When she died in 1821 at age ninety-seven, the Massachusetts paper The Franklin Herald published an obituary calling her “a woman of colour” and noting that “in this remarkable woman there was an assemblage of qualities rarely to be found among her sex. Her volubility was exceeded by none, and in general the fluency of her speech was not destitute of instruction and education. She was much respected among her acquaintance.”
Even in death, Terry Prince was considered exceptional, and it is possible that she was exceptionally “strong” or stubborn.
A woman who held so many superlatives—the first to face off against the all-white and all-male supreme court, a vocal advocate for her child, and a town crier, a known eyewitness—likely occupied a fraught position, and we cannot underestimate how equally vulnerable and valuable her traits would have made her.
We need only to look to Anne Hutchinson—executed a century before Terry Prince’s song—or to Nina Simone’s “Backlash Blues” or to the case of Jacqueline Dixon for stories of “know-your-place aggression” and backlash against (Black) women who stood their ground. We cannot ignore the very real racial-sexual terror Terry Prince could have—and we don’t know if she did—experienced for her actions.
Thus I do not want to risk emblematizing Terry Prince to the point of losing her humanity. As bell hooks and others have warned us, the danger in the myth of the strong, assertive Black woman is its elision of our pain and vulnerability. To fully see Lucy Terry Prince is to contextualize the conditions that made her choose to survive. Her song itself signals ongoing trauma from the incidents she witnessed. Phrases like “dreadful slaughter” and “killed outright” paint a painful scene still vivid in the psyche. And it is very likely that the named trauma of the Bars incident—and the unnamed traumas she experienced while enslaved and later as the mother of six children—affected her daily life. To maintain her safety and the safety of her family, Terry Prince would have had to tread skillfully, codeswitching between assertiveness and (performing) “knowing her place,” as we have seen.
To that point, if we revisit the incident with Williams College, Terry Prince’s insistence on her son’s acceptance is actually in keeping with the cult of domesticity, which dictated that women took responsibility for the education of their children. It also helps that her magnum opus recounts the events of the Bars incident in a way that makes the white colonists look favorable and the Abenaki people the criminals. That her song was published posthumously and circulated orally during her lifetime rather than in print also makes it less a performance of gender or racial aberrance. When read another way, then, each of Terry Prince’s seeming transgressions against the expectations of her gender and race and time—with perhaps the exception of her property battle—might equally resituate her within them.
I say all this not to withhold praise from Terry Prince for her very real accomplishments but to suggest that the way she achieved them is what is most exceptional. By working both within and against a system that seldom rewarded women for acting out—and living to tell—Terry Prince demonstrates the performative dexterity often required of African American women across history to survive, to avoid singing the backlash blues.
Her legacy extends beyond “Bars Fight” to a complex figure who must have suffered as much as she succeeded. A trickster, both a “respectable lady” and a bold troublemaker, Lucy Terry Prince should be the subject of more study—and new ballads, new songs.
1749–1754
RACE AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Dorothy E. Roberts
In the 1700s, Europe experienced an intellectual movement, known as the Age of Enlightenment, that set the course of scientific theory and methods for the next three centuries. Leading thinkers embraced reason over superstition and shifted the basis of their conclusions about the universe from religious beliefs to secular science, giving science the ultimate authority over truth and knowledge. In many respects, the Enlightenment advanced ways of understanding the natural world and human behavior, but it was also the period when the modern scientific concept of race as a natural category was installed.
The expansion of the slave trade in the 1700s necessitated an expanding conceptual racial system of governance, spurring the change among European intellectuals from theological to biological thinking. During the Enlightenment, race became an object of scientific study, and scientists began to explain enslavement as a product of nature. Racial science was deployed to explain unequal outcomes in health, political status, and economic well-being as stemming from natural racial differences rather than from racist policies.
By 1749, European naturalists had begun to use race as a category for scientifically classifying human beings. The major groundwork for modern biological typologies was laid by Carl Linnaeus, whose twelve-edition catalog of living things, Systema Naturae, was published between 1735 and his death in 1778. Linnaeus divided Homo sapiens into four natural varieties—H. sapiens americanus, H. sapiens europaeus, H. sapiens asiaticus, and H. sapiens afer—linked respectively to the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and he ascribed innate physical, social, and moral characteristics to each group. Although Linnaeus, like the biologists who succeeded him, claimed these racial categories were based on objective observations of nature, they were far from neutral. Eighteenth-century classifications positioned races in a hierarchy, placing Europeans at the top with the most positive traits (“Vigorous, muscular. Flowing blond hair. Very smart, inventive. Ruled by law”), and placing Africans at the bottom and with the most negative features (“Sluggish, lazy. Black kinky hair. Crafty, slow, careless. Ruled by caprice”).
The Enlightenment is typically touted as a radical break from the Christian theology that preceded it. However, one aspect of its thinking transported from theology to science—the belief that some powerful force apart from human intervention divided all human beings into separate races. Many European theologians held that God created the races and made Europeans in His image. After the Enlightenment, with the Divine no longer an acceptable basis for scientific evidence, European scientists pointed to nature as producing innate distinctions between races. (A century later, after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, scientists began attributing race to evolution.) Thus, the racist theological concept of race survived the Enlightenment transition from “supernaturalist to scientific explanations of human origins and potential.”
Benjamin Franklin, one of the most revered intellectuals of his day, was instrumental in importing Enlightenment thinking to the British colonies in North America. There, Enlightenment scientists’ understanding of race served a critical political function: the view that nature had created racial distinctions resolved the contradiction between the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and tolerance and the enslavement of African people. The shift to secular thinking reinforced the view that Black people were innately and immutably inferior as a race and therefore were subject to permanent enslavement. After chattel slavery ended, the biological concept of race continued to shape the social and biological sciences, medical practice, and social policies, forming a scientific foundation for eugenics, Jim Crow, and post–civil rights color-blind ideology that ignores racism’s persistent impact.