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3. “I Know What a Slave Knows” Mary Prince as Witness, or the Rhetorical Uses of Experience
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3. “I Know What a Slave Knows” Mary Prince as Witness, or the Rhetorical Uses of Experience Oh the horrors of slavery!—How the thought of it pains my heart! But the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate; for few people in England know what slavery is. I have been a slave—I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free. —Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince The above epigraph is arguably the most interesting and important passage in The History of Mary Prince. It points out Prince’s need to position herself as an “authentic” eyewitness to slavery, even as her contemporary audience wants to read her as such. This passage thematizes the fact that, for Prince, the experience of slavery represents a different kind of epistemology, and that one of the crises of witnessing slavery is the very problem of how to narrate slave experience to an audience outside that epistemological community of slaves. These are the concerns I bring to this reading of Prince’s History. Relatively little critical commentary exists on The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself.1 The critic primarily responsible for raising Prince from literary historical obscurity is Moira Ferguson, editor of the 1993 edition of The History . In her long introduction to Prince’s narrative, Ferguson provides a new historicist reading of the text, which is complemented by her discussion of Prince in her book Subject to Others 85 (1992). Ferguson’s reading of the narrative in these two contexts is finely wrought and compelling. She focuses, in part, on the performativity of Prince’s narrative. She is especially interested in the ways in which The History, though an as-told-to narrative, does not readily surrender . . . to editorial rule. Equivocal in her [Prince’s] presentation to a largely sympathetic European audience , she formulates herself as a slave-representative, as well as an individual slave-agent. For example, after warmly acknowledging the assistance of “very good” missionaries, she simultaneously inscribes the presence of an additional audience drawn from slave communities: “But [pro-slavery forces] put a cloak about the truth. It is not so. All slaves want to be free. . . . I know what slaves feel. . . . We don’t mind hard work, if we had proper treatment [but] when we are quite done up, who cares for us, more than for a lame horse?”2 In addressing Prince’s awareness of the political complexities into which her narrative intervenes, Ferguson contends that “the language of slaves markedly differs from the language of their supporters” (283). In fact, according to Ferguson, Prince speaks in a “double-voiced discourse” that addresses both her desire for manumission and her desire for narrative authority, if not autonomy (284). Similarly, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William L. Andrews both comment on the extraordinary way in which Prince’s text claims narrative authority for itself. Gates identifies the narrative’s power and authority as deriving from its being the first published by a female slave. According to Gates, it addresses itself more specifically to the brutalities experienced by women under slavery . By assuming the position of narrator, Prince becomes the subject of narration, rather than its object: 86 “I Know What a Slave Knows” [34.237.245.80] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:10 GMT) Prince’s account makes her reader acutely aware that the sexual brutalization of the black woman slave—along with the enforced severance of a mother’s natural relation to her children and lover of her choice—defined more than any other aspect of slavery the daily price of her bondage. Whereas black women are objects of narration in the tales written by black men, Prince’s slim yet compelling story celebrates their selftransformation into subjects, subjects as defined by those who have gained a voice.3 Andrews carries Gates’s observation a step further, suggesting that Prince is remarkable in that she claims for herself the position of greatest authority to speak on slavery: A black female slave [Prince] declares herself to be a more reliable authority on slavery than any white man and fully capable of speaking for all her fellow slaves, both male and female, against any...