## The Question of Voice
One of the persistent difficulties in writing about Biddy Mason is the absence of her own voice from the historical record. She could not write, so no letters, diary, or personal testimony in her own words have survived. The testimony she gave to Judge Hayes is not transcribed. The instructions and teachings she gave to her family and community are preserved only in second-hand form.
The great-granddaughter transmission — Gladys Owens Smith reporting the teaching about keeping your hand open — is the closest the record comes to Mason’s own words. Even this is several generations removed from the original; Gladys Owens Smith was reporting something she had been told, not something she had directly received from Mason. The transmission is real but its fidelity to Mason’s exact words cannot be verified.
This absence of first-person voice is not unique to Mason among historical figures who were enslaved or who were illiterate. The historical record systematically underrepresents people who could not produce written documents, and among those it underrepresents, it particularly underrepresents enslaved people whose literacy was both denied and criminalized. What we know about Mason comes almost entirely from records produced by the legal and commercial systems she interacted with, from accounts written by others who observed her, and from the institutional histories of the organizations she helped found.
Working from these records requires a certain epistemological honesty: we can say what Mason did, in many cases, but we cannot say what she thought about what she did. We can document her actions but not her inner life. We can trace the consequences of her choices but not the reasoning that produced those choices. This is a limitation that has to be acknowledged rather than papered over with plausible but invented inner monologue.