SOURCE: Fish, Cheryl.“Voices of Restless (Dis)continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in the Antebellum Americas.” Women's Studies 26 (1997): 475-95.

[In the following essay, Fish explores how the mobility of Nancy Prince and Seacole, two free-born black women, helped to shape their identities and impacted the travel-narrative genre.]

Travel, with its many bourgeois associations, might be a loaded term for African Americans in that it cannot be easily evoked to talk about the experience of the Middle Passage; for that reason, bell hooks often uses the term “journey” when she writes of the geographical and psychic mobility of African Americans.¹ This distinction draws attention to the slave experience as central to the literature of the African diaspora, and while acknowledging this centrality, I want to posit another significant, albeit linked, tradition that self-consciously shifts the focus from forced to chosen mobility. In thinking about the ways in which travel provided an escape from domestic obligation and limited opportunities for two free-born black women on whom my work has focused, Nancy Prince and Mary Seacole, I claim the slave experience is presented and “troped upon” in their narratives as part of a dialectic with what it means to be a free and mobile subject with a complex relationship to nationality, class, and public discourse. Prince and Seacole, who travelled between the Americas and Europe for different lengths of time from the 1820s to 1850s, had strong abolitionist sentiments and particular incidents in their narratives point to the contingent nature of freedom for mobile blacks, depending on laws, luck, and location; however, I shall argue that mobility and narratives of the journey by free-born blacks are significant genres through which other experiences and identity formations for Africans in the diaspora have been produced and read.² The book-length narratives, A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (Boston, 1850, 53 and 56) and Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (London, 1857) contain fascinating linguistic strategies, survival tactics, and local as well as cross-cultural interventions at sites where emancipation and emigration were creating mobile, racially hybrid populations.³ These narratives should be included in the ongoing recuperative project in global cultural studies as well as added to the canon of the literature and history of the Americas as scholars posit more complex configurations of racial and national identities. It is ironic that the metaphor of the journey or ship in motion has been used to convey the restless (dis)continuity that exceeds racial discourse and avoids capture by its agents (Gilroy 2), but women of color who illustrate this restless discontinuity have often been excluded. For example, in Gilroy's important book on intercultural formations between the Americas, Africa and Britain, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness and in Karen Lawrence's recent study of women as travellers and wanderers, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition, black women's voices and their strategic revisions of the journey are noteworthy absences. Two recent studies by Carla Peterson and Francis Smith Foster examine the writings of free-born black women in antebellum America (including Nancy Prince), and their research and analysis have served as a guide for my own work. Peterson's investigation of the meaning of displacement for the “Colored Tourist” is particularly provocative. While Carole Boyce Davies describes black women's subjectivity as “migratory and dialogic,” traversing geographical and national borders, the focus of her book is mainly on twentieth-century fiction, poetry, and vignettes she calls “migration horror stories” rather than on the literature written to represent actual journeys and to authenticate the exceptionality of their narrators.

To complicate the implications of the meaning created by the travelling subject, I have coined the term “mobile subjectivity,” defined as a fluid and provisional epistemology and subject position dependent upon the narrator's relationship to specific persons, ideologies, locations, and geographical space. Through movement, temporary dwelling, and locally engaged work, these women became what James Clifford calls “participant/observers” (98) deeply involved in the conflicts and causes they witnessed, and their travel accounts consciously and unconsciously voice particular agendas. They brought extensive knowledge to their analysis based on the politics of their home cultures—the New England African-American community and church in the case of Prince, and the curing and caring skills of a Jamaican doctress and boarding house proprietor in the case of Seacole.

Travel for Nancy Prince and Mary Seacole was not undertaken for the sake of mere adventure or education although those were some of the results; rather, each woman embodied her desire to leave home by finding a “field of usefulness” (Prince 43) through which to explore the wider world.⁴ “Field” performs here as a choice of vocation, an almost ethnographic form of fieldwork that includes observation and representations of difference, and it is also a metaphor for a stretch of open land; both meanings are central to my reading of mobility in relation to benevolent work, the laboring body, geographical space, and the politics of gender and genre. The representation of women's working bodies in motion and in stasis is important because the popular press of the 1850s and even more contemporary critics valorize a certain kind of traveller as the “true artist” of the journeying/book-making populace but ignore the material life of the traveller. “These are the men who invest travel with a vague romance, which is not to be discovered in the countries they visit, but in that subtle sympathy which satisfies the reader that his author is not only a travelled man, but a traveler” (unsigned review, Putnam's Monthly, June, 1855, 565). Needless to say, the “real” traveller was probably not engaged in productive work, nor did he plan to earn his livelihood by publishing a narrative. Paul Fussell goes as far as saying that “to constitute real travel, movement from one place to another should manifest some impulse of non-utilitarian pleasure” (21).

If the travelogue is now recognized as a significant outlet for many kinds of appropriations and divergent uses, until recently these hybrid accounts have been omitted from the serious study of literatures or elided under the rubric of memoir, autobiography, or even novel or epic, none of which can fully account for the uniqueness of each text and the ideologies specific to travel writing. But recently travel literature has become a prime site or “contact zone” for those who study the construction of nation and the relationship between observation, truth-telling, and the dissemination of history. This interdisciplinary cultural work has been developing out of the significant revisionary practices of feminists and other scholars for whom the project of recovery has far-reaching implications. In fact, the recovery and reissuing of these and other texts by nineteenth-century black women in the Oxford University Press/Schomburg Library series, has paved the way for scholars to historicize the contradictory positions and sassy visionary agendas offered by women like Mary Seacole and Nancy Prince (whose narrative was included in a volume simply titled Collected Black Women's Narratives) and offer complex readings that link them to a larger nexus.⁵

While the narratives by Prince and Seacole share some generic conventions with the slave narrative as well as with spiritual autobiography,⁶ my work focuses on how they draw on the popularity of the travelogue, a genre with episodic discourse that tends to blur boundaries between truth and fiction, the fantastic and the mundane, and has as its center the construction of a self whose wandering gaze uses the other as a mirror. As Mary Louise Pratt has argued, travel writing and enlightenment natural history catalyzed each other to produce Eurocentered forms of planetary consciousness (Pratt 5) and valorized colonial expansion; at times, Prince and Seacole align themselves with what might be considered the colonizing paradigm with its assumption of Western superiority and endorsement of empire, but through a subjectivity that is mobile and shifting, they often avoid binary oppositions by positioning themselves as marginalized foreigners or the objects of another's gaze. They also allow a chorus of dialogic voices to interrupt and commingle with their own narration, decentering, valorizing, or opposing their views which has the effect of disrupting easy binaries. Yet Prince and Seacole have vastly different narrative strategies, which proves that this work defies simplistic categorization and underscores the fact that there is no essential woman traveller's or black woman's resistant voice—each woman's cultural and familial background, her class position, and her age need to be taken into account, as well as how factors such as race and gender affect the mechanics of the journey. For instance, because of her race, Nancy Prince was not allowed to stay in a cabin on board ship, but forced to remain on deck where she became ill; Mary Seacole was turned down by Florence Nightingale and others to serve as a nurse in the Crimea most likely because of her age as well as her race. Prince used moral suasion and the authority of God to mock such hypocrisy, while Seacole wrote as a picara, using humor and excessive homage to Englishness even as she ironically undercut that flattery at times.

Significantly, Prince and Seacole's writing voice, persona, and mode of authentication are shaped by their anticipated readers. First, let me turn my attention to Nancy Prince. While the U.S. slave narrative was generally written for Northern white readers in order to incite them to action, Prince discursively negotiates with a particular readership—one that cut across race and gender, a literate public of black New Englanders and committed white abolitionists.⁷ Unlike most other writers of travelogues in the antebellum period, she anticipates and expresses the anxieties that signify the complex realities of her black readers' lives as free subjects who have great advantages over their enslaved brethren, yet as Americans experience racism, discrimination, mob violence, and, under certain conditions, the possibility of being enslaved. Just as Harriet Wilson turned to a fictional third-person autobiography for Our Nig (1859), Prince uses a hybrid genre to address the hypocrisy of Northern whites in their treatment of blacks, but does so by incorporating it into larger cautionary tales interspersed with biblical allegory. In order to valorize her desire to travel and her authority to write about it, she begins by emphasizing her identity as a U.S. citizen and granddaughter of the American revolution, as her maternal grandfather, Tobias Wornton, or Backus (Prince 5) fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill while a slave, which seems at least as important as her conversion to evangelical Baptism.⁸ Because the title of her 1841 pamphlet on Jamaica, The West Indies: Being a Description of the Islands, Progress of Christianity, Education and Liberty Among the Colored Population Generally (Boston: Dow & Jackson) sounds like the standard travel/missionary report from the field, some of its diverse purposes and uses are not obvious. For instance, the pamphlet offered testimony by Prince to complement and contextualize fund-raising appeals she made in The Liberator for a proposed school for orphans and indigent girls in Kingston.⁹ In addition, her travel narrative contained warnings for African American readers about emigration schemes and corrupt colonial policies in Jamaica. Prince puts black readers on alert, pointing to mistakes, exaggerated promises, and faulty historiography created by missionaries and colonial administrators in their dealings with freed Afro-Jamaicans as well as with emigrants, and in doing so engages in ongoing debates about the meaning of freedom, citizenship, and nation, border crossings that mark the black Atlantic. For example, Alexander Barclay, Commissioner of Emigration in Jamaica, attempted to attract laborers after emancipation, including African Americans, promising free passage, constant and steady employment and “comforts enjoyed by the laboring classes … exceeded by none” (Remarks on Emigration 8). Prince countered his offer and other advertisements that appeared in the abolitionist press by writing of her visits to African Americans in Jamaica: “… They all feel deceived … I called on many Americans and found them poor and discontented, ruing the day they left their country …” (The West Indies 12). And when she later incorporated her pamphlet into the longer Narrative of Life and Travels it could have been classified by readers as merely autobiographical and therefore perceived as insignificant as a political tract that had much in common with current debates in the abolitionist and mainstream press.¹⁰ In contrast to the slave narrative, which includes the acquisition of literacy as a central tenet for its narrator's personhood, Nancy Prince is an agent who spreads literacy to former slaves in Jamaica in order to valorize herself as an enlightened American subject taking the project of uplift abroad and to convince readers of the inherent decency and ambition of the freed Afro-Jamaicans and, by inference, African Americans.

If we gender Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic to include women as cultural agents, Nancy Prince's significant interventions between the Americas and Europe are an attempt to disrupt what she views as oppression and containment from a number of provisional homespaces. In the process of journeying, she encountered resistance, violence, stereotyping, and loneliness, as the liminality of travel removed her from the familiar and brought her in contact with risk and otherness. This created a sense of displacement, articulated textually as a dialectic between physical or masculinized strength and an infirm or feminized body that maintains an empowered spirit. These representations reveal an ambivalence about the need to maintain female propriety while circumstances demanded otherwise. I want to turn to several significant passages in her travelogue that point to the conjunction of the laboring mobile body in relation to particular locations, traditions, genres and institutions to illustrate the way this work shares commonality and yet refigures themes present in other popular nineteenth century genres.

Prince's text traces a relationship between travelling away from one's homeland and the necessity of leaving one's mother.¹¹ She valorizes a kind of mobility connected to usefulness and productive work in order to distance herself from her mother, whom she associated with the nomadic wandering of the Jew, a kind of permanent displacement, and the indiscreet sexuality of the prostitute. In the opening, and most personally revealing pages of her narrative, she describes how her mother had remarried several times, bore many children, and suffered from a mental disorder that prevented her from properly caring for her children. Nancy wrote that her family was “scattered all about” (9) and that she assumed a maternal position as a young girl, keeping track of her siblings and finding suitable homes and domestic positions for them. As if it were an incident out of domestic fiction, Nancy narrates the rescue of her sister Silvia from a brothel, making a heroic quest to save her. Earlier, Prince had linked travel to her stepfather's escape from slavery; he jumped ship and swam ashore. Nancy travels from Salem to Boston by foot and horse and sleigh (12), and not only secures her sister but also exposes abuses committed by that “heroic” stepparent; mobility becomes a form of recovering both sisters' bodies and allows Nancy to move on as well as to break the silence regarding the abuse of power. This success also paves the way for her later plans to open a school for orphans of color first in Boston and then in Kingston, safe homes for young women away from the temptation of illicit sexuality and demonstrates her commitment to what Patricia Hill Collins and Stanlie M. James call “othermothering,” taking responsibility first for her siblings and then helping other children. If Harriet Jacobs valorized her authority through motherhood, Nancy Prince's freedom is contingent upon a detour around biological motherhood, but she notes the separation of children from mothers (which marks slavery in the Americas), and expresses anger at women she finds morally inadequate or licentious. The female body is an uncanny reminder in Prince's text of the paradox of the sexual and the maternal under particularly threatening circumstances for black women; in travelling and writing of her experiences, Prince confronts and displaces her own body through textual rupture and contiguity.

I point to the use of the synecdoche, a marker of the body's boundaries, as Prince's strong arms hold on to her sister as the old madame “seized her to drag her down into the kitchen” (14) and in an incident not recorded in her narratives, she apprehended a slavecatcher by dragging “him to the door and thrust(ing) him out of the house” telling women and children who had gathered to “pelt him with stones and anything you can get a hold of” (Hilton 4). Shifts between her empowered arms and dislocated, decorporealized body but strong back talk makes sense as a strategy for negotiating what Carla Peterson calls her public exposure as a writer, and allows her to emphasize the mission of uplift, instead of stereotyped sexuality of the black female body (Other American Traditions 192).

A key moment in literature of the journey or pilgrimage is the departure from one's home, for it is a liminal passage that strips away defining social and cultural relations and is often painful, evoking protest, grief and mourning (Leed 11). When Nancy Prince leaves the U.S. for the first time it is presented as a “determination to do something for myself,” a flight from domestic drudgery placed in the context of utilitarian escape rather than in terms of romance or pleasure. Prince reverses the traditional marriage plot in popular novels by writing of her decision to leave first, then mentioning without fanfare, her marriage “… after seven years of anxiety and toil, I made up my mind to leave my country … Mr. Prince arrived from Russia … February 15, 1824, we were married … April 14, we embarked on board the Romulus … bound for Russia” (20-21). The strategy of omission, the sudden but very brief mention of Nero Prince, an African-American man who had worked as a ship's cook and as a butler for the Russian court, suggests Nancy's ambivalence about marriage, sexuality, and childbirth based on her mother's plight, and the significance of geographical mobility and spiritual empowerment for the black woman's sense of freedom, agency and necessary risk. In Russia, Prince had a relatively privileged position as a wife the Tsar's guard, and she even set up her own sewing business, employed a journeywoman and apprentices, and sold garments to the Empress. The passages from the Russian section of her narrative rely more heavily on observation in the tradition of Western travel writing. She manages to maintain an awkward kind of distance, struggling it seems, to keep from making generalizations in favor of simply highlighting the exotic for her readers; however, laboring and dwelling in a homeplace for nine years, Prince offers a distinct approach from most of the male narrators of travelogues to Russia from the same period, who position themselves as flaneurs, wandering the countryside, lacking Prince's complicated insider/outsider subjectivity.

The final example I want to cite from Prince's narrative is one where her physical mobility is restricted within the larger frame of her journey and brings to the surface the fear of “losing one's place” while also showing us her strategy of refusing to “stay in one's place.” It occurs at a significant geographical crossroad between the U.S. and Caribbean and points to the dislocation between nation and citizenship, sight and speech, silencing and agency.

Prince's descriptions of her travels in Jamaica in 1840 and 1842 following emancipation are noteworthy for highlighting confrontations between herself and various class leaders, missionaries, ship captains, and other authority figures; what had enabled her to survive these confrontations was her ability to move on, as one who was a servant of God but seemed independent as a widow and freelance missionary/philanthropist.¹² When Prince heads home from Jamaica, as chaos and disorder forced her to abandon her projects, she stresses racial difference and the tenuous relationship between slavery and the unofficial criminal status of free blackness. Alone among the passengers on board, Nancy Prince guesses the captain's deceitful plans to detain them in Key West: “the whites made themselves comfortable, while we poor blacks were obliged to remain on that broken, wet vessel” (76) because of laws required free blacks to be put in custody or risk being beaten or even enslaved in Southern states. While Prince's mobility is halted, she is “forced” to see the “awful sight” of a vessel of slaves full of young men, girls, and children bound to Texas for sale!” (80). Prince is prohibited from communicating to blacks she sees on land, but she uses her voice as the unbound lash of verbal retribution, “killing” her taunters with rhetoric by repeating and reversing their claim to believe in God, insisting that their behavior illustrates they do not obey God. This juxtapositioning of a free but contained body in resistance, forced to confront but not connect with other African Americans that do not share her location aboard ship, illustrates the way that some white authorities disrupted possible black alliances and also reverses the gaze of the slave imagining freedom. This startling intersection confounds set notions of identity: Nancy Prince imagines how she might buy “one dear little girl that was taken from her mother in Virginia … if I had had the money” (81), but ironically, this liminal passage takes her to New York, “thankful was I to set my feet on land” (81). There, she needs to borrow money from abolitionists in order to redeem her luggage, suggesting one of many possible liaisons, despite splits and divisions from within the anti-slavery movement, that help the free black traveller to survive. The journey home leads to her conclusion “fearful is the world's pilgrimage” without refuge in God, her most comforting “hiding place,” which places her narrative within the cycle of Christian experience central to the Puritan myth of fall and recovery, as she blurs the sacred and the secular and only hints at how she survived back in Boston after her journey, again pointing to the prejudice in New England. “I labored with much success, until I hired with and from those with whom I mostly sympathized, and shared in common the disadvantages and stigma that is heaped upon us, this our professed Christian land. But my lot was like the man that went down from Jerusalem, and fell among thieves …” (84).

Now I turn my attention to Mary Seacole. Like Prince, she represented herself as an exceptional black woman travelling between the Americas and Europe, but Seacole's ironic “yellow” picara mediates between the pleasures and pathos of war and empire in an effort to, in her words, “become a Crimean heroine!” (76). In doing so, she valorizes both her commonality with “Englishness” and her creole Jamaican otherness for an idealized English reader. The genre of the travelogue enables Seacole to negotiate her authority by proving herself as an “other” worthy of heroism and support, a mobile “mammy” figure whose love of war and nurturing of English soldier “sons” is stronger than the threat her presence represents. Mary Seacole refigures the mercantile energy and anti-esthetic stance that marks what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “capitalist vanguard” of European travellers and transforms the Victorian lady exploratress into doctress, asserting a knowledge of healing based on practices of Afro-Jamaican women with a methodology and success rate often superior to more traditional doctors. By seizing her right to mobility as a “female Ulysses” (2) who lights out for colonial territories, Seacole practices both medicine and commercial proprietorship in Panama and the Crimea.

Seacole negotiated with a number of complex identities in her travelogue: she is a “yellow” or mulatta woman, a position she inhabits to mediate between black and white, and British and West Indian subjectivities. She creates herself as an industrious, pragmatic healer in order to distance herself from the “lazy” creole stereotype while simultaneously valorizing her Afro-Jamaican medical practices. To do so, she becomes a non-threatening, non-sexual “aunty” in Panama and “mother” at the Crimean war front, a signifier for nourishment or a nursing black mother's breast, healing, cooking, and wielding her “stout” body and soft heart (7). Through the use of a mobile subjectivity, in this case a laboring female body as travelling medicine chest, Mary Seacole physically and discursively “dissects” and heals bodies at the Panamanian frontier and Crimean war front. In doing so, she bridges the gap between curing and caring just at the historical moment when these practices were being split off by gender and professionalized into the separate spheres of doctoring and nursing (Ehrenreich and English 40). A relatively privileged free woman of color who travelled away from post-emancipation Jamaica and its history of slavery, Seacole moves to locations dominated by American and then British colonizing presences, textually negotiating with race, imperialism, and femininity to mime certain colonial discourses, but with a difference.¹³ She practices versions of gendered and racialized parodying, inverting, generalizing, signifying, and paying excessive homage. This is a double-voiced discourse that destabilizes her identity and the colonial paradigm, therefore acting out in relationship to Englishness what Judith Butler calls a “failed copy, as it were” (146) from a “hybrid displacing space” (Bhabha 57-8). A mobile subjectivity—expressed discursively through shifting spacial coordinates, as well as in a chorus of dialogic voices—enables her to accommodate discourses of Empire even as she attempts to charmingly disrupt and refigure them. In my larger project, I look at the mechanisms through which Seacole, who dared to “trespass” unofficially at the war front after Florence Nightingale turned her down, came to be brushed aside by historians after her figurative fifteen minutes of fame, while Nightingale became synonymous with heroic nursing and the reform of the medical profession.

I close with an example from the Crimea section of Seacole's narrative to illustrate the way she appropriated the observer/participant's dual position in travel writing with the sense of heroic adventuring that disrupts traditional paradigms of women's participation in war. Seacole first describes the specularity of bombardment, but becomes a mobile subject, shifting between the audience and the stage, to use the theatrical metaphors that dominated war discourse in the nineteenth century (Paul Virilio, quoted in Gallagher 8). She is in “attendance” at Cathcarth's Hill to watch the second bombardment of Sebastopol, but longs “to see more of warfare, to share in its hazards” (148). She gains the right to express machismo and intense enjoyment experienced through cathexis, as watching the bombardment and the threat of shells exploding nearby is a liminal zone of eroticized thrill. The only time in the narrative that Seacole uses language that reveals a temporary relaxation of her maternal posture comes in her discussion of watching the bombardments and in putting herself at risk under fire.¹⁴ These actions combine the traditionally marked male and female division of war experience: men “see battle” while women are the primary, passive spectators (Gallagher 5). Thus, in placing herself under fire by tending to the wounded at battlefields and expressing excitement regarding bombardment in sexualized language, Seacole bonds with male soldiers and becomes a warrior figure in her own right. She proudly gains access to pass by stations set up to stop stragglers and spectators from reaching the battlefield; the men “raise a shout” for her, their voices overturning her previous failures to pass into official Crimean service. But instead of gun or sabre, she carries a travelling medicine chest, a sign of her laboring mobile body, here a large bag flung across her shoulder, filled with “lint, bandages, needles, thread, and medicines,” as well as sandwiches, fowls, tongues, ham and wine and spirits (156), to nourish and nurture. Her excitement comes from watching battles from the popular overlook Cathcart's Hill, connecting her to the soldiers who had grown so used to being in peril from shelling they “found it difficult to get on without a little gratuitous excitement and danger” (155). Yet under fire, the most “masculine” of activities, she never loses sight of her female propriety, which has the effect of undermining the image of the warrior on her horse entering the forbidden battlefield. She is transformed back into an absurdly misplaced Victorian matron: when a shot or shell would come close, those around her yelled “‘Lie down, mother, lie down … and with very undignified and unladylike haste I had to embrace the earth … one, more thoughtful than the rest, would give me a helping hand, and hope the old lady was neither hit nor frightened’” (157). The image of her falling fearfully to the ground is of course one that might be associated with feminine frailty, a destablizing image, as if she wants to remind readers of her age and the absurdity of her presence on the battlefield. After this round of self deflation and bodily vulnerability, she rhetorically fires back, not by comparing her results directly with that of the “kind-hearted doctors,” but in a choice of words that undercuts her flattery, writes that the doctors who attended to patients she had helped “looked more like murderers” (158).¹⁵ She continues to move from battlefield to her British Hotel, accomplishing the balance of motherly deference to English soldiers that her readers could admire but with undercurrents and contradictions that must be carefully scrutinized. Her compromised position makes sense when we realized that like Nancy Prince, Mary Seacole was writing a travelogue to help support herself, as geographical mobility did not lead to enduring economic mobility. For both women, travel was liberating but exhausting and no traditional home was waiting.

Now we need to map the territory created by the contradictory positions in the narratives that document black women's mobility and read this literature in interdisciplinary contexts—in dialogue with various institutional practices, such as missionary work, philanthropy, healing, and how these activities intersect with projects of imperial expansion. By drawing on archival materials and resources from the social sciences, folklore, religion, and history, we can better read and speculate about the literature of women's journeys as useful threads in a larger web of complex identity formations. As feminist scholars, we must not merely celebrate hybridity and exceptionalism, but read between the lines as we travel in time, combining old and new technologies in collaboration—we must acknowledge what has come before us as well as looking forward at what has been.¹⁶

Notes

1. In addition to the Middle Passage, hooks also writes “travel is not a word that can easily be evoked to talk about … the Trail of Tears, the landing of Chinese immigrants, the forced relocation of Japanese Americans, or the plight of the homeless” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992, 173).

2. For instance, Olaudah Equiano changes from being the “travelee ripped from his family and culture and westernized perforce” to become a traveler himself, “observing Europe and other continents just as Europeans had observed Africa” (552). Geraldine Murphy, “Olaudah Equiano, Accidental Tourist,” Eighteenth Century Studies, Summer 1994, 551-568.

3. All citations from Prince come from the 1853 edition of her narrative, as reprinted in Collected Black Women's Narratives (New York: Oxford/Schomburg Library, 1988) unless otherwise specified; citations from Seacole are from the Oxford/Schomburg edition of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1988).

4. This term was often used to describe the work of uplift or the spiritual vocation of African-American women who preached in unauthorized organizational structures. For instance Daniel A. Payne described certain women of the African Methodist Episcopal church as believing themselves divinely commissioned to preach, and therefore “laying out a field of usefulness for themselves …” History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville: A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1891, p. 41).

5. Scholars such as Dorothy Porter, Dorothy Sterling, Darlene Clark Hine, Gerda Lerner, William L. Andrews, Bert James Lowenburg and Ruth Bogin, Jean Fagan Yellin, Nell Painter, James Oliver Horton, and Hazel Carby are a few of many who have done significant recuperative work, historicizing/theorizing the contributions of African American women as writers, teachers, healers, activists, workers, and public speakers in the nineteenth century and making their work more accessible to others.

6. The progress of life as a journey, beset by trials and dangers, from imperfection to perfection, from bondage to freedom (Foster, Written by Herself, 61) is present to some extent in practically all ante-bellum writing by African Americans. According to William L. Andrews, in the black spiritual autobiography, “the protagonist wishes to escape sinfulness and ignorance in order to achieve righteousness and a knowledge of the saving grace of God. In the slave narrative the quest is toward freedom from physical bondage and the enlightenment that literacy can offer to the restricted … consciousness of the slave” (To Tell A Free Story, 7). I believe it is important to distinguish the literature written by blacks around the theme of voluntary or chosen travel, in order to map out the different purposes, rhetorical strategies, embedded critiques and political interventions that both reinforced and diverged from other historiography; it is productive to examine “secular” strands as they intermingle with religious ones. In addition, I feel these narratives fall between the cracks because of institutional preference for fiction over non-fiction in terms of what gets taught; for that reason the category of the literature of travel may create an opening for rethinking genre and reading works by women like Prince and Seacole in dialogue with other texts.

7. The black population of Boston in 1850 totalled approximately 2,000; the 1850 census reported that only 14 percent of the city's black adults were unable to read and write, and that number dropped to 8 percent by 1860. Massachusetts-born blacks had a high rate of literacy because of strong public education within the state, but literacy in some cases referred to a rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing (Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 2, 12-13).

8. Prince was baptized in May, 1819, at the age of 20, by the Reverend Thomas Paul (Prince 17) founder of the first independent African American Church in the North and an important leader and missionary who travelled to Haiti in 1823. Paul was also a chaplain of the Masonic African Grand Lodge No. 459, where Prince's husband Nero Prince was also a member and commander (For references to Thomas Paul, see Encyclopedia of African American Religion, ed. Larry G. Murphy et al., New York: Garland, 1993; William McLouglin, New England Dissent, 1660-1883, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, note 48, p. 766; J. Marcus Mitchell, “The Paul Family” Old Time New England, Winter, 1973).

9. The connection between her fund-raising appeals and the sale of the pamphlet is made evident in an advertisement in The Liberator, addressed “To the Benevolent.” Donations in money, children's books or clothing solicited from “the benevolent and liberal” by Mrs. Nancy Prince “being about to establish a manual labor school for orphans and outcasts at Kingston, Jamaica. They were to leave donations at Miss Ray's house or the offices of the newspaper, where “may be found a pamphlet on the present state of Jamaica, written by Mrs. Prince” (Nov. 12, 1841).

10. The three editions of A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince were not reviewed or mentioned publicly by those who were generally supportive, like Garrison, or leading African Americans of Boston, although one account written years later claimed Life of Mrs. Prince was “found in the houses of many of the old residents of Boston, as well as other places all over Massachusetts” (“Reminiscences” Woman's Era, July 1894). The first edition was advertised in The Liberator at the same time Narrative of Sojourner Truth was, but Garrison added an endorsement for Truth: “This is a most interesting Narrative of a most remarkable and highly meritorious woman, the sale of which is to be for her exclusive benefit. We commend it to all the friends of the colored population” (May 10, 1850). No such note was written for Prince, although she too had published it as a means of support. It may have been that Prince was already familiar to the community, while Truth was not; Prince's narrative was sold at the offices of The Liberator, as well as at her house and at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, which indicates she was part of the network. While the topics covered in Nancy Prince's pamphlet, and in the Jamaica section of Life and Travels are clearly engaging with debates on questions of emigration, Prince's writings are not cited in the press—Carla Peterson has documented the difficulty of Mary Shadd Cary faced as a black woman taking an active part in emigration debates (Doers of the Word, 117).

11. Karen Lawrence notes the connection between Freud's notion of the uncanny and the rediscovery of the female body associated with the mother in the plot of adventure narratives by males. For example, Paul Zweig theorizes that the female body threatens the whole enterprise of adventure, “To be Kaylpsoed is to fall outside the poem, as Odysseus does for seven idle years” (quoted in Penelope Voyages, 7).

12. Prince was recruited by American missionaries David Ingraham and William Collier (43), but according to her narratives, she often travelled independently to different parishes within Jamaica and met with various missionaries, including English Baptists and native ministers. In the longer version of this essay, I go into more detail about her encounters with various members of the clergy. For information on other women who wrote narratives while residing in, or visiting the Caribbean, see Bridget Brereton, “Text, Testimony and Gender: An Examination of some Texts by Women on the English-Speaking Caribbean from the 1770s to the 1920s” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, Eds. Verene Shepherd et al., New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

13. As Amy Robinson suggests in her provocative essay, “Authority and the Public Display of Identity,” by attaching one's identity to the “mother” country and adapting certain forms of mimicry, the formerly colonized subject “is always already constituted as derivative of a truer self” but Mary Seacole's “ironic distance from authenticity may prove an insurgent guide” (Feminist Studies 20, 540-1). Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee locate Mary Seacole as a subject with Jamaican and British cultural origins and have positioned her within the British colonial tradition; their research has helped me to illuminate Seacole's portrayal of Americans in light of her desire to appeal to English readers. I read Seacole, however, as a woman of the Americas whose work can be read in a transnational context. (Alexander and Dewjee, “Editor's Introduction” Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1984, and Mary Seacole: Jamaican National Heroine and ‘Doctress’ in the Crimean War. London: Brent Library Service, 1982).

14. Undoubtedly, she was not the only woman to come under fire, but her willingness to do so was noted by W. H. Russell in a letter to the editor of the London Times (April 11, 1857). Some of the Russian sisters of mercy, who served as nurses to the Russian troops, came under fire in Sebastopol at first-aid points and while crossing the bay, bullets, cannonballs and bombs fell close by (Curtiss, 464).

15. Times correspondent W. H. Russell, in a letter, but not in his memoirs, made the comparison, saying he had seen Seacole “go down under fire … and a more tender or skillful hand about a wound or broken limb could not be found among our best surgeons” (London Times, April 11, 1857). Seacole repeats his testimony to indirectly make the comparison; repaying his compliment, she writes of watching him witnessing the scene under fire, taking notes, and offering a helping hand as well.

16. I wish to acknowledge plenary talks by Carla L. Peterson, Amy Kaplan and Marilyn Mobley at the 19th Century Women Writers in the 21st Century Conference, Hartford, Connecticut, May 30-June 2, 1996, as helping me to clarify what's at stake in recovering and recontextualizing writing by black women and for reminding me to keep asking questions about the work and my positionality in relation to it.

Works Cited

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