The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative in Around the World in 80 Books

May 23, 2010 Lindsey Z rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A chilling and detailed account of the atrocities of slavery. Some parts are difficult to read because of the intense violence. The voice of Mary Prince is strong and sympathetic. I wish this narrative were longer. At 30 pages, it doesn't give enough of Mary's life story. The supplemental material by the editor is useful, as it includes letters from Mr. Wood, Mary's owner, along with additional information about Mary's attempts to buy her manumission. I recommend this short read for anyone study ...more

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Jan 04, 2022 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it really liked it

Shelves: a-reviewed, author-woman, 4-star, genre-memoir, usa, theme-unrooted, z-challenges-2022, z-read-gelesen-2022, author-black, theme-enslavement

It seems awful to give this a rating. It is a slave narrative and it is commensurately grim. And yet the author does not try to be grim. The prose is descriptive and for the most part dispassionate. The events she describes are enough; a simple telling of them conveys all the horror. So obviously there are content warnings for torture, violence, enslavement, brutal exploitation, sexual abuse, the sundering of families. treating persons like chattel, human bondage, human trade, and I can't even r It seems awful to give this a rating. It is a slave narrative and it is commensurately grim. And yet the author does not try to be grim. The prose is descriptive and for the most part dispassionate. The events she describes are enough; a simple telling of them conveys all the horror. So obviously there are content warnings for torture, violence, enslavement, brutal exploitation, sexual abuse, the sundering of families. treating persons like chattel, human bondage, human trade, and I can't even remember what else. But it is necessary to read this, and maybe the most awful thing of all is how few slave narratives survive. Because these were people without voices, or at least, without literate voices.

As with the narrative of Frederick Douglass, there is a strong conviction here that slavery brutalises the enslaver along with the enslaved. And indeed, as a European white person, it makes me aghast with what casual savagery white women and men treated their 'belongings'. It seems to me they treated them even worse than their belongings; no matter what money they paid for the humans, they did everything to break and destroy them. Reading this short narrative gives one a glimpse into this past and this reality, and it made me realise once again that it is the system of slavery that is abhorrent. I grew up with the myth of 'only some bad eggs treated slaves badly', 'most slave owners meant well', 'these were theirs and they took care of what was theirs' -- all of this is humbug, and Mary Prince and Frederick Douglass (and no doubt others whom I have not yet read) make the point strongly: there is no enslavement that is not brutal. 'Freedom is sweet', writes Mary Prince, and tells us that all slaves want freedom.

We who are free take it absolutely for granted but freedom may be even more precious than health as there can be no health when you are enslaved: Mary Prince's story makes this clear. She is worked almost to her death, through all manner of illness, and exposed to frightful health hazards that have a lasting effect on her body.

Mary Prince also points out the contradiction she experiences when she arrives in London, England: here the white people do not behave brutally. It makes me think: they knew it was wrong. They knew they could get away with it in the colonies. The system bent them. Thin is the line between 'ordinary human beings' and brutes. As a German, I am reminded of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, a historical account of how 'ordinary' German soldiers were turned into bloodthirsty monsters (again, away from their homelands, in a free-for-all environment). This makes every account of enslavement also very chilling. It is especially chilling to think oneself into not the victims but the perpetrators, as one must if one is white.

Mary Prince was enslaved in Bermuda which to this day (which I discovered via google) remains a 'British protectorate'. It is useful to read an account that is not on American soil so that British people have no excuse in disavowing this history. Nor German people. Nor any people. Germans enslaved people in the 1930s and early 1940s (only we called them 'Zwangsarbeiter' and pretended it wasn't the same), and also during our brief but brutal colonial period (of which I have yet to read anything as this was basically non-existent during my younger years; the Nazis overshadowed everything).

I googled Mary Prince after finishing this brief read and came upon the journal of a Bermudian enslaver, John Harvey Darrell (whose relatives features in Prince's account). The chilling thing about Darrell's diary is that he mentions enslaved people only in passing. They hardly feature although his entire life in Bermuda was built upon their exploitation. And the words he chooses in those few sentences are telling: an apartment 'swarmed' with slave women, 'living as they pleased'. The wilful blind spot is chilling and is what enabled 'ordinary' people to live their double life of contradiction. 'Swarming' also resonates with me because in Germany, too, Nazi language dehumanised Jews and other unwanted Germans by turning them into insects and vermin.

I can only heave a big sigh and recommend this short account to anyone who wants to be cured of lingering myths, and to sympathise, empathise, grieve with and have respect for Mary Prince who either wrote it down or, as seems likely, told it to a certain woman whose name starts with S-- (and who may or may not have embellished it, giving us even more barriers between now and the lost voices).

Also some kudos to the much-maligned Amazon: Looking for a book to fulfil the challenge prompt 'can be read in one sitting', I stumbled across Amazon's Kindle Unlimited edition (without the editorial additions of Thomas Pringle in the first edition of c.1831). I would not have read this otherwise, and I am glad I did. ...more

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