UNDERGRADUATE

asserting herself in the face of someone who expected
submission from any enslaved person. Prince introduces
to the reader the unification of the community of the
enslaved as a coherent group with similar experiences
and goals. By aligning herself with this community and
focusing on not only her life but also the lives of fellow
slaves, Prince becomes the spokeswoman for those
who did not have access to print culture. The History
underlines this unity among the enslaved by emphasizing
intimate, and humanizing, connections between slaves in
familial, romantic, and religious capacities. For instance,
Prince drew strength from the support of her mother and
extended family in early childhood, and while this form
of support was severely limited by her circumstances as a
slave, the love of her family continued to sustain Prince in
later years. Prince also goes to great lengths to ally herself
with local men in both formal and informal relationships,
some of which were explicitly romantic or marital, in
efforts to purchase her freedom or to safeguard herself
against many of the gendered dangers slave women
faced in the West Indies. Religion also plays a key role
in The History as a uniting force that consolidates the
religious communities of the enslaved with the religious
communities of the British public.
to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in
like words” (Prince 52). By using an apt simile to describe
her situation Prince gives this scene special importance
that explicitly likens the slave trade to butchery and the
trade in chattel husbandry.
In presenting this scene after telling the story of
her childhood, which focused on nurturing humane
development, Prince dispels any impression of the
innocuousness of the slave trade and thereby speaks to
its unforgiving cruelty. This scene becomes the fulcrum
by which Prince turns to tell the horrible truth of slavery
in the West Indies because she enters young adulthood
through the trauma of separation from her family of
origin into the alien world of hard labor and unrelenting
punishment. The forced disintegration of her family
unit is evidence of a common experience for many of
the enslaved in the Atlantic world; as Orlando Patterson
describes in the book Slavery and Social Death: A
Comparative Study, in undermining these relationships
by means of forcing geographical distance between
family members, the slave-owning class subverted these
relationships to further institute social control over the
enslaved. (Patterson 6).
During her years as a slave in the West Indies, Mary
Prince lived through several different circumstances as a
slave, working as a child companion, a maid, a laborer in
salt ponds, and a nurse. Under a litany of slave masters,
Prince endured cruel punishment and grave mistreatment
in addition to the hard labor she was forced to perform.
One of the most brutal realities of her experiences that
stands out in the narrative was the torture of separation
from her family of origin. Prince describes a brutal scene
in the narrative where she, as a child, and other enslaved
people—among them the young, the old, men, women,
and children—were forced to present themselves for sale
at an auction. Prince exercises precise narrative control in
communicating this scene to the audience, emphasizing
for the reader how the traders “handled me in the same
manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about
At the same time Prince was separated from her family,
she was assigned to the role of nurse for the children of
her masters. The labor of the enslaved in the West Indies
was strategically gendered, and at an early age Prince’s
masters forced her to work as a nurse, fulfilling the
station of caretaker despite being a young girl, herself
still a child in need of care. The inversion of needing
family support to being a supporter of her master’s
family is a significant feature of Prince’s narrative, as it
speaks to the regard slave masters had for their slaves.
However, Prince in turn interprets the gender roles
imposed upon her in a way that is both empowering and
community-oriented; indeed, Sandra Pouchet Paquet
maintains in Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity
and Self-representation that “as a child-nurse, [Prince]
modeled an incipient motherhood and cross-class,
46 CREATING KNOWLEDGE