"To BE FREE IS VERY SWEET:" RACIAuSED REPRESENTATIONS OF SLAVERY... 85

assert authority over recalcitrant slaves who, while grudgingly accepting
the master's authority, showed themselves less willing to accept similar
claims from the mistress. As one female slave in North Carolina commented,
"No Sir, Missus, 'ain't allowingg nobody what w'ar de same kind of shirt I does
ter whip me" (Fox-Genovese 313). Mistress and slave understood that the
household represented the limits of white female power, but that that power
was only ever at best, a delegated power; ultimate authority resided in the
hands of the master, and the mistress was only ever a representative of that
authority. Hence, enslaved women and their mistresses both sought to
establish the boundaries of the mistress/maid relationship. Prince's narrative
highlights the inherent tensions structuring her relations with Mrs. Ingham
and Mrs. Wood, both of whom implicitly understood that even partial
capitulation to Mary's pleas for a lighter workload or greater freedom
undermined their sovereignty. Neither mistress could countenance Mary's
pleas for freedom, understanding that their status as ladies was derived from
slave labour that freed them from drudgery. Both mistresses regarded
Prince's efforts to wrest for herself a degree of autonomy as acts of
subversion, her quest for self-determination a direct attack on their own
tenuous authority.
 In the act of writing the History, Mary Prince literally wrote her way to the
freedom she regarded as her natural right. But the History is not simply
Mary's individual story; it is a polemic against slavery, told on behalf of all
voiceless enslaved peoples. Mary's narrative bears testimony to the
enslaved's undiminished belief in the rights of all people to freedom, their
resilience, their persistent will to survive in the face of great inhumanity and
brutality, the survival strategies and skills deployed by enslaved women in
their quest for freedom. In bringing to British abolitionist audiences the full
horrors of the peculiar institution, Mary Prince exposed the fallacious myth
of benevolent slavery. Unlike the privileged onlooker Maria Nugent, Prince
had no illusions that slavery was inimical to humanity; slavery dehumanised
every individual, both enslaved and enslaver, entangled in its mesh. Moreover,
Mary Prince's narrative revealed the imbrication of white women within the
institution of slavery; Mary did not experience white women as mere
bystanders or victims of slavery, as so many were wont to describe them,
but as active participants in a system that denied her humanity. To be sure,
some such as Maria Nugent empathised with enslaved women, but her
concerns extended no further than their sexual exploitation, its effects on
white society, and the moral vacuum arising from the general acceptance of
religious principles. An embedded sense of her own racial superiority, and
her acceptance of the institution of slavery, her belief in empire, her elite
class status prohibited an authentic understanding of the material realities
of slavery, and what enslavement meant to those denied freedom, hence her
insistence that the enslaved represented a 'happy and contented' people.
Mary's descriptions of the ill-treatment routinely meted out to the enslaved