The quote starts out with Prince setting the stage by showing how uncomfortable and vulnerable she felt.

This excerpt, upon examination of its words, summarizes Mary Prince’s feelings about how she was treated and how she sees white men. The comparison of her antagonists to a butcher is significant. Her word choice is very specific as she describes the moment the white men study and bid on her. Mary Prince had just been taken from her first owners, which meant she had also been taken away from her mother, brothers, and sisters, to be sold. This excerpt from Mary Prince’s “The History of Mary Prince a West Indian Slave” gives good insight, from a slave’s point of view, to the conditions of slavery in the 18th century. Prince was engulfed in a multi-layered religious culture at odds with her providential narrative of redemption.“I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in like words–as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts.” (Prince 871) Disciplinary ledgers reflect congregants’ consultation of African spiritual adepts, flouting of church regulations, and mockery of Christianity. African-derived folk practices flourished alongside and within evangelical worship. Just a few years after Britain’s closing of the slave trade, Antigua was the site of intense struggle over Christianity. This project uses Moravian manuscripts to reveal the complex spiritual world that Prince’s narrative concealed for strategic reasons.

The first ex-slave memoir by a woman, it is also a religious narrative structuring Prince’s life as the intertwining of physical liberation and emancipation from sin through membership in the Moravian Church in Antigua. These spiritual encounters are revealed in the life story of Mary Prince, who escaped to freedom in England in 1826 and wrote a memoir, The History of Mary Prince, (1831), which helped to galvanize the British antislavery movement. This contribution examines the transatlantic reverberations of the Protestant Reformation in Christian missions among enslaved Africans in the West Indies.

The history of mary prince sparknotes