63 LITERATURE Michelle Gadpaille University of Maribor Maribor, Slovenia Trans-Colonial Collaboration and Slave Narrative: Mary Prince Revisited Summary In 1831 in London, two formidable women met: Mary Prince, an ex-slave from Bermuda, who had crossed the Atlantic to a qualied freedom, and Susanna Strickland, an English writer. "e narrative that emerged from this meeting was !e History of Mary Prince, which played a role in the ght for slave emancipation in the British Empi re. Prince disappeared once the battle was won, while Strickland emigrated to Upper Canada and, as Susanna Moodie, became an often quoted 19 th century Canadian writer. Prince dictated, Strickland copied, and the whole was lightly edited by "omas Pringle, the anti-slavery publisher at whose house the meeting took place. "is is the standard account. In contesting this version, the paper aims to reinstate Moodie as co-creator of the collaborative Mary Prince text by considering multiple accounts of the meeting with Prince and to place the work in the context of Moodie’s pre- and post-emigration oeuvre on both sides of the Atlantic. Key words: Mary Prince, Susanna Moodie, slave narratives, Anti-Slavery movement Čezkolonialno sodelovanje in pripoved sužnje: Mary Prince vnovič Povzetek Leta 1831 se v Londonu srečata pomembni ženski: Mary Prince, nekdanja sužnja z Bermudov, ki je našla onkraj Atlantika pogojno prostost, in angleška pisateljica Susanna Strickland. Srečanje obrodi pripoved z naslovom Zgodovina Mary Prince, ki je odigrala svojo vlogo v boju zoper suženjstvo v britanskem imperiju. Po zmagi se je za Prince izgubila vsaka sled, medtem ko je Strickland emigrirala v Zgornjo Kanado, kjer je postala kot Susanna Moodie pogosto citirana kanadska pisateljica 19. stoletja. Kar je Prince narekovala Strickland, je potrpežljivo uredil "omas Pringle, založnik in borec proti suženjstvu, v čigar hiši sta se ženski sestajali. Takšna je splošno sprejeta verzija, ki pa jo članek izpodbija z vzpostavljanjem Moodie kot soustvarjalke skupnega besedila Mary Prince, in sicer tako, da upošteva mnogotera poročila o sestajanjih s Mary Prince ter umešča delo v kontekst Moddiejinega opusa na obeh straneh Atlantika, to je pred njeno emigracijo ter po njej. Ključne besede: Mary Prince, Susanna Moodie, pripoved sužnjev, gibanje za odpravo suženjstva UDK 821.111(71).09Moodie S.:929Prince M.:326.8 DOI: 10.4312/elope.8.2.63-77 64 Michelle Gadpaille Trans-Colonial Collaboration and Slave Narrative: Mary Prince Revisited Trans-Colonial Collaboration and Slave Narrative: Mary Prince Revisited 1. Introduction Over nearly three centuries of trade in slaves there were “an estimated thirty-ve thousand Atlantic slave voyages” (Hochschild 2006, 28). From that vast number of transported slaves and their descendants, some came forward in print to inform the world of conditions from within slavery. Of sixty-thousand who escaped the American south for the north, for example, one hundred managed to write slave narratives (Gates 2006, 1). "is gure is impressive, given the obstacles to any slave or ex-slave becoming a published author. "e silenced condition of slavery is explicable by illiteracy, language denial and the state of material deprivation in which New World slaves lived. "ose slaves and ex-slaves who took up their pens usually did so retrospectively, from a condition of earned freedom and often from the safety of non-slaveholding territories. England itself formed a partial refuge for Africans lucky enough to get there because English law permitted an interpretation that freed all slaves on English soil (Hochschild 2006, 35‒6). One such example is the woman known as Mary Prince, who arrived in London in 1828 after a life of toil and abuse in the British colonies of Bermuda and the Antilles. In 1831, Prince’s story, !e History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, sold with great success. Mary Prince, however, had not taken up her pen; instead, the writing was done on her behalf by Susanna Strickland, who would later emigrate to another part of the British empire, Upper Canada, and as Susanna Moodie to become the author of Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Canada’s best known settler author. 1 It was thus partly through Moodie’s writing talent that Prince was given her voice. "ough much attention has been given to the encounter between the two women, Moodie’s role has more often been accepted as that of passive amanuensis. 2 "is study aims to create a more nuanced account of the transaction between the black speaker and white recorder, by looking at Moodie’s treatment of slaves and slave language before and after 1831, in texts written in London as well as in the colonial territory of the Canadas. It is my contention that the encounter between these women left a long-lasting trace in the work of Moodie, one that may re%ect an anxiety of mimicry on Moodie’s part. 2. Trans-Colonial Context As a story, !e History of Mary Prince held many surprises for the English reader of 1831. "ough it told of verbal and physical abuse, of grief and family separation, it also narrated resilience and resistance. Most surprising might have been the degree of mobility in the life of this slave. For Prince was well traveled ‒ not just across the Atlantic to England where she ran away from 1 I will designate the author as Moodie throughout. Although she was Susanna Strickland when she worked with Prince for the Anti- Slavery society, she married soon after, and is better known as Susanna Moodie. 2 For fuller accounts of the historical genesis of The History of Mary Prince, see M. Ferguson’s edition of the reissued work (1987), as well as Whitlock 2000, Paque 1992, and Baumgartner 2001. 65 LITERATURE her owners, but within the West Indies. Born in the mid-Atlantic, in Bermuda, Prince was transported to T urk’s Island (near the Bahamas) to work in the salt industry; after returning to Bermuda and changing owners, she moved south again, to the British colony of Antigua in the Lesser Antilles. In all, this slave covered nearly 7000 miles in ocean travel. Moreover, Prince seems to have acquired as she matured, a certain degree of agency in changing masters and location. "is trace of the willed life project can be overlooked by the reader focusing on the sensational details of whipping and near starvation. "is facet of slave life is corroborated by the account given in the contemporaneous Negro Slavery Described by a Negro, the story of Ashton Warner from the island of St. Vincent. Prince and Warner shared a common ghost writer, for it was again Susanna Moodie who took down Warner’s story, having also taught him to read the Bible. As Susanna Strickland, her name appeared on the title page of Negro Slavery in 1831. Warner’s travels were even more various, though, at 5000 miles, less extensive because of the shorter distances between the islands of the Lesser Antilles. By his account, Warner visited Grenada, Martinique, Barbados and St, Kitts before embarking for London. Both slave narratives reveal the extent to which even these most marginalized of imperial subjects participated in the economic exchange between colonies and moved across seas and oceans, sometimes as the property of their colonial masters, but sometimes as quasi-free agents bound on commercial or life projects of their own ‒ such as Warner’s travels to Grenada and Barbados (Strickland 1831, 58‒61). In transcribing the slave accounts, Moodie retained precise geographical details that bolster the value of the texts as anti-slavery testimony. In contrast, other details of Prince’s story were clearly elided and the text shaped as an appeal to humanitarian feeling and women’s sympathy. "e constructed nature of the Mary Prince text gains prominence when we consider Moodie’s post-emigration writing in which she re-tells the story of her meeting with Prince in two di&erent ways. Temporal and spatial displacement a&ects memory and narration in such a way as to raise questions about the original account of the genesis of !e History of Mary Prince. To assign authorial agency for this text, we must go back to London in 1830/31. 3. The Collaboration on Mary Prince !e History of Mary Prince enjoyed a modest publishing success, going through three London editions in 1831. 3 Moodie’s name did not appear on the cover, which included the words “related by herself” to exert Prince’s claim of authenticity. Nor was Moodie named in the original paratext that accompanied the slim account of the slave’s life. As the transcriber of Mary Prince’s oral narrative, Moodie was publicly assigned the anonymous role of drawing-room scribe. Baumgartner, for example, nds that, althou gh “the most signicant collaboration occurs between Prince and Miss S-----,” nevertheless, Miss S---- herself is “barely detectable” in the text (Baumgartner 2001, 265; 254). "e original account of this act of transcription comes from the 1831 “Preface” to Mary Prince, in which "omas Pringle mentions copying services rendered by “a lady who happened to be at the time residing in my family as a visitor.” Pringle’s wording, especially the phrase “as a visitor”, 3 Publishers who handled the text include F. Westley and A.H. Davis of London, as well as Waugh & Innes of Edinburgh. 66 Michelle Gadpaille Trans-Colonial Collaboration and Slave Narrative: Mary Prince Revisited puts the transaction on the purely accidental level ‒ almost a leisure time activity for lady callers. Susanna, however, was hardly an amateur at the time but an author whose work was already selling. "e word ‘visitor’ is also disingenuous, as it conceals the closeness of Pringle’s relationship to Susanna, who used to refer to Pringle as “my dear adopted father” or even as “Papa” (Moodie 1985, Letters, 50; 11). "at the lady in question might have been present for reasons connected to anti-slavery advocacy is excluded by Pringle’s insistence that she was a visiting amateur doing the family a favour. Pringle’s wording also stresses the closeness of the published text to Prince’s oral recital. 4 It was written out fully, with all the narrator’s repetitions and prolixities, and afterwards pruned into the present shape, retaining, as far as was practicable, Mary’s exact expressions and peculiar phraseology . . . to exclude redundancies and gross grammatical errors. (Gates 2006, 251) Any editing or censorship has been relegated to the background as far as possible (practicable is Pringle’s word). "e second account of the transaction occupies a paragraph in Moodie’s letter to her friends the Birds in late January 1831. In the middle of more exciting events such as the temporary suspension of her engagement, the letter writer inserts this account:  I have been writing Mr. Pringle’s black Mary’s life from her own dictation and for her benet adhering to her own simple story and languag e without deviating to the paths of %ourish or romance. It is a pathetic little history and is now printing in the form of a pamphlet to be laid before the Houses of Parliament. Of course my name does not appear. Mr. Pringle has added a very interesting appendix and I hope the work will do much good.... (Moodie 1985, Letters, 57) As the account closest in time to the meeting of the two women, this one recommends itself by its immediacy. "e writer echoes Pringle’s concept that the “simple story” has been left intact, and its details merely taken down in “dictation”. However, Moodie’s metaphor of the path of writing, from which %ourish and romance are deviations, is an intriguing one. "e wording suggests that there must have been at least some temptation to take these deviations, and that "ourish and romance were powerful inducements in literary composition. Rhetorical restraint is depicted as having been accomplished for the “benet” of Prince herself, a benet for which Susanna gladly sets aside personal recognition. "e passage still constructs Prince as being owned (Mr. Pringle’s black Mary), and includes her skin colour as a matter of social identication for her correspondent. As evidence about the transaction, this account falls more on the side of passive amanuensis ‒ the version of events congruent with Pringle’s wishes ‒ despite the strong opening words I have been writing, which suggest an activity that stretched over more time that would have been taken by mere transcription. 4 Throughout the paper, I will refer to her as Mary Prince, since that is the name in the title of the main work being explored. However, there are doubts about her name, and her petition to parliament names her as Molly Wood. Prince had been married in the Moravian church to a man called Daniel James. She left her husband behind when she came to England, however, and no account refers to her by the name of James. 67 LITERATURE Moodie alludes to her connection with Mary Prince in a letter written a few months later, just after her wedding to Dunbar Moodie (April, 1831): Mr. Pringle ‘gave me’ away, and Black Mary, who had treated herself with a complete new suit upon the occasion, went on the coach box, to see her dear Missie and Biographer wed. (Moodie 1985, Letters, 60) "is reference suggests fondness and familiarity between the two women, while revealing that di&erences of rank and race still expressed themselves in terms of address: “Black Mary” from Moodie but “Missie” on the part of Mary Prince. Interestingly, Moodie now calls herself Prince’s “Biographer,” in what is surely a departure from the claim in the earlier letter that Prince’s written story belonged to Prince alone. "ese contemporary letters reveal their author’s %irtation with conversion to Methodism, as well as her role in distributing anti-slavery literature (Moodie 1985, Letters, 49). Both details indicate that Moodie was tted by belief to become the media tor between the slave voice and the anti- slavery narrative that the movement required. Although she is careful to give credit to Prince in these letters, there are slippages that suggest how the earnest young writer might have strayed from the path of strict “dictation” to that of ‘%ourish’ in composing the “pathetic little history” in a manner calculated to highlight its pathos for the English public. "e Moodie in the Pringle’s drawing room should be seen as a disciple producing a gospel for the collective cause and not as a visiting amateur with a pen and paper. 4. Later Accounts of the Collaboration "e third account of the meeting between ex-slave and author occurs in Moodie’s novel Flora Lyndsay (1854), published after Roughing it in the Bush, and heavily autobiographical, perhaps even “Moodie’s autobiography in ctional form” (Ste enman-Marcusse 2001, 123). "e novel centers on the decision of a gentlewoman, Flora Lyndsay, to emigrate to Upper Canada and on the complicated arrangements to be made beforehand and the adventures of the Atlantic voyage. "e slavery question is explored during the voyage to the embarkation port in Scotland, when Flora’s fellow-passengers include a West Indian, Mrs. Dalton, whom Flora engages in debate about slavery. Flora takes the anti-slavery side, while Mrs. Dalton voices the pro-slavery position, including the idea that the enslaved condition was itself proof that slaves had no souls: “"eir degradation proves their inferiority” (Moodie 1854, 123). Mrs. Dalton’s position recapitulates the state of skepticism that Moodie attributes to herself before her meeting with Prince and Warner (Strickland 1831, 6‒7). "e author thus has her alter ego, Flora, debate her own pre-conversion beliefs and defeat them. Defending the intelligence and humanity of slaves, Flora reveals that, before embarking, she had “taught a black man from the island of St. Vincent’s to read the Bible %uently in ten weeks”. 5 A few pages later, she reveals her role in the production of Mary P----: “I wrote it myself from the woman’s own lips”, Flora says (Moodie 1854, 124‒5). 5 Moodie, 1854, 123. This refers to Moodie’s work with Ashton Warner in writing Negro Slavery Described by a Negro in 1831. 68 Michelle Gadpaille Trans-Colonial Collaboration and Slave Narrative: Mary Prince Revisited Moodie’s wording opens the question of the true relation of amanuensis to speaker in the production of the Mary Prince text, or, at any rate, of the ctional Flora Lyndsay and Mary P---. One sentence presents clashing claims of agency: I wrote it myself from the woman’s own lips. "e contradiction between the main clause and the prepositional phrase at the end permits one to elevate Flora to primary authorship of the text, and thus to wonder about Moodie’s parallel role in creating Mary Prince. Certainly, Mrs. Dalton interprets this as a claim of authorship: . . . and I have been talking all this time to the author of Mary P ___. From this moment, Madam, we must regard ourselves as strangers. No West Indian could for a moment tolerate the author of that odious pamphlet. (Moodie 1854, 125; my emphasis) Mrs. Dalton’s prejudices prevent her believing that any ex-slave could have been an author, so her ascription of agency to Flora is perfectly in character. T o Mrs. Dalton, Mary P--- is necessarily a convenient invention on which to hang the agenda of the Anti-Slavery movement. Without falling into the same fallacy as Mrs. Dalton, it is yet possible to read this remark in a semi- autobiographical work as signifying a more engaged role for Moodie in the production of the Mary Prince text. What might have motivated Moodie to give Flora this near-paradoxical remark, appearing to reclaim custody of the Mary Prince text? With her brief conversion to Methodism long in the past, Moodie must have lost the zeal for marketing a dated ideology. Perhaps it simply no longer mattered who had written what. With the passage of twenty-three years and of the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833, the issue of authenticity in the History of Mary Prince might have faded in practical relevance (even as it became magnied in personal relevance). Prince and her problems had been left behind on the other side of a wide ocean. Moreover, slave narratives from the American continent (some penned by ex-slaves themselves) were becoming much more usual by the 1850s. Accounts of conditions under slavery and of personal escape from this condition had been written by Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, Solomon Northup, Moses Roper and William Wells Brown (Gates 2006, 3‒4). !e Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849) originated closer to Moodie’s home ‒ from what is now Dresden, Ontario. "e story told by Mary Prince had not only performed its task in the ght against British slavery but had been overtaken by more up-to-date accounts. As both documentary evidence and ctional entertainment, then, !e History of Mary Prince had lost importance. Nevertheless, it must have remained an important memory for Moodie and a connection with the %ourishing anti-slavery movement in the United States. In Moodie’s autobiographical memory, a life narrative short on success might well have looped back to pick up this early, unacknowledged publishing coup. However, it is worth noting that an autobiographical incident involving a similar conversation forms part of Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush; or Life in Canada which was published just prior to Flora Lyndsay. In Chapter 11, she narrates a conversation resembling that between Flora and the Mrs Dalton. In Roughing It, the racist conversational opponent is named only as Mrs D---, and is a United Empire Loyalist who cannot abide Mollineux, a black settler (Moodie 1989, 214). Mollineux, who had just sold a cow to the Moodies, got his start on land earned from 69 LITERATURE the D--- family, but this patronage does not prevent Mrs. D from despising him: “Good God, do you think that I would sit down at the same table with a nigger? . . . Sit down with a dirty black indeed!” (Moodie 1989, 215). "e conversation functions as an index of the hypocrisy of Yankees who criticize English settlers for eating separately from their servants, while themselves harbouring racial prejudice. In the eyes of Moodie, a certain separation between master and servant is justied on the grounds of di&erences in education and habits, while discrimination on the grounds of race alone is unjustiable. In Roughing It, Moodie o&ers purely biblical arguments in favour of more equal treatment of black people, and never alludes to her own intimate transactions with black people in London. "is omission of the Mary Prince episode reads curiously when one considers the deant claim of association with Prince and Warner that marks the similar Flora Lyndsay passage. "ere is a structural similarity to the narratives ‒ and even a resemblance between the names, Mrs. Dalton, Mrs. D ‒ that can lead one to suspect that both episodes may be less records of actual conversations than distillations of many such defenses of black dignity. "e defense of Mollineux in Roughing It in the Bush presents itself as a rehearsal for the full-blown anti-racist dialogue in Flora Lyndsay. We cannot reconstruct what pushed Moodie to craft the scene between Flora Lyndsay and Mrs. Dalton that re-opens the authorship and authenticity debate around the Mary Prince text. However, if Flora Lyndsay’s experience can be taken as analogous to that of Moodie, then the role of Pringle’s “lady” in producing the Prince text may have been greater than had ever been acknowledged in Moodie’s lifetime, and certainly must have seemed greater in Moodie’s own memory. 5. Context within Moodie’s Other Writing In order to reconstruct the moment of Moodie’s act of textualizing the Prince story, we must examine Moodie’s other writing and explore her representations of racial otherness, narrative agency and the adoption of voice. One must begin with the years before Moodie came to London, and with her rst publications. Moodie’s ea rly didactic ction reveals her use of Africans as characters. Although exhibiting traces of the racist ideas that were common at the time, even among evangelical abolitionist circles, Moodie’s c tion shows a contrary tendency to individualize African characters by according them life narratives. Let us consider the interplay of these two contestatory principles in Hugh Latimer (1828; 1834), 6 which is a sentimental, moralized story, where poverty and virtue triumph over snobbery and wealth. In this work, two boys, Hugh Latimer and Montrose Grahame, epitomize the lower and upper classes. Latimer su&ers the sneers of gentlemen’s sons because his mother keeps a shop. As a test of the boys’ empathy, Moodie introduces an African boy – a slave and cake-seller – who enters the schoolyard only to be verbally and physically abused by some of the pupils. Rescued by Hugh and Montrose, the black boy, Pedro, is taken to Montrose’s father, where he tells his story. After his freedom is purchased from the Jewish owner, Pedro agrees to become Montrose’s servant and vanishes from the story. 6 There is some confusion about the date of appearance. Hugh Latimer was published as early as 1828 by A.K. Newman and Dean & Munday (Moodie, 1985. Letters, 218) but was reissued in 1834. 70 Michelle Gadpaille Trans-Colonial Collaboration and Slave Narrative: Mary Prince Revisited "roughout, Moodie treats this character in a manner not very di&erent from the unthinking racism of earlier writers. Pedro, for instance, speaks a truncated language: “Who buy? . . . Little Massa, buy cake of poor Blackey”. One of his tormentors complains that “a magpie could speak better English” (Moodie 1834, 37‒8). Moreover, Moodie’s image of the happy ending for the young African is a menial career, in Montrose’s words, “Let him be my servant, he will feed my dog, and take care of my pony” (Moodie 1834, 55). Clearly, the author uses Pedro’s story as a side issue in the drama of Latimer’s class vindication. In this way Moodie echoes the ideas of anti-slavery activists who believed that even emancipated Negroes should keep their place in society. 7 T o be anti-slavery in England in the 1830s did not necessarily imply a desire to overhaul the social structure and its assumptions. On the other hand, Moodie does indicate an emerging anti-slavery ideology in this one- dimensional text. For instance, Pedro has human feelings; his humanity is recognized by Montrose’s uncle: “"is poor fellow seems to possess a feeling heart” (Moodie 1834, 53). Pedro shows sensibility in his reaction to the schoolyard humiliation: “What was sport to them was agonizing to the feelings of the poor negro . . . uttering a wild and piercing cry, he sank down upon the ground, and burying his head between his knees, wept aloud” (Moodie 1834, 39). "is sentimental vignette echoes the abolitionist scenario of the master beating the slave. Moodie chooses to highlight how di&erently the act is conceptualized by the two main actors: sport for the boys is torture to Pedro. In real master-slave encounters, the master’s agenda often included the idea that torture functioned as just punishment, as moral education or as a social good, ensuring the stability of plantation society. It took an act of imaginative will to see the other perspective. Reading Pedro in place of the tortured slave, we can see Moodie ascribing subjectivity to the receiving end of the whip, calling attention to the emotional and not just the physical consequences of degradation. "is scenario, then, shows the early Moodie’s awareness of the instrumental value of sensationally narrated slave experience in didactic ction for juveniles, if not yet in anti-slavery propaganda aimed at the adult reader. A second reminder of the author’s exposure to anti-slavery ideology involves the slave’s personal story: Moodie includes a concise version of Pedro’s history, which functions as an agent in his acquiring a freer life. "e reader learns about his place of origin and enslavement (the coast of Coramondel [sic]), his journey from owner to owner (“serve many massas”) and eventual ownership by a Jew, “massa Isaac”. "irdly, Moodie appends to Pedro’s qualied happy ending the promise that Pedro will be taught to read and write (Moodie 1834, 55). "ese three gestures signal that Moodie thought of Africans as fellow human beings, as people with pasts, with narratives of their own lives and as potentially intelligent consumers and creators of text. One must not get carried away with reading a post-civil rights liberalism into Moodie’s position on Pedro. Whatever her early anti-slavery sentiments, Moodie situates this story within a dominant ideology tolerant of benign forms of slavery. In its ideological stance, Hugh Latimer belongs to the interval between the abolition of the trade and the end of slavery itself. "is is a narrative, for instance, that has room for good and bad masters: “Me love kind massa ‒ me 7 Even William Wilberforce, who worked tirelessly for the abolition of first the slave trade and then of slavery itself, still envisioned emancipated slaves as “a grateful peasantry” (Hochschild 2006, 314). 71 LITERATURE no hate good man” (Moodie 1834, 47). Pedro is victimized, less because he is a slave than because he has had multiple bad masters. Moreover, his current bad master is distanced from the normative English reader by his Jewishness. Massa Isaac fullls the stereotype of the grasping Jew. 8 What has happened to Pedro is thus not the fault of English society as a whole, but of one specic bad element in society. "e ever-presen t potential for goodness and redemption underlies this narrative. Even the promise of literacy supports this interpretation, as Pedro will learn to read the Bible and become a Christian, something impossible at Master Isaac’s. While Latimer and Montrose undoubtedly perform a good deed in buying Pedro from Isaac, it is still a transaction that makes Christian action perfectly practicable within the bounds of slave-owning. "e potential for ameliorative agency thus exists on the individual level and not the societal. Moreover, what Moodie denitely denies Pedro is an articulate voice with which to tell his story. His English is barely su