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Mrs. Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related By Herself

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It is a Friday afternoon, I see sitting down at a table outside a café in London, Mrs. Mary Prince in a long blue dress. I join her for a cup of tea and a discussion about her book The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself. I had a long list of questions I wished to ask her, but so as to not waste her valuable time, I kept our discussion short. The excerpt of her story talks about how all of the slaves wanted freedom, going against the popular belief that slaves were happy being slaves and did not want to be free. Slaves had a very rough life. However, I never knew what the slaves went through during their time as slaves until I read her story. How could a slave owner think slaves were happy with the way they were living? …show more content…

They spent countless hours doing manual labor or being household servants to their masters. They were treated as the scum of the Earth. Children were taken from their mothers, and wives from their husbands. When they did wrong in the eyes of their master, they were punished. Often times they were punished by being whipped. Owner’s sometimes treated slaves worse than they did animals. Prince writes, “They tie up slaves like hogs—moor them up like cattle, and they lick them, so as hogs, or cattle, or horses never were flogged” (Prince 826). They were tied up like cows, and they were beaten or whipped in way that not even animals were beaten. This is the type of torture Mary Prince escaped

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