The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave

Born into slavery in Bermuda around 1788, Mary Prince dictated her life story in London in 1830, while still legally the property of a man who refused to sell her her freedom. She describes being sold away from her mother as a child, then about ten years in the salt ponds of Turk’s Island, where standing in the water opened boils that ate to the bone. Thirteen years with the Wood family in Antigua followed, along with a Moravian congregation and a marriage to Daniel James, who had bought his freedom. Prince could not write, so Susanna Strickland took the words down and Thomas Pringle of the Anti-Slavery Society edited them into print in 1831. It was the first account of a Black woman’s life published in Britain. The voice carries it: plain, exact, and hard to answer.