The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831)
Before Zadie Smith created the ‘multicultural novel’ in 2000 with White Teeth and won a string of awards and prizes, the precedent for female black writing had already been set two centuries earlier by a woman named Mary (not Seacole, but) Prince in a book titled The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. So what exactly opened a market for this black woman in her earlier forties during the nineteenth century?
Although Phillis Wheatley (the forerunner of Bernadine Evaristo) was the first black poet in England with the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in September 1773, the first female black prose writer was Mary Prince in 1831. Born in the British colony of Bermuda in 1788 as a slave she was sold to Captain Williams and given to his grandchild, Betsey Williams, as a gift. She spent the first twelve years of her life with the Williams family and learned how to read and write:
‘This was the happiest period my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave, and too thoughtless and full of spirits to look forward to the days of toil and sorrow.’
She was hired out to another family before her twelfth birthday and then sold to another captain:
‘I was then put up to sale…and the people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum for so young a slave.
I then saw my sisters led forth and sold to different owners; so that we had not the sad satisfaction of being partners in bondage. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us…It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing.’
She spent five years in the service of this owner, and had her first experience of observing sexual liaisons between slave owners and slaves:
‘Poor Hetty, my fellow slave, was very kind to me, and I used to call her my Aunt; but she led a most miserable life, and her death was hastened by the dreadful chastisement she received from my master during her pregnancy.’
There were no males on the plantation except two young boys no older than twelve. No male slaves were allowed on the plantation, and Hetty did not have a boyfriend. Although Mary Prince does not mention it, the only person that Hetty could have copulated with was her owner.
In 1805, she was sold to another owner and sent to the Turks Island:
‘Work – work – work – Oh that Turk’s Island was a horrible place.’
She observed the fate of every West Indian slave born in the British colonies:
‘Mr. D- had a slave called Old Daniel, whom he used to treat in the most cruel manner. Poor Daniel was lame in the hip, and could not keep up with the rest of the slaves; and our master would order him to be stripped and laid down on the ground and have him beaten with a rod of rough briar till his skin was quite red and raw…He was an object of pity and terror to the whole gang of slaves, and in this wretched case we saw, each of us, our own lot, if we should live to be as old.’
This more than anything prompted her to save up enough money to buy her freedom and escape the impending doom that awaited the old slave. But she would have to wait another twenty years before her opportune moment.
When she returned back to Bermuda with her owner, she began to experience first hand sexual abuse:
‘He had an ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water. This was worse to me than all the licks.’
Again, Mary does not blatantly mention the sexual abuse, but it is encoded within the text so that it would not offend the sensibilities of her nineteenth century readers.
In 1815, she was sold to John Wood, who took her to Antigua. It was while she was in his service that she started to attend the Moravian church where she met her future husband, Daniel James, a free black man. By Christmas 1826, they were married:
‘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.’
By 1828, when she was forty years old, she was invited to accompany the Woods family to England to attend to their domestic duties. She had saved up enough money to buy her freedom, but they refused to assist her. She then parted company with them and sought refuge at the Anti-Slavery Society in London by becoming a domestic servant to Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the Society. But in between working for Thomas Pringle in 1829 and publishing her book in 1831, there were other events taking place that went in her favour.
The Anti-Slavery Society was founded on the 10th October 1823 after sixteen years of silence since the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Within those years, the distance of slavery deafened the ears of Britons to the suffering of slaves. They needed to be reawakened to the acts of oppression in the colonies, and the Society’s publication, The Anti-Slavery Recorder, served this purpose. It was created to circulate information on the existing state of slavery; to champion a gradual abolition of slavery so that slaves could be taught what to do with their freedom; to give a brief biography of eminent abolitionists and freed slaves who have distinguished themselves with intellectual attainment; and to promote literary publications as to the effects of slavery in the colonies.
In 1824, Elizabeth Heyrick published her pamphlet, Immediate, not Gradual Abolition, and tried to persuade the gradualists of the Anti-Slavery Society to push for a speedy end to slavery. When they refused, she set up the Birmingham Ladies Society for the relief of Negro Slavery on the 8th April 1825, the same year that William Wilberforce retired from parliament. It seemed that although the men were successful in championing the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, it was now down to the women to push for the Abolition of Slavery in the British colonies.
The Anti-Slavery Society’s main objection to an immediate abolition was the school of thought that slaves would not know what to do with their freedom. They wanted a partial abolition where slaves could serve as apprentices on the plantation and be paid for their work for a number of years. But there was overwhelming evidence of the quality control management that freed slaves had over their lives. The clearest example was the nearly formed republic of Haiti. Previously known as Saint Domingue (a former French colony), it became the first independent state governed by freed slaves spearheaded by Toussaint L’Ouverture, known as the black Spartacus. An examination of his journey to independence may suggest that he indirectly had more to do with the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act than William Wilberforce.
In 1793 when Britain declared war on France, it began to sweep through the French and Spanish Caribbean and seize islands such as Tobago, St. Vincent, Dominica, Grenada and the Grenadines. In 1794, it seized Martinique, Guadeloupe and St. Lucia. Its next target was St. Domingue, but its mandate was not to liberate the slaves but to have them subject to British rule. You could say that the war with France was a struggle of plantation dominance. The slaves had already revolted against their French owners back in 1791, and by the time Britain had entered the island they were under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave. This was the only time in history when a former slave was successful in overthrowing an oppressive regime, inspired an army of freed slaves and then went on to defeat another superpower – the British army. Whereas Spartacus was caught and crucified by the Romans, Toussaint L’Ouverture expelled the British army under the command of General Maitland from the island and began to lay the infrastructure for an independent state. He reconstructed roads, built schools and encouraged the arts. He established courts of justice, a black ruling class, lauded the virtues of stable family life and published a constitution for the island in July 1801. He invited planters back to manage their plantations, but insisted that the workers were paid on a three-year contract, but could leave at any time. He even signed trade agreements with North America and Britain to export coffee and sugar to stimulate the economy. But although he did not officially declare independence during his lifetime, he still pledged his allegiance to France as though he saw himself as a Frenchman rather than a West Indian. After he died on the 27th April 1803, Saint Domingue was declared the independent state of Haiti on the 1st January 1804.
It was because of this new development that the British government were more enthusiastic about an abolition bill to stem the flow of resentful Africans into the British West Indies and reduce the risk of a rebellion. William Wilberforce administered the parliamentary procedures in the House of Commons, and Lord Grenville did the same in the House of Lords in order to realise this initiative in 1807. But there were other examples of freed slaves who knew how to enjoy their freedom.
Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of Captain John Lindsay in the Royal Navy spent the first 35 years of her life at Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath where she grew up as a middle-class Black Englishwoman. She married a local minister by the name of Rev. Davinier, but as she did not write a novel or an autobiography she did not assume the role of a black Jane Austen.
Joanna Vassa, the only surviving daughter of Olaudah Equiano, enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle of £80,000 from her father’s estate, and married a clergyman by the name of Rev. Henry Bromley. Again, she did not write a novel or autobiography, which means that the literary world was robbed of the middle class black experience in nineteenth century England.
Julius Soubise, the former domestic servant of the Duchess of Queensberry, went on to become an accomplished swordsman and trainer of horses.
Ignatius Sancho, former valet of the Duke of Montagu, went on to run a grocery store in Westminster, associated with Laurence Sterne and David Garrick, composed classical music, became a man of letters and was arguably the first black man to vote in Britain (1774).
George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a black native of Biala, Poland, became the first professional black composer of classical music and a friend of Beethoven.
And Thomas Molineaux, the former slave from Virginia who bought his freedom and came to England in 1810, challenged the heavyweight champion, Tom Cribb, to become the first black champion prizefighter in England.
All of these examples were available to the Anti-Slavery Society, but it seemed as though they needed a breath of fresh air to make the immediacy of abolition become more urgent. It was down to the women of England to do something about it.
At a conference in May 1830, Elizabeth Heyrick submitted a resolution to the Anti-Slavery Society stating that if they refused an immediate abolition the women’s anti-slavery groups would withdraw their funding. The Anti-Slavery Society agreed to drop the words gradual abolition and began a campaign for an immediate abolition.
For the abolition of the slave trade campaign, it was the men who were used to illustrate the evils of the trade. Publications like A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African prince (1772), Letters of the late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782), Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly submitted to the inhabitants of Great Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, a native of Africa (1787), and The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) emphasized the African identity of freed slaves (even though Ignatius Sancho had never set foot on African soil) in order to champion a bill that would stop ships leaving Liverpool, Bristol and London to recruit slaves in West Africa. In other words, the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade put an end to the Middle Passage in the hope that it would end slavery itself. Because a change was not forthcoming, the task now was to emphasize the effects of slavery on West Indian slaves in the colonies. Enter stage right Mary Prince, a West Indian slave.
Because immediate abolition was driven by the female anti-slavery societies, it seemed now appropriate to have slavery observed from a female perspective. Thus the creation of The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave in 1831:
‘I have been a slave – I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains and set us free.’
The book went through three editions, leading to the Slavery Abolition Bill becoming law on the 29th August 1833 (exactly a month after William Wilberforce died on the 29th July 1833) and enforced on the 1st August 1834. Full emancipation took place in 1838 in the colonies.
In conclusion then, it was Mary Prince who paved the way for successive writers like Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo and even Mary Seacole to follow. Without her contribution to literature, we would not have White Teeth or The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands as slavery would probably not have ended when it did.
Although Phillis Wheatley (the forerunner of Bernadine Evaristo) was the first black poet in England with the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in September 1773, the first female black prose writer was Mary Prince in 1831. Born in the British colony of Bermuda in 1788 as a slave she was sold to Captain Williams and given to his grandchild, Betsey Williams, as a gift. She spent the first twelve years of her life with the Williams family and learned how to read and write:
‘This was the happiest period my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave, and too thoughtless and full of spirits to look forward to the days of toil and sorrow.’
She was hired out to another family before her twelfth birthday and then sold to another captain:
‘I was then put up to sale…and the people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum for so young a slave.
I then saw my sisters led forth and sold to different owners; so that we had not the sad satisfaction of being partners in bondage. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us…It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing.’
She spent five years in the service of this owner, and had her first experience of observing sexual liaisons between slave owners and slaves:
‘Poor Hetty, my fellow slave, was very kind to me, and I used to call her my Aunt; but she led a most miserable life, and her death was hastened by the dreadful chastisement she received from my master during her pregnancy.’
There were no males on the plantation except two young boys no older than twelve. No male slaves were allowed on the plantation, and Hetty did not have a boyfriend. Although Mary Prince does not mention it, the only person that Hetty could have copulated with was her owner.
In 1805, she was sold to another owner and sent to the Turks Island:
‘Work – work – work – Oh that Turk’s Island was a horrible place.’
She observed the fate of every West Indian slave born in the British colonies:
‘Mr. D- had a slave called Old Daniel, whom he used to treat in the most cruel manner. Poor Daniel was lame in the hip, and could not keep up with the rest of the slaves; and our master would order him to be stripped and laid down on the ground and have him beaten with a rod of rough briar till his skin was quite red and raw…He was an object of pity and terror to the whole gang of slaves, and in this wretched case we saw, each of us, our own lot, if we should live to be as old.’
This more than anything prompted her to save up enough money to buy her freedom and escape the impending doom that awaited the old slave. But she would have to wait another twenty years before her opportune moment.
When she returned back to Bermuda with her owner, she began to experience first hand sexual abuse:
‘He had an ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water. This was worse to me than all the licks.’
Again, Mary does not blatantly mention the sexual abuse, but it is encoded within the text so that it would not offend the sensibilities of her nineteenth century readers.
In 1815, she was sold to John Wood, who took her to Antigua. It was while she was in his service that she started to attend the Moravian church where she met her future husband, Daniel James, a free black man. By Christmas 1826, they were married:
‘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.’
By 1828, when she was forty years old, she was invited to accompany the Woods family to England to attend to their domestic duties. She had saved up enough money to buy her freedom, but they refused to assist her. She then parted company with them and sought refuge at the Anti-Slavery Society in London by becoming a domestic servant to Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the Society. But in between working for Thomas Pringle in 1829 and publishing her book in 1831, there were other events taking place that went in her favour.
The Anti-Slavery Society was founded on the 10th October 1823 after sixteen years of silence since the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Within those years, the distance of slavery deafened the ears of Britons to the suffering of slaves. They needed to be reawakened to the acts of oppression in the colonies, and the Society’s publication, The Anti-Slavery Recorder, served this purpose. It was created to circulate information on the existing state of slavery; to champion a gradual abolition of slavery so that slaves could be taught what to do with their freedom; to give a brief biography of eminent abolitionists and freed slaves who have distinguished themselves with intellectual attainment; and to promote literary publications as to the effects of slavery in the colonies.
In 1824, Elizabeth Heyrick published her pamphlet, Immediate, not Gradual Abolition, and tried to persuade the gradualists of the Anti-Slavery Society to push for a speedy end to slavery. When they refused, she set up the Birmingham Ladies Society for the relief of Negro Slavery on the 8th April 1825, the same year that William Wilberforce retired from parliament. It seemed that although the men were successful in championing the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, it was now down to the women to push for the Abolition of Slavery in the British colonies.
The Anti-Slavery Society’s main objection to an immediate abolition was the school of thought that slaves would not know what to do with their freedom. They wanted a partial abolition where slaves could serve as apprentices on the plantation and be paid for their work for a number of years. But there was overwhelming evidence of the quality control management that freed slaves had over their lives. The clearest example was the nearly formed republic of Haiti. Previously known as Saint Domingue (a former French colony), it became the first independent state governed by freed slaves spearheaded by Toussaint L’Ouverture, known as the black Spartacus. An examination of his journey to independence may suggest that he indirectly had more to do with the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act than William Wilberforce.
In 1793 when Britain declared war on France, it began to sweep through the French and Spanish Caribbean and seize islands such as Tobago, St. Vincent, Dominica, Grenada and the Grenadines. In 1794, it seized Martinique, Guadeloupe and St. Lucia. Its next target was St. Domingue, but its mandate was not to liberate the slaves but to have them subject to British rule. You could say that the war with France was a struggle of plantation dominance. The slaves had already revolted against their French owners back in 1791, and by the time Britain had entered the island they were under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave. This was the only time in history when a former slave was successful in overthrowing an oppressive regime, inspired an army of freed slaves and then went on to defeat another superpower – the British army. Whereas Spartacus was caught and crucified by the Romans, Toussaint L’Ouverture expelled the British army under the command of General Maitland from the island and began to lay the infrastructure for an independent state. He reconstructed roads, built schools and encouraged the arts. He established courts of justice, a black ruling class, lauded the virtues of stable family life and published a constitution for the island in July 1801. He invited planters back to manage their plantations, but insisted that the workers were paid on a three-year contract, but could leave at any time. He even signed trade agreements with North America and Britain to export coffee and sugar to stimulate the economy. But although he did not officially declare independence during his lifetime, he still pledged his allegiance to France as though he saw himself as a Frenchman rather than a West Indian. After he died on the 27th April 1803, Saint Domingue was declared the independent state of Haiti on the 1st January 1804.
It was because of this new development that the British government were more enthusiastic about an abolition bill to stem the flow of resentful Africans into the British West Indies and reduce the risk of a rebellion. William Wilberforce administered the parliamentary procedures in the House of Commons, and Lord Grenville did the same in the House of Lords in order to realise this initiative in 1807. But there were other examples of freed slaves who knew how to enjoy their freedom.
Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of Captain John Lindsay in the Royal Navy spent the first 35 years of her life at Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath where she grew up as a middle-class Black Englishwoman. She married a local minister by the name of Rev. Davinier, but as she did not write a novel or an autobiography she did not assume the role of a black Jane Austen.
Joanna Vassa, the only surviving daughter of Olaudah Equiano, enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle of £80,000 from her father’s estate, and married a clergyman by the name of Rev. Henry Bromley. Again, she did not write a novel or autobiography, which means that the literary world was robbed of the middle class black experience in nineteenth century England.
Julius Soubise, the former domestic servant of the Duchess of Queensberry, went on to become an accomplished swordsman and trainer of horses.
Ignatius Sancho, former valet of the Duke of Montagu, went on to run a grocery store in Westminster, associated with Laurence Sterne and David Garrick, composed classical music, became a man of letters and was arguably the first black man to vote in Britain (1774).
George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a black native of Biala, Poland, became the first professional black composer of classical music and a friend of Beethoven.
And Thomas Molineaux, the former slave from Virginia who bought his freedom and came to England in 1810, challenged the heavyweight champion, Tom Cribb, to become the first black champion prizefighter in England.
All of these examples were available to the Anti-Slavery Society, but it seemed as though they needed a breath of fresh air to make the immediacy of abolition become more urgent. It was down to the women of England to do something about it.
At a conference in May 1830, Elizabeth Heyrick submitted a resolution to the Anti-Slavery Society stating that if they refused an immediate abolition the women’s anti-slavery groups would withdraw their funding. The Anti-Slavery Society agreed to drop the words gradual abolition and began a campaign for an immediate abolition.
For the abolition of the slave trade campaign, it was the men who were used to illustrate the evils of the trade. Publications like A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African prince (1772), Letters of the late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782), Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly submitted to the inhabitants of Great Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, a native of Africa (1787), and The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) emphasized the African identity of freed slaves (even though Ignatius Sancho had never set foot on African soil) in order to champion a bill that would stop ships leaving Liverpool, Bristol and London to recruit slaves in West Africa. In other words, the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade put an end to the Middle Passage in the hope that it would end slavery itself. Because a change was not forthcoming, the task now was to emphasize the effects of slavery on West Indian slaves in the colonies. Enter stage right Mary Prince, a West Indian slave.
Because immediate abolition was driven by the female anti-slavery societies, it seemed now appropriate to have slavery observed from a female perspective. Thus the creation of The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave in 1831:
‘I have been a slave – I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains and set us free.’
The book went through three editions, leading to the Slavery Abolition Bill becoming law on the 29th August 1833 (exactly a month after William Wilberforce died on the 29th July 1833) and enforced on the 1st August 1834. Full emancipation took place in 1838 in the colonies.
In conclusion then, it was Mary Prince who paved the way for successive writers like Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo and even Mary Seacole to follow. Without her contribution to literature, we would not have White Teeth or The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands as slavery would probably not have ended when it did.
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