitute a sure-footed intervention in the civilizing mission, her sparring voice audible only to initiates. Implied in Mary Prince's words is the idea of a change not yet accomplished. By using the future tense, she points toward the continued absence of these “truths” at this post-conversion period of her life. Apparent obeisance to a future spiritual freedom as an end in itself, which the subtly oppositional narrative contradicts, is a rhetorical strategy to secure much more. Conversion aids social acceptance. In Homi Bhabha's words, her repetition of the Reverend Mortimer's discourse is a “mutation, a hybrid … [that strategically reverses] the process of domination through disavowal” by further fastening her own identity.⁸ Yet people in the know, African-Caribbean reader-listeners who have lived through kindred experiences and realize she is restricted in what she can say (and is probably compensating for this containment), hear an altogether different voice—reserved, grave, mocking. Self-fashioned yea-saying inverts the binary set-up of colonial subject lording it over colonial other. Intent on survival, she must “continually guard against … being returned to the position of the object.”⁹

To underscore her double-voiced discourse, however, is not to assume that her text is nothing more than a strategy, unproblematically conceived, for manumission. On the contrary, chances are high that Mary Prince somewhat demurred about religion yet shared many of Pringle's beliefs and perhaps even admired him, given that prayer, meditations, and conversion offer relief and escape from control. Mary Prince, after all, speaks within a certain discursive determination. Her text of counterinsurgency may win her access into the master discourse but she is still pinioned in the discourse of her violators. That constant ambivalence both engenders demystification of her situation and imprisons her vision. Some of Anna Freud's postulates help to clarify Mary Prince's probable conflicts: Freud contends that imitation forestalls rejection, increases the chance of access, and enables the threatened individual to transform [herself] into a more secure person.¹⁰ Without her conversion experience Mary Prince would have been much more isolated in London and might not have ventured to the anti-slavery headquarters in the first place.

The History, as a whole, expatiates on these quiet, largely invisible contestations for power. A brief summary of the History will help to contextualize those contestations. Born about 1788 in Bermuda, Mary Prince describes her first twelve years living as a slave with her mother and siblings in the home of Captain Williams. Her father lives and works nearby. Around 1800 she is sold in the presence of her mother and other grief-stricken members of the slave community to Captain I———and his wife. In their house she endures persistent floggings, head-punchings, and gruesome daily experiences that include witnessing a protracted murder. She learns to work hard tending animals and children and doing numberless household chores; at one point she runs away and is returned by her father. Fortified by his presence, she denounces the owners' brutalities to their face. Five years later they sell her to a sadistic taskmaster, Mr. D———of Turks Island, who works her exactingly in the salt ponds and heinously punishes her. Again she witnesses murders committed with impunity. Returning to Bermuda in 1810 with D———, she starts saving for manumission and sparingly but strikingly alludes to that concealed area of her life taken up with sexual abuse and harassment. One persistently telling indicator is the carefully mentioned, especially harsh treatment she receives at the hands of her mistresses. By about 1814 she inveigles being sold to Mr. and Mrs. John Wood because they live in Antigua where manumission is less difficult to obtain. In this section, Mary Prince concentrates on illness, marriage, religion, and her complex, daily relationship with the Woods who persistently refuse to grant Mary Prince her freedom. After they travel to London and mercilessly work a severely arthritic Mary Prince, she walks off.

Battles over power are partly played out through a gradually evolving complex of decisions to escape: on page one the protagonist looks back on “the happiest period of my life [when] I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave.” By specifically stressing this later reevaluation—her backward glance in the present at the past—she alerts readers from the very beginning not to take the account at face value. By page two she records running away, apparently mournful after learning that her first owner, Mrs. Williams, has died.¹¹ Here she quietly ushers into her narrative a thematics of escape.

When Mr. Williams sells Mary Prince and her siblings, Mrs. Prince talks forebodingly of “shrouding” the children as she dresses them for auction. This equation of slavery and death overflows into supplementary statements by Mary Prince, as the epigraph to this chapter denotes. Being severed from her mother and sold is a form of death, death of the family unit as well as of various individuals. Years later, when she is flogged mercilessly for a trivial offense by Captain and Mrs. I———, her second owners, she flees to her mother, trying to forestall the ominously predicted “shrouding.”¹² In the I———'s house, she has already witnessed the systematic daily torture and eventual murder of the French slave Hetty, whose plenitude of chores Mary Prince inherits.¹³ Resistance and vigilance determine life or death. An exhumation of sorts, Mary Prince's text restores such silenced voices as Hetty's. When her father returns her to Captain and Mrs. I———, she protests life-imperiling floggings before him and the owners: “I was weary of my life,” she exclaims, but adds exultantly: “he did not flog me that day.”¹⁴ Here she signals a small victory that endorses a persistently oppositional consciousness.

Mary Prince displays a comparable opposition when she broaches the topic of sexuality. Since she converted years earlier in Antigua and confessed to immoralities, she is well attuned to evangelical dictates regarding that subject. Her response is to leave unstated the implications of her vignettes and intertextually invoke contemporary published statements about the insistent sexual abuse of female slaves.¹⁵

When owner D———beats his daughter, Mary Prince records her bold intervention and community response: they laud her as a local hero. She then informs the reader that she refused to wash D———naked in his bath: “at last I defended myself [against him and] after that I was hired to work at Cedar Hills, and every Saturday night I paid the money to my master.” Moreover, when D———agrees to sell Mary Prince, he warns the future owners that “I should not be sold to any one that would treat me ill.”¹⁶ His smug protectiveness expresses a perverse last bid for power and Mary Prince invites us to read between the lines of this proprietorial volte-face. Her incredulity at the calmness D———exhibits as he has her beaten on Turks Island—he took snuff with composure, she says, as he watched her being flogged—suggests her perhaps initially naive shock at a common contradiction: slaveowners recklessly injuring a concubine as a magnification of power. On different registers, Mary Prince avenges herself.

Once sold by D———to Mr. and Mrs. Wood, Mary Prince vows to become free and explains how she saved up to do so, her discourse imbedded with allusion and implied resistance. “I wanted, by all honest means, to earn money to buy my freedom.”¹⁷ The fact that she wanted to save money “honestly” highlights Pringle's values and her knowledge that other, less acceptable means were available, to which she may have yielded, given the primacy she accords freedom. To back up the obtrusive adjective “honest,” she mentions doing laundry and selling coffee. She then adds that she sold “other provisions to the captains of ships.” Since a certain friend of Mary Prince named Captain Abbott incensed the Woods by meeting her after a curfew imposed by them and later offered to buy her, and since Mary Prince and Captain Abbott were subsequently slandered by plantocrats for their relationship, she hails his presence elliptically. Additionally, she mentions several friendships with both free black men and white men that reaffirm her desired and actual position within a free community in the here and now; she validates her right to autonomous participation in community culture and flouts the Woods' use of curfew to curtail and even ridicule her social life. To mention a specific sexual relationship, however suggestively, would be in violation of Pringle's preference to play down any voluntary, pre-conversion sexual activities. The fact that the pro-slavery lobby attempted to expose her relationship with Captain Abbott, following publication, pinpoints how damaging such testimony was regarded by both sides.¹⁸ Hence it is likely that Mary Prince attempts nuance, extemporizes, and gives play to the reader's imagination when she speaks of such relationships. Even if Pringle did not explicitly stipulate how he would like certain topics to be presented, Mary Prince would have known from her acquaintanceship with the Moravians that avowed Christian evangelicals considered extramaritial sexual activity morally reprehensible. Hence she may have opted to play the matter down, hedged the controversial topic creatively when Pringle “carefully examin[ed] her on every fact and circumstance detailed,” not as an intentional duplicity, but as a way of negotiating an acceptable way to present herself. She knows that her survival as a free woman partly depends on passing Pringle's tests. In her ambiguous representation of personal relationships, she may have been guessing that his fixed, univocal outlook would block out undesirable innuendo and collateral meanings. Suggestiveness contextualizes a necessarily suppressed reality.

One of her supporters, Joseph Phillips, responds to post-publication attacks on what plantocrats termed Mary Prince's “profligacy.” Phillips asserts in Pringle's Supplement the commonplaceness, by Antiguan standards, of Mary Prince's relationships: “Such connexions are so common, I might almost say universal, in our slave colonies, that except by the missionaries and a few serious persons, they are considered, … very venial.”¹⁹ Even more graphically, in terms of forced sexual relations, Richard B. Sheridan quotes the Reverend John Barry, a Methodist missionary in Jamaica, whose testimony in a House of Lords Report of 1832 states that women were “subjected to Corporal Punishment for Non-compliance with the libidinous Desires of the Person in Authority on the Estate.”²⁰

Neither Pringle nor the Woods will brook the truth of these observations. For Pringle's purposes, Mary Prince had to renounce only highly generalized past sins after conversion—that nonetheless obliquely signal unchristian sexual practices—to prove her endorsement of a more becoming role: that of a repentant Christian.²¹ Besides, any mention of female “immodesty” or of sexuality without defilement would be bait to the unctuous Woods who configure her as a pagan Jezebel, a recalcitrant Mary Magdalen. Since Mary Prince is enjoined to screen an everyday part of her life, she begins on page one to inveigle these forbidden affairs into her History in yet another veiled contestation of power.

As an adult recalling her childhood, she states that she commiserated with Mrs. Williams, disparaging Mr. Williams as “a very harsh, selfish man [given to] … reside in other female society.”²² Hence she subtly establishes the precedent for male slave-owners' sexual practices. By tracing a textual pattern of slave-owners' abusive behavior toward cross-class females, in bondage or not, Mary Prince ends up totalizing slave-owners as “generic” beings. She reverses customary linguistic and political power relationships since slaves are usually the ones perceived as synonymous and interchangeable—“they all look alike, act alike,” in Abdul JanMohamed's words.²³

Concurrently her expressive sorrow after conversion about prior sinfulness summons up a buried text about past sexual independence. Once again she acts pragmatically and speaks with two voices when circumstances dictate discretion. She overtly repudiates certain forms of sabotage and sexual-social autonomy, yet her continuous inscription of maltreatment by female owners suggests other readings. The sadism of Mrs. Wood and Mrs. I———bespeaks a complex sexual jealousy partly directed at Mary Prince's implied efforts at a distinctive self-definition.

Mary Prince also enciphers motherhood obliquely, her strange silence an egregiously conspicuous omission in near-Victorian, family-conscious England. She links it with violence, elaborating on Hetty's death as a result of atrocities perpetrated during and after childbirth. Thus the floggings, the severe kicking and punching that the I———s and others repeatedly inflicted on Mary Prince, we infer, caused irreversible damage to her body. Explicit statements linking violence with sterilization would discount her text as suitable evangelical reading material. On the other hand, Mary Prince tries to communicate an alternate profile of her own domestic “fitness” (in all senses) in the absence of motherhood. She takes pleasure in working as a nursemaid, in visiting with her own mother, siblings, and other children. Weighty silence, as much as anything, speaks to the grim, damaging sexual coercion of female slaves and her discursive power in circumnavigating evangelical taboos.

Mary Prince goes on to consider new moral alignments that succeed conversion during her servitude with the Woods: marriage, then literacy not long after.²⁴ These are freedom-engendering structures that double as rhetorical strategies for gaining reader acceptance and self-validation. Mary Prince uses them to explore new directions for manumission and to acquire status not as a mute, colonized object, but as a voiced individual with a socially condoned moral, literate life; they mark her identity and her agency, validate her refusal to be constructed in someone else's terms. Agreeing with Pringle may have its equivocal dimension but agreement also spells social and physical security to a vulnerable woman. Her embrace of religion, moreover, justifies publication in Pringle's eyes. She talks about conversion, marriage, and literacy with self-respect: “The slave woman [she remarks] … asked me to go … to a Methodist meeting for prayer. … This meeting … led my spirit to the Moravian church; so that when I got back to town, I went and prayed to have my name [my italics] put down on the Missionaries book”; on a second occasion, she takes pride in the fact that, “whenever I carried the children their lunch at school, I ran round and went to hear the teachers. … [They] taught me to read … and I got on very fast”; and lastly, she underlines her own spiritual and moral regeneration while highlighting here and elsewhere the threat her marriage posed: “[I] would not say yes till he went to church with me and joined the Moravians. … We could not be married in the English Church. English marriage is not allowed to slaves; and no free man can marry a slave woman.”²⁵

So why, after establishing certain valuable securities, did Mary Prince not emulate what many resolute slaves did and save up for manumission? The obvious answer is that she did just that, but when the Woods doggedly refused to free her, she was obliged to adopt different tactics to emancipate herself.

Trying to leave their household as a free woman turns into a complex process, fraught with psychological ploys. Mary Prince discloses that the Woods agreed she could accompany them to England, despite incessant arguments about conditions of work and manumission. She does not explain this contradiction. Were they so confident of their owner-control that they could risk bringing her to a country where she would be (as it was then popularly thought) automatically free? Was it a self-aggrandizing gamble on their part to let her talk them into taking her?²⁶ Or did Mr. Wood's sexual desire prevail over Mrs. Wood's jealous reluctance in camouflaged but ongoing domestic disputes over a slavewoman?

At any rate, Mary Prince offers a pithy manifesto of personal insurrection, displaying what Thomas Pringle characterizes reprovingly as “a somewhat violent and hasty temper, and a considerable share of natural pride and self-importance.”²⁷ Assertiveness irked the anti- and pro-slavery lobbies alike since it challenged and diffused their power:

But their hearts were hard—too hard to consent. Mrs. Wood was very angry—she grew quite outrageous—she called me a black devil [sexual innuendo apparent], and asked me who had put freedom into my head. “To be free is very sweet,” I said: but she took good care to keep me a slave. I saw her change colour, and I left the room.

About this time my master and mistress were going to England to put their son to school, and bring their daughters home; and they took me with them to take care of the child. I was willing to come to England: I thought that by going there I should probably get cured of my rheumatism, and should return with my master and mistress, quite well, to my husband. My husband was willing for me to come away, for he had heard that my master would free me,—and I also hoped this might prove true; but it was all a false report.²⁸

This scene entangles daily realities and weaves together an emancipationist declaration with multiple evidence of same: rumors that were rife in slave communities about freedom in Britain, condensed expressions of anger, quickwittedness, offstage dialogues, a manipulation of illness that could be linked to repressed anger and downright frustration, a tentative plan for escape, community ties, and a willful courage despite physical frailty. Beyond this compression of information, her claim to a general humanity—“to be free is very sweet”—not only denotes the future when she will be free from bondage but imbeds her self-awareness of continuous psychic freedom and the incapacity of anyone to deny her consciousness. The specious rationale about leaving the warm Caribbean to cure rheumatism in damp England accentuates her judiciously masked goal. (One wonders why no one questioned her about that.) Perhaps she saw a chance to capitalize on the Woods' long-witnessed internal discord over her status, to usher the possibility of freedom into the space opened up by their dissension.

On board ship, she made friends with a steward who was, she pointedly states, “in the same class in the Moravian Church” as her husband Daniel James.²⁹ This seemingly chance meeting might well explain why she felt tough enough to leave the Woods. Religious conversion had guaranteed Moravian aid even as far as London. Chances are Mary Prince had already made her mind up in the Caribbean to leave the Woods since they made a point of advertising their intransigence: they sold five slaves other than her even after free friends made sundry efforts to buy her manumission.

Nonetheless she had to bide her time in London, “a stranger,” as she says, “[who] did not know one door in the street from another.”³⁰ Isolated and not eminently employable, she was, after all, a somewhat penurious black woman separated from family and friends and accustomed to taking orders as a physical slave for nigh on forty-five years. Between the time of leaving the Woods and coming to Pringle with, in his words, “the idea of writing [her] history,”³¹ she might have become better acquainted with the substantial black community in London among whom “a tradition [had grown up] of personal struggle and resistance by black women.”³² Before that influence exerted itself, however, she had to struggle between her desire for freedom and an understandable reticence to take that ultimate, probably irreversible step. Finally, after yet more quarreling with the Woods about being forced to wash clothes with severely rheumatoid hands (the issue of illness-feigning is relevant here), she lays out the dilemma she faced and her decision to leave:

[Mrs. Wood] said, she supposed I thought myself a free woman, but I was not; … I knew that I was free in England [Actually Mrs. Wood was technically correct. Since 1772, British law had stipulated that no individual could be forcibly removed from Britain] but I did not know where to go, or how to get my living; and therefore, I did not like to leave the house. But Mr. Wood said he would send for a constable to thrust me out; and at last I took courage and resolved that I would not be longer thus treated, but would go and trust to Providence.³³

The Woods cannot bear to free her—or at least their grave ambivalence is palpable—nor can they cope with her claim to autonomy and the subsequent publication that verifies the difficulties involved in establishing that claim. They become the I———s and the D———s of the world if they fail to protest. Repudiating Mary Prince's narrative recuperates a semblance of their humanity even though she has already reversed the power relationship, exposed their barbarity, and claimed them as others for posterity.

The final pages of the History record her efforts to find work and stay free and the Anti-Slavery Society's strenuous negotiations for her legal manumission. These activities parallel the provincial women's agitation for emancipation and constant press reports of atrocities against male and female slaves. The last one-and-a-half pages are poignantly spoken in the present tense to concretize her immediate plight. They also ratify Mary Prince's new position as a publicly acknowledged, independent (though not legally free) subject: “I hope that God will find a way to give me my liberty and give me back to my dear husband.” In the last fifty lines she ventriloquizes the aspirations and realities of other slaves. Afterwards she draws attention to the production of the narrative itself, referring to the white poet-amanuensis, Susanna Strickland, as “my good friend, Miss———[who] is now writing down for me.”³⁴ By way of thanking Strickland, Mary Prince affirms her own status as interlocutor, claiming her narrative before the very eyes of Pringle and the transcriber, her public mediators, as it were. In another unemphatic power reversal, the amanuensis has become an archetypal slave-other who takes orders and generates wealth (in this case textual wealth) simultaneously, an embodiment of Mary Prince's literacy.

In her concluding oration, she calls for “English people” [to] “know the truth,” to pray and unceasingly petition the king “till all the poor blacks be given free, and slavery done up for evermore.”³⁵ The saluted black compatriots who already “know the truth” remain silently present. With that audience as well as her white British audience in mind, Mary Prince seized the unique opportunity to exhibit both an individuated and a representative chronicle of a female slave's life in full view on the public stage, totemic of the nation's history and a challenge to its conscience.

No longer the silent, fictive object of colonial discourse, Mary Prince has asserted her entitlement to language and to a forum in the marketplace; the heterogeneity of slaves notwithstanding, she has transformed orality into a community act. Mindful of the men, women, and children whom she has geographically left behind, she elegizes and eulogizes other slaves, rendering her text a sacred repository of tales about the silenced living and the silent dead.³⁶ She accords an equal status to inveterately suppressed voices, those of her husband Daniel James, her mother, Caribbean domestic servants, and potentially freed slaves, who, Mary Prince argues, should be part of the British wage-labor system. Their dialogues lie in and through her own. And in fact the post-publication controversy enables some of those voices to be heard for the first time and makes manifest the power of insurgent texts, mediated or not. Moreover, she occasionally records conversations that stress a community presence as well as a subtle but ubiquitous community resistance. For example, when she arrives at the second owners' house, two bondwomen advise her to “keep a good heart, if you are to live here.”³⁷ Laconically they alert her to imminent tribulation, offer emotional support, and counsel her to stand firm to facilitate survival. Their remarks site them on the never-ending transhistorical continuum of struggle. In that sense Mary Prince is also (with the same rider about the heterogeneity of slaves understood) a community historian, a recorder in her own right, regardless of editorial mediations.

After the publication of Mary Prince's History and the intense debate that it generated, Mary Prince spoke with her mind and her body on several important occasions but otherwise remained significantly silent. Let me back up for a moment. First of all, provincial evangelical women ordered copies of the History as anti-slavery propaganda against which opponents launched a predictable assault. Like Thomas Pringle, these women aimed to “authenticate” Mary Prince's facts with dispatch, especially her whipping experiences. Flogging had become a critical issue in provincial women's propaganda campaigns ever since Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, George Canning, had introduced a bill in the House of Commons in 1823, arguing that flogging black females was unbecoming to a sense of Christian propriety.

In fact, flogging was one of the worst punishments evangelical women could imagine—especially, but not only, in the case of females—since it combined absolute control and remorseless abuse of the female body by males. (Such a preoccupying concern for female safety connotes their own, perhaps self-denied, vulnerabilities.) Abhorrence of flogging was also part of the longstanding theological criticism of extremes of physical punishment based on the idea that all men and women are the imago dei and must be accorded human dignity.³⁸ Flogging, in a word, was anti-Christian. Worst of all, it was a public act, involving an exposed nakedness and an unsolicited male gaze, sometimes even attracting spectators and enthusiasts.³⁹

Mary Prince's repeated descriptions of floggings in her History reflect these anxieties and considerations; she was probably asked for the sake of the emancipationist cause to be as specific as possible about unspeakable, possibly repressed, traumas.⁴⁰ She responded by claiming a silent subjectivity, by presenting her body as a text of the “truth” of her history; this body could not lie. Once again she accepts her role within the dominant discourse yet manages to extend its possibilities to her own advantage. By the time she discusses her marriage, she had touched on almost every clause included in resolutions drawn up by Ladies Anti-Slavery Associations around the country. Mary Prince's text corroborates and consolidates associationist demands for conversion and family unity, for an end to flogging in general, and female flogging in particular. Just as Pringle certifies the “authenticity” of her narrative, so she in turn justifies evangelical women's nationwide political participation, not generally considered an appropriate activity unless understood as “charity.”⁴¹ In the appendix to the third edition of Mary Prince's History, Lucy Townsend, an officer of the pioneering Birmingham Ladies' Society for Relief of Negro Slaves and a solid evangelical leader, wrote a letter to Thomas Pringle asking “to be furnished with some description of the marks of former ill-usage of Mary Prince's person.” Once again the Birmingham group who included Elizabeth Heyrick assumed the lead. White British female abolitionists took the flogging of Caribbean black females personally, as an affront to all women, their union on this issue another quiet anti-patriarchal attack. Pringle relayed the request to his wife, Margaret Pringle, who did not mince words in her reply to Lucy Townsend:

The whole of the back part of her body, she states, is distinctly scarred, and, as it were, chequered, with the vestiges of severe floggings. Besides this, there are many large scars on the other parts of her person, exhibiting an appearance as if the flesh had been deeply cut, or lacerated with gashes, by some instrument wielded by most unmerciful hands. Mary affirms, that all these scars were occasioned by the various cruel punishments she has mentioned or referred to in her narrative. … I beg to add to my own testimony that of Miss Strickland (the lady who wrote down in this house the narrative … of Mary Prince) … together with the testimonies of my sister Susan and my friend Miss Martha Browne—all of whom were present and assisted me this day in a second inspection of Mary's body.⁴²

Historically responsible, as independent-minded as they had been when they kept their Association politically separate from the London anti-slavery headquarters, and intent on mobilizing the best propaganda to change public opinion and gain political support, evangelical women configure Mary Prince within what could be thought of as a “scopic [masculinist] economy [that] signifies … her relegation to passivity: she will be the … object.”⁴³ Her objectified body invokes the horror of slavery. But just as much to the point, Mary Prince's graphic memoirs that have been spoken as well as written down have already destabilized any possible casting of herself as object. Indeed since she would have operated well within her rights (as evangelicals conceived of them) to refuse their request to view her body on the grounds of modesty, Mary Prince not only permits but probably desires her body to be used in this way, as a space of inscription. Their request offers her a rare opportunity to speak her history—and the history of other slaves—corporeally to the world. She authenticates herself within a society in which she has little power to generate, in Robert Stepto's phrase, “authenticating devices” that will corroborate and fortify her text(s); such “devices” are usually initiated and written by others on a slave's behalf.⁴⁴ In that sense, female abolitionists become Mary Prince's instrument because she is challenging the meaning they attach to historical responsibility: they seek legal liberty for slaves; she insists on a much wider definition of liberty that includes the right to gainful employment, public voicing, a redress of received Eurocentric mythologies; and some redefinition of power and values. The meaning of freedom is being negotiated. Her act of self-exposure exposes illicit impositions of cruel force and deemphasizes evangelical women's insistence on an end only to the flogging of females. She reminds gazers and readers alike that flogging recognizes no sexual difference. Her body-as-text announces that, regardless of gender, torture speaks and is spoken. She re-sounds the void on behalf of slave communities everywhere.

The pro-slavery lobby supported her testimony quite differently. Her “pretended history” is nothing more than a string of “hideous falsehoods and misrepresentations,” according to the notorious plantocratic editor of the Glasgow Herald, James Macqueen. Vituperative accusations proselytized precisely what they sought to contain: her notable presence and authority. Understandably though unwittingly, defamers highlighted how Mary Prince's careful grooming, smart outfits, show of self-possession, and the free exercise of sexuality not only enhanced her self-definition but facilitated her access to life-affirming avenues of information and human communication.⁴⁵ In their ardor to denounce her “dissolute character” in graphic detail, they reaccentuated Pringle's reticence to allow sexuality to be discussed. They affirmed its presence everywhere and its significance in her life. The competing descriptions of the pro- and anti-slavery lobbies underlined Mary Prince's refusal to be defined in their terms.

Thomas Pringle's Supplement summarizes the rancorous debate brought about by detractors' repudiations and thereby exposes the power of Mary Prince's narrative to provoke them. The Supplement includes correspondence from the Woods that slanders Mary Prince's moral character, Pringle's well-intended character sketch of Mary Prince in response and his point-by-point refutation of the Woods' charges, Joseph Phillips' and a Mrs. Forsyth's supportive testimonies, and Pringle's explanation of the Reverend James Curtin's antagonism toward Mary Prince. After the History appears, Mary Prince breaks a dignified post-publication silence by agreeing to an interview with the Reverend Curtin; she amplifies her authority by not flinching from prior aspersions he has publicly cast.⁴⁶ She admits to Thomas Pringle that she may have misunderstood the Reverend Curtin's conversion practices in Antigua. She accepts a small correction of fact—she was baptized in April not August. Thus she retracts testimony around the edges and, since these refutations are the best a minister charging inveterate profligacy can do to advance his case, she silently reconsolidates the veracity of her narrative. She displays slaves' everyday reality as it had not hitherto been shown in a century and a half of Anglo-Africanist portrayals.

A tug of war also exists between partisans and plantocrats over the principle of naming. Pringle opts for the metaphorically dense Mary Prince while Wood favors “the woman Molly,” its casual nature and absent patronym underscoring the Woods's obsession with ownership. Mary Prince rarely names herself throughout the narrative though the range of names attributed to her offers another space in which her roles and desires can be “told.” In the parliamentary petition of 1829, for example, “Mary Prince or James, commonly called Molly Wood” [asks to] return to the West Indies, but not as a slave.”⁴⁷ The earliest title of the History, moreover, was The Life of Mary, Princess of Wales, a West Indian Slave—Princess of Wales being a name with which Mary Prince's owners tried to ridicule her sense of self-possession. Interestingly, the ultimate, official title privileges Mary Prince's personal narration—The History of Mary Prince … Related by Herself—and her life lived heterogeneously as well as in and through time. How much say she had in that final, more self-validating title remains unclear. This layering of names signifies her criss-crossing attachments, voluntary and coerced, but nomenclature cannot begin to define her ontological complexity. So she appears to stand somewhat apart; she is the “I” who recognizes her multiple subject positions but refuses definition on this basis alone. With such naming symbolism, both Pringle and Wood strive to contain and control her within their own separate economies, one avowedly based on spiritual values, the other based on material ownership of human beings.

Despite oppositional agendas that created a national political split, all three groups, the plantocratic lobby and male and female emancipationists as a whole press Mary Prince's narrative into the service of their own branch of dominant ideology—including that of “separate spheres” for men and women—that will secure a post-emancipation, European-dominated, colonial world. This is not to argue that Mary Prince consciously opposed such a world, but the world that she projected uncharacteristically recognized the everyday authentic reality and conflicts of African-Caribbean and black British men and women as well as white. The three groups hold widely diverse views on human equality that in turn differ from the view envisaged and enunciated by Mary Prince in her History and in her silent dialogues with slave narratees. Notwithstanding abolitionists' sincere commitment to emancipation, in their multiple objectifications of Mary Prince, the British colonizers are often more ideologically unified than they at first appear. At one level, they create isomorphic structures.

Set beside these homogenized, yet differently constructed or intended views, Mary Prince denies their “truth.” If anything, she reverses roles with her supporters because, even though she knows they can pass a bill, find her employment, publish her narrative, she refuses “to internalize the other as the object of benevolence.”⁴⁸ She makes their theory of emancipation responsible for what it says. She literalizes it. The former colonized other becomes the sovereign subject who reduces a group of ruling-class abolitionists to a one-dimensional role in colonialism: to end slavery. With the discursive means at her disposal, she attempts a reversal of power and instigates “new struggles against existing forms of power.”⁴⁹ The History authorizes her, not them, in that her text and her body are “available” for all to read; she is no longer simply an abstract European construction of tropes, figures, and “authenticating devices”; she mocks, consciously or not, their always sincere efforts to invoke pity for slaves by depicting one-dimensional victims. She declines to be effaced or constituted as a “fixed” fetish that will primarily validate the evangelical ethic. Furthermore, she pushes plantocrats into a defensive posture as blusterers, forced to attack the “word” of an individual whose humanity they customarily deny. In Frantz Fanon's formulations, she breaks their “flaunting violence” and psychologically takes up residence in the “settler's” place.⁵⁰ Discursive guerilla warfare forces cultural reinscription. Insurgency is countermythology.

Mary Prince, then, claims subjectship from Europeans in written and spoken language. She sets herself apart, not only from contemporary emancipationists, but also from the protracted lineage of white female writers that began haltingly in the late seventeenth-century to question the legitimacy of slavery. Despite the fact that her History causes other texts to proliferate—prefaces, apologias, diatribes, reports in The Times—her account assimilates them, comments on them, and self-augments as a result; out of her conflicts with authorities and her grasp of their ideological limitations, she establishes an autonomous domain of her own. Mary Prince reverses the idea of devices such as supplements and newspaper articles to authenticate her personhood. Instead, the white British texts that seek to construct and contain her become borders around an inviolable textual frontier that she has created for herself, on her own behalf. Her published text—a version of experiential truth refracted through the lens of an invisibly manacled woman and a propagandistic editor and transcriber—signifies visible public victory for a self-motivated subject. She attains authorship while simultaneously conforming and subversively erupting (consciously and unconsciously) out of that conformity. Mary Prince inaugurates a black female counteroffensive to pro- and anti-slavery Anglo-Africanism and refuses a totalizing conception of black women as flogged, half-naked victims of slavery's entourage. Her text encourages a tripartite (though overlapping) view of emancipationist writers based on gender and racial difference. No African-British slavewoman prior to 1831 had written for publication. Mary Prince's narrative helped to name that hitherto untold history and at the same time problematized the customary univocal though politically differentiated accounts by abolitionists and plantocrats alike. Claiming voice and agency, Mary Prince debunks old mythologies, declines external definitions of slaves and ex-slaves, and clears a path for more open contestations of power in the future. She announces her participation not only in the emancipationist and anti-colonialist struggles but in the collective movement for black women's rights that was to be notably absent in the upcoming agitation for British white women's suffrage.

Notes

1. This text was originally published in 1831 by F. Westley and A. H. David in London and Waugh and Innes in Edinburgh. It included “A Supplement to the Editor” in which Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, explains the circumstances of his publishing Mary Prince's narrative. The text went into a third edition that year. No copies of the second and fourth edition have so far been uncovered. A postscript to the second edition is included in the prefatory apparatus to the third edition which faithfully follows the first edition except for an appendix. Two reprintings follow the first edition. One is edited and with an introduction by Moira Ferguson and a preface by Ziggi Alexander (London and New York: Pandora), 1987. All citations are from this edition. The second, edited and with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., appears in the volume The Classic Slave Narratives, along with The Life of Olaudah Equiano, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: New American Library, 1987).

   Part of the argument in this chapter about European constructions of slaves and slavery is indebted to Edward Said's thesis in Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), especially his idea that there is little correspondence

   between the language used to depict the Orient and the Orient itself, … because [the aim of the language is] … to characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe.

   (pp. 71-72).

2. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 124.

3. For the discussion of colonial discourse, I am greatly indebted to the current critical debate by, for example, Homi K. Bhabha, Patrick Brantlinger, Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Abdul R. JanMohamed, Christopher Miller, Chadra Talpade Mohanty, Benita Parry, Mary Louise Pratt, Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Jean Fagan Yellin.

4. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince. A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (London: Pandora Press, 1987), p. 45. (Original editor Thomas Pringle, Edinburgh, 1831).

5. Mary Prince, A History, p. 45.

6. I am renegotiating Gerald Prince's concept of the “narratee” here. As recent studies in reader recognition have shown, the text is not only addressed to the person reading the book but to an auditor constructed within the narrative itself, in this case members of slave communities, or, in Gerald Prince's language, slave narratees. See Gerald Prince, “Introduction to the Study of Narratee,” Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane S. Tompkins (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 7-25.

7. Mary Prince, A History, pp. 82-83.

8. Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” “Race,” Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 172-173.

9. Jacques Lacan analyses the gaze and the “technique of camouflage” and mimicry in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1981), pp. 98-99; Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 5.

10. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1966), Part 2: 113-115. Another terse example of Mary Prince's double-voiced discourse is her statement that her “dear mistress [took] great pains to make me understand [the word of God]” (Mary Prince, A History, p. 82). Mary Prince's motivation, as Sigmund Freud argues in Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1900, Reprint. New York: Avon, 1965), is consciously or unconsciously, always purposive. Consciously she may not intend to suggest coercion or the appropriateness or inappropriateness of catechism-by-rote to someone seeking freedom, but her choice of words “gives her away.”

11. Mary Prince, A History, p. 47. For a discussion of the politics of childhood recollections, see Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of AnteBellum Slave Narratives (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 95-96 and passim. Foster argues that many slave narratives depict childhood as “a fairly happy time punctuated by incidents which temporarily disturbed the individual and foreshadowed for the reader the disasters to come.”

12. Pringle's priorities show up in the supplement to Mary Prince's narrative where he declined to print in full the names of Captain I———and his wife (Mary Prince's third owner, and D———): they were dead when the narrative was published, Pringle argued, and would have had “to answer at a far more awful tribunal.” “Besides,” Pringle added, “it might deeply lacerate the feelings of their surviving and perhaps innocent relatives” (Mary Prince, A History, p. 46). In the Bermuda Archives in Hamilton, Bermuda, among file cards that refer to various church, maritime, and other records, there is evidence to suggest that Captain I———may have been Joseph Ingham who married Mary Spencer on September 26, 1789. They lived in Spanish Point and had a son named Benjamin who was baptized on October 16, 1790. (In the text, Mary Prince states that they lived at Spanish Point and had a son Benjy, who was roughly her own age.) The identity of D———is still a mystery. Of the possible references to Mary Prince in the Slave Registry of 1820-21 the one that appears on page 76 seems the most likely (Mary Prince was often called Molly): “Owner: Joseph Dill. Slave: Molly, female black houseservant age 28.” No slaves with names similar to those in the History are found in the 1820-21 Slave Registery. Worth noting, too, is Thomas Pringle's background in light of his shielding of slave abusers. Thomas Pringle spent many years in South Africa after personal financial collapse in Scotland, where he espoused traditional white supremacist attitudes toward Africans, evident in his published poetry.

13. No record so far has been found of the burial of the Frenchwoman, Hetty, as the slave of Captain I———. That lack could mean she did not have an official burial due to her condition and I———'s fear of publicity. It also might indicate the Woods's insecurity about power. Tzvetan Todorov's distinction between a massacre and a sacrifice society has a suggestive bearing on ambivalence in the Woods's behavior. Hetty's unrecorded death fits roughly within Todorov's characterization of a massacre society. “The more remote and alien the victims, the better: they are exterminated without remorse, more or less identified with animals.” Tzvetan Todorov, in The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 144. The fact that Mary Prince's presence or absence, unlike the existence of Hetty, deeply affects the Woods seems to hinge on their sense of power. To borrow loosely from Todorov: the severe floggings of Mary Prince that seem to stop short of death are more allied with his concept of sacrifice or ritual murder: “it is performed in the name of the official ideology and will be perpetrated in public places in sight of all and to everyone's knowledge. The victim's identity is determined by strict rules” (Todorov, The Conquest, p. 144). The more appreciated the victim is, and many witnesses testified to the confidence the Woods's placed in Mary Prince, the greater the power accruing to the perpetrator and the stronger the social fabric appears to be. Note also that the impunity with which Mary Prince's owners abused their slaves is hardly surprising on an island that introduced the treadmill in the late 1820s as a “normal corrective expedient” and a substitute for whipping.

14. Mary Prince, A History, p. 60.

15. Both Hilary Beckles, Barbara Bush, and Lucille Mathurin discuss the issue of sexual abuse and the courageous resistance of female slaves. Mathurin offers compelling evidence to prove how abuse affects childbearing. See Hilary Beckles, Black Rebellion in Barbados: The Struggle Against Slavery 1627-1833 (St. Michael, Barbados, W.I.: Antilles Publications, 1984); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1838 (Kingston: Heinemann, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Lucille Mathurin, The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies During Slavery (Jamaica, W.I.: Institute of Jamaica Publications, 1975), pp. 250ff. Sexual abuse and “systems of concubinage” are discussed at length in Elsa V. Goveia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), and in Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves. The medical and demographic history of slavery in the British West Indies, 1680-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Sheridan quotes tellingly from William Taylor's testimony before the Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery in 1832. Frances Smith Foster also discusses rape and abuse in “Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Woman,” in Pryse and Spillers, eds., Conjuring: Black Woman, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 31, and in Witnessing Slavery, pp. 108-109. Whether evangelical men and women knew of the constant rebellions, particularly by female slaves, is an open question. Would they have known, for example, that the Barbados Council declared “black ladies … have rather a tendency to the Amazonian cast of character” (Mathurin, The Rebel Woman), p. 15, or that 1,782 women compared with 941 men were punished between 1824 and 1826; or that “the black female spitfire was a plague on the lives of drivers, overseers, and managers” (Mathurin, The Rebel Woman), p. 13? Could they have been aware of a ditty (likely of questionable morality in evangelical eyes) sung by black women in the Caribbean that suggested why they felt empowered to revolt?

    And while he palaver and preach him book
    At the negro girl he'll winkie him yeye
    “Hi! de Buckra, hi!.”

    (Beckles, Black Rebellion, p. 16)

    We do know, however, that the legal cases of such abused and exploited female slaves as Kitty Hilton, Grace, and Kate had become notorious causes célèbres through the propaganda of the Anti-Slavery Reporter. Female petitioners such as the slave Polly (mentioned in Quaker anti-slavery correspondence) also added to the composite profile of rebelling women.

16. Mary Prince, A History, p. 14.

17. Mary Prince, A History, p. 16.

18. As far as possible, Pringle wants Mary Prince to conform to an evangelical Christian model of womanhood, granting that acceptance of conversion necessitates admission as well as absolution of former sinfulness. Plantocrats, by contrast, want to sign her as a prostitute. Such pro-slaveryites as James Macqueen, a well-known editor of the Glasgow Herald, and the Reverend James Curtin, an Antiguan missionary and afterwards a parochial clergyman who baptized Mary Prince and then gave pro-slavery parliamentary testimony, are two cases in point. In “The Colonial Empire of Great Britain,” in Blackwoods Magazine, November, 1831, Macqueen vitriolically attacks Mary Prince's narrative in minute detail and offers extensive refutation by plantocrats and their supporters (pp. 744-764). The Anti-Slavery Reporter for February 1833 published a long report of the Reverend Curtin's testimony before a Committee of the House of Lords on the condition and treatment of slaves. “Mr. Curtin could not recollect any instances (with one or two exceptions) of cruel treatment of slaves in Antigua, during his thirty years' experience” (p. 516).

19. Mary Prince, A History, p. 101.

20. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, p. 243.

21. I am borrowing and renegotiating the idea of the idealized self from Erving Goffman. Goffman argues that a “performance” conforms to “officially accredited values of the society” because of the “socialization process. … Performers … offer their observers an impression that is idealized in several different ways.” See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 35. Thus I am suggesting that Mary Prince consciously offers the history of an “idealized” victim because she realizes that Thomas Pringle desires exactly such a prescribed individual. Thus she codes and fashions the abridged narrative of her life partly to conform to his construction of a slave.

22. Mary Prince, A History, p. 48.

23. Abdul JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 83; and Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country: or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” Gates, “Race,” Writing and Difference, p. 139.

24. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially chapters 3, 4, and 5, tellingly foregrounds the unique importance of literacy. The sequence of Mary Prince's oral narrative parallels that of slaves' conversion narratives; possibly her evangelical editor and transcriber influenced that sequence: Mary Prince is happy, then she endures suffering, gets to Antigua, meets Moravians, marries, morally improves, is done in by unchristian owners, deserves more moral treatment, and justifiably (in God's eyes) walks away. More succinctly stated, “immorality” cannot be an issue for conversion, Q.E.D.; only after Mary Prince marries, does she convert.

25. Mary Prince, A History, pp. 72-74. I am not discounting other influences on Mary Prince's decision to “branch out”: namely, gossip about manumission, “talk” around the Woods's house, information she heard from missionaries and other slaves about the 1807 bill, about slaves' legal status, and subsequent historical developments.

26. Mary Prince, A History, pp. 16-18.

27. Mary Prince, A History, p. 105.

28. Mary Prince, A History, pp. 75-76.

29. Mary Prince, A History, p. 76.

30. Mary Prince, A History, p. 77.

31. Mary Prince, A History, p. 45.

32. Joan Grant, “Call Loud: The History of Mary Prince,” in Trouble and Strife 24 (Autumn 1988): 10.

33. Mary Prince, A History, p. 78.

34. The transcriber of Mary Prince's manuscript was Susanna Strickland (later Moodie), who wrote a volume of poems dedicated to the Moravian editor and abolitionist, James Montgomery, and later a travel narrative about her life in Canada. She was a recently converted Methodist. To date I can only speculate as to why Susannah Strickland Moodie (from the celebrated Strickland family and much biographized) seems never to have mentioned the transcription. She may simply have wanted to keep her name out of the controversy. On the other hand, it could indicate the extent to which the narrative was indeed (Pringle's disclaimers to the contrary) Mary Prince's own.

35. Mary Prince, A History, p. 84.

36. The discussion of multiple dialogues and voices in the text is indebted to M. M. Bakhtin's essay “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259-422.

37. Mary Prince, A History, p. 54.

38. Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) offers a gripping discussion of this issue. I thank Thomas Bestul for this reference.

39. The case of missionary Henry Whiteley is one example. He returned to England from Jamaica and wrote an account of the atrocities he witnessed. Two hundred thousand copies were distributed within two weeks. See C. Duncan Rice, “The Missionary Context of the British Anti-Slavery Movement,” Slavery and British Society 1776-1846, ed. James. Walvin (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 160.

40. Although it seems certain that religious constraints on editors and transcribers caused the censorship of many references to sexuality, it is also possible, as the cases of incest survivors suggest, that systematic brutality and male violence were not always wholly recalled or recallable. Yet, since brutality against slaves was constant, the chances of repression were not at all likely. See Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), pp. 340-344, 626-648, on such defense mechanisms as repression, displacement, and projection.

41. Anne Boylan, “Women in Groups: An Analysis of Women's Benevolent Organizations in New York and Boston, 1797-1840,” Journal of American History 71, no. 3 (December 1974), pp. 497-523.

42. Mary Prince, A History, pp. 119-120.

43. Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p. 101.

44. I owe a reinterpretation of this point to a lively discussion with members of the London History Workshop, 18th July, 1988.

45. In Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), Mary Turner discusses the importance of slaves dressing up and Anglo-Saxon recognition of the implications of that fact.

46. Mary Prince, A History, p. 107.

47. Mary Prince, A History, pp. 116-117.

48. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Post-Coloniality and the Field of Value,” Plenary session talk, Conference on Cultural Value, Birkbeck College, University of London, July 16, 1988.

49. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 209.

50. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1963), trans. Constance Farrington, pp. 44-45.