So. Good afternoon, everyone.
For those who may not know who Mary Prince was, she is taken to be.
By most followers as the very first female slave narrative that took place in in the Americas,
which includes the Caribbean, South and North America, she was a Bermuda born slave.
Who travelled to the UK about 18 28, and she published her slave narrative in 1831.
So that is the basis for my paper, her slave narratives. You can see the titles, I didn't have to read it.
Recently, I came across a book by Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of my mother, and it really struck me.
There was one line in the book Towards the End in which she says,
This account of my life has been an account of my mother's life, as much as it has been an account of mine.
And this struck me because it just dealt with the subject matter of my paper.
Identifying and speaking about Mary Prince's mother. So I start with what I call the foundation of the mother.
The very first three words of her narrative are I was born.
These first three words of the history of Mary Prince. Tie this account of her life inextricably to her mother,
and with the severance of the umbilical existence, they would continue a developmental connectivity.
She carries on in her own words. I was under her care, her own care,
so her mother basically raised her even though she was in an enslaved situation in a household, in a white household.
So every detail that sets the stage footprint is history.
Giving flesh to its authenticity would have been imparted knowledge from her mother, where she was born, who owned her at birth.
The identity of her father. How she came to be owned by one of her slave owners, Captain Williams, without the mother's presence.
I call it her pre sense of life. Then there would be no history as we know it.
As expressed in the opening quote to this paper,
the account of Prince's life is an account of her mother's life, as much as it is an account of her own.
Using original source material not previously cited, we have identified Prince's mother.
These records, on the one hand, change what we know about Prince.
The presumed year of her birth. Will be amended.
Her registered name as a child is revealed, and we see her value in the Bermuda slave system increasing as she ages, on the other hand,
these records establish her mother's details of registration and will demonstrate how the adult female slaves value progressively decreases with age.
In naming Sue, the records reveal more accurately the year of her death, and we are also able to pierce the veil into her own childhood.
The purpose of this paper is twofold.
And first, to name the mother of the Bermudian slave known as Mary Prince, who has remained unnamed since the publication of the history in 1831.
And second, to expose one symptom of the continuing psychological effect of colonialism hour, and when I say our, I'm speaking of Bermuda personally,
our propensity to abdicate responsibility to research, verify and document our own history in deference to the white visiting research expert.
Although Prince names her father in the narrative and adopts his Christian name as her surname,
hence the pen name Mary Prince, she does not name her mother in the narrative.
The historical records identifying Prince's mother have been hiding in plain sight all along,
but because they have been overlooked by visiting scholars. It has been assumed by them and accepted by us that such records do not exist.
Here in lies the evidence. Of our abdication.
We are the record holders. The guardians of the historical documents, if you will, but we only see what we have through the lens of an outsider.
This, I believe, is indicative of mental slavery.
Waiting for the superior other. To legitimise our history.
Princess, history is what I now call overexposed, but yet it's still underexposed in preparation for this paper,
I conducted a random survey of published material and Mary Prince between 1987 and 2000,
the published activity of white and black scholars on the subject was more or less on par.
There were an equal number of books more or less.
And Gillian Whitlock assures us that Mary Prince has not become as vogue as Harriet Jacobs, then from 2001 to 2018,
published activity on Prince is history more than doubled, with white scholars outperforming black scholars three to one.
But despite the increased attention to Prince when it comes to the authentication of the details of the history,
we find that there are only two published scholars from which all the rest draw the assumption of accuracy.
Moira Ferguson in 1987. Is that the front end?
And it was through Miss Ferguson and the same year Henry Louis Gates Jr. also published the narrative.
It had not resurfaced since 1831.
So in 1987 there was this activity and this Ferguson went further than Mr. Gates in that she tried to authenticate the history.
She tried to get the details to show the truth of it.
Did the facts match up? And then more recently, we have Margo Madison McFadden, who has published in 2017, both a white female,
not Bermudian researchers fit Ferguson, hailing originally from Scotland and Madison McFadden from Canada.
I argue that it is in this area of thorough historical examination that Prince is still
under exposed and as concerns the details and identity of her mother not exposed at all.
Sue has remained lost to us for the past 30 years since the resurrection of the narrative.
So the paper focuses on print this first 12 years of life,
which have been taken to be her birth taken to be in 1788 up until she was 12 years old and she was sold to another owner.
You see that in her own words, she says I had scarcely reached my 12 year when my mistress became too poor to keep so many of us at home,
and she hired me out to Mrs. Prutton.
And then she describes the death of her owner, Mrs. Williams, and that she stayed at Mrs. Prudence for three months after that.
It's generally accepted by scholars that her owners, originally the miners family and Devon.
And then she was subsequently owned by John Williams Jr. and his wife, Sarah.
The Devins Your Parish records from six thousand sixty three to seventeen ninety eight,
the first in a set of five volumes of church vestry books for the DaVinci Church stored in the Bermuda archives.
This volume contains assessments of real and personal property,
which cover the period of Prince's childhood in what they called colloquially brackish pond.
Neither Ferguson nor McFadden cite this volume as a source in any of their respective publications.
So we'll first go to look at the records in this volume.
Of John Williams Jr., who was the owner of Mary Prince during her childhood and after the Myers family, and you see here that.
The Negroes that he owns and this one male.
An adult female, you can tell by the. The value.
Forty five pounds to fifty pounds as an adult. And then you have two children.
Mall £20, Hanna, £15 and an unnamed child at eight pounds.
Mall is Prince's registered name in her childhood during this period, mall or Marley or the amenities of Mary, a pet name or nickname.
And having gone through the names of all the females in the 1790,
female slaves in the 1790 registered their honour marries ceremony moles on commonly.
Following on five years later, 1795. You have John Williams, senior, we're going to look at John Williams Jr. here.
And once again, there's Sue here. Forty five pounds more.
Twenty five, she's increased by five pounds. Hannah Twenty.
And the same thing occurs in 1798. John Williams Jr.
Sue is there, she's increased in value to 50 pounds and more has increased along with Hannah, they're now equal.
And in princess narrative, she states that she was the eldest child and the next sister to her was named Hannah.
This is the only scenario in those records that give that match princess narrative and.
Sue is the only adult female slave owned by John Williams Jr. during that period.
So this is Prince's mother and that is Mary Prince.
Also, the record of her owner's death.
Sarah Williams occurred, the burial record is 23rd of April 1798.
And Prince says that three months after that, she was so she was called him to be sold.
So we know that she would have been sold somewhere in the summer of that year.
So what we now come up with then is a revised chronology.
Yes, revised chronology of trends. I'll go through this quickly.
So we've revised her birth years now going to be eighty five because there were two three children in the 1790 record,
which would have put her approximately at five years old.
The narrative changes, and she's actually sold along with her two sisters in the summer of 17, 1998, after her earnest death.
In conclusion, the report cited in this conference paper uncovered the identity of Prince's mother 30 years after Prince's story
first resurfaced in 1987 and allow us to reconstruct a more accurate timeline of Prince's early life in Bermuda.
There are additional records which throw further light on Prince, which didn't have time for today, but one of them would be her mother,
identified as a slave owned by Richard Darrow in her narrative when she actually runs away from her third owner.
She says that she ran to her mother, who was living at Richard Daryl's house and down here you will see a sue who is now age 70 years old.
She's described as black. This is a ditto here. The one above is black.
This is just a blow up, which Darrell, here's Sue here.
And. Her Sue and her sister back.
And finally, being able to identify soon and we go back and look at the miners family in Devin Shear,
we find out at age 70, an 18, 20 21, she would have been born around 1750.
At that time, there was only one miners' family and Devin Shear,
and that was Benjamin Myers and his wife and who may have been owners of Prince's mother.
This inventory was taken in 1780 1757, and you see here under Negroes that are listed as part of this inventory.
There is a girl by the name of some immigrant slave girl.
This very well may be Prince's mother,
and then it gives the possibility that the other two Negro women listed here could very well have been her grandmother.
One of these so last sentence, but you don't need not wait any longer for others to authenticate the Bermuda chapter of Prince's life story.
We have everything we need right here in Bermuda and in our own possession.
We just need to give ourselves permission to look for ourselves and the final flight.
Those of you who may be familiar with Minister Moon as a performer and her piece for women,
I've taken the liberty to construct a fifth woman and so that particular verse would go.
My skin is black. My heart is heavy. My four children sold out from under me.
My daughter was Mary Prince. Our story helped done up slavery since.
What do they call me? My name is Sue.