Mary Prince - The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave

De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Mary Princes History is the first narrative of the life of a black woman to be published in England. In 1828 Mary Prince made her way to the offices of the Anti-Slavery Society in Aldermanbury, east London, where she reported that she had been ill-treated by her current master and mistress who had brought her to England with them on a trip from Antigua. Prince had worked for Mr and Mrs Wood for about thirteen years, and she had been eager to accompany them on their trip to London because she believed she might find a cure for her rheumatism there. However, on arriving she suffered an acute attack which made it painful for her to wash the large piles of clothes they gave her, but the Woods ignored her complaints and continued to work her as hard as ever, repeatedly threatening to turn her out of doors if she did not do as she was told. This finally proved too much for Prince, and she left the Woods and went to lodge with a Mr Mash, the shoe-cleaner, and his wife. Eventually she appealed to Christian missionaries for help, and when a woman called Hill told her about the Anti-Slavery Society, she travelled to their headquarters in east London to ask for legal advice.

Prince reached Aldermanbury by a circuitous route, via Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos Islands (Prince talks of Turks Islandthough Princes life was indeed one of diaspora and displacement. Born in Brackish Pond, Bermuda, in 1788, she was the property of a Charles Myners until she was given to Captain Williams, a man who was just as cruel as the subsequent masters she was to serve. At least Williamss wife and daughter treated Prince with kindness, and she was also relatively happy when she was temporarily hired out to Mrs Pruden, whose daughter Fanny initiated an informal course of reading. [H]er method of teaching me was as follows, Prince says of Fanny: Directly she had said her lessons to her grandmamma, she used to come running to me, and make me repeat them one by one after her, and in a few months I was able not only to say my letters but to spell many small words. These early years were the happiest of Princes life, since as she herself comments, she was too young to understand rightly [her] condition as a slave, and too thoughtless and full of spirits to look forward to the days of toil and sorrow. However, the idyll was interrupted by Mrs Williamss death, after which Prince and her siblings were put on the market, a harrowing scene which she describes with characteristic vivacity and feeling: