"To BE FREE IS VERY SWEET:" RACIAUSED REPRESENTATIONS OF SLAVERY...


their integration and incorporation into racist social structures fatally
undermined the potential for sisterhood between white and black women.
In the final analysis, racial difference overrode their common gender identity.
 Notwithstanding the now mythical narratives of Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs
 and Ellen Craft, enslaved black women of the slaveholding U.S. South left
 behind few personal testimonies. In weaving together the fragmented strands
 of their lives, feminist historians have of necessity relied primarily on texts
 produced by whites to recover enslaved black women's histories." Finding
 the authentic voices of black and white Caribbean women has posed even
 greater challenges for historians in this region. The History of Mary Prince,
 published in 1834, remains the sole known surviving first-hand account of
 slavery by an enslaved woman to emerge from the Caribbean (Ferguson 1997).
 Only a handful of texts by white women of the Caribbean plantation period
 have been addressed by scholars, and it may be of significance that these
 were the products of women who were often temporary, rather than
 permanent residents.12 Hence, while the writers of these texts and the
 experiences they convey may not be representative of white Caribbean
 women in general, they offer rare female perspectives on the slave societies
 they observed. When compared to the voluminous accounts of anti- and
 pro-slavery American women, one can only wonder at the scarcity of first-
 person narratives of slavery penned by their Caribbean counterparts. Both
 groups endured restricted access to education; the acquisition of literacy
 skills often represented a punishable offence for enslaved peoples, while
 educational facilities for white women remained limited. Inevitably, this has
 meant that, to a greater extent than gender historians of the American
 slaveholding South, Caribbean gender historians have been forced into a

 I Among the best known narratives of enslaved African-Americans are William and
 Ellen Craft's Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom: The Escape of William and
 Ellen Craft From Slavery, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1999); Harriet Jacobs'
 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, (Jean Fagan Yellin, ed.
 Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1987 [first published under the pseudonym Linda Brent,
 1861]). See also Gates (1988).
 12 The texts that have received the most critical attention are: (1) Janet Schaw's
 Journal of A Lady of Quality; Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the
 West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal in the years 1774-1776 (E.W. Andrews and
 C.M. Andrews, eds. New Haven: Yale U P, 1939); (2) Maria Nugent's Lady Nugent's
Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801-1805 (see Wright 1966); (3) Elizabeth
Fenwick's The Fate of the Fenwicks: Letters to Mary Hays, 1798-1828 London (A.F.
Fenwick, ed. Methuen, London, 1927); (4) Mrs. A.C. Carmichael's Domestic Manners
and Social Condition of the White, Coloured and Negro Population of the West Indies,
2 vols. (New York: Negro Universities P, 1969 [originally published London, 1833]);
(5) Frances Lanaghan's Antigua and the Antiguans, 2 vols., (London: Spottiswoode,
1967 [originally published anonymously in London, 1844]). For a nuanced discussion
of these texts, see Brereton (1995).