“She Trafficked On Her Own Account”: Black Women’s Abolitionist Geographies in Robert Wedderburn’s Horrors of Slavery (1824) and History of Mary Prince (1831)

ABSTRACT

Robert Wedderburn self-published Horrors of Slavery (1824) within ultraradical networks in London, so his life narrative was not shaped by the political ambitions of white, middle-class abolitionists. By celebrating the communal, place-based resistances of his enslaved mother and grandmother as the source of his own emancipation from slavery, Horrors reworked the Romantic figuration of sorrowful, enslaved Black mothers. Wedderburn’s mother, Rosanna, demanded that his enslaver father manumit him. His grandmother, Talkee Amy, was a higgler and obeah woman who “trafficked on her own account.” Wedderburn’s description of Rosanna and Talkee Amy’s place-based abolitionist geographies then serves as an illuminating intertext for History of Mary Prince (1831). Like Wedderburn’s mother and grandmother, Prince entered and navigated spaces in a way that asserted her humanness by rebelliously claiming kinship and higglering in unofficial local economies. In both narratives, Black women cultivated communal, material, and place-based forms of liberation from slavery, and their stories supplement and even challenge current understandings of Romantic-era abolition and women’s activism.

Acknowledgments

A visiting fellowship from the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library funded my research into the publications of Robert Wedderburn and the Romantic-era British Caribbean. I am grateful for the work of the anonymous readers, whose insightful and detailed reports improved this essay.

Notes

1 Ryan Hanley argues that Horrors amounts to a “personal vindication” that lacks the insurrectionary tone displayed in Wedderburn’s earlier publication, Axe Laid to the Root (227). In a similar vein, Michael Morris suggests that Horrors is “Consistent with Wilberforce’s abolitionism” and thus “this text strikes a moral rather than political tone” (185). The exception to this assessment would be Raphael Hoermann’s argument: “Symptomatic of Wedderburn’s refusal to be neatly pigeon-holed, this self-published abolitionist pamphlet breaks the mould of abolitionist literature from the onset” (298). Horrors indeed breaks with abolitionist literature through its anti-capitalist, working-class orientation, and this essay adds that Horrors further breaks with anti-slavery discourse by championing Black women’s resistance to slavery.

2 Moira Ferguson asks similar questions about Prince: “Was she able to encode deliberately and discreetly, customarily unnamable privations? To what extent did she acknowledge, in directing her narrative, that both sides of the slavery debate vied for control over her?” (282).

3 Following Diana Paton’s Cultural Politics of Obeah, I use the lower-case “o” when spelling obeah.

4 The term higgler, used in the Caribbean from the eighteenth century to the present, designates a Black female entrepreneur in the internal economies of those islands. Winnifred R. Brown-Glaude suggests that through higglering in the internal markets, enslaved women “transformed themselves into economic subjects within a broader social and economic context that defined them as objects” (91). The occupation of “higgler” carries a stigma because “the commercial savvy of the higgler … marked her as deviant. Blacks, enslaved and free, were not expected to exhibit this kind of capitalist know-how. For this affront, higglers were denigrated; they were represented in the public discourse as aggressive rogues who took advantage of others” (97). Higglers have been and continue to be denigrated in public discourse in Jamaica. However, attempts to change the word to something with less stigma, such as “vendor,” problematically asserts that these alternative economies should be absorbed into capitalist discourse. When using the term higgler, I am using the historical language not to stigmatize but rather to emphasize the rebellious and transformative aspects of the alternative economies developed by Black women.

5 Ferguson argues that abolition was an opportunity for white women to enter the public, political sphere: “Between 1823–1833, female emancipationists transformed the cultural face of England as a result of the discourse on slavery” (299).

6 A popular weekly paper with a circulation of 10,000, Bell’s Life advertised itself as “Combining, with the News of the Week, a rich Repository of Fashion, Wit and Humour, and the interesting incidents of Real Life.” Among radical newspapers, Bell’s Life was unique in its content, “with its unabashedly broad coverage of sporting subjects, its lurid crime stories, and its advertisements for louche songbooks,” as Yuri Cowan notes. Unlike most other “cheap” publications, Bell’s Life appealed to a diverse audience, from middle-class writers, such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hood, and Robert Southey, to the lower classes, who all read it “in spite of its cheap format and its sometimes racy tone” (311).

7 Sue Thomas notes, “Wedderburn plays on the human/animal species boundary used by proslavery writers to justify the treatment of bondspeople” (113). However, Elizabeth Bohls suggests Wedderburn’s target is not only proslavery writers but also abolitionist ones: “Abolitionist propaganda often treated slaves like livestock; Wedderburn inverts the trope” (Romantic Literature 76).

8 Edlie L. Wong also points out that Rosanna negotiated “the oppressive entanglements of kinship and property under colonial slave law to insist on her unborn child’s freedom as a condition of her transfer in ownership” (64).

9 Joseph Albernaz insightfully interprets Wedderburn’s representation of maternal practices as a type of general strike that should alter biases about the gender of workers: “Seen through the prism of Wedderburn’s life, activity, and writing, the general strike’s intimacy with maternal captivity and defiance further displaces the frame of the striker as only, or paradigmatically, a waged white male productive worker” (551).

10 I make an extended argument about the significance of Miss Campbell’s land redistribution and Wedderburn’s land-based conceptions of liberation in “Provision Grounds Against the Plantation” (22–23).

11 Higglering unenclosed markets controlled by capitalist interests. K. D. M. Snell asserts that in England the social consequences of enclosure had dire consequences for women because they could no longer earn money through the cottage economy: “Enclosure, we shall see, markedly curtailed such quasi-independent production, so altering women’s position vis-à-vis strictly wage labour. It produced pressures from men, affected in the same way, against female competition in what had become more clearly thought of as a labour market” (157–58).

12 Matthew Lewis’s Cornwall plantation was located just a few miles from James Wedderburn’s, and his Journal of a West India Proprietor recorded that the journey between Kingston and Westmoreland required navigating narrow roads over dangerous precipices and through raging rivers. It took him approximately eleven days via horse-drawn coach to make the round-trip journey (157–73).

13 Diana Paton documents that in abolitionist literature, “Concern about the flogging of women is evident from the earliest critical representations of slave punishment” (No Bond 6).

14 Obeah and witchcraft were often erroneously conflated in the British imagination. Diana Paton argues that in Jamaica, “legal language assimilated a range of African practices to the early modern European crime of witchcraft” (Cultural Politics 21).

15 Alan Richardson has written about Romantic-era literary obsession with obeah, although he limits his discussion to male obeah practitioners. He argues, “It is not Toussaint but the obeah-man who is made to embody British colonial anxiety” (12). Wedderburn’s recollections of his grandmother fall in line with Emily Senior’s analysis of obeah: “The obeah practitioner is one such model of an alternative ‘colonial modernity’—a spectral figure identified with moments of intercultural encounter specific to the unique social complex of the plantation that brought exchange, instability, and revolution, with influence far beyond the plantation’s bounds” (160).

16 Debbie Lee has also grappled with the complexity of this textual history, and she argues that History of Mary Prince “revised the most heavily symbolic antislavery icon: that of the slave woman” (Slavery 208).

17 I am using a matrifocal concept of kinship in this chapter because it is the one Wedderburn proposes. However, scholars have pointed out that kinship among the enslaved in Jamaica is far more complex. Colleen A. Vasconcellos argues, for example, “a concentration on nuclear or matrifocal families oversimplifies the complex nature of life in the slave villages” (29).

18 For example, see the abolitionist Zachary Macaulay’s Negro Slavery (38–39).

19 Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, “For the slaves of Saint-Domingue, the ideological significance of these provision grounds may have been as important as their intrinsic economic worth. In a system that denied them the most fundamental rights, the cultivation of their grounds remained one of their few prerogatives” (39).

20 From the supplementary material in History of Mary Prince (102).

21 Sinanan also argues that Prince’s desire to return to Antigua is profoundly significant aspect of the narrative: “Prince refuses to accept freedom in pre-emancipation England as freedom, and her desire to return to Antigua insists on a future of full abolition, not just of slavery itself, but of Western humanism” (“Mary” 77).