CECILY JONES


struggle for freedom was eventually won with the signing of the Slave
Emancipation Act in 1833.
 In contrast to Maria Nugent's vision of slavery as a civilising, benevolent
force, Mary Prince's narrative reveals how this peculiar institution reduced
masters and mistresses to levels of brutality. Whites argued that Africans
were an uncivilised, brutal and primitive people; but paradoxically, it is the
former who are revealed as irrational, inhumane, capricious, unrestrained,
capable of great savagery and inhumanity. Slavery is dehumanising to all,
owners and slaves, white and black, men and women. In describing her
tempestuous relationship with Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Ingham, Mary is at pains
to show that female slave owners could be equally cruel and sadistic as
slave masters. Living alongside white women, Mary Prince could not be
immune to the iniquitous patriarchal gender order that deprived white
women of meaningful social and political power. Yet, Prince understood
that ownership and management of slaves conferred on white women the
ability to exercise a perverse power over the bodies of black men and women.
Some among her mistresses were 'kindly;' but Mary was in no doubt that
their economic, social, and racialised privileges derived from her own
insubordination.
 Contestations of power between mistresses and enslaved women pervade
both narratives. Maria Nugent bemoaned the difficulties of extracting labour
from the domestics at King's House, while Mary Prince's efforts to negotiate
improvements in her labour conditions with Mrs. Ingham and Mrs. Wood
only served to provoke the mistresses' temper. Nugent's pro-slavery
consciousness underlined her unquestioning assumption of her right to
utilise slave labour, but enslaved women ceaselessly rejected owners' claims
to the fruits of their labour. When enslaved women protested the sheer
amount of labour demanded of them, malingered, shirked tasks, wilfully broke
valuable household items, talked back to their owners, or ran away, they
sent a resounding message to their owners that they recognized themselves
as more than slaves, as human individuals deserving of freedom. Mrs. Wood
regarded Mary's quest for freedom as a personal affront. She "was very angry
- she grew quite outrageous she called me a black devil, and asked me who
had put freedom into my head. 'To be free is very sweet I said, but she took
care to keep me a slave" (Ferguson 85-86). Freedom, Mary insisted, was not
the sole prerogative of whites who maintained their domination of blacks only
by rule of law.
 Mary's struggles to assert her identity not as a slave but as a human being
and a woman inevitably provoked conflict with her mistresses. Stripped of
social power, white women's authority derived from their roles within the
household, particularly from their roles as mistresses of enslaved peoples.
The mistresses' fulfilment of her domestic responsibilities depended wholly
on her ability to successfully manage the domestic slaves knowledge of
which domestics were fully cognisant. Ceaselessly mistresses struggled to