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Mary Prince. The History of May Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself. Ed. Moira Ferguson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. 144 pp. $10.95. At its publication in London and Edinburgh in 1831, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave did more than add yet another document to the narratives of British former slaves dating back to the eighteenth century, and to the many case histories of black slave women reported in the Anti-Slavery Society's Anti-Slavery Reporter. Prince provided the first lengthy discussion of life for a black slave woman in on( of the British colonies, and her History contributed to the heated debate over slavery that had raged in England since the 1820s, when a bill for full emancipation was first introduced in Parliament.While I hesitate for many reasons to label Prince's narrative the British version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (no one ever cited Mary Prince as the catalyst in the outbreak of a full-scale Civil War in England), according to Moira Ferguson, The History of Mary Prince had gone into a third edition by the end of 1831, and two years later, in 1833, The Emancipation Bill passed the House of Lords; in 1834 a law went into effect throughout the British Caribbean which set up apprenticeships for "free" blacks; and in 1838 England abolished slavery in the Caribbean completely.
Reading this most recent edition of The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave triggers a de'jA vu. Everything in the work resembles Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl: Written by Herself: the strident, moral voice of the former slave recounting and remembering her ordeal in bondage, the harrowing scenes of physical abuse at the hands of both a slave master and a jealous slave mistress, the master's refusal to allow the slave girl to marry the man of her choice-a free black man-and the pivotal moment when the slave decides to rebel and take her stand for freedom. The fact that the Prince story was published thirty years before that of Jacobs proves that slavery in both the Caribbean and the United States locked black women into the same abusive pattern of existence. The two texts corroborate one another.