Lucy Terry Prince Composes Poem
On this day in 1746, Lucy Terry Prince was among the residents of Deerfield present during an Abenaki raid on the village. Lucy, an enslaved woman, described the horrific event in "The Bars Fight," the earliest known poem by a black writer in North America. The work is also believed to bethe most accurate account of what happened that day. Five colonists died, one was badly wounded, and another was taken captive. We know more about the raid than we do about the poet. No other writing of hers has been found. We do know that, at her death in 1821, she warranted an unusually long obituary that praised her as a "remarkable woman [with] an assemblage of qualities rarely to be found among her sex."
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