Islander working to uncover new information on self-liberated slave Mary Prince

For many years now, Islander Margot Maddison-MacFadyen has been on "the trail" tracing the life of Mary Prince.

Maddison-MacFadyen says Prince is the first known black woman to escape colonial enslavement, tell her own story and have it published.

'A calling'

"I felt like I was being haunted actually. It was a funny feeling, it was like my whole body started to buzz and I thought this is a calling … I'm going to have to take up this calling — I'm going to have to do this," said Maddison-MacFadyen.

She was self-liberated.- Margot Maddison-MacFadyen

Mary Prince was in Bermuda in either 1787 or 1788 — researchers are still debating this fact. She was enslaved for years in Bermuda, Grand Turk Island and Antigua. It was in London, after being taken by another slave owner where she "walked out the door" and "never came back," said Maddison-MacFadyen.

"She was self-liberated."

Maddison-MacFadyen says she has been drawn to the stories and history of emancipation since she was a young girl reading the work of William Blake who was an abolitionist himself.  

Research taking form

But it was in 1988 when her life as a researcher on the subject would begin to take form — during her undergraduate degree, she was introduced to a book called, The History of Mary Prince.

Years later, Maddison-MacFadyen moved to the Turks and Caicos Islands where she was the Head of the English department at the British West Indies Collegiate.

Turks and Caicos was also a place Mary Prince had been enslaved for about 10 years of her life from about 1802-1812.

"So I decided to investigate. I knew there were a number of things about her story ... that historians didn't know about," Maddison-MacFadyen said.

Path to PhD 

Maddison-MacFadyen then moved with her husband to Grand Turk Island for six months.

"The research was very easy to come by because the elders … knew the story and showed me the buildings where she had been locked up at night."

The experience set her on a path, she says, which led her to a PhD on the subject, which she completed in 2017.

... I thought, you know, I need to do my part and I need to try and investigate this story further....- Margot Maddison-MacFadyen

"I had actually been offered other PhD's as a younger person and turned them down because they didn't really have a historical story that I felt really compelled to really try and do something about — but this one I do," she said.

Maddison-MacFadyen remembers a particular day where she remembers standing in front of one of the buildings where Mary was kept — the building still had bars on it.

'Search continues'

"I was looking at that window with the bars and I thought, you know, I need to do my part and I need to try and investigate this story further from a historical perspective and to get it out to a wider audience because it's such an important story," she said.

Maddison-MacFadyen is now in the process of researching Mary Prince's later years for the government of Bermuda. She will be travelling to England in the next couple of months to pursue this new project. 

"The search continues," she said.

Maddison-MacFadyen will be giving a public lecture tomorrow evening at 7 p.m. on the life of Mary Prince, in the faculty lounge at UPEI. Everyone is welcome.

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