Mary Prince, born into slavery in Bermuda around 1788, was sold at about age twelve away from her mother and siblings to separate owners at auction, with buyers physically inspecting the slaves as livestock. The children were sold one by one while their mother wept, and Prince recounts the exact moment of being handled and appraised like an object before strangers.
Prince asserts that enslaved people do not need to be told by outsiders that slavery is evil: they feel and know their own suffering directly, contradicting owners who claimed slaves were content. She insists that only those who have been enslaved can truthfully speak to what slavery is.
In England slavery was unenforceable, so Prince was legally free the moment she arrived, yet her owners refused to manumit her so that returning to Antigua (where she had a husband and home) would re-enslave her. Freedom thus became a trap: she could be free only by abandoning everything that made life worth living.
Prince narrates slavery through the cumulative physical toll on the body: rheumatism from standing in salt ponds, floggings that scarred, and swollen limbs, treating injury as the verifiable evidence of cruelty. Reading suffering as inscribed on the body shifts proof from the owner's word to the slave's flesh.