UNTOLD STORIES

Mary Prince's Story and Sara Baartman 'Untold stories'

Discussion

“The history of Mary Prince”

In 1831, a few years before the abolition of slavery, the first evidence of a slave on his condition is published in London. This story is now available in French. Mary Prince describes how, at the age of twelve, she is sold into a slave market in Bermuda and separated from his mother and his brothers and sisters. With each new master at each new island, is repeated when a life of forced labor and abuse exercised almost daily on her or his companions. After long and painful years of servitude, she accompanies her last owner in England. Then aged about forty, married to Antigua a free man, she wants to get his freedom in order to find her island and her husband without falling back into slavery (Sharpe, Jenny, 1996).

Her parents were both slaves: her father was a sawyer owned by David Trimmingham, and her mother a house-servant of Charles Myners. When Myners died in 1788, Prince and her mother were sold as household servants to Captain Darrell, who gave Prince to his granddaughter, Betsey Williams. When she was 12, Prince was sold for £38 sterling (2009: £2,040) to Captain John Ingham, of Spanish Point, but never took easily to the indignities of her enslavement, and she was often flogged. As a punishment, Prince was sold to another Bermudian, probably Robert Darrell, who sent her in 1806 to Grand Turks, which Bermudians had used seasonally for a century for the extraction of salt from the ocean. Salt was a pillar of the Bermudian economy, but could not easily be produced in Bermuda, where the only natural resource were the Bermuda cedars used for building ships. The industry was a cruel one, however, with the salt-rakers forced to endure exposure not only to the sun and heat, but also to the salt in the pans, which ate away at their uncovered legs.

It was this evidences that Thomas Pringle and his friends in the abolitionist society Aldermanbury to build, among others, to seek freedom of Mary Prince. In the second part of the story, Thomas Pringle says the battle for Mary, and the story is no less edifying than the first, showing the eagerness of slavery to persist like a system. In his commentary, Daniel Maragna back on the historical context in which this story: claims anti-slavery in England, slave revolts in the Caribbean. The word of a slave woman and is breaking into the public space to assert their humanity and the crime of slavery by its negation (Sharpe, Jenny, 1996).

Originally published in London in 1831, Mary Prince's narrative was, as far as we know, the first autobiographical account of an enslaved African American woman's experiences to appear in print. Like most nineteenth-century black women's texts, Prince's narrative virtually disappeared until the recent scholarly renaissance in African American and women's studies. Republished both by Oxford University Press as part of Six Women's Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, ...