JUST as February is known as Black History Month in Bermuda, May is Heritage Month. As a student of both Bermuda's history and culture I can well understand the spirit behind this observance. Nevertheless, I have always viewed this annual commemoration with mixed feelings.

One of the reasons I hold such a view is because I reject the notion that the historical experience of Bermudians, black and white, should be culturally compartmentalised: feted once a year, put under an intense community spotlight for a brief period and thereafter put back into storage and forgotten about until the next year rolls around.

I have long been an advocate of the Bermudianisation of the black historical experience in this country: I go further and demand that Bermuda simply tell the truth about its history, the history of a biracial community that remains largely unwritten in the sense that the black experience has received very short shrift from various historians.

To be fair, in recent times I have noted some subtle ? and welcome ? changes in the telling of black history during this so-called Heritage Month.

There have finally been moves in the education system to place further emphasis on exploring the black Bermudian historical experience in this country. I speak now of those schools where teachers have been giving their students assignments specifically related to the Afro-Bermudian role in the development of this island.

This is a long overdue step but one I am prepared to publicly endorse. If the longest journeys begin with a single step, then I guess Bermuda may finally be on the way to embracing ? and teaching ? the shared history of this island.

Given the publicity attendant on Heritage Month, I recently decided to re-read the classic slave narrative of Bermudian slave Mary Prince, a book that helped to rally the cause of Emancipation in Britain when it appeared in the 19th century.

I can state that the account of her experience as a slave in Bermuda still has the power to move and shock me. And Mary Prince's book certainly belies any notion that slavery in Bermuda was more benign than it was in other slave-owning societies at that time.

Who was Mary Prince and what were some of her experiences as a slave in Bermuda?

Mary Prince was born in Bermuda round 1788 in an area called Brackish Pond on a farm owned by a Mr. Charles Myners.

Her mother had been a household slave and her father, whose name was Prince, was a slave who worked in the shipbuilders' yard at Crow Lane. He belonged to a slave owner whose family name is still prominent today.

The significance of the Mary Prince story is not only that it provides a first-hand account of slavery in Bermuda but it was also the first narrative of slavery ever written by a woman ? emphasising the importance of female slaves to the whole iniquitous system of slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Mary Prince had been put to work as a child minder (what we might call today a nanny) and a domestic servant. She would later work in the fields ? hoeing, planting and minding sheep and cattle. It might be hard for us living in the Bermuda of today to envision a largely rural island jacketed with large cedar and mangrove forest.

But it was no accident that during those times the principal mode of transportation around the island was by way of boat. In those days it was quite possible, if you left the rudimentary system of roads, to find yourself spending a day or two hacking your way from one part of the island to the other through what was at the time Bermuda's dense undergrowth.

Bermuda at the time had started a small salt production industry in the Turks Islands. This short-lived Caribbean endeavour only merits passing mentions in most of Bermudian history books. But it was Bermudian slave owners and their slaves who started the enterprise, with the slaves raking the salt.

MARY Prince tells of her experiences in the Caribbean, witnessing ? and experiencing ? beatings and what today we would call severe sexual harassment. She spent long hours standing in the salt ponds, resulting in her developing deformed feet and boils which reached to the bone as well as a serious eye disease from prolonged exposure to salt which threatened her sight.

Mary Prince was taken to England by a new master, John Wood, and it was there she made her dash for freedom coming under the protection of the Anti-Slavery Society. But attempts to buy her freedom were refused by the Wood family, who held her as a legal slave until 1834 when slavery in the British Empire was abolished.

Mary Prince herself did not write the narrative of her life. She was probably illiterate, but the idea to put her narrative on paper was hers.

She dictated her story to a female member of the Anti-Slavery Society and a Thomas Pringle edited it and made it clear there were no alterations to the story as Mary Prince had related it.

Now the fact diverse hands were involved in recording her story may tempt some to try to discredit her narrative ? especially those sections relating to the brutal treatment which she herself experienced and witnessed as a slave in Bermuda.

But in the book , it is reported that "when Mary Prince was medically examined in London in 1831, it was found that the whole back part of her body is distinctly scarred and, as it were, chequered, with the vestiges of severe floggings and other parts of her body were covered by large scars where the flesh had been deeply cut".

The narrative of Mary Prince is a legitimate part of Bermuda's history and thus should be included in the curriculums of the island's schools. Her book certainly flies in the face of retroactive claims that a so-called "benevolent" form of slavery supposedly existed in these islands.

One would speculate as to why slaves suffered such brutalities in a small island not dependent on the notoriously harrowing plantation system of farming to earn its keep. One factor was almost certainly widespread but low-key white fear.

For how could you keep a whole people in slavery if you did not employ some degree of violence to keep them in that state? The narrative of Mary Prince makes clear that both the slave owners and their wives committed acts of violence against their slaves.

Still, that is no reason why this period in Bermuda's history should not be the subject of study. This sad epoch is long gone but it remains an integral aspect of our island's history. How will we know where we as a country are going if we don't understand where we first came from?

After reading Mary Prince's book, I certainly did not feel like running out and beating the first white person I saw. I doubt any of our students would be seized by such impulses, either, even if the accounts of Mary Prince still have the power to shock.

I must admit her story has been at the forefront of my mind in recent days. I can't even drive past Crow Lane without feeling a twinge, imagining all that may have happened there all those years ago.

In an essay in the Penguin paperback edition of Mary Prince's narrative, esteemed historian Fred D'Aguiar writes: "Mary Prince's narrative retains that moral charge 170 years after its first publication. It continues to be crucial to Old and New World societies because of its moral imperative: slavery then and how to commemorate it now form a twin axis of that moral gravity.

"Mary Prince's narrative continues to emit a shock of the real.

"The uplifting force of the story is Prince herself. It is Mary Prince, her uprooted and scarred body and harrowing testimony, which shows the readers how far from Christian values the society she was born into strayed by upholding slavery.

"Her narrative touches the hearts and minds of those who see her predicament as a test of the capacity of a Western society to conduct itself in a civilised manner. She is the keeper of the conscience of a civilised society."

An historian of international standing describes her as "the keeper of the conscience of a civilised society".