Perhaps the most heart-wrenching scene in the first quarter of the narrative of Mary Prince, the sale of Prince and two of her sisters at a slave market portray the pains of a family separated on the grounds of black slavery. After the death of her first mistress, to whom Prince’s mother and siblings also belonged, the master of the house sought to take another wife and as a means to his ends, decided to sell the three female slaves. As a slave in the same household, Prince’s mother performs the task of preparing her daughters for the slave market as one would an animal for, sale and the chosen scene portrays the feelings of the slaves and their perceptions of the white buyers. To that end, the mentioned part of the text serves two main purposes: it illustrates the nature of the slave system as the literal act of purchasing persons of African descent and at the same time, points out the despair of black families born into the institution of slavery.
Foremost, the slave system placed blacks in the inferior status of mere commodities that whites could sell and purchase as they saw fit. Accordingly, Prince’s mother took her daughters to a marketplace in “Hamble Town” and after arriving, instructed the girls to stand “against a large house, with [their] backs to the wall” in order of birth (5). Through it all, the older woman “wept over [her children]” but was powerless to prevent their master from going through with his plans since she lacked the funds to do so and their skin color meant they were eligible as property (Prince 5). In other words, children begotten by a slave were automatically slaves as well, and because they served the sole purpose of providing cheap and hard labor, slaves did not earn salaries. Expectedly, when faced with the task of escorting her offspring to the market, all that the woman could do was “[weep] as she went” and allow the parting with her children as other masters purchased their persons (Prince 5).
About the despair of the black families that existed in slavery, the separation of parents from their children portray one of the many horrors of life in bondage since from the point of sale, a permanent separation was a possibility. As an elaboration of her painful understanding of the given claim, Prince asserts that her heart “throbbed with grief and terror” as she faced the prospective buyers in the marketplace (5). Additionally, she likens the pain of hearing the whites casually talk about buying one of them to the addition of “Cayenne pepper” to a wound and as a result, declares the whites to have “small hearts” (Prince 5). Naturally, an open heart would mean that a person is dead; however, the sting of adding pepper to an open wound is an imaginable form of pain and Prince successfully uses the image to explain her exact emotions to the reader. Concurrently, the fact that the girls stood while facing the buyers means the Caucasians had no reservations about discussing prices in front of the blacks and Prince was aware of the same as she states that the whites have “small hearts” (5). Hearts are not subject to racial groups, and so, such words act as an explanation for the fact that, at the height of slavery, Caucasians did not have the capacity to worry about the black slaves.
In conclusion, the presented argument that the scene presents is compelling because it approaches the anti-slavery sentiment from a fresh angle. In other words, the nature of slavery as physically brutal is renowned to any person who has read literature about the same. The documented lives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, to mention a few, portray the harsh treatments of slaves in the hands of their white masters, but none of them manages to capture the real horrors of slave auctions from a young slave girl's point of view. Hence, the inclusion of the point at which she and her family separate despite her young age adds a new factor to The History of Mary Prince and makes it a successful argument against black slavery.
Works Cited
Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative. Dover Publications: New York, 2004. Print.
