Near the end of her testimony Mary Prince says "I have been a slave myself - I know what slaves feel." She reminds the reader that her story is based on her experience. Everything in her testimony is true and she has the scars on her body to show for it. Her knowledge is not based on speculation or conjecture, it is felt, it comes from the heart and it is tested on the pulse and enshrined as memory. Her declaration aims at those who may doubt the validity of her testimony. Her resolve springs in part from the fact that Mary Prince relays her story and relies on someone else to write it down. Mary Prince states for the record that although she may not be the writer of her experience nevertheless the experience remains hers exclusively. She accepts the interference of second and third party mediators but defies anyone to think that she is not truly represented in her testimony.

The reader needs this etymological equivalent of a double take offered so late by Mary Prince in her story if only because what she reveals sounds so extreme an experience that at various points during her story the events read like make-believe. But this is the life of a woman slave. Mary Prince’s memory parades before an English public in the first quarter of the nineteenth century far removed from the Antillean slave world detailed by her. The exotic is robbed of its romance by Prince’s itimised cruelties suffered by her and the slaves around her. Long hours of labour and gratuitous beatings and insults and murder of slaves who do not appear to have recourse to the law bring home to her English audience the corruption of the English and English administration abroad. If the idea of paradise goes something like this: its fruits are to be harvested, plantation-style, using slave labour; then Prince’s narrative shows that the price paid for those fruits is the humanity of all involved.

A reader today bridges a similiar credulity gap when faced with Mary Prince’s story. The excess cruelty, the greed, the barbarism all grate against a sensibility honed on roughly liberal-humanist grounds. Her single story stands for that of countless others and this pressure on her narrative, the fact that in all likelihood this is not just about her experience but that of millions others spread well over two centuries speaks volumes to the present about the nature of that past. In Mary Prince the past is not another country but an ever-present reality. Knowing her story extends the boundaries of the reader’s comprehension of the present as indebted to the past.

Mary Prince tells her story to Susanna Strickland who faithfully records it. And editorials by the Scottish poet, Thomas Pringle, frame Prince’s narrative. The tone of the story while clearly Prince’s nevertheless shows signs of an editor’s pencil at work. For example, there are veiled references to ‘indecencies’ that point to Mary Prince’s sexual exploitation by at least two of her owners. And her voluntary sexual liaison with one owner (in so far as using her body to secure certain privileges can be said to be voluntary) seems inadmissible to the religious sentiments of the time. The way the story is sanitised (no sex horrors and no sexual agency on Mary Prince’s part outside of her official marriage) makes it abundantly clear that it serves as a centrepiece of abolitionist propaganda. This is not to say that Thomas Pringle, her chief advocate, her employer, and a secretary of the abolitionist movement in London in 1831, presents her in a false way. On the contrary, what survives of her testimony is a massive indictment of slavery and as such it achieves its abolitionist and humanitarian functions.

But what interests me is the well-intentioned liberal sentiment of the day that surrounds Prince’s narrative, that is, the moral world invoked by Prince. Two figures loom in and around the narrative: Thomas Principle and Susanna Strickland. They appear to be the conscience of their day. Without their activities (and this is true of all abolitionists) British society appears to have put its conscience to sleep for the duration of slavery. The ethos of Strickland and Pringle is Christian and therefore redemptive of state religion. These two figures literally save Christianity by keeping alive a germ of fairness when faced with the fact of Christian complicity in slavery. They remind British society that Christianity cannot be reconciled with slavery. Theirs is a revision of the society from within inspired by the pressure from the outside of Prince’s testimony.

A larger uplifting force is the story of Prince herself. It is Mary Prince, her uprooted and scarred body and harrowing testimony, which shows the British public how far from Christian values the society has strayed by upholding slavery. Her narrative touches the hearts and minds of those who see her predicament as a test of the capacity of English society to conduct itself in a civilised manner. She is the keeper of the conscience of a civilised society. Her story reminds British society just how much lost ground it needs to recoup if it is to measure up to any notion of morality that can be tested against the St. James Bible. As long as she lives and speaks (in this sense her story is timeless) the society has before it the opportunity to save itself, to do something about her bondage and show itself capable of living up to its civilised name. But the people in charge of that task are the Pringles and Stricklands of the land. They rise to the challenge of uplifting their society when they take the moral baton offered by Mary Prince.

Remove Mary Prince from the British landscape and the nation loses in one sense its ability to win back its morality. Britain needs Mary Prince because she represents its flickering hope to transform itself into a civilised nation founded on Christian values. Without her Pringle and Strickland lose their evidence of a need for a moral change in the society. Their argument becomes an abstraction. The pressure from within is absorbed and nullified by the machinery of gentlemanly debate and committee procedure and protocol. With Prince’s story the abstraction of a better society becomes real. She enables the British. She helps them to take a measurement of the gap between their moral lives and her story of her experience under a British administration. She reminds them of exactly what they need to do to throw off the yolk of barbarism cloaked in a civility of technological superiority and middle-class manners. She returns an emotional intelligence to the centre of a legislative malaise.

Mary Prince’s narrative retains that moral charge 170 years after its first publication. It continues to be crucial to Old and New World societies because of its moral imperative: slavery then and how to commemorate it now form a twin axis of that moral gravity. Writers and readers today have become accustomed to the many imaginary equivalents of the slave narrative all of which are united in their attempt to bridge the gap of representation: How to speak on behalf of so many bodies over such a long period with so few stories about their demise, their likely trajectory as stock, their struggle to retain vestiges of a decimated humanity? But every writer knows the difference between the symbolic representation of suffering and the testimony spoken by someone who has suffered. The weight of the real is no less heavy with the passage of time. Mary Prince’s narrative continues to emit a shock of the real. It trumps all imaginary texts, and for once, the imagination bows to the higher authority of testimony.