The monstrosity that was the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been a mere condition of life within the western world for several centuries when “The History of Mary Prince” was published in 1831. A work of autobiography, in it Mary Prince described her life as a slave, first in Bermuda, then at several locales within the Caribbean. It was, according to most sources I’ve found, the first autobiography of a female slave published in the UK, and it became a hugely important text in the abolitionist movement.
It’s easy to see why. Prince’s narrative is direct, uncluttered. Her descriptions of life without freedom and dignity are grotesque…but she is always careful to emphasise their mundanity. Horror as NORMAL. A cruel master beats her and her fellow slaves more or less whenever he wants. Several men and women die from the beatings, and the master suffers no consequences. The bixzarre complexities of the legal reality of slavery are given time, too, when Prince finds her freedom in England and attempts to journey to her husband in Antigua (who is a freeman) only to discover that this would mean an almost certain return to enslavement.
Reading it now, as a Bermudian, is an uncanny experience. Prince was born at Brackish-Pond (a half hour drive from my house). Her father was owned by a Mr. Trimingham and the farm she lived on belonged to a Mr. Darrell (both still influential families on the island). This is evil masquerading as the every day…which is one of the major takeaways of this book, to see how easily a people can become accostomed to oppressing another that they cannot even SEE the oppression, become insulted when it is even suggested that the oppression EXISTS (Prince’s publisher was sued for libel by one of the named persons in the book).
And I look around today, and I see the slave trade developing in Libya (and other places) and I see the rise of gleeful racism in North America, and I wonder if we ever learned the lessons Prince tried to teach us…or, worse perhaps, if we DID learn them, only to put them aside when we remembered just how profitable monstrosity can be. Me like books.
Me Like Books 